Seneca · a new plain-English translation from the Latin
Seneca to his dear Lucilius: greetings. I'm slow in replying to your letters, not because I'm tied up with business. Don't let that excuse fool you: I have free time, and so does everyone who wants it. Things don't chase people down — people embrace them and think being busy is proof of success. So why didn't I write back to you at once? Because the question you were asking was coming up in the natural course of the work I'm putting together —
for you know I mean to cover the whole of moral philosophy and explain every question that belongs to it. So I wondered whether to put you off until its proper place came round in that work, or to give you a special ruling outside the regular order. It seemed kinder not to keep someone waiting who has come from so far.
So I'll pull this one out of that connected sequence of topics, and if there's anything else of the sort you're after, I'll send it to you unasked, without your even having to request it. You ask what these questions are? The kind it's more pleasant to know than useful — like the one you're asking now: is the good a body?
The good acts; it benefits, after all; whatever acts is a body. The good stirs the mind, and in a sense shapes and contains it — and those are properties of a body. Whatever is good for the body is a body; therefore whatever is good for the mind is too, since the mind itself is a body.
The good of a human being must be a body, since the human being himself is corporeal. I'd be wrong not to say that whatever nourishes him, and whatever preserves or restores his health, are bodies too; so his good is a body. I don't think you'll doubt that the emotions are bodies (let me slip in another point you didn't ask about) — anger, love, sadness — unless you doubt that they change our expression, tighten our brow, relax our face, bring on a blush, or drain the blood away. Well then — do you think such plain marks of a body can be stamped on us by anything but a body?
If the emotions are bodies, so are the diseases of the mind — greed, cruelty, vices hardened and set beyond correction; therefore malice too, and all its forms: spitefulness, envy, arrogance. And likewise the virtues, first because they are the opposites of these, and second because they give the same evidence of themselves. Don't you see how much vigor courage gives to the eyes? How much intensity prudence gives? How much modesty and calm respect gives? How much serenity joy gives? How much sternness severity gives, and how much relaxation gentleness gives? So it is bodies that change the color and bearing of bodies, that exercise their power over them. And all the virtues I've listed are goods, along with everything that stems from them.
Can there be any doubt that whatever can be touched by something is a body? For nothing but a body can touch or be touched, as Lucretius says. Now none of the things I've mentioned would change the body if they didn't touch it; therefore they are bodies.
Again, whatever has such force that it can push and compel, restrain and hold back, is a body. Well then — doesn't fear hold us back? Doesn't boldness push us forward? Doesn't courage launch us and give us momentum? Doesn't restraint rein us in and call us back? Doesn't joy lift us up, and sadness pull us down?
In short, whatever we do, we do under the command of either vice or virtue; and whatever commands a body is a body, whatever exerts force on a body is a body. The good of the body is corporeal; the good of a human being is the good of a body; therefore it is corporeal.
Since I've indulged you as you wished, let me now say to myself what I can see you're about to say to me: we're playing at soldiers with pebbles. Subtlety is wasted on things that serve no purpose — such exercises don't make men good, only learned.
Wisdom is a more open matter, or rather a simpler one; for a good mind it's enough — for the few who need it — to make use of letters; but we, as with everything else, pour philosophy itself out into needless excess. Just as with everything, so with learning too, we suffer from overindulgence: we study not for life but for the lecture hall. Farewell.