Seneca and Rorty (on Freud)

It is very easy to read Seneca as advocating the formation of moral character as self-purification — as the battle between unruly passions on the one hand and purified reason on the other. “Passions” as the basis for our behavior toward others is automatically bad, and “reason” (as passion’s absolute opposite) is the human/divine faculty that allows us to overcome passion-driven behavior. Certain passages in Natural Questions show that exercising one’s reason totally and completely is reconnecting with the divine requiring one to leave the body behind. In “On Anger,” passions overturn reason and run amok leading to madness and insanity.

But self-purification tends to come with a long-range biography that is conspicuously absent in Seneca. The Senecan self has no story to tell about its struggle to overcome its demons. Clearly Seneca opens the individual self as the ground for an internal moral struggle. In doing so, the possibility of each individual having his or her own long-range story to tell is there. Yet if it’s there at all, it remains nascent. The closest we get is Serenus’ opening confession in “On the Tranquility of Mind”. It could go on, but it does not. It is enough to describe a general condition of the mind where help is required.

So, yes, the possibility of such narratives are opened up, but there are no sweeping autobiographical, totalizing narratives of one’s self, not because they’re not possible, but because they seem unnecessary.

Yes, the possibility to tell the story of oneself is there. Lucilius is “making progress” throughout the Letters. Seneca constantly refers to his proficiens (and himself) as on a “journey”. But the necessity for a meta-narrative of oneself as the protagonist of the journey is simply not in Seneca. The journey is, at best, episodic and made up of discrete events that are the tests of one’s ability to activate reason, judgment and virtue in the heat of the moment — more Don Quixote’s picaresque travels than Tom Jones’ journey to finding his true identity in a hidden letter.

There is no exhortation for Lucilius to look backward on himself in any prolonged and consistent meditation. I believe that the reason for this missing necessity is that the kind of “self-knowledge” that the proficiens seeks is not totalizing. The imperative to “know thyself” is not total and complete — there is no need for a final answer. Instead, “know thyself” is always corrective without feeling the need to render a final judgment.

At the same time, this act of “knowing thyself” teeters on the edge of meaninglessness. Acting virtuously is a “commitment” that one must constantly reactivate. Seneca’s proficiens are constantly reminded of this commitment and their continuous need to renew and reactivate it at every moment. Every event of life is a test of this commitment. Without it, life is an unending string of, on the one hand, unpredictable events (“fortune”) or, on the other, endless repetition:

Everything passes only to return. I do nothing that is new, see nothing that is new. Sometimes this too produces nausea. There are many who feel not that life is hard, but that it is pointless. (Letter 24)

One must deal with life through a renewed commitment to find purpose, to act virtuously come what may. And this can only happen as a “self-enlargement” rather than a “purifying self-discovery” to borrow from Richard Rorty. In this way, I like to find in Seneca what Rorty found in Freud by way of Donald Davidson:

The increased ability of the syncretic, ironic, nominalist intellectual to move back and forth between, for example, religious, moral, scientific, literary, philosophical, and psychoanalytical vocabularies without asking the question “And which of these shows us how things really are?” — the intellectual’s ability to treat vocabularies as tools rather than mirrors — is Freud’s major legacy. (“Freud and Moral Reflection”)

The use of vocabulary as a tool rather than a mirror held up to oneself is not really an opposition for Seneca. Because the self has no founding truth — it is but a mechanized assembly of impressions, impulses and assent that must be fashioned into a coherent self — the mirror and the tool can be linked without smuggling in a “true self.” Words are simultaneously tools and bearers of truth in Seneca — Letters 38 and 40 focus specifically on the link between self-formation, truth and words:

Speech that focuses on the truth should be unaffected and plain…. Bear in mind that this type of speech, which is intended to bring healing to the mind, has to get deep inside us. Remedies that do not stay in the system cannot be effective. (40.4)

His advice in Letter 2 (and plenty of other places) blends the admonition to “know thyself” of Rorty’s mirror with the self-enlargement that is an ongoing art of living: “read only a limited number of writers and be fed by them if you mean to derive anything that will dwell reliably with you”. In reading, one does not discover oneself — as Augustine does in the garden — but rather how to be in the world as a moral individual assessing reality and making judgments about it. Seneca’s truths are not total and they are not personal; they are pragmatic and must be personalized.

This is possible only because there is no truth hidden away in the Senecan self. The self is constantly under construction, but the construction is not part of a long-term process of self-discovery, revelation and conversion that will become critical to the salvation of the Christian individual.

Nor do we need to see Seneca’s concept of self as Sartre’s “dreadful freedom” with a gaping “hole in being”. With Rorty reading (Davidson reading) Freud, I can read Seneca as saying, “We shall not need a picture of the ‘human self’ in order to have morality — neither of a non-mechanical enclave nor of a meaningless void where such an enclave ought to have been.” (Rorty, “Freud and Moral Reflection”)

The reason that I can read Seneca this way is because “know thyself” is always ultimately a practical endeavor. The mirror is always a tool of self-fashioning. The lens of self-discovery is always a distortion and a form of deception where one gives oneself the gift they set out to find.