Stoicism and Using Your Time Wisely

To be a Stoic is to use time to your advantage. A Stoic will want to slow down the pace of events so that knee-jerk reactions don’t turn into actions that you’ll regret later. “The cure for anger,” writes Seneca, “is delay.” The key skill here is “stepping back” so that the situation can be evaluated. The starting point is to step back from your own reactions to evaluate what is happening. This, in fact, is all that you can control, and therefore all that you can be responsible for in Stoic morality. This stepping back, as I’ve covered earlier, is a way of buying time so that you (and the others with you) don’t go down a path that you’ll need to apologize for later. Stepping back is a central theme running throughout Seneca’s work. It is the core skill of “the sage” but can be learned by everyone who wishes to act morally: “excellence of mind is available to all: in this regard we are all nobly born” (Letters on Ethics 44.2).

It should be clear that “stepping back” is not about avoiding difficult situations. Avoidance is actually detrimental to moral development. One must frequently and repeatedly embrace challenging situations so that one is “hardened” by them. “The mind comes to scorn suffering by suffering” (On Providence 4.13). Thus the skill of stepping back must be learned by repeatedly putting oneself into into situations that require it. To do so over and over is to develop the habit of automatically stepping back when the situation arises. In other words, you get used to it by doing it. Or “fake it ‘til you make it,” if you like. If Stoic virtue can be defined as anything, this is it — the well-trained ability to embrace difficulties so that stepping back is ingrained into our habits.

Stepping back is thus a form of embracing living in the world with oneself and others — not avoiding them. It is as much a “stepping up” as a “stepping back.” But what are we learning to step back from? We step back from our own initial reactions so that we can face any situation with a calm mind: “It is not what you face that counts, but how you face it” (On Providence, 2.4). Learning how to face the unpredictable events of life is the key skill in moral development. To learn this skill, we need exemplars — sages who show us how bad it can get and how to intentionally and consciously bear everything with a calm mind. This ability to summon calmness in the face of difficulty is a major part of virtue. It is where it begins, and it is the fundamental quality demonstrated by Stoic exemplars. These exemplars help others activate their own “stepping back” by showing how it’s done. “Why do they suffer certain hardships? So they can teach others to suffer them: they are born to serve as an example” (On Providence 6.3).

What specifically does the exemplar teach us? The lesson is how to change our perspective in the face of challenges. Instead of lashing out at others and getting angry at the events themselves, one must take stock of one’s own reactions as the starting point of virtue:

Clearly good men must do the same [as wrestlers who pick stronger opponents to train against]. They must not flinch at hardships and difficulties, and must not level complaints against fate; but whatever happens, they must find the good in it — should turn it to good. It is not what you face that counts, but how you face it (On Providence 2.4)

Stepping back to evaluate and control how we are reacting is virtue in action and it is the starting point for moral responsibility. There is something very important going on here with Seneca’s definition of virtue that is fundamentally different from our Platonic and Christian inheritance. Both of those traditions seek virtue as eternal values outside of history that can and should be activated at opportune moments. In the Platonic worldview, we seek to understand these virtues through contemplation. In the Christian worldview, we seek them through prayer and revelation, and we internalize them through various forms of self-renunciation as conversion to the Truth. In these worldviews, the virtues are known and understood intellectually (via the disembodied mind) and can only be activated through that knowledge. In these traditions, the body is at best neutral and at worst actually a hindrance to acting virtuously.

Virtues are also fundamentally separable and definable in this worldview. They must be because they are accessible by contemplation, which means language will be fundamental to our ability to define and communicate them. In other words, if you believe that human beings can and should behave virtuously and that this capability requires us to intellectually understand them in order to live by them, then how language works is going to have a profound effect on what you think virtues are. You will seek to define courage so that you can know how to be courageous. The same for moderation. Your inquiries will treat them as separate things with their own knowable essences. Plutarch, arguing against Zeno (the original Stoic), clearly defends this worldview against what he sees as the “self contradiction” of the Stoic concept of virtue:

