Letter 113, From Pedantic to Practical

Like many of the Letters, Letter 113 begins as a response to a request from Lucilius. Seneca’s contempt for the question is immediate. It is “minutiae” and a “waste of free time.” Responding to it “will do us no good.” Seneca will, nonetheless, comply.

With this up front caveat, he embarks on a comic deconstruction of virtues as if they were self-motivated “animate creatures.” His aim is not to correct Stoic misconceptions of this topic, though he certainly spends a lot of text doing so. His ultimate aim is to show the futility of engaging in this level of useless speculation. In fact, at paragraph 26, he can no longer sustain the game and breaks off abruptly (though at 15 he hinted at his annoyance for continuing the line of thought much longer).

“For heaven’s sake,” you say. “What a web you are weaving at this point!” I burst out laughing when I envision that solecisms, barbarisms, and syllogisms are animate creatures, and like a painter, I give them suitable faces. Is this what we are discussing with bent brow and knotted forehead? Can I not quote Caecilius and say, “What solemn idiocy!” It’s simply ludicrous. So let’s instead turn to something that is useful and salutary for us, and ask how we can arrive at the virtues and what route will bring us to them. (26)

This coming from a man who has been writing the Letters simultaneously with Natural Questions, which arguably could be broken off in the same way at times.

There is a crucial difference between NQ and Letter 113. Where NQ attempts to elevate the mind through a investigation of nature’s laws, Letter 113 is about the inner workings of the mind. Beyond a certain point, the latter is a useless endeavor for Seneca though his adept handling of Stoic concepts of “impression,” “assent” and “impulse” shows that he cares much for the history and the concepts.

Knowing the intimate internal details of how the mind works is not important for ethics. He says as much in “On Comets” in NQ. When he comes to a point of uncertainty in the investigation of comets, he admits that we have a lot of unknowns about them. But it’s the comparison he makes that is interesting here:

“…there are many things that we admit exist, but we do not know what they are like. Everybody will agree that we have a mind, by whose commands we are driven on and called back. But what the mind is, this controller and master of ours, no one will explain to you, any more than he will explain where it is: one person will say that it is breath, another that it is a kind of harmony, another that it is a divine power, a portion of god, another that it is the finest part of the soul, another that it is an incorporeal power; someone will be found to say it is blood or heat. So far from being able to acquire a clear grasp of other things, the mind is still trying to understand itself. (“On Comets” 25.1)

In a long work with the expressed purpose of elevating the mind, a definitive knowledge of the mind is not at all necessary. We can (and must) agree that the mind is the center of the moral universe — that what’s going on in it can be trained, taught and directed toward virtue. But knowing the intimate details of how it works is not useful for that purpose.

If we treat Seneca as a proto-phenomenologist or pre-Freudian, we will be sorely disappointed. You will not find a programmatic investigation of the mind as its own field of inquiry. You’ll scour the text in vain. The mind here is at best a “house” where the scene of the action occurs (paragraph 11). It is where these mechanisms (impressions, assent, impulses) are activated, but the outcome of Seneca’s discussions is not a psychology of internal forces buried in an unconscious.

Of course, impressions, assent, impulses and other concepts of “Stoic moral psychology” frequently make their appearance throughout Seneca’s work, but at best they are heuristic devices that help us slow down our knee-jerk reactions, step back and decide on the right course of action in any given situation:

Don’t teach me whether courage is an animate creature but [teach me rather] that no animate creature is happy without courage, that is, unless it has acquired the strength to resist chance occurrences, and by pondering every contingency has mastered them before they happen. What is courage? It is the impregnable fortification for human weakness. By encircling himself with it, a person can calmly endure throughout this life’s siege, because he uses his own strength and his own weapons. (Letter 113.27)

We are far away from primitive human drives that must be repressed and shaped into a civilization. There is no origin story involving a “state of nature” that must be transformed by a “social contract” in Seneca’s worldview. Rather, we are always in the middle of things. We are always trying to figure it out in the situations in which we find ourselves. All of Seneca’s interlocutors are, like Serenus, “in between” or, like Lucilius, “making progress.” If there are any internal forces to be overcome, they have been internalized through habit formation over the course of a life. The movement of impression to assent to impulse has been “habituated” and is not explained by natural human forces.

But this overcoming of oneself is not, as it would be for Christianity two centuries later, the overcoming of an original sin implanted in us before we even arrived on earth. The self in Seneca faces discrete events in their individuality, pauses to evaluate them, and then acts in accord with what he or she believes to be the most virtuous course of action at the moment. Reflecting on one’s actions and making daily corrections is the essence of the work.