Seneca · a new plain-English translation from the Latin
You want to know what I think of the liberal studies. I respect none of them, I count none of them a good, if its end point is cash. They are hired trades — useful just so far as they get the mind ready, so long as they do not hold it back. One should linger over them only while the mind is unable to tackle anything greater; they are our warm-up, not our work. You can see why they were called 'liberal' studies: because they are worthy of a free man. But only one study is truly liberal — the one that sets a man free: the study of wisdom, lofty, brave, great-souled. The rest are small stuff for children. Or do you believe there is any good in subjects whose professors, as you can see, are the most disgraceful and scandalous of men? We ought not to be learning these things; we ought to have learned them.
Some have judged that the question to ask about the liberal studies is whether they make a man good. They do not even promise that; they make no pretense of that kind of knowledge. The literary scholar is busy with the care of language and, if he wants to range wider, with histories — and, pushing his boundaries out as far as they will go, with poetry. Which of these paves a road to virtue? Parsing syllables, fussing over words, memorizing myths, the laws and measures of verse — which of these takes away fear, removes desire, bridles lust? Pass to geometry and to music: you will find nothing in them that forbids fearing, forbids desiring. And whoever is ignorant of that knows everything else in vain.
The question is whether these men teach virtue or not. If they do not teach it, they do not even transmit it; if they do teach it, they are philosophers. Do you want proof of how far they are from having set up shop to teach virtue? Look how unlike one another all their pursuits are — yet there would be uniformity if they were teaching the same thing. Unless perhaps they can persuade you that Homer was a philosopher — though they refute that with the very arguments they use to prove it. For now they make him a Stoic, approving virtue alone, fleeing pleasures, refusing to leave the honorable even at the price of immortality; now an Epicurean, praising the condition of a city at peace, passing life amid banquets and song; now a Peripatetic, introducing three classes of goods; now an Academic, declaring everything uncertain. Clearly none of these positions is in him, because all of them are — for they contradict one another. But grant them that Homer was a philosopher: then surely he became wise before he knew any poetry; so let us learn the things that made Homer wise. As for asking me which was the elder, Homer or Hesiod — that is no more to the point than knowing why Hecuba, though younger than Helen, wore her years so badly. And the ages of Patroclus and Achilles — do you really think investigating those is to the point? Do you ask where Ulysses wandered rather than see to it that we are not wandering all the time? There is no leisure to hear whether he was tossed about between Italy and Sicily or beyond the world known to us — indeed so long a wandering could not have happened in so narrow a space. Storms of the soul toss us daily, and our worthlessness drives us into every one of Ulysses' misfortunes. There is no lack of beauty to trouble the eye, no lack of an enemy; on one side savage monsters that delight in human blood, on another treacherous enticements for the ear, and elsewhere shipwrecks and every variety of disaster. Teach me this: how to love my country, my wife, my father; how to sail toward these honorable ports even after shipwreck. Why inquire whether Penelope was unchaste, whether she pulled the wool over her generation's eyes, whether she suspected the man before her was Ulysses before she knew it? Teach me what chastity is, and how great a good lies in it, and whether it is located in the body or in the mind.
I pass to the musician. You teach me how high and low notes harmonize, how strings that give back different sounds produce concord. Bring it about instead that my mind is in harmony with itself and my plans do not clash. You show me which musical modes are plaintive; show me instead how, in the middle of adversity, not to let out a plaintive note.