Zeno admits several different virtues, as Plato does, namely prudence, courage, moderation and justice, on the grounds that although inseparable they are distinct and different from each other. Yet in defining each of them he says that courage is prudence <in matters concerning endurance, moderation is prudence in matters concerning choice, prudence in the special sense is prudence> in matters requiring action, and justice is prudence in matters requiring distribution — on the grounds that it is one single virtue, which seems to differ in actions according to its dispositions relative to things. (The Hellenistic philosophers Vol. 1 378, emphasis added)

Virtue is not fundamentally intellectual, it is activated in the moment as a disposition to the situation at hand. It becomes into courage when courage is called for. It becomes justice when the distribution of social good are at stake. Plutarch can’t handle the idea that Zeno can assert the difference among virtues while simultaneously asserting that they are all reducible to a “disposition.” (He would have also struggled with Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics on this point.)

Relative disposition is the key term here, and I emphasized it in this passage because it is a technical term in Stoicism. This is how virtue becomes contagious not only for Seneca, but for Stoicism. To be clear, Stoic virtue is about controlling how you respond to situations and, hopefully, helping others control themselves too. In order for virtue to have this power it must be a physical embodiment of some sort. This is a requirement of Stoic Physics, and it is fundamental to its Ethics. The animus (“commanding-faculty”) can’t have any power unless it is a body made of substance. Its moral power is described as “relative disposition” — how we comport ourselves in any morally significant situation. So, when Seneca says that we “must find the good in it — should turn it to good,” he is emphasizing the active and physical power of virtue as the disposition of your animus, which is neither mental nor physical but both simultaneously.

Seneca presents us with human beings turning seemingly bad situations into morally good ones by how they respond, and this response is not only verbal, it is embodied in your disposition, which is mental and physical at the same time. “It is not what you face that counts, but how you face it.” Good is therefore something that is created in the moment through slowing down our reactions and helping others slow theirs too. When Seneca writes, “whatever happens, they must find the good in it — should turn it to good,” he is explicitly shifting his description from “finding” to creating. We don’t find good in the situation, we turn the situation into something good. To channel Deleuze for a moment, what is good and what is virtue are not transcendent; they are immanent. Each situation could go good or bad depending on how we respond. We have to summon goodness out of difficult situations by how we behave. Again, “It is not what you face that counts, but how you face it.” This ability to face events calmly and with self-reflection is the ability to “turn” the apparently bad into the actually good.

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To return to my opening statement about using time to your advantage, this ability to turn bad situations into morally good ones by changing your perspective is about the use of time:

That is why there are men who, when bad things were slow to come, spontaneously put themselves in their path and, when their virtue looked like it would pass into obscurity, sought out an occasion for it to shine forth. (On Providence 4.3, emphasis added)

Because virtue is immanence and not transcendence, it can “pass into obscurity” if it is not regularly reactivated through practice and intention. It must be activated and re-activated so that we “harden” it and strengthen it. We must use our time wisely by not letting ourselves go unchallenged in life for too long. We must actively seek out challenges to make us stronger.

To use time wisely is also to activate that training in the moment by reflexively and automatically stepping back from ourselves:

Accordingly, we must struggle against the passions’ first causes. The cause of anger is a belief that one has been wronged, to which one ought not lightly give credence. One shouldn’t immediately assent even to what is clear and obvious, for some things are false that look like the truth. One must always take one’s time: the passage of time makes the truth plain. (On Anger 2.22.2, emphasis added)

We must learn to step back from our own knee-jerk reactions by recognizing that our knee-jerk responses contain nascent beliefs that need to be verbalized and examined. Those knee-jerk responses may at first “look like the truth,” but time and verbalization can reveal that your initial feelings betray you.

In both of the passages I just examined, we buy time to bring about moral improvement. In the one from On Providence, we accelerate our training when “bad things are slow to come,” and in the one from On Anger, we don’t give in to knee-jerk reactions but find the time to slow them down, verbalize them and evaluate them. Time, here, is not a neutral ticking clock that can be rewound, sped up, or stopped. It is an active force that should be used wisely for moral development.

