Seneca · a new plain-English translation from the Latin
Seneca to his dear Lucilius: greetings. I had spared you, and passed over whatever knotty material still remained, content, as it were, to give you a taste of what our school argues, in order to prove that virtue by itself is sufficient to fill out the happy life. You tell me to gather up every syllogism there is, whether devised by our own school or adapted for our use: if I were willing to do that, it would not be a letter but a book. I say again and again that I take no pleasure in this kind of argument; I am ashamed to go down armed with an awl into a battle line drawn up on behalf of gods and men.
'Whoever is prudent is also temperate; whoever is temperate is also steady; whoever is steady is untroubled; whoever is untroubled is free of sadness; whoever is free of sadness is happy; therefore the prudent man is happy, and prudence is enough for the happy life.'
Certain Peripatetics respond to this syllogism in this way: they interpret 'untroubled,' 'steady,' and 'free of sadness' to mean not one who is never troubled, but one who is troubled rarely and moderately. Likewise they say a man is called 'free of sadness' if he is not prone to sadness, and not frequent or excessive in this fault; for they say it denies human nature to claim that anyone's mind is wholly immune to sadness; the wise man, they say, is not overcome by grief, but he is touched by it—and so on, in ways consistent with their school's position. By this they do not remove the emotions, but temper them. But how little we grant the wise man, if he is only braver than the weakest, more cheerful than the saddest, more moderate than the most unrestrained, greater than the most abject! What if Ladas were to marvel at his own speed only by comparing himself to the lame and the crippled?
She would fly over the tips of standing grain
and never bruise the tender ears with her stride,
or she would race across the middle of the sea, skimming
the swelling waves, her swift feet never wetting in the water.
This is swiftness measured on its own terms, not the kind praised only by comparison with the slowest. What if you called someone healthy simply because his fever was mild? Moderate sickness is not good health. 'In just this way,' they say, 'the wise man is called untroubled, the way certain fruits are called seedless—not because they have no hardness of pit at all, but less of it.' That is false. For I do not understand the good man's freedom from evils as a diminishment of them, but as an exemption from them entirely; they ought to be nonexistent, not merely small; for if there is any amount of them at all, they will grow, and meanwhile they will hinder him. Just as a large, fully formed cataract blinds the eyes, a slight one clouds them. If you grant the wise man any emotions at all, reason will be no match for them and will be swept away as if by a torrent, especially since you are not giving him a single emotion to wrestle with, but all of them. A crowd of even middling emotions can do more than the violence of one great one. He has a desire for money, but a moderate one; he has ambition, but not an inflamed one; he has a temper, but an appeasable one; he has inconstancy, but less erratic and changeable; he has lust, but not a mad one. A man would be better off having one vice whole and entire than one who has all of them, even if lighter. Besides, it makes no difference how great an emotion is: however large it is, it does not know how to obey, it does not accept counsel. Just as no animal submits to reason—not the wild ones, not the tame and domesticated ones either, for their nature is deaf to persuasion—so the emotions, however small they are, do not follow reason, do not listen to it. Tigers and lions never shed their savagery; they sometimes lower it, and just when you least expect it, their tamed ferocity flares up again. Vices never grow gentle in good faith. Besides, if reason has any effect at all, the emotions will not even begin; and if they begin against reason's will, they will persist against its will as well. It is easier to block their beginnings than to control their onrush.
So this notion of moderation is false and useless, to be classed with saying that one should be moderately insane, or moderately sick. Virtue alone possesses due measure; the soul's diseases admit no tempering. You will find it easier to remove them than to govern them. Can there be any doubt that the ingrained, hardened vices of the human mind — the ones we call diseases — are without measure: greed, cruelty, lack of self-command? Then the passions are without measure too, for it is from the passions that one crosses over into the vices. Besides, if you grant any legal standing to grief, fear, desire, and the other crooked impulses, they will slip out of our control. Why? Because the things that provoke them lie outside us; so they will grow in proportion as the causes that excite them are great or small. Fear will be greater the more there is to terrify a man, or the closer he has seen it; desire will be keener the larger the prize whose hope has called it forth. If it is not in our power whether the passions arise, neither is it in our power how large they are: once you have allowed them to begin, they will grow along with their causes and will be as big as they become. Add to this that such things, however slight at first, spread and swell; nothing destructive ever keeps within bounds. However trivial the beginnings of a disease, it creeps onward, and sometimes the smallest added attack sinks a body already ailing. And what lunacy it is to believe that when the beginnings of things lie outside our decision, their endings lie within it! How am I strong enough to stop a thing I was too weak to keep out — when it is easier to shut something out than to suppress it once admitted?
