Seneca · a new plain-English translation from the Latin
Seneca to his dear Lucilius: greetings. You are going to quarrel with me, I can see it, once I have laid out for you today's little question, over which we lingered quite a while; you will cry out again, 'What has this to do with character?' Cry out, then — but first let me set against you some others for you to quarrel with, Posidonius and Archidemus (they will submit to judgment), and then I will say: not everything that touches on morals actually shapes good character.
One thing has to do with feeding a person, another with training him, another with clothing him, another with teaching him, another with giving him pleasure; yet all of these have to do with the person, even if not all of them make him better. Different things touch on character in different ways: some correct and set it in order, others examine its nature and its origin.
When I ask why nature produced the human being, why she preferred him to all other animals, do you judge that I have wandered far away from questions of character? That is false. For how will you know what qualities a person ought to have unless you have first found what is best for a human being, unless you have examined his nature? Only then will you understand what you ought to do and what you ought to avoid, once you have learned what you owe to your own nature. 'I,' you say, 'want to learn how to desire less, fear less. Shake superstition out of me; teach me that this thing called happiness is a light and empty matter, needing only the easiest addition of one syllable to become unhappiness.' I will satisfy your wish: I will urge on the virtues and thrash the vices. Someone may judge me too excessive and unrestrained on this front, but I will not stop hunting down wickedness, holding back the wildest passions, checking pleasures that are headed toward pain, and shouting down our own prayers. Why not? Since we have wished for the greatest of evils, and whatever we say to congratulate ourselves has been born out of that very wishing.
Meanwhile, allow me to work through some things that seem a little further removed from the point. We were asking whether every living creature has a sense of its own constitution. That it does is most apparent from the fact that creatures move their limbs aptly and readily, exactly as if they had been trained in this; there is not one that lacks agility in the use of its own parts. A craftsman handles his tools with ease, a ship's helmsman skillfully turns the rudder, a painter, out of the many varied colors he has set before himself to render a likeness, picks out the right one with great speed and moves between the wax and the work with an easy face and hand — in just this way, an animal is nimble in every use of itself.
We are used to marveling at skilled dancers, because their hands stand ready for every meaning of things and feelings, and their gesture keeps pace with the speed of words: what art gives to dancers, nature gives to animals. No creature struggles to move its limbs, none hesitates in the use of itself. They do this the moment they are born; they come forward already possessing this knowledge; they are born already trained.
'Animals move their parts aptly for this reason,' someone objects, 'because if they moved otherwise they would feel pain. So, as you Stoics yourselves say, they are compelled, and it is fear, not will, that moves them straight.' That is false; for whatever is driven by necessity is sluggish, while agility belongs to what moves of its own accord. And so far is fear of pain from driving them to this that they strain toward their natural motion even when pain is actively holding them back.
So an infant who is practicing standing and getting used to carrying his own weight, the moment he begins to try out his strength, falls, and gets up again and again in tears, until through the pain itself he has trained himself into what nature demands. Certain creatures with a hard shell, turned over, keep twisting themselves and stretching out and turning their feet this way and that until they are set back in place. An overturned tortoise on its back feels no torment, and yet it remains restless with longing for its natural position, and does not stop straining and shaking itself until it stands again on its feet. So every creature has a sense of its own constitution, and from this comes the ready handling of its limbs; and we have no greater proof that this awareness comes to them along with the knowledge needed to live than the fact that no animal is clumsy in the use of itself.
'Constitution,' the objector says, 'is, as you Stoics put it, the ruling part of the mind disposed in a certain way toward the body. How does an infant understand something so tangled and subtle, something that even you can barely put into words? Every animal would have to be born a master of logic to grasp such a definition — something that is obscure even to a great many educated men.' What you object would be true if I were claiming that animals grasp the definition of constitution, rather than the constitution itself. Nature is more easily understood than described. And so that infant does not know what constitution is, but he does know his own constitution; he does not know what an animal is, but he feels that he is one. Besides, he understands his own constitution only crudely, in the rough, and dimly. We too know that we have a mind; what the mind is, where it is, of what sort it is, we do not know. Just as our own sense of our mind comes to us, even though we do not know its nature or its seat, so is the sense that every animal has of its own constitution. For it is necessary that they perceive that by means of which they perceive everything else; it is necessary that they have some sense of the thing they obey, by which they are ruled.
Every one of us understands that there is something that sets our impulses in motion; what that thing is, he does not know. And he knows that he has an effort, an impulse, in himself; who or what that is, he does not know. So it is with infants too, and with animals: the sense of their own ruling part is present, though not fully clear or distinctly expressed.