All of this may sound rather obvious, but it is easier said than done. It is easy to agree that we shouldn’t give into our knee-jerk reactions, but that is not how our moral practices actually work today. We are encouraged to embrace our initial feelings as “truthiness” and therefore to avoid stepping back from them. We forget that “some things are false that look like the truth” at the moment of first impression. Instead, we are encouraged to lean into them. Do you have a feeling that the 2020 election was stolen because all of your friends and neighbors voted for the losing candidate? Lean into it. Embrace it. It must be true. Is making a good life seemingly harder for you than it was for your parents and grand parents? It must be all those immigrants. Let’s put up a wall.

Seneca gives us a different way to think about moral development and responsibility that steps back from embracing our initial feelings as the source of moral truth. I want to use this essay to dwell on his emphasis on how to use time as fundamental to moral responsibility. My purpose is not to argue that he got it right and that we should all become Stoics. That would be silly. Rather, I do think that there are some important lessons that only become apparent when I use different concepts as a lens through which to read Seneca: concepts from Deleuze like immanence, series and sense; concepts from Bergson like intensities, effort and duration; concepts from Foucault like ascesis and truth-telling. All of these shift the focus to a form of ethics that doesn’t seek answers from a pure outside of the situations we deal with. Yet we can still seek effective outcomes that are “good” and “virtuous.” I don’t need a fundamental Truth about human nature to argue that liberal democracy is better than tyranny, or that leaving girls to perish in a burning school because they are not properly dressed is morally horrifying. This search for Truth is the road to tyranny anyhow.

Applying these concepts to a particular reading of Seneca activate a lost mode of ethics that focuses on how we conduct ourselves as human beings making our way in the world that is not reducible to unreflective concepts of “reason” or “human nature” as their stable grounds. To conceive of an ethics that sees virtue and goodness as immanent values that human beings can produce as they interact with each other — by how they conduct themselves with each other — is a powerful antidote to current battles over whose truths we should believe and the echo chambers that our modern relationship to truth has created. Rather than trying to convince others we have the right answer, we’ll focus on our own responses to truths that are told. We’ll learn how to step back from our knee-jerk reactions, and help others do so too, so that the basis for our beliefs can be verbalized. At the same time, “reason” won’t be reduced to speech and therefore to nostalgia for Truth or a sterile and procedural drive for “consensus.” Reason will involve the whole body — individual and collective — and not just the abstract “mind.” We will find value in our demeanor and disposition toward ourselves and others as much as in our words.

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With that longish preamble, I’ll get on with it. Seneca’s worldview and all that he writes is based on two fundamental beliefs about the human condition. First, the world in which we live is a tightly woven field of highly determined causes and effects, which the human being can only experience as chance. This is Seneca’s brand of Stoic Physics and is encompassed by his terms providentia (everything is determined) and fortuna (the highly determined is experienced as chance events). For Seneca, the human animus can experience this determinism only as an unpredictable flow of events: 

… I know that all that all things come to pass by a law that is fixed and is decreed for eternity. The fates lead us, and the amount of time that remains for each person was stipulated at our first hour when we were born. Cause hangs on cause. Things both private and public are drawn along in a long order of events. Each thing must be suffered bravely because all things do not simply occur, as we think, but rather they arrive. (On Providence, 5.6-7)

The human animus is the basis for how the world is experienced. To accept that “cause hangs on cause” can only be an act of faith and cannot be experienced directly. It is a purely intellectual proposition (and is the basis for the first section of On Providence and the whole of Natural Questions). It can only be “suffered bravely” or, to use a more common Stoic term, “endured.” The events of the world, though determined, cannot be foreseen by the human mind: “rather they arrive.” 

This leads to the second aspect of the human condition: we are only responsible for what we can control and all that we can control is how we respond to the events of life. Moral responsibility, in other words, starts with understanding, evaluating and controlling our response to things that happen. This is Seneca’s brand of Stoic Ethics and is encompassed in the terms endurance, judgment, virtue, impression, assent, impulse, et cetera. Hard determinism therefore doesn’t mean that you live your life as an automaton. Contrary to our current way of thinking, not only is moral improvement conceivable without contradiction in a hard determinist world, in fact hard determinism is the condition of possibility for moral improvement for Seneca. When he argues that “cause hangs on cause” and that “all things come to pass by a law that is fixed and is decreed for eternity,” he is not at all saying that we can or should know all of this as if we were Laplace’s demon with a perfect knowledge of the entire chain of causes. Rather, hard determinism is something that we must accept in order to get on with the business of living a moral and ethical life even if we can’t experience the full understanding of what is causing the events around us.