Virtue alone admits no such tempering; the mind's evils do not accept a middle degree; you will more easily remove them than govern them. Is there any doubt that the ingrained, hardened vices of the human mind, which we call diseases—like avarice, cruelty, lack of self-control—are immoderate by nature? Then the emotions too are immoderate; for it is from the emotions that one passes into these diseases. Besides, if you grant any legal standing at all to sadness, fear, desire, and the other perverse impulses, they will not be in our power. Why? Because the things that provoke them lie outside us; and so they will grow or shrink according to whether the causes that stir them are great or small. Fear will be greater the more, or the nearer, the thing is that terrifies; desire will be sharper the greater the hope of the thing that calls it forth. If it is not in our power whether the emotions exist at all, then neither is it in our power how great they will be: once you have allowed them to begin, they will grow along with their causes and become as great as circumstance makes them. Add to this that these things, however small at first, grow beyond measure; nothing destructive ever keeps within bounds; however slight the beginnings of diseases, they creep on, and a sick body is sometimes overwhelmed by the smallest addition. But how mad it is to believe that we can set the limits of things whose beginnings lie outside our own control! How am I strong enough to put an end to something I was too weak to keep from starting, when it is easier to shut something out than to suppress it once it is let in? Others have drawn the distinction this way, saying: 'the temperate and prudent man is calm in the disposition and habit of his mind, but not in outcome. For as far as the settled state of his mind goes, he is not disturbed, not saddened, not afraid; but many causes from outside befall him and bring disturbance upon him.' What they mean to say is this: that he is not, in fact, an angry man, though he does sometimes grow angry; and that he is not a fearful man, though he does sometimes feel fear—that is, that he lacks the vice of fear, but not the emotion itself. But if this is granted, then through repeated practice fear will pass over into a vice, and anger, once admitted into the mind, will unravel that very disposition of a mind free from anger. Furthermore, if he does not disregard causes coming from outside, and does feel some fear, then when he must go bravely against swords or fire, for his country, its laws, its liberty, he will go out hesitantly and with his resolve wavering. But this inconsistency of mind does not fall upon the wise man. I think it should also be observed that we must not confuse two things that need to be proved separately: it is proved on its own terms that the only good is what is honorable, and again on its own terms that virtue alone is enough for the happy life. If the only good is what is honorable, everyone agrees that virtue is sufficient for living happily; but the reverse does not follow—that if virtue alone makes one happy, the only good must be what is honorable. Xenocrates and Speusippus think that a man can become happy by virtue alone, yet do not hold that the only good is what is honorable. Epicurus too judges that a man who has virtue is happy, but that virtue itself is not sufficient for the happy life, because it is the pleasure that arises from virtue that produces happiness, not virtue itself. A silly distinction: for the same man says that virtue is never found without pleasure. So if pleasure is always joined to virtue and inseparable from it, then virtue alone is also sufficient; for it carries pleasure with it, without which it does not exist, even when it exists alone. But this claim is absurd: that a man will indeed become happy by virtue alone, but will not become perfectly happy. I cannot see how that could be so. For the happy life has within itself a good that is complete and beyond all surpassing; and if that is so, it is perfectly happy. If the life of the gods contains nothing greater or better, and the happy life is a divine life, then it contains nothing to which it could be raised any higher. Furthermore, if the happy life lacks nothing, then every happy life is complete, and one and the same life is both happy and happiest. Do you doubt that the happy life is the highest good? Then, if it possesses the highest good, it is happy in the highest degree. Just as the highest good admits no addition (for what could be above the highest?), so neither does the happy life, which cannot exist without the highest good. But if you introduce a 'more happy,' you will also introduce a 'much more happy'; you will create countless gradations of the highest good, whereas I understand the highest good to be that which has no degree above itself. If one person is less happy than another, it follows that he would desire the other, happier person's life more than his own; but the happy man prefers nothing to what is his own. Either alternative here is unbelievable: either that something remains for the happy man which he would rather have than what he has, or that he does not prefer the thing that is better than what he has. For surely, the wiser he is, the more he will stretch himself toward what is best, and the more he will desire to attain it by every means. But how is a man happy who can still desire something—or rather, who must?
