Lucius Annaeus Seneca, the Younger

I've deeply disliked modern philosophy. To me, it feels like the field comes up with theories about human life, happiness, behavior, ideals, but then brazenly refuses to put any of it to the test. It prefers the beauty of an idea to the reality of its implementation. It's kind of like fantasy-writing except the authors pretend it's an actual field of study instead of acknowledging what they're doing is just a fun mental exercise.

In the meantime, I've felt like there was something missing show more from human understanding. There's no one out there trying to create a philosophy and live it, see how it works in the real-world, modify it, and improve it. This field is absent from human life, even though, to me, it feels like this would be the most important thing humans could do.

This collection of letters is that missing field in action. These letters were only intended for 1 person (Lucilius), so there's a deep level of intimacy to them. We don't see Seneca as the public figure, but Seneca as the man, trying to live the good life, putting his ideals to the test every day as best he can, faltering along the way and being upfront about the faltering. Throughout, he tries to emphasize that philosophy-- all of this -- is only useful if it improves life.

He does go on random esoteric rants about abstract ideas (as all philosophers ultimately do) but that's not the core of these letters -- there is a small amount of intellectual debate between 2 people (where, unfortunately, we only get 1 side), but it's mostly "how are you, here's how I'm doing, here are some of the things I'm facing/have faced and here's how it interconnects to this philosophy I'm practicing".

What's also weird is how extremely apropos almost all of his advice is to our modern lives. Not just in a "timeless ideal" sense -- he complains about how noisy it is to have an apartment in the city, how sometimes we like to pretend to be too busy to respond to messages, he even complains about shops setting up for Christmas (Saturnalia) earlier and earlier every year! It really makes him feel relatable to me and my own world, which is why I think it also strikes such a strong chord with me.

It's also just so refreshing to see a person trying to merge their intellectual ideals with their real-life self, and exchanging tips and tricks to help do that, but also not getting lost in the abstract, and not beating themselves up too much when they slip up. I feel like I'm trying to do the same in my life, and reading these letters makes me feel like I'm not the only one doing that. I feel personally supported by this guy from 2000 years ago in a way I don't feel in the modern world.

I've never more desperately wanted to meet a person from history and sit and have a beer with them. show less

Seneca’s Hercules reads more like a series of monologues than a play, and the translator has chosen to convert it into rhyming couplets, which gives it a rather Shakespearean style. The text is firmly in Juno’s camp, which is interesting - she’s so often portrayed as simply petty and jealous, but here she is motivated by a need to protect heaven from a man who’s grown powerful enough to take control of it, and who, having proven his worth on earth, is now looking to heaven for his show more next challenge. show less

This is a great and thorough look at anger.

Many modern books take a neurological or biological perspective, and focus quite a bit on the part of anger where it initially occurs and disrupts you "in the moment". Very few talk about what we do in our own minds to keep anger going, and how unhealthy and ultimately foolish that is. This does, and thoroughly at that.

I "only" gave it 4 stars because it lacks some of the modern angle of "self-compassion". Sometimes, we know what's right but are show more unable to act on it in the moment. Some of us are overly harsh on ourselves when those moments happen, which can be a new problem in and of itself, which we're only really understanding now.

But, otherwise, for a 2000 year-old text, it holds up really really well. show less

CCXXIII: “[W]e are attracted by wealth, pleasures, good looks, political advancement and various other welcoming and enticing prospects: we are repelled by exertion, death, pain, disgrace, and limited means. It follows that we need to train ourselves not to crave the former and not to be afraid of the latter. Let us fight the battle the other way round — retreat from the things that attract us and rouse ourselves to meet the things that actually attack us” (230)

What a thing to be show more Lucilius, the addressee of these letters from a stoic. If this Lucilius was, as speculated, the procurator of Sicily, receiving correspondence from a man of standing such as Seneca may not have been out of the ordinary. But these are remarkable letters that are friendly and full of depth. I would love such correspondence, but I fear that letter writing like this is long a thing of the past. Today, we have neither the occasion nor, often, the skill or attention to write letters like these.

In the letters you read the voice of one who never lost the ethos of a teacher. The letters are full of observations, questions, provocations, admonitions, and corrections. Seneca covers a range of topics from friends, happiness, the liberal arts, diet, vices, virtues, death, old age, habits, and noise. These are letters of a person who is living out his old age, experiencing life, and framing it through the wisdom of a stoic philosophy that has been developed outside the pages of these letters but that comes through in tight, shareable adages about cultivating wisdom through philosophy, and developing and practicing temperance in our appetites and desires.

In later letters, Seneca touches on fears of death, infirmity, pain, and disgrace. He advocates the courage to face these fears because we are going to face our share of them in life regardless. There is no sense in fearing what we cannot control. The only thing we can control is our reactions, an ability that we cultivate through philosophy. And if there is one thing that about stoicism that people seem to remember and carry forward to our modern age, it’s this.

Where we seem to get stoicism wrong in popular adaption is in thinking about stoicism as detachment, a stony demeanor or a lone person (a man, usually!) who faces the world dispassionately. This person is a boulder in the middle of a river, unaffected by the rushing waters around them. He is an emotionless, distant, inscrutable, reasoning being. I can see how one arrives at that version of Bro-Stoicism (Bro-icism, maybe?) but this overlooks the fourth virtue of stoicism in addition to wisdom, temperance, and courage: justice. Justice is about doing good and right for others as is their due. And at the very least we can see the correspondence between Seneca and Lucilius as a manifestation of justice, sharing wisdom not as a set of dictums (well, not always) but as a set of habits of mind to practice, through which one may flourish.

Amusingly, Seneca is not always good at following his own advice. Although he generally seems to keep his appetites under control there is a bit of crabbiness when his dinner is not prepared, or his apartments are not made ready for his arrival after travel, or people make too much noise outside, etc. This is not the cheerful acceptance that he advocates but I suppose that it is a way of dealing with and making the best of things.

There are many meditative passages in these letters and some that I have flagged to come back to because they seem to offer perspective that I find personally valuable in addressing my own personal and professional fears. There are also passages in these letters that seem to offer perspective that is problematic.

Personally, I have a difficult time understanding Seneca’s critique of the liberal arts or of eclectic reading and learning because it is unfocused. Or maybe I’m just a little sensitive because I feel a little called out here. I get that there is a lack of depth with learning that is too diffuse, but the world and its people are full of diverse experience and there is little chance that we can engage with that diversity of experience if we choose a narrow path.

I also have difficulty accepting Seneca’s view of nature. There is something appealing about saying that our habits and approach to life should be in alignment with nature: rise when the sun comes up, eat when we are hungry, drink when we are thirsty, welcome good fortune when it comes to us, accept ill fortune when it comes as well. But what is nature? How can one be in harmony with nature in, say, one’s professional life where you can be taken advantage of? Where your job might be exploitative by design? Where good fortune comes not to everyone at some point but to those who compete best for it? Is nature in that sense not a State of Nature but rather the system one finds oneself in? If so, is the wisdom one needs the wisdom about how to live and work in that state of nature? I think that this is the way to read Seneca’s view of nature. However, in that kind of setting it seems that people vary greatly in terms of their agency or the ability to control things about their situation. Seneca can’t possibly mean that control of one’s situation means abdicating duties or even getting out of exploitative situations. Certainly not in a republic where one’s role IS one’s duty. Perhaps instead, the lesson is more modest that we can at least control our reactions to those situations. That is at least some kind of control, paltry as it seems. show less