The geometer teaches me to measure estates rather than teaching me how to measure what is enough for a man. He teaches me to count, and lends my fingers to greed, rather than teaching me that those computations are beside the point — that a man whose fortune wears out the bookkeepers is not the happier for it; rather, how much useless property that man owns who will be reduced to utter misery if he is forced to reckon up, by himself, how much he has. What use is it to me to know how to divide a little field into parcels, if I do not know how to divide it with my brother? What use to tot up with precision the feet in an acre, and to catch even what escapes the measuring-rod, if a high-handed neighbor scraping off a bit of my land can make me miserable? He teaches me how to lose nothing of my boundaries; but what I would rather learn is the art of losing them entire, and cheerfully. 'I am being driven,' the man says, 'from the field of my father and grandfather.' Really? Before your grandfather, who held that field? Can you explain what man — no, what people — it belonged to? You entered it not as owner but as tenant. Whose tenant? If things go well for you, your heir's. The jurists say that no public property can be acquired by usage; what you hold, what you call yours, is public — the property, in fact, of the human race. A splendid art! You know how to measure circles; you reduce whatever shape you are given to a square; you state the distances between stars; nothing exists that does not fall within your measurement. If you are such a craftsman, measure a man's mind; say how great it is, say how puny it is. You know what a straight line is: what good is that to you if you do not know what is straight in life?
I come now to the man who glories in his knowledge of the heavens —
where the cold star of Saturn takes itself off,
into what orbits the Cyllenian fire wanders across the sky.
What will knowing this profit me? That I should be anxious when Saturn and Mars stand in opposition, or when Mercury makes his evening setting with Saturn looking on — rather than learn this: that wherever those bodies are, they are favorable and cannot change? The unbroken order of the fates and their inescapable course drive them along; they come round in fixed rotations, and the outcomes of all things they either cause or mark. But if they cause whatever happens, what good will knowledge of an unchangeable thing do? And if they merely signal it, what is the point of foreseeing what you cannot escape? Know these things or don't — they will happen.
But if you keep in view the swift sun and the stars that follow
in their order, never will tomorrow's hour deceive you,
nor will you be caught by the snares of a cloudless night.
Provision has been made, amply and more than amply, to keep me safe from snares. 'What — does tomorrow's hour really never deceive me? Whatever befalls a man without his knowing deceives him.' I do not know what will happen; I know what can happen. From that total I will beg off nothing; I expect all of it, and if any of it is remitted, I count myself lucky. The hour deceives me if it spares me — and yet even then it does not deceive me. For just as I know that anything can happen, so I also know it will not necessarily happen. So I look for the best and am ready for the worst.
On one point you will have to bear with me while I stray off the prescribed track: I cannot be induced to admit painters into the roster of the liberal arts, any more than sculptors, marble-workers, or the other servants of luxury. Just as firmly I expel wrestlers, and that whole science built of oil and mud, from these liberal studies — otherwise I must also admit the perfumers and the cooks and all the others who fit their talents to our pleasures. For what, I ask you, is liberal about those fellows who vomit on an empty stomach, whose bodies are fattened while their minds are starved and comatose? Or are we to believe that kind of training is liberal for our young men — the young men our ancestors trained upright: to throw javelins, to whirl a stake, to manage a horse, to handle weapons? They taught their sons nothing that had to be learned lying down. Still, neither the old exercises nor the new ones teach or nourish virtue. What is the profit in guiding a horse and governing its gallop with a bit, while being dragged off by passions with no bit at all? What is the profit in beating many men at wrestling or boxing, and being beaten by anger?
'What then — do the liberal studies contribute nothing to us?' To other things, much; to virtue, nothing. Even those admittedly humble trades that work with the hands contribute a great deal to the equipment of life, yet they have nothing to do with virtue. 'Then why do we educate our sons in the liberal studies?' Not because these can bestow virtue, but because they prepare the mind to receive it. Just as that primary schooling — 'letters,' as the ancients called it — through which children are given their elements, does not teach the liberal arts but clears the ground for taking them in later, so the liberal arts do not conduct the mind all the way to virtue; they clear its road.
Posidonius says there are four kinds of arts: the common and menial, the theatrical, the boyish, and the liberal. The common are the craftsmen's, done by hand and busy with equipping life, making no show of grace or of honor. The theatrical are those aimed at pleasing eye and ear; among these you may count the stage-engineers who devise scaffolds that rise by themselves, platforms that climb silently into the air, and other surprises — things that were joined splitting apart, things that stood apart coming together on their own, things that stood high sinking gradually into themselves. The eyes of the ignorant are struck by all this; knowing none of the causes, they marvel at everything sudden. The boyish arts, which have something resembling the liberal about them, are those the Greeks call 'encyclical' and we call liberal. But the only truly liberal arts — or, to speak more truly, the only free ones — are those whose concern is virtue.
