Seneca · a new plain-English translation from the Latin
Seneca to his dear Lucilius: greetings. [1] You want something useful, something necessary to a man hurrying toward wisdom: that philosophy be divided, and its vast body arranged into limbs. It is easier, after all, to be led to knowledge of the whole through its parts. If only philosophy as a whole could come before us the way the entire face of the world comes into view all at once—a spectacle most like the universe itself! For it would surely seize every mortal with wonder at itself, and we would abandon the things we now, in the vast ignorance of vast fools, consider great. But since that cannot happen, philosophy must be looked at the way the secrets of the universe are looked at. [2] The wise man's mind embraces the whole mass of it, and covers it no less swiftly than our eyesight covers the sky; but for us, who must break through fog and whose vision fails close at hand, individual things can more easily be shown one at a time, since we are not yet capable of grasping the whole. So I will do what you ask, and divide philosophy into parts—not into scraps. To divide it is useful; to hack it apart is not. For it is difficult to grasp the smallest things as it is to grasp the greatest. [3] The people are divided into three classes, the army into centuries; whatever has grown large is more easily recognized once it has been broken into parts—which, as I said, should not be countless and tiny. Too much division has the same fault as none at all: whatever has been cut down to dust is as good as jumbled together.
[4] So first, if you agree, let me say what the difference is between wisdom and philosophy. Wisdom is the perfected good of the human mind; philosophy is the love and pursuit of wisdom: philosophy strains toward what wisdom has already reached. Where the word 'philosophy' comes from is obvious; by its very name it confesses what it loves. [5] Some have defined wisdom as knowledge of things divine and human. Others put it this way: wisdom is knowing things divine and human, and their causes. This addition seems superfluous to me, since the causes of things divine and human are themselves part of the divine. There have also been those who defined philosophy this way and that: some called it the pursuit of virtue, others the pursuit of correcting the mind; some have called it the striving after right reason. [6] This much seems settled: there is some difference between philosophy and wisdom. It cannot be that the thing pursued is the same as the pursuing. Just as there is a great difference between greed and money—greed desires, money is desired—so it is between philosophy and wisdom. Wisdom is the effect and reward of philosophy; philosophy comes on its own, wisdom is arrived at. [7] Wisdom is what the Greeks call sophia. The Romans used to use this very word too, just as they now use 'philosophia'; your old comic plays will prove it to you, and so will the inscription on the tomb of Dossennus:
Stop, stranger, and read the sophia of Dossennus.
[8] Some of our own school, though they held that philosophy was the pursuit of virtue—virtue being what is sought, and philosophy the seeking—nevertheless did not think the two could be pulled apart; for there is no philosophy without virtue, nor virtue without philosophy. Philosophy is the pursuit of virtue, but pursued through virtue itself; nor can virtue exist without pursuit of itself, nor pursuit of virtue without virtue. It is not as with people trying to hit something from a distance, where the one aiming is in one place and the target in another; nor is it like roads leading to cities, which lie outside the cities—so too the roads to virtue lie outside virtue itself. No: one arrives at virtue through virtue; philosophy and virtue are bound together.
[9] The greatest and the majority of authorities have said philosophy has three parts: moral, natural, and rational. The first orders the mind; the second investigates the nature of things; the third demands precision in the meaning of words, in structure, and in argument, so that falsehood does not slip in disguised as truth. But there have also been those who reduced philosophy to fewer parts, and those who spread it into more. [10] Some of the Peripatetics added a fourth part, civic philosophy, because it requires its own particular training and deals with its own subject matter; some added to these the part they call 'economics,' the science of managing a household; some even set apart a separate topic on ways of life. None of this, though, will fail to be found within the moral part. [11] The Epicureans thought philosophy had two parts, natural and moral; they threw out the rational part. But then, forced by the facts themselves to distinguish ambiguous things and to expose falsehoods hiding under the appearance of truth, they too introduced a topic they call 'on judgment and the standard'—which under another name is the rational part—though they consider it an appendage of the natural part. [12] The Cyrenaics did away with both the natural and the rational parts and were content with the moral part alone—but even what they cut away, they bring back in another way; for they divide moral philosophy into five parts: one on things to be avoided and sought, a second on the emotions, a third on actions, a fourth on causes, a fifth on proofs. But causes belong to the natural part, and proofs to the rational. [13] Ariston of Chios said that the natural and rational parts were not only superfluous but actually harmful; and he trimmed down even the moral part, the only one he had left standing. For he removed the section containing exhortations and moral advice, saying that belonged to a schoolmaster, not a philosopher—as if the wise man were anything other than the schoolmaster of the human race.
