Seneca’s “On Tranquility of Mind” is a Socrates Effect. Not just because Socrates own redefinition of being a useful citizen is cited (5.2). The parallels are many, but the extensions are even more powerful.

Unlike Seneca’s other dialogs and unlike his one-sided Letters to Lucilius, “On Tranquility of Mind” gives the interlocutor, Serenus (probably his cousin), a voice.

(1.1) When I was taking stock of myself, Seneca, I found some faults openly displayed for me to take in hand, and others less obvious and hidden, and others that were not constant but recurred at intervals…

The opening confession by Serenus reveals a struggle on the two fronts opened up by Plato’s Socrates’ concept of citizenship.

Front #1: The Mind/Animus

Like Socratic citizenship, Serenus’s own mind/soul (both encompassed by “animus”) is the site of the struggle. He is asking Seneca for help — “as I would ask a doctor”(1.1).

I cannot tell you once and for all the nature of this weakness of a mind [animus] torn between tendencies, not veering strongly either to what is right or what is perverse; but I can explain it by taking parts of it. I will tell you what happens to me, and you will find a name for my affliction. (1.4)

The dialog opens the space of the famous “Senecan interiority.” This interiority is only hinted at in Plato’s Socrates. We get some demonstrations of it — as when Socrates is found meditating prior to entering the scene of the Symposium. And certainly the exhortation to “care for your souls” is a call to turn one’s attention to oneself.

But Plato never dwells in the interiority of the subject — it’s all surface. The characters exist to further the progress of reasonable dialogs and to demonstrate what it is to pursue good reasons to justify one’s actions. Interiority is merely hinted at, not theorized or enacted in any protracted fashion.

To borrow a metaphor from Deleuze, “On Tranquility of Mind” enacts the folding back on oneself that is called for by Plato’s Socrates but never fully displayed in the dialogs. Do we have in Seneca, the beginnings of modern subjectivity — a self-examining and self-correcting individual who requires help and guidance from another to activate the folding?

This is not, however, the folding entailed in a Christian confession where self-discovery, renunciation and salvation are the objectives and procedure. Rather, it is administrative and ongoing — Serenus is not asking for help discovering his truth, but he’s asking for techniques and tools for managing the daily ups and downs of a life of a citizen with a political function. (He is, or soon will become, a prefect.) (Foucault’s Hermeneutics of the Subject lectures discuss this use of administrative language in Seneca.)

Front #2: Useful Citizenship

We learn in 1.10 that Serenus has entered “political life” but he’s not sure he’s up for it. Public service in the conventional sense is full of dangers. It is a world of rules, rituals, personalities and arbitrary power that makes it a minefield for the middle administrative types that Serenus (and Lucilius and other of Seneca’s proficiens) represents.

Serenus, however, is explicitly struggling with how to be a useful citizen, and much of Seneca’s response will be returning to and extending Socrates’ discussion of how the private citizen makes himself useful to the body politic without having to take up a public office.

The effort of a good citizen is never without use; heard and seen, by his expression and nod and silent persistence and even by his gait, he is of help. Just as some medications benefit by their mere smell, without taste or contact, so virtue, even hidden and at a distance, spreads advantage…. Why do you think a man who keeps quiet is not useful as an example? So it is by far the best to mix leisure with your affairs whenever a life of action will be barred by chance hindrances or the condition of the state. For never are all options so utterly fenced off that no room is left for honorable action. (4.6-8)

From here, Seneca invokes the Example of Socrates with explicit reference to his mission — “he bore himself as a mighty example for those willing to imitate him, walking as a free man among the thirty masters” (5.2)

(There is a third front — “the universal commonwealth of humanity” — but I will take that up at another time.)

“Spiritual Exercises”

The bulk of the dialog details how to achieve “tranquility” — which is what Serenus asks for in his confession. Senecan interiority is an effect and output of the techniques — what Pierre Hadot called ancient philosophy’s “spiritual exercises.”

The techniques are familiar — anticipating death and other calamities so as not to be surprised by them; regulating one’s own desires; finding purpose; retreating into oneself for meditation and contemplation; and reading and writing from a few authors to internalize their lessons.

This turning inward — Deleuze’s “fold” — through the activation of specific techniques makes Senecan interiority more than a descriptive undertaking. The text (like arguably all of his philosophical works that we have) is a “how to” manual for putting these techniques into daily practice (2.4-5). The effect will be “tranquility” as a coping mechanism and mental attitude for handling life’s ongoing challenges.

As such, these spiritual exercises are techniques of making oneself into a useful citizen.