These two beliefs run through his body of work as two forces that drive nearly all that he has to say to his interlocutors. Taken together, both of these beliefs put human experience at the center of philosophy in a way that was only nascent in Plato and Aristotle. In that process of working out a practical morality as the expression of these two beliefs, Seneca (and probably Stoicism in general) undid a host of earlier assumptions about the function of reason, how we imagine what Truth is, and the nature of cause and effect. If we can successfully unpack those assumptions, we can find a different way to imagine how one might live with oneself and others that breaks free from stultifying and dead-end concepts that we live with today. No longer will we be locked into our current “common sense” view of morality that finds an Emersonian vision of the rugged individual whose free will is the source of their identity and autonomy. Nor will we find this model’s opposite — we are purely automated creatures blindly following the dictates of the tightly determined laws of Physics and Neuroscience. We won’t fall into warmed-over versions of Emersonian rugged individualism like Existentialism, humanism or compatibilism. We’ll also break free from some of the popular forms of Stoicism that happen frequently today. We’ll be able to move away from Stoicism as “life hacks” or as a way to condescend to the world with a moral smugness.

We will, however, find a form of Stoicism that is much more practical and attainable for us mere mortals. Undoubtedly Stoicism as a doctrinaire “philosophy of life” can seem unattainable because our popular conceptions of it revolve around the eradication of emotion as inherently bad. In my reading of Stoicism, this isn’t at all what it’s about. Far from Stoicism being an eradication of feelings in favor of a pure rationality, it is an embracing of feelings and emotions as fundamental to the human condition. There are good ones and there are bad ones, but in the end they are judged as useful or not. Stoic reason, therefore, is not judged by its ability to access Truth as definable doctrine; it is judged as whether or not it is effective in helping you control your reactions to unpredictable events and to help others do so as well. Hence Seneca’s frequent alliance of reason with techniques (and what we would call emotions) of calmness, patience, tranquility, and joy. Calmness and patience, for sure, are techniques and dispositions we activate in the moment to slow down the knee-jerk responses of ourselves and others. Joy and tranquility are more often portrayed as the beneficial effects of our ability to be calm and patient.

Reason’s effectiveness for the Stoic is only partially judged by its ability to speak truth. Reason, in fact, is not purely a capacity for accessing and speaking Truth as it was for Plato. It is, rather, a capacity for self-control that is contagious. It works as much by demeanor as it does through speech:

Plato and Aristotle and the whole crowd of philosophers who would later go their separate ways all derived more from Socrates’ conduct than from his words (Letters on Ethics 6.6)

Plato’s Socrates speaks. He asks questions that reveal that you don’t know what you are talking about because you can’t give coherent reasons for why you act the way that you do. All the while, however, running through the Platonic dialogs is the sense that we should be able to use our reason to arrive at definitive answers to tough questions like “what is virtue?” Throughout the dialogs, reason is on display as the spoken word, and there is always the possibility and desire for a definitive answer. Speech seeks to come to rest when it arrives at Truth.

Seneca’s Socrates, on the contrary, rarely speaks. He moves through the world influencing others by his self-control and his example: “Now, what’s more unworthy than having another man’s wickedness determine a wise man’s passion? Will the great Socrates no longer be able to return home wearing the same expression he had when he left?” (On Anger 2.7.1). We learn “more from his conduct than his words.” As such, Socrates represents Seneca’s vision of reason as effort and demeanor even more than as speaking. To be sure, truth telling (libertas) is key to Seneca’s use of reason (see Letter 4o especially), but it is very different than Plato’s vision of reason as a contemplative faculty of the mind that seeks eternal answers independent of the body.

