Letters from a Stoic

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 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 show more 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

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 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 show more 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

The Letters is regarded as one of the three key Stoic works, along with Marcus Aurelius' Meditations and Epictetus' Discourses. My initial thoughts were that Seneca's letters provided gems of genius amid banal everyday topics. Indeed, one critic compared Seneca's style with a boar taking a whiz (provided in the detailed notes to the letters). But the moments of genius continue to resonate as if Seneca showed me, empirically, a primal instinct. There is so much of the source of contemporary social norms in this work. I am often surprised how modern complaints were "old hat" even in the time of the classics. For example, Seneca despises those who follow the crowd and let the majority following determine right and wrong. Further, he show more complains about the modern conveniences and how people suffer from what we might today term "affluenza". Maybe this does not bode well for the present state of affairs. I have learnt a great deal from this book, as I did with Meditations, and I am eager to delve into Discourses. show less

This is my first foray into Greek philosophy as an adult. Bits of Stoic philosophy seem absorbed into modern culture, so few of the adages and admonitions are "brand new" to me. The human faults he addresses at length, mostly to do with excess and lack of self control, are as relevant today as they were two thousand years ago. Buckle up, Seneca has strong opinions on just about every facet of the human experience.

Much of the first few letters discusses becoming happy with oneself, to the point of needing nothing else, riches or home or possessions or companionship. This is more or less tempered by the contention that you should want friends and family, and riches only in proportion as is needed to service those people and the public show more good, but that you should be equally comfortable with none of it.

Probably the single most relatable anecdote is Seneca's complaint that people prepared for Saturnalia earlier each year such that December "used to be a month but is now a year". Halloween, Christmas, anyone?

Here I also found my new favorite Diogenes anecdote: Upon observing a child drinking from a stream with his hands, Diogenes immediately his cup and chastises himself for foolishly carrying around extra luggage.

A few segments that stood out to me:

- In Letter LXIII (probably the best to me,) Seneca discusses the death of a friend. He gives some admonition that one should not grieve overlong because it's basically done to prove to ourselves or others that we loved the deceased, and that we'll stop grieving when it's "convenient" anyway. This is probably a massive oversimplification of grief in the modern day, but I'm sympathetic to it. Commenting on one who has no other friends he calls this self-injury: "[fortune] has deprived us of a single friend but we have deprived ourselves of every friend we have failed to make."
- Letter LIV: Talking about the fear of death, Seneca asserts that the time before one is born is more or less equivalent: "If there is any torment [after I die], there must also have been torment in the period before we saw the light of day."
- In Letter LVI Seneca discusses occasionally working above the din of a bath house rather than in seclusion, and amongst this I mostly enjoy some commentary about how an anxious person's mind will be more (or merely differently) anxious during the supposed "peaceful stillness" of night.
- In letter CXXIII he addresses the distortive and destructive impact of vice and how it pushes our limits and expectations further as we indulge. He discusses the idea that absurd vices infect society because "... our lives are guided by the example of others; instead of being set to rights by reason we're seduced by convention". Things that we wouldn't consider doing or owning if only a few people did them are seen as reasonable once they are ubiquitous. He gives some hilarious examples that are analogous to today's status-signal luxuries. Here too he addresses the need to stay away from people who indulge to excess or make mischievous, gossipy or otherwise destructive talk, as "once such talk has made its entry and been allowed inside, it becomes a good deal bolder."

Seneca rails at length about the supremacy of philosophy over all other fields of endeavor. He arbitrarily demarcates where prose is overly flowery (or 'effeminate') or where technology is too advanced to be good. This is actually pretty relatable, but it's hard to draw much value from it. He quotes the contemporary and wildly popular Virgil liberally and mostly refrains from chiding the poet for any literary excess while knocking down Gaius Maecenas, whose writing at least as translated here seems pretty natural. I'm sympathetic to his points, but this gets kind of old.

If you find your interest waning in the latter half of the collection, consider skipping ahead a bit, as some of the most substantial letters are the last few.

The Penguin Classics edition has an excellent biographical introduction to Seneca and useful footnotes. I wish I hadn't known that Seneca was fabulously wealthy before reading and had instead learned it afterwards, as I think my reading was a bit tainted by that. It's a little harder to buy the commentary about how noble it is to "do without" when the person telling you so is one of the richest people in the Roman empire.

There's a bunch of other random thoughts I have based on context but this review is already overlong. A lot of the commentary will at this point seem like "fluff" to most, but I take the (short) piece for what it is, enjoy what it offers that is novel to me and ignore the sillier bits. show less

Series of letters from an ageing Stoic philosopher, writing in 64AD on topics from travel to disease to death. Enjoyable stuff, I'm fond of the Stoics as a rare variety of philosopher I find useful as well as interesting, although my engagement did vary from letter to letter. No Marcus Aurelius, but one I would return to.

Non est beatus, esse se qui non putat.

Rating: 4/5 – Ancient advice for the good life

There’s a lot of fantastic stuff in this book. Though most the wisdom within isn’t new to me, it was incredible to see how enduring some of the ideas have been throughout human history.

What’s truly remarkable about this book is how relatable it was, millenia later. It’s comforting to know that for at least 2000 years humans have been struggling with vanity, excess, and pride. So much of what feels like a modern struggle has been persisting for likely as long as we’ve had civilization.

There’s a tremendous comfort in learning that your struggles are not new. There’s inspiration in learning that the ancients were seeking the same wisdom as show more yourself.

https://www.timothyrice.org/stoicletters/ show less

A massive, necessary stone in the road to understanding and internalizing Stoicism.

A fascinating work given the author's history and life as one of the wealthiest people in Rome. It really is a kind of paean to what he wanted to be like, and you could tell in the subtext of the entire thing that he knew he wasn't living up to his ideals, that which he knew to be the best way to live, but he was trying.

It is interesting, though, how he could recognize privilege, but not think of charity when talking about spending money.