I will tell you the source of this error: people do not realize that the happy life is one single thing. Its own quality, not its size, puts it in the best possible condition; and so it is the same whether long or short, spread wide or narrower, distributed into many places and many parts, or drawn together into one. Whoever measures it by number, by extent, by parts, robs it of the very thing that makes it exceptional. And what is exceptional about the happy life? That it is full. The end of eating and drinking, I think, is being satisfied. One person eats more, another less: what does it matter? Both are now full. One drinks more, another less: what does it matter? Neither is thirsty. One has lived more years, another fewer: it makes no difference, if many years made the one man happy just as much as few years made the other. The man you call less happy is not happy at all; this word admits no diminishing.
'Whoever is brave is without fear; whoever is without fear is without sadness; whoever is without sadness is happy.'
This is our school's syllogism. Against it, they try to respond as follows: that we are treating as an admitted fact a claim that is actually false and controversial—namely, that the brave man is without fear. 'What then?' they say. 'Will the brave man not fear looming evils? That would be the mark of a madman out of his senses, not a brave man. No,' they say, 'he fears things with the greatest moderation, but he is not entirely outside the reach of fear.' Those who say this fall back into the same error, making lesser vices stand in the place of virtues; for a man who does fear, but rarely and only a little, is not free of the fault—he is only troubled by a lighter form of it. 'But surely I think it madness not to be afraid of looming evils.' What you say would be true if they were in fact evils; but if he knows they are not evils, and judges only baseness to be evil, then he ought to look upon dangers without concern, and disregard as trivial the things that others fear. Or if it belongs to a fool and a madman not to fear evils, then the wiser a man is, the more he ought to fear. 'As you people see it,' they say, 'the brave man will expose himself to dangers.' Not at all: he will not fear them, but he will avoid them; caution suits him, fear does not. 'What then?' they ask. 'Will he not fear death, chains, fire, the other weapons of fortune?' No; for he knows that these things are not evils, but only seem to be; he considers all of them the ordinary terrors of human life. Describe captivity, floggings, chains, poverty, the mutilation of limbs whether by disease or by violence, and whatever else you can bring up: he counts these among the fears of the deranged. These are things to be feared by the timid. Or do you think something is an evil, when it is a thing that we sometimes must go to meet of our own will? You ask what evil actually is? It is yielding to the things called evils, and handing over to them your own freedom—the freedom for which everything else ought to be endured: freedom perishes unless we scorn the things that would place a yoke upon us. People would not be uncertain about what befits a brave man, if they knew what courage really is. It is not rash recklessness, nor love of danger, nor a craving for what is fearsome: it is the knowledge of distinguishing what is evil from what is not. Courage is the most careful guardian of itself, and at the same time the most patient in enduring the things that only have the false appearance of evils. 'What then? If a sword is aimed at a brave man's throat, if one part of his body after another is repeatedly pierced, if he sees his own entrails spill into his own lap, if the torture is renewed after a pause, so that he may feel it all the more, and fresh blood is drawn from wounds already dried—does he feel no fear? Will you say that he feels no pain either?' No, he does feel pain—for no virtue strips a man of his human capacity to feel—but he does not fear; unconquered, he looks down on his own sufferings from a height. You ask what his state of mind is then? The same as that of someone comforting a sick friend.
'What is evil does harm; what does harm makes a man worse; pain and poverty do not make a man worse; therefore they are not evils.'
