In his ‘Letters to Lucilius’ Seneca expounds his version of Stoic philosophy. As I explain in my review of the letters, I think they consist more of a mix of moral exhortation and self-help advice than a fully worked-out ‘philosophy’. But on the occasions when he does set out to argue from first principles I find myself quite strongly disagreeing with just about every assertion and every argument Seneca makes. Letter 76 lays out the premises of Seneca’s philosophy with particular clarity (a ‘premise’ being defined as “a statement taken to be true and used as a basis for argument or reasoning”) from which I extract the following sequence of assertions.
Seneca’s argument
– Seneca says there is a God who made the universe and created man. Wrong.
– Seneca says God planted a fragment of divine Reason in man. Wrong. No God, no divine Reason.
– Seneca says every created thing has one particular merit or attribute which sets it apart – the fruit of the vine, the speed of the stag, the strong back of a pack animal, the hunting dog’s sense of smell and so on. The one distinctive attribute of human beings is Reason. Wrong:
a) This notion that every thing has just one peculiar merit is primitive and childish. Quite clearly all living organisms have multiple features and qualities. Study biology.
b) To say that the One Special Thing about humans is Reason is a wild underestimate of the numberless qualities which contribute to human survival and evolution. As one example, according to my son the biologist, humans can run for longer than any other animal, not a massively important attribute but a refutation of Seneca’s claim that there is just one thing which sets humans apart from other animals. Then there’s also the small factor of the opposable thumb, which gives us the ability to manipulate tools and develop the countless inventions and technologies we have devised – far more distinctive than ‘divine Reason’.
(As an indication of how malleable this argument is, I have just read in Tacitus’s Histories the stirring speech of Gaius Julius Civilis who tells his warriors that The One Distinctive Thing About Humans is Courage [Tacitus, Histories, book 4, chapter 17]. 1,900 years later, Jean-Paul Sartre would claim the One Distinctive Thing About Humans is our existentialist Freedom. It’s a parlour game. Anyone can join in.)
c) Anyway, humans are emphatically not rational. Humans are wildly irrational. A book like Stuart Sutherland’s Irrationality, which brings together a century of psychological study of how clumsily and irrationally all humans think, almost all the time, demolishes the Rationalist argument forever.
d) The entire form of this argument is tendentious because it is clearly designed to justify what follows.
– Seneca says all these animals are designed to ‘reach the goal of their nature’ i.e. they aspire to maximise the distinctive attribute given to them by God. Wrong. There is no God and this one, special attribute doesn’t exist. Seneca has invented it for the sake of his argument.
– Seneca says that, seeing as man’s one special attribute is Reason, and that all beings find their greatest fulfilment when they maximise their one special attribute, it follows that man will be happiest and most fulfilled when he cultivates his Reason to the max.
Well:
a) It’s wrong to say that man’s one special attribute is ‘Reason’.
b) Humans are wildly irrational.
c) Since it doesn’t exist, this ‘Reason’ can’t be developed to the max as if that implies one, widely agreed state of mind.
d) If this notion of ‘Reason’ actually existed, surely all ‘philosophers’ would agree about it, whereas anyone who’s read a bit of philosophy immediately discovers that there are hundreds of ‘philosophies’ and philosophers who completely contradict each other.
e) Far from ‘philosophy’ making its practitioners calm and content, there’s plenty of evidence that some of the greatest philosophers were deeply unhappy individuals: characters as different as Nietzsche and Wittgenstein spring to mind. There is no evidence whatsoever that someone who practices ‘philosophy’ is more happy than the general run of the population.
(By this point it should be clear that although Seneca uses philosophical-sounding arguments to support his case, he isn’t really dealing in philosophy but with lessons in mental resilience and moral uplift.)
– Seneca goes on to say that when this ‘Reason’ is brought to ‘perfection’ through the study of ‘philosophy’, ‘this perfected reason is called virtue’ (Letter 76, section 10). This also is obviously wrong:
a) There is no such thing as ‘Reason’ with a capital R, instead:
i) Two and a half thousand years of philosophers can’t agree what ‘Reason’ is or how it works.
ii) According to psychologists like Sutherland, instead of One Reason humans use hundreds of different strategies for thinking and problem solving, which often overlap and contradict each other, hence the appearance of the real world we actually live in, made up of endlessly conflicting opinions and plans.
b) What is this ‘virtue’? Seneca identifies ‘virtue’ with the perfection of human ‘Reason’ but by now we can see that this is just playing with words, it’s like moving shiny counters around on a board game, it doesn’t relate to anything in the real world.
– Seneca goes on to identify this maximised Reason with ‘virtue’ and ‘the good’ and ‘the honourable’. I appreciate that Seneca is engaging with the tradition of moral philosophy which is concerned with trying to define terms like ‘the good’, ‘honour’, ‘virtue’ but I believe that, mildly entertaining although these verbal games are, they have little or nothing to do with real people or the actual world we live in. Within the rules of the game called ‘moral philosophy’ these kinds of definitions and redefinitions may have meaning, but it is a niche activity with no impact on the real world.
Also, it often feels as if Seneca is using rhetorical tricks to prove that His Way is the Only Way to achieve these great goals i.e. it is less an open-ended enquiry designed to establish an objective truth than a tendentious distortion of arguments all designed to ‘prove’ a view of human nature and a way of life which he already subscribes to. It amounts to a wordy rationalisation of a personal lifestyle preference (to live a simple life and read books is best).