To better understand this, “emotion” is a good place to start. For Seneca, emotions are not things, they are intensities that are either rising or falling; they are not things that take up residence in the animus as Aristotelian “functions.” As such, they “elude the present” to use Deleuze’s phrase from The Logic of Sense (his prolonged look at Stoicism). As intensity, they elude the present because they are always becoming something more and something less, which can’t be contained in a concept of “now.” For example, when Seneca asks himself “what Anger is,” he explicitly doesn’t provide a definition of a psychological entity. Rather he immediately writes about how it “comes into being” (On Anger 2.2.1). Anger isn’t an “is,” it is an intensity experienced as duration (to use Bergson’s terms).

Another way to look at this is to see how his answer hinges on turning anger from a noun into a verb. We are “becoming angry” rather than having anger inhabit us. Like all emotions in Stoicism, it rises and it falls. It does not have a nature or an Aristotelian purpose that defines its essence. If it had a function it would have some usefulness. Aristotle thought anger could be useful in some situations if moderated. In fact, for Seneca, anger is utterly devoid of function: it is always “useless” and is thus the complete absence of function. He devotes much of the first book of On Anger to establishing this complete lack of functional and practical utility.

By removing its function and its purpose, Seneca gives us a practical moral psychology that is not a battle between entities with essential functions. It is better understood as pure activation always rising and falling, always becoming more and less intense. It is never the same and, at least in Latin (as opposed to Greek), its various forms “lack their own labels”:

Indeed, there are certain forms of anger that simmer down short of shouting, some that are both frequent and difficult to shake, some that are savagely physical and not very verbal, some that are let loose in a torrent of bitter abuse and curses; some forms don’t go beyond complaining and sulking, some are deep and weighty and inward-turning. There are a thousand other varieties of this polymorphous evil. (On Anger 1.4.3)

Defying categories, anger is best understood as an unquantifiable intensity. Any one of these “forms” can become another smoothly and seamlessly. Thus, anger is never the same entity making the same appearance on the stage. It “differs within itself” as Deleuze would say. Accordingly, my anger is not the same as yours just as my different episodes of anger are not the same for me each time. Anger is merely the label we use to attempt to name the intensities so that we can gain some therapeutic control over our moral responses to the events of life. Insofar as it is useful to label it, it is better to think of it as a verb than as a noun.

As intensity, the problem will always be about beginnings. Where does anger as an emotion “start”? The “start” is fundamental to Seneca’s analysis of any emotion:

If you allow [emotions] to begin, they will increase as their causes increase, and their magnitude will be whatever it becomes. Besides, even the smallest feelings may grow out of control. That which is destructive never observes a limit…. But what madness it is to think that the beginnings of emotion are not subject to our will and yet believe that our endings are … Is it not easier to keep things out than to control them once they are let in? (Letter 85.12-13)

Let us not confuse ourselves here. The beginning of emotion is not a conventional “now” with a stable and identifiable present. There is no moment where emotion definitively begins and grows. Such a reading embraces a spatial bias that is an effect of language, which, as the vehicle of analysis, carries that spatial bias with it.

But can’t we sense here, even in the English translation, the language stretching itself to describe something other than a compartmentalized sequence? A “cause” creates a “small feeling” which enacts a “will” that yields a moral action. It is tempting to compartmentalize this sequence and to find the moment of “will” as a “now” moment where moral responsibility definitively happens. (Even neuroscientists struggle to isolate this now moment and will more likely see “the moment of decision” spread across several neurological phenomena.) To be sure, there is plenty of support for this compartmentalized sequence in the scholarship on Stoicism. But I don’t read this passage that way (or any other passages where Seneca is talking about how emotions start and run out of control). I read it as attempting to pass along a sense of intensity to his readers. The movement from cause to feeling to will to decision to emotion is described as movement, transformations, growth and the complete lack of limits. It is not about finding the hard boundaries between mental entities.