'What you propose is false,' they say, 'for it does not follow that whatever does harm also makes worse. A storm and a squall do harm to the helmsman, yet they do not make him worse.' Some of the Stoics answer this objection as follows: that the helmsman is indeed made worse by the storm and squall, because he cannot accomplish what he set out to do, nor hold his course; that he is not made worse in his skill, but in the exercise of it. To which the Peripatetic replies, 'So then poverty, pain, and anything else of that kind will also make the wise man worse; it will not take his virtue away from him, but it will hinder its operation.' This would be rightly said, were the helmsman's situation not different from the wise man's. For the wise man's purpose in living his life is not necessarily to accomplish what he attempts, but to do everything rightly; the helmsman's purpose is necessarily to bring the ship into harbor. The arts are servants; they must deliver what they promise; wisdom is mistress and ruler; the arts serve life, wisdom commands it.
I think it should be answered differently: that neither the helmsman's skill nor the exercise of that skill is made worse by any storm. The helmsman did not promise you good fortune, but useful effort and knowledge of how to steer a ship; and this becomes all the more apparent the more some chance force has opposed him. Whoever was able to say, 'Neptune, you shall never sink this ship except on a straight course,' has fully satisfied his art: the storm hinders not the helmsman's work, but his success. 'What then?' they say. 'Does it do the helmsman no harm, this thing that keeps him from reaching harbor, that renders his efforts fruitless, that turns him back or holds him fast and strips him of resources?' It does harm—not to him as helmsman, but as a man sailing; otherwise he is no true helmsman at all. It so little hinders the helmsman's art that it actually displays it; for in calm weather, as they say, anyone can be a helmsman. These things are harmful to the vessel, not to its pilot in his capacity as pilot. The helmsman has two roles: one shared with everyone else who has boarded the same ship—he too is a passenger; the other his own—he is the helmsman. The storm harms him as a passenger, not as a helmsman. Furthermore, the helmsman's skill is a good belonging to someone else: it pertains to those he carries, just as a doctor's skill pertains to those he treats. The wise man's good is shared: it belongs both to those with whom he lives and to himself alone. And so the helmsman may perhaps suffer harm, since the service he has promised to others is hindered by the storm; but the wise man suffers no harm from poverty, none from pain, none from the other storms of life. For not all his work is prevented—only the part that concerns others; he himself is always in action, and his achievement is greatest precisely when fortune has set itself against him; for then he is carrying out the business of wisdom itself, which we have said is both a good belonging to others and his own.
Besides, even when he is under the pressure of some necessity, he is not thereby prevented from doing good to others. Poverty may keep him from teaching how the state should be governed, but he still teaches how poverty itself should be handled. His work extends across his whole life. Thus no turn of fortune, no circumstance, shuts out the wise man's activity; for the very thing that keeps him from doing other things is itself the subject of his action. He is fitted for either kind of situation: ruler of good things, conqueror of bad ones. He has trained himself, I say, to display virtue as much in favorable circumstances as in adverse ones, and to look not at the material he is given but at virtue itself; and so neither poverty nor pain nor anything else that turns the inexperienced aside and drives them headlong can hold him back. Do you think he is being crushed by misfortunes? He is making use of them. Phidias did not know how to make statues only out of ivory; he made them out of bronze too. If you had given him marble, or some even cheaper material, he would have made from it the best thing that could be made from that material. So too the wise man will unfold virtue in riches, if that is granted him; if not, in poverty; in his homeland, if he can; if not, in exile; as a commander, if he can; if not, as a common soldier; sound in body, if he can; if not, disabled. Whatever fortune he receives, he will make something memorable out of it. There are certain trainers of wild animals who bring the fiercest creatures, terrifying even to encounter, to tolerate a man's presence, and, not content merely to have shaken off their savagery, tame them into close companionship: a trainer puts his hand into a lion's jaws, a tiger's own keeper kisses it, the smallest Ethiopian boy orders an elephant to kneel and to walk a tightrope. Just so, the wise man is an artist in taming misfortunes: pain, want, disgrace, imprisonment, exile—everywhere terrifying—become gentle once they reach him. Farewell.