'Just as there is a natural part of philosophy,' he says, 'a moral part, and a logical part, so this crowd of liberal arts also claims its own place within philosophy. When we come to questions of natural science, we rest the case on geometry's testimony; therefore geometry is a part of the discipline it assists.' Many things assist us without being parts of us; indeed, if they were parts, they would not assist. Food is an aid to the body, yet it is not a part of it. Geometry renders us a certain service: it is necessary to philosophy the way the carpenter is necessary to geometry — but the carpenter is not a part of geometry, nor is geometry a part of philosophy. Besides, each has its own boundaries. The wise man investigates and knows the causes of natural things; their numbers and measures the geometer pursues and calculates. On what principle the heavenly bodies hold together, what force and what nature is theirs, the wise man knows; their courses and returns, and those certain oscillations by which they sink and rise and sometimes present the appearance of standing still — though standing still is not permitted to heavenly bodies — the mathematician computes. The wise man will know the cause that produces reflections in a mirror; the geometer can tell you how far the object must be from the image, and what shape of mirror gives back what images. That the sun is large the philosopher will prove; how large it is, the mathematician — who advances by a kind of practice and drill. But in order to advance, he must beg certain first principles; and no art whose foundation is held on sufferance is its own master. Philosophy asks nothing from anyone else; it raises the whole structure from the ground up. Mathematics is, so to speak, a surface-tenant: it builds on another's land, accepting first principles by whose favor it reaches what lies beyond. If it went to the truth on its own, if it could grasp the nature of the whole universe, I would say it contributed much to our minds, which grow by handling the heavens and draw something down from on high.
One thing alone brings the mind to completion: the unshakable knowledge of good and evil — and no other art inquires into good and evil at all. Let us take the virtues one by one. Courage is the scorner of everything frightening; it looks down on the terrors that would put our liberty under the yoke; it challenges them and breaks them. Do the liberal studies strengthen it? Faithfulness is the holiest good of the human heart; no compulsion forces it to deceive, no reward corrupts it. 'Burn me,' it says, 'flog me, kill me: I will not betray them; the harder pain digs for my secrets, the deeper I will bury them.' Can the liberal studies make souls like that? Temperance commands the pleasures; some it hates and drives off, others it rations and reduces to a healthy measure — and it never approaches them for their own sake. It knows the best measure of what we desire is not how much you want but how much you ought to take. Kindness forbids being arrogant toward one's fellows, forbids being harsh; in words, in deeds, in feelings it shows itself gentle and approachable to everyone; it counts no misfortune another's, and loves its own good chiefly because that good will be good to someone else. Do the liberal studies teach that character? No more than they teach simplicity, or modesty and restraint, or thrift and frugality, or the mercy that spares another's blood as its own and knows that man is not to be used wastefully by man.
'Since you say,' comes the objection, 'that virtue cannot be reached without the liberal studies, how can you deny that they contribute anything to virtue?' Because virtue is not reached without food either, yet food has nothing to do with virtue. Timber contributes nothing to a ship, though a ship is made of nothing but timber. There is no reason, I say, to think a thing comes about by the help of something merely because it cannot come about without it. One can even go further and say that wisdom can be reached without the liberal studies at all; for though virtue must be learned, it is not learned through them. Why should I suppose a man who does not know his letters cannot become wise, when wisdom does not reside in letters? Wisdom delivers facts, not words — and perhaps memory is more reliable when it has no prop outside itself. Wisdom is a large, spacious thing; it needs the whole room to itself. There is learning to be done about things divine and human, about past and future, about the perishable and the eternal, about time — and consider, on that one subject, how many questions arise: first, whether time is anything in its own right; then whether anything exists before time, apart from time; whether time began with the universe, or, because something existed before the universe, time existed too. About the soul alone the questions are countless: where it comes from, what it is like, when it begins to exist, how long it exists; whether it migrates from place to place, changing residence as it is thrown into one animal form after another, or serves only a single term and then, released, roams through the whole; whether or not it is a body; what occupation it will have once it stops acting through us; how it will use its freedom when it has escaped this cage; whether it forgets its past and begins to know itself from the moment it is drawn away from the body and withdraws to the heights. Whatever region of things human and divine you take hold of, you will be worn out by the enormous supply of matters to investigate and learn. So that these many great subjects may have free lodging, everything superfluous must be cleared out of the mind. Virtue will not squeeze herself into those cramped quarters; a great thing wants room to move. Let everything else be evicted; let the whole heart be empty for her.