The counter-argument to Seneca
There is no God. The universe came about in a big bang 13.7 billion years ago. Certain laws and regularities emerge from the nature of the matter created by this cataclysm. Stars form, galaxies form, planets form around suns. Conditions for life happened to occur on this planet as they probably have on countless others. Primitive replicating structures come about as an inevitable product of chemistry. As soon as the most primitive replicating organisms come about they are governed by evolution through natural selection, which dictates that only the most fit will replicate, thus setting in train an endless process of diversity and selection. Human beings are a random offshoot of mammals, themselves lucky to survive the last great extinction event 66 million years ago. There is no teleology or purpose or plan. Shit happens, whether it’s your valley flooding or a meteor hitting the earth, and some organisms survive to pass on their genes to their offspring. Over vast distances of time – hundreds of millions of years – fast-breeding organisms have diverged to fill every available niche in countless different ecosystems which themselves change and evolve all the time. Modern archaeology shows that there is not one human race, but that over the past few hundred thousand years, many different forms of the genus Homo have sprung up, flourished for a time, then died out. Seneca and we happen to belong to the one branch or variety which happens to have survived. Others might have; we happened to. There was no God, providence or teleology involved.
To attribute this immensely long chain of chance and accident to the providence of some creator God is psychologically appealing but factually ludicrous. If there is a God behind it then he works so completely through accident and mass extinction as to be indistinguishable from randomness.
Therefore humans do not possess some ‘divine Reason’ which can be cultivated to its maximum potential at which point it can grandly be called ‘virtue’. The exact opposite. Humans quite evidently employ hundreds, maybe thousands of different mental strategies, tricks and approaches to solve the problems thrown up by day-to-day existence, and struggle daily to implement our deep biological drives (to eat and drink, get shelter, find a mate, raise a new generation, find physical and psychological security) against the challenges of the rebarbative real world, with all kinds of florid, varied and unpredictable outcomes.
Summary
Seneca’s theistic rationalism looks for and privileges One Thing in every field: One God, One Human Race, One Reason, One Virtue, One Philosophy.
Although I can see the appeal of submitting to this One World point of view – I can see the comfort it brings to its adherents or even to modern readers who bathe in its simple-minded reassurance while they’re reading his text (and I can also see how so much of Stoicism was incorporated into the equally consoling and comforting One World Christian ideology) – nonetheless, I find it creepy, I detect in it authoritarian, even totalitarian tendencies. To genuinely believe that there is just One Way to Virtue which all people should submit themselves to…
And it also happens to be factually incorrect at every step.
By contrast, I believe in diversity, in manyness, in multitudes. In my worldview humans have evolved over a very long period to possess incredibly complex mental and physical attributes, far too complex and multifaceted to encompass in one definition, in one ‘philosophy’, in one set of magic words like ‘Reason’, ‘good’ and ‘virtue’, even in words like ‘science’ or ‘biology’. The real world continually surprises us and overflows all human attempts at neat definitions, whether in philosophy, religion, science or any other system.
People are quite obviously capable of believing all kinds of things, struggle with all kinds of problems, use all manner of beliefs and faiths and rites and rituals and traditions and cultures to get them through their days and lives. All these belief systems and practices are themselves constantly evolving, added to, improved, fossilise, dumped, revived, you name it – with the result that human cultures are mind-bogglingly rich and diverse and many-sided – far too many to summarise or encapsulate in this prescriptive One World dogma.
Conclusion
Therefore it is my view that, although I can see why, narrowly appealing and comforting though Seneca’s teachings may appear at a first reading, they are nonetheless not only a) factually incorrect at every level, at every step or his argument, but b) derive from an incredibly narrow social caste (the Roman aristocracy) during an incredibly narrow moment in history (Nero’s tyranny).
Seneca’s letters are worth reading because they give a vivid insight into the mindset of a very clever man situated very close to a terrifyingly arbitrary tyrant and working out a philosophical tradition he inherited from Greek originators to fit his very specific (and very fraught) circumstances (hence the obsessive belief in suicide as an escape from tyranny).
He circles around central Stoic beliefs, reviewing them from different angles in different contexts and this provides a very useful, panoramic view of this particular belief system – and a fascinating insight into a particular cultural moment.
And many of his recommendations – shorn of their theistical underpinning – are of value, at least to the kind of reader who is already predisposed to bookish aloofness. Avoid the crowd, despise pleasure, cultivate the life of the mind, rise above the chaos of petty emotions and transient enjoyments – all this reads very well and flatters a certain kind of bookish reader who may believe that they already practice some or all of these prescriptions.
But then surely these precepts are taught by the high-minded in pretty much every major religion: surely this kind of advice can be found not only in the Christianity which incorporated so much of it, but in Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism, Jainism, Shintoism and countless other religious traditions? Or expounded by high-minded secular humanists. Ignore the trashy entertainments of the masses, despise the vulgar trappings of wealth, be content with the simple life, concentrate on acquiring wisdom.
Widespread though his conclusions may be, because they speak to a certain character type which recurs across diverse cultures, and propose a type of psychological practice which clearly speaks to a certain type of person — to focus back on the specific arguments Seneca uses to justify and underpin his philosophy – the logical sequence of arguments which I summarised at the start of this post – I have explained why I believe they are factually incorrect and intellectually untenable from start to finish.
Related links
- Moral letters to Lucilius translated by Richard Mott Gummere (1917 to 1925)
- Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium Wikipedia article
- A sympathetic summary of the key topics of Seneca’s Moral Letters
Books & Boots 