'You say,' the objector goes on, 'that every animal is first drawn toward its own constitution, but that the human constitution is rational, and so a human being is drawn toward himself not as an animal but as a rational being; for it is in the part by which he is human that a human being holds himself dear. How, then, can an infant be drawn toward a rational constitution, when he is not yet rational?'
Every age has its own constitution — one for the infant, another for the boy, another for the young man, another for the old man; all of them are drawn toward whatever constitution they are currently in. The infant is toothless: he is drawn toward that particular constitution of his. His teeth come in: he is drawn toward that constitution instead. For even that plant which is going to grow into standing grain and fruit has one constitution while it is tender and barely rising above the furrow, another once it has grown strong and stands, on a stalk soft enough yet firm enough to bear its own weight, and another still when it turns golden, faces toward the threshing floor, and its ear has hardened: whatever constitution it comes into, it holds onto that one, it is composed to fit that one.
The age of the infant is one thing, of the boy another, of the young man another, of the old man another; yet I am the same person who was once an infant, and a boy, and a young man. So, although each person's constitution is different at different times, the way he is drawn toward his own constitution is the same throughout. For nature does not commend to me the boy, or the youth, or the old man, but simply me. So the infant is drawn toward the particular constitution that belongs to an infant at that moment, not toward the one that will belong to the youth he will become; for even if something greater remains, into which he is going to pass, this does not mean that the constitution in which he is now born is not, itself, in accordance with nature.
An animal is drawn first of all to itself; for there must be something to which everything else is referred. I seek pleasure. For whom? For myself; so I am taking care of myself. I flee pain. On whose behalf? On my own; so again I am taking care of myself. If I do everything for the sake of caring for myself, then care for myself comes before everything else. This is present in every animal, and it is not implanted from outside but is born in along with it.
Nature brings forth her offspring, she does not cast them aside; and because the surest protection is the one nearest at hand, each creature is entrusted to itself. And so, as I said in earlier letters, even the tenderest creatures, freshly poured out from the mother's womb or the egg, know at once, on their own, what is dangerous to them, and avoid what is deadly; even the shadow of birds flying overhead makes them cower, exposed as they are to birds that live by prey. No animal comes forward into life without a fear of death.
'How,' the objector asks, 'can a newborn animal have any understanding of what is life-saving or life-destroying?' First the question is whether it understands, not how it understands. That they do have such an understanding is evident from this, that if they understood any further, they would do nothing more than they already do. Why is it that a hen does not flee a peacock or a goose, but flees a hawk that is far smaller and not even known to her? Why do chicks fear a cat but not fear a dog? It is clear that they possess a knowledge of what is going to harm them that has not been gathered by experience; for they take precautions before they could possibly have had any experience at all.
Next, so that you do not think this happens by chance: they do not fear the wrong things, and they never forget this protective vigilance; their flight from what is destructive is constant and unvarying. Moreover, they do not grow more timid the longer they live; and this in fact shows that they do not arrive at this behavior through practice, but through a natural love of their own safety. What experience teaches is slow and inconsistent; whatever nature hands down is uniform for all and immediate.
Still, if you press me, I will tell you how every animal is compelled to understand what is harmful. It feels that it is made of flesh; and so it feels what can cut that flesh, what can burn it, what can crush it, which animals are armed to do it harm: it draws from these the image of an enemy, something hostile. These things are bound up together; for at the very moment a creature is drawn toward its own safety, it also seeks what will help it and dreads what will injure it. Impulses toward what is beneficial, and aversions from what is opposed to it, are natural; nothing dictates this by any process of thought, nothing is done by deliberation — whatever nature has prescribed simply happens.
Do you not see what subtlety bees show in constructing their homes, what concord there is in dividing up and carrying out the labor from every side? Do you not see how the spider's web — something no mortal can imitate — required what a labor to lay out its threads, some sent out straight to serve as the framework, others running in circles, moving from dense to sparse, so that the smaller creatures, for whose destruction those threads are stretched, may be caught in them as if in nets?
This skill is born, not learned. And so no animal is more accomplished than another of its own kind at this task: you will find spiders' webs all alike, and the same shape of cell repeated in every corner of the honeycomb. Whatever art hands down is uncertain and uneven; what nature distributes comes out equal. Nature has handed down nothing more than the care of self-preservation and the skill for it, and that is exactly why creatures begin to learn and to live at the very same moment.
Nor is it surprising that they are born already possessing the thing without which being born would be pointless. The very first tool nature gave them for enduring was this: an inclination toward themselves and a love of self. They could not have preserved themselves unless they wished to; and this wish by itself would not have been enough, but without it nothing else would have helped at all. Yet in no creature will you find contempt for itself, nor even carelessness; even in the silent and the dumb, however sluggish they may be in other respects, there is a shrewdness for staying alive. You will find that the things useless to others are not lacking to themselves. Farewell.