'But it is delightful to know many arts.' Then let us keep only as much of them as we need. Do you think a man deserves censure who accumulates useless goods and lays out a parade of costly objects in his house, and not the man who buries himself in the useless bric-a-brac of learning? Wanting knowledge past the point of enough is intemperance of its own kind. Consider too that this chasing after the liberal arts makes men tiresome, wordy, tactless, pleased with themselves — men who fail to learn the necessary things because they have learned the superfluous ones. The scholar Didymus wrote four thousand books; I would pity him if he had merely read that much superfluity. In these books he investigates Homer's birthplace, Aeneas' true mother, whether Anacreon lived more given to lust or to drink, whether Sappho was a prostitute — and other things you would want to unlearn if you knew them. Now go and tell me life is not long!
But when you come to our own people too, I will show you plenty that ought to be cut away with the axe. It costs a great outlay of time and a great weariness of other men's ears to earn the compliment 'What a learned man!' Let us be content with a plainer, countrier title: 'What a good man!' Is that how it is to be? Am I to unroll the annals of every nation and hunt for the first writer of poetry? Am I to calculate the span between Orpheus and Homer, when I have no chronology to go by? Am I to study the critical marks with which Aristarchus pricked at other men's verses, and wear my life out on syllables? Am I to stay stuck in the geometer's sand-tray? Has the wholesome precept 'be sparing of your time' slipped so far out of my mind? Am I to know these things — and be ignorant of what? The scholar Apion, who toured the whole of Greece under Gaius Caesar and was adopted by every city in Homer's name, used to say that Homer, after finishing both his subjects, the Odyssey and the Iliad, added to his work a beginning in which he embraced the whole Trojan war. His proof was that Homer deliberately placed in his first line two letters giving the number of his books. A man who wants to know a great deal needs to know that sort of thing. Won't you consider instead how much time bad health takes from you, how much public business, how much private business, how much daily business, how much sleep? Measure your life: it does not hold so much. I have been speaking of the liberal studies — but how much superfluity the philosophers have, how much that retreats from any use! They too have sunk to distinctions of syllables and the proper force of conjunctions and prepositions, and have come to envy the grammarians, to envy the geometers: whatever was superfluous in those men's arts they have imported into their own. The result is that they know how to speak more carefully than how to live. Hear how much harm excessive subtlety does, and how hostile it is to truth. Protagoras says one can argue either side of any question with equal force — including this very question, whether every question can be argued on either side. Nausiphanes says that of the things that appear to be, none is any more existent than nonexistent. Parmenides says that of all appearances, nothing exists except the universe as one. Zeno of Elea knocked the whole business out of business: he says nothing exists. The Pyrrhonists work the same ground, and the Megarians and Eretrians and Academics, who introduced a new branch of knowledge — knowing nothing. Toss all of these onto that useless heap of liberal studies. The first group hand me a knowledge that will do me no good; the second strip away the hope of any knowledge at all. Better to know useless things than to know nothing. The first do not hold up a lamp to aim my sight at the truth; the second gouge my eyes out. If I believe Protagoras, nothing in the nature of things exists except doubt; if Nausiphanes, only this is certain, that nothing is certain; if Parmenides, nothing exists but the One; if Zeno, not even the One. What, then, are we? What are these things that surround us, feed us, hold us up? The whole of nature is a shadow — either empty or deceiving. I could not easily say which group angers me more: those who decided we know nothing, or those who did not leave us even that — the knowing that we know nothing. Farewell.