[14] Since philosophy, then, is threefold, let us begin by arranging its moral part first. This, in turn, it has been agreed to divide into three: first, the assessment that assigns to each thing its due worth and judges how much each is worth—this is most useful, for what is more necessary than putting the right price on things?—second, the study of impulse; third, of action. First you must judge how much each thing is worth; second, direct toward it an impulse that is ordered and controlled; third, bring your impulse and your action into agreement, so that in all these things you are consistent with yourself. [15] Whatever is missing from these three throws the rest into disorder. What good does it do to have correctly assessed everything, if you are excessive in your impulse? What good does it do to have curbed your impulses and to hold your desires in your own power, if in the actual carrying out of things you are ignorant of timing, and don't know when, where, and how each thing should be done? It is one thing to know the worth and value of things, another to know the particulars of action, and still another to rein in impulse and move toward action without rushing headlong. Life is in harmony with itself only when action does not fall short of impulse, and impulse is conceived in proportion to the worth of the thing pursued—so that it is slack or keen exactly as that thing deserves to be pursued.
[16] The natural part of philosophy splits into two: bodies and incorporeal things; and each of these divides further into what I might call its own grades. The topic of bodies falls first into things that act and things produced by them—and what is produced are the elements. The topic of the elements itself, some think, is simple; others think it divides into matter, the cause that moves everything, and the elements.
[17] It remains for me to divide the rational part of philosophy. All speech is either continuous, or broken up between question and answer; the latter has been called 'dialectic,' the former 'rhetoric.' Rhetoric is concerned with words, thoughts, and arrangement; dialectic divides into two parts, words and their meanings—that is, the things spoken of, and the terms by which they are spoken of. A vast further division follows in each. So at this point I will make an end, and
follow only the highest summits of the matter;
otherwise, if I wanted to make parts of parts, this would turn into a book of quibbles.
[18] None of this, best of men, Lucilius, do I discourage you from reading—provided that whatever you read you immediately apply to your character. Restrain your vices, rouse what has grown slack in you, tighten what has grown loose, tame your stubbornness, and, so far as you can, harass your own desires and those shared by everyone; and when people say to you, 'How much longer the same old thing?'—answer:
[19] 'I ought to be the one saying, "how much longer will you go on committing the same sins?" Do you want the remedies to stop before the diseases do? I will say it all the more, and precisely because you refuse to hear it I will persist; medicine only begins to do good once, touching a body that has grown numb to itself, it draws out the pain. I will say things that will benefit you even against your will. Let some voice that flatters you not, for once, reach you—and since each of you, one by one, refuses to hear the truth, hear it in public.
[20] 'How far will you go in extending the boundaries of your estates? Is a field too narrow for one master, when it once held a whole people? How far will you stretch your plowlands, not content to mark out the size of your farms even by the measure of provinces? Great rivers flow through private property from source to mouth, and mighty streams that once bounded mighty nations now belong to you alone. Even that is too little, unless you have girdled the seas with your latifundia, unless your bailiff rules beyond the Adriatic, the Ionian, the Aegean, unless islands—once the residences of great commanders—are counted among your cheapest possessions. Own as widely as you like, let what was once called an empire become one estate; make everything you can your own, as long as more remains that is someone else's.
[21] 'Now I speak to you whose extravagance spreads out just as widely as their greed. I say to you: how long before there is no lake without your villas' rooflines looming over it? no river without your buildings lining its banks? Wherever a hot spring bubbles up, there some new resort of luxury will be built. Wherever the shore curves into a bay, you will immediately lay foundations, and not content with dry land unless it is land you made yourselves, you will drive the sea inward. You may have your roofs gleaming in every location—here perched on mountains for a vast view of land and sea, there raised from the plain to the height of mountains—yet however much you have built, however enormous, you yourselves remain single bodies, and small ones. What good do many bedrooms do you? You lie in only one of them. Wherever you are not, is not yours.
[22] 'Next I turn to you whose bottomless, insatiable gullet ransacks the seas on one side and the lands on the other, pursuing prey with hooks, with snares, with every kind of net, at enormous effort: for you, no animal is safe except from your own disgust. How little of all those dishes, gathered with such labor, do you actually taste, with a mouth exhausted by pleasures? How little of that wild beast, dangerously caught, does the queasy, bloated master actually sample? How little of all those shellfish, hauled from so far away, actually slides down that insatiable gut of yours? Wretched people—do you not realize that your hunger is bigger than your stomach?'
[23] Say these things to others, so that in saying them you hear them yourself; write them, so that in writing them you read them yourself—applying everything to your character, to calming the madness of your passions. Study not so that you may know more, but so that you may know better. Farewell.