Insofar as Seneca is describing moral responsibility, which he definitely is, he is describing a decision-making process that does not have a compartmentalized “now” that can be isolated from the flow. Our ability to control our responses is not a present moment but is spread across a flow of mental processes that are harder to control as intensity rises. “Emotion knows nothing of obedience and heeds no advice” (85.8), which is why “if reason is of any use, then the emotions will not even begin…. It is easier to forestall their beginnings than to govern the impulse” (85.9). To be clear, you are responsible for all of this. Your responsibility to control your actions is yours exclusively, and this is when and where morality happens. Reason is better understood here and throughout Seneca’s work as effort within the intensity rather than as an independent faculty sitting outside awaiting its moment to intervene with its free will. As such, the effort is far easier at the beginning when the intensity is lower and the effort of self-control is a lot easier.

Moral responsibility is thus spread across time and expressed as one’s ability to deal with intensity and duration as Bergson theorized this problem. If we try to isolate our responsibility as a moment of free will, we treat responsibility as a noun and therefore as something that occurs in a defined space at a defined moment. I’ll get to why this is important shortly. For the current moment, let’s ask ourselves to treat responsibility as a verb — “to become responsible” or “to activate responsibility.” This is, in fact, a good way to understand emotions and reason in Seneca — as verbs of becoming rather than as nouns denoting defined beings or entities:

Indeed, the mind is not sequestered, keeping a watch for the passions as things external and apart, so that it can keep them from going farther than they ought. Rather, the mind itself turns into the passion: that is why it cannot summon back its useful, healthy vigor once it has been betrayed and weakened. Reason and passion, as I said, don’t have distinct dwelling places but are the mind’s transformation to a better and worse condition. (On Anger 1.8.2-3; emphasis added)

While reason and passion here are nouns denoting a state of mind, they don’t have hard boundaries between them. Their character as nouns breaks down as soon as we see them as movements and transformations of the same substance. Their noun character mixes with their verb character such that we have things that are never stable and always in the process of becoming each other. Reason cannot be understood fundamentally and only as contemplation of Truth and speaking it to others; it is a mental and physical effort to manage “better and worse conditions” of the mind so that we don’t give into our knee-jerk reactions.

Again, this is virtue for Seneca. Virtue and reason are our efforts to calm ourselves in the face of challenges. As such, reason and virtue are activated in our demeanors and dispositions as much as they are activated in the content of the words we speak. We “derive more from Socrates’ conduct than his words.” This is why we should try to understand reason and emotion as intensities that flow into each other and not as entities with essential functions. As intensities, they gather up mental and physical processes and express them in our demeanors and dispositions to others as we get them to adopt the same calmness of mind. As such, “the skill of the wise person is a shared good: it belongs both to those he lives with and to himself” (Letters on Ethics 85.36). This is why understanding reason as an effort to control intensity rather than accessing Truth is important to understanding what Seneca is passing down to us.

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Our knee-jerk reactions as the starting point for moral responsibility was rigorously theorized by the Stoics as propatheia. While Seneca doesn’t use the term propatheia, he does use conceptually the same terms throughout his body of work as Margaret Graver pointed out in Stoicism and Emotion (98). More importantly for her argument, she does see him offering in Book 2 of On Anger one of the most extensive available discussions of principia proludentia adfectibus, which she translates as “beginnings preliminary to emotion” (98).

Let’s take a key section of Book 2, which of course begins by reminding us that beginnings and intensities are at stake in understanding emotions like anger:

Now, to make plain how passions begin or grow or get carried away: there’s the initial involuntary movement — a preparation for the passion, as it were, and a kind of threatening signal; there’s a second movement accompanied by an expression of will not stubbornly resolved, to the effect that “I should be avenged, since I have been harmed” or “this man should be punished, since he’s committed a crime.” The third movement’s already out of control, it desires vengeance not if it’s appropriate but come what may, having overthrown reason. (2.4.1-2)

There is a lot of complexity in these movements, and the second one that Seneca describes is where scholars of Stoicism tend to find the moment of moral responsibility. It is important, however, to note that Robert Kaster’s translation uses the term “movement” and not “moment.” If we take this choice seriously (as I will in what follows), we are involved in understanding a flow that doesn’t have strict boundaries. Rather, we are reading about a series of interwoven effects that are themselves the “becoming angry” of anger. As we’ll see, these interwoven effects are not only mental; they tie the individual experiencing them to history and the materiality of the universe without sacrificing autonomy and freedom. In fact, these effects are the conditions of possibility of Stoic autonomy.

The second movement is when the crux of the matter happens. It exists so that Seneca can walk a tightrope between hard determinism (the initial movement which is “involuntary” and automatic) and moral responsibility as self-control over one’s actions (the “expression of will not stubbornly resolved”). Verbalization is at the heart of this second movement: “I should be avenged since I have been harmed” or “this man should be punished because he has committed a crime.” This ability to verbalize one’s initial involuntary feelings is fundamental to Stoic Ethics. In fact, it had a formal name in early Stoic Ethics, lekta. This act of verbalization is an attempt to interpret the implied beliefs embedded in one’s “initial involuntary movement.”

In lekta, the full innovation and practicality of Seneca’s moral vision can be understood. It is several things at once without being dominated by any one of these aspects. At the risk of being too schematic and therefore to lose the sense of blending that is at stake, I’ll take each of these several aspects separately. First, by virtue of being a language made up of words, lekta activates a past that is not just my past, it is a collective past. Language only has meaning because it is a very real and tangible preservation and accumulation of the past. When we activate it, we activate the past to make sense of the present. Terms like “crime” and “punish” and “avenge” and harm” all bring with them cultural baggage that is not reducible to what I think about them, though what I think about them is important. They cannot be activated as words unless there is cultural baggage that gives meaning to the words and the feelings that are being interpreted. This cultural baggage precedes the verbalization and exists as the “threatening signal” of the first movement that is verbalized in lekta in the second movement. These terms activate history both in my “initial involuntary movement” and in the language I use to give meaning to it.

The second thing that happens in the movement that includes lekta is the meeting between Stoic Ethics and Physics. We find the meeting in the initial impression, which is a material effect of being a body in the world and subject to the laws of Physics. When this meeting is morally significant, lekta is crucial: “An ardent mind’s nature makes people disposed to anger, because fire is active and intransigent; a mixture in which cold predominates makes them timid, because cold is sluggish and pinched” (On Anger 2.19.2). Further, when Seneca imagines cutting open the body of an angry person, he sees a material mixture of substances flowing in and around the body.

If the mind [animus] could be made visible and shine forth in some material form, its black, blotchy, seething, twisted, swollen appearance would stun the viewers. Even now, when it makes its way through bones and flesh and so many other obstacles, its deformity is enormous: what if it could be shown uncovered? (On Anger 2.36.3)

These substances are physical evidence of anger and they embody the human being’s fundamental connection to the laws of nature, but they don’t completely explain what anger is. Rather, anger and emotion are effects that are not reducible merely to this admixture in the body. Yes, these material causes are aligned with the material substance of the universe. Yes, the same material forces that cause earthquakes cause anger, and, if we could cut open the body of the angry person, we’d see that.

But, again, this physical manifestation is not anger itself because anger is experienced in the human animus from this cause — or is this materiality an effect created by the animus? The directional flow is both ways. We can’t assume that the laws of Physics cause the experiential as an automated effect of the physical. Lekta assumes that the flow can go in the other direction such that the experiential can push back on those laws. What Seneca imagines he sees in the dissected body of the angry person is an effect of knee-jerk reactions not being controlled. This could have been stopped if some effort had been exerted at the beginning of the intensity. In other words, the experiential could exert force back on the physical because it is part of it, but not completely subsumed by it. Bodies that naturally contain more heat are more susceptible to anger but they don’t automatically become angry.

It is as if the materiality coursing through the universe passes something along to our bodies that causes psychological effects. But these effects exist on their own and have their own logic that is not completely beholden to, or explained by, the Stoic laws of Physics. Propatheia, lekta, impression, assent, impulse and the other concepts of the Stoic moral psychology are not merely contained within the laws of Physics that drive floods, earthquakes and thunderstorms. Anger crosses the boundary between the world of Physics and human experience without being the same thing on either side of the boundary.

In On Fate, Cicero makes this distinction between types of causes explicit as he interprets the early Stoic Chrysippus:

“Of causes,” he explains, “some are complete and primary, others auxiliary and proximate. Hence when we say that all things come about through fate by antecedent causes, we do not mean this to be understood as ‘by complete and primary causes’, but ‘by auxiliary and proximate causes.’” (Long and Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers Vol 1, 387)

This is, I believe, what Deleuze identified as the “Stoic paradox,” which he defined as “to affirm destiny and to deny necessity” (The Logic of Sense, 169). In this paradox, he found two “series” working in relation to each other without each of them being purely self-contained. Series one is the realm that I’ve been calling Stoic Physics — material causes operating according to the laws of nature. This is what Chrysippus (via Cicero) referred to as the realm of “complete and primary causes.” Series two is the realm of Ethics — the ability for the human being to exert effort to make moral decisions about right and wrong behaviors. This is the realm of “auxiliary and proximate causes” for Chrysippus. While discrete, these two series are not separated by an uncrossable chasm. They remain semi-autonomous as they influence each other:

Things and propositions are less in a situation of radical duality and more on the two sides of a frontier represented by sense. This frontier does not mingle or reunite them (for there is no more monism here than dualism); it is rather something along the line of an articulation of their difference: body/language. (The Logic of Sense, 24, emphasis added)

“Things” (Physics/body), “propositions” (lekta/language) and “sense” (frontier) nicely capture what is happening in Seneca’s description of the first and second movement toward emotion. The first movement contains a “threatening signal” that is not yet a fully formulated proposition that appears in the second movement. The signal remains just a sense that is yet to be turned into a verbalized proposition. So maybe it is better to say that there is no hard boundary between Physics and Ethics, but rather there is a frontier. Anger emerges in that frontier. This further argues against seeing anger, emotion and reason as distinct things but rather as intensities that flare up or down as the forces of Ethics and Physics collide in the frontier that they actually create. Lekta indicates the presence of this frontier. In fact, lekta is how series two (Ethics) pushes back on series one (Physics) but also indicates that series two manages to have its own internal logic that makes moral responsibility possible in a hard determinist’s world.

We’ve now arrived at the third aspect in the movement of lekta. The ability to interpret and verbalize our knee-jerk feelings makes possible autonomy, self-sufficiency and freedom. To the modern ear, this is completely contradictory given what I’ve discussed as the first two aspects of lekta. If our initial feelings are determined by 1) the weight of history and 2) the laws of Physics, then how can we even begin to conceive of anything like human freedom and autonomy? Aren’t we tied to these forces in a way that makes it impossible for us to do anything other than what these forces dictate?

Seneca’s answer is clearly no. It works like this. Lekta captures the sense contained in the initial feeling — the “threatening signal” that is verbalized in the second movement. But it is only a sense. This sense connects us to these forces but we do not have to accept the implications automatically. In that act of verbal capturing, we exert an effort to arrest the rapid movement of intensification that keeps the feeling from becoming an out of control emotion such as anger. This effort is what Foucault and others have called Stoicism’s ascesis — the “stepping back” that makes self-control possible without necessitating us to posit an empty moment of free will and therefore a coherent modern subject.

Why is there no free will here, but there is something like freedom? The Stoic self builds its ability to control itself through constant activation of lekta as ascesis when it encounters morally challenging moments. We have, in other words, human experience elevated to a full fledged actor in the drama of life — not fully reducible to automated effects of the causal web of physics or history. Yet human experience is not completely independent of these underlying causes. Yes, human experience has an unavoidable connection to physics by way of the body — Deleuze called this “destiny” in Stocism. But that unavoidable connection does not fully determine how we react to these physical movements through our bodies — destiny does not require necessity to continue Deleuze’s formation.

We can think of this freedom as a form of effort. Effort doesn’t require us to think about human experience as fully automatic expressions of Physics or history or neurotransmitters. We are not automatons. To put it in modern terms, just because we can track decision-making to particular activations of neurons and regions in the brain doesn’t mean that, over time, we lack any ability to control and shape how those neurons are activated.