Ars Didactica: Seneca's 94th and 95th Letters 9783666252914, 9783525252918

Citation preview

Hypomnemata Untersuchungen zur Antike und zu ihrem Nachleben

Herausgegeben von Albrecht Dihle, Siegmar Dçpp, Dorothea Frede, Hans-Joachim Gehrke, Hugh Lloyd-Jones †, Gnther Patzig, Christoph Riedweg, Gisela Striker Band 181

Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht

John Schafer

Ars Didactica Seneca’s 94th and 95th Letters

Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht

Verantwortliche Herausgeberin: Gisela Striker

Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet ber http://dnb.d-nb.de abrufbar. ISBN 978-3-525-25291-8 Hypomnemata ISSN 0085 – 1671 Umschlagabbildung: »Antike Schulszene«, rçmisches Relief,  ak-images/Erich Lessing.

 2009 Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Gçttingen / www.v-r.de Alle Rechte vorbehalten. Das Werk und seine Teile sind urheberrechtlich geschtzt. Jede Verwertung in anderen als den gesetzlich zugelassenen Fllen bedarf der vorherigen schriftlichen Einwilligung des Verlages. Hinweis zu § 52a UrhG: Weder das Werk noch seine Teile drfen ohne vorherige schriftliche Einwilligung des Verlages çffentlich zugnglich gemacht werden. Dies gilt auch bei einer entsprechenden Nutzung fr Lehr- und Unterrichtszwecke. Printed in Germany. Druck und Bindung: a Hubert & Co, Gçttingen Gedruckt auf alterungsbestndigem Papier.

MATRI VXORI FILIOLÆ

Contents 1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.1 Background and Aims . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.2 Conspectus of the Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

9 9 12

2 Letters 94 and 95: a map 2.1 General . . . . . . . 2.2 Letter 94 . . . . . . . 2.3 Letter 95 . . . . . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

15 15 16 20

3 Historical Background: Aristo of Chios and Other Stoics . 3.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2 The Early Stoic Debate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3 Aristo, Seneca, and Letter 94 . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

25 25 25 30

4 Rules? . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.1 Introduction . . . . . . . 4.2 Recent Scholarship . . . 4.3 Initial Remarks on Rules 4.4 Deliberation in Stoicism 4.5 Letters 94 and 95 . . . . 4.6 Conclusions . . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

33 33 34 41 47 54 59

5 Contextualizations . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.1 The Context of the Epistulae Morales 5.2 Tracing the Progress of Lucilius . . . 5.3 Letters 94 and 95 in Context . . . . . 5.4 Why This Debate? . . . . . . . . . . . 5.5 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

67 67 71 74 77 83

6 Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.1 Praecepta . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.2 Decreta . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.3 Praecepta and Decreta: Destabilization and Convergence 6.4 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. 85 . 85 . 96 . 105 . 109

7 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111 Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115 Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121

1. Introduction 1.1 Background and Aims The younger Seneca and his works have been the object of widely disparate critical views. The hostile assessment of their innovative and sententious style began in Seneca’s own lifetime and achieved something like canonical status after the criticisms of Quintilian.1 More devastatingly, perhaps, he has never escaped the charge, which also dates from his own lifetime,2 of being a moralizing hypocrite, “in his books a philosopher,” in Milton’s withering phrase. Yet from their respectful reception by the early Church to their extraordinary flowering in the twelfth century and their fruitful and brilliant appropriation by early modern figures such as Montaigne and Justus Lipsius,3 Seneca’s philosophical writings have not lacked for positive evaluation. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, however, their reputations suffered serious reversals. It became common to dismiss Seneca as a derivative thinker (and artist), and as a jejune and muddled practitioner of “eclecticism.” Not only did he write within a tradition, Stoicism, which had come to be seen as a prime exemplar of post-Aristotelian intellectual degeneracy ; nor only did he cast his thoughts in Latin and in “Silver” Latin at that; but he was also one of the most famous personalities and a leading political figure of a bad age, the murderous final years of the Julio-Claudian dynasty. Everything about him, to a certain cast of mind, signaled moral, artistic, and intellectual decadence. In recent years this unjust verdict has been powerfully challenged. Interest in and understanding of Hellenistic philosophy have grown enormously in the last generation; the prejudice against reading philosophical texts in Latin has diminished. Seneca’s philosophical work is increasingly respected in its own right; no longer is he merely mined for source material on earlier thought.4 At the same time (for the most part independently), appreciation of Seneca’s 1 The emperor Caligula famously characterized Seneca’s oratory as harena sine calce, “sand without lime,” (Suetonius 4.53). Quintilian: 10.1.125 – 131. 2 See the delator Suillius Rufus’ attack on Seneca in Tacitus, Annals 13.42. 3 See Trillitzsch 1971 for ancient pagan and Christian reactions to Seneca and Reynolds 1965 for the medieval tradition; on Montaigne, see especially Pire 1954 and Cancik 1967, 91 – 101; on Lipsius, see Cooper 2004b. 4 Inwood is the leading philosophical interpreter of Seneca: his papers on him are collected in Inwood 2005; translations of and commentary on selected Senecan letters are found in Inwood 2007a. Also noteworthy are Cooper and Procop 1995, an annotated translation of several of the dialogi and most of the De Beneficiis. Graver 2007 contains much good work on Seneca. See also Cooper 2004 309 – 334 and Williams 2003.

10

1. Introduction

literary genius has been revived in Latinist circles. His tragedies have seen an extraordinary revival, especially since Tarrant’s groundbreaking 1976 commentary on the Agamemnon. On the prose side, the Epistulae Morales, in particular, have emerged from a long period of underappreciation, during which they have been distortingly and reductively seen as a disconnected collection of moral essays with an epistolary veneer, or else simply as genuine letters to their recipient Lucilius.5 Their multilayered structure, varied philosophical and literary agenda, and literary suppleness are now being seen afresh, with impressive and varied results.6 In short, it is an exciting time to be a student of Seneca and of Stoicism. This work is an attempt to contribute to these revivals. It will examine a crucial text for our understanding of Seneca’s philosophical works, namely letters 94 and 95 of the Epistulae Morales. In recent years these letters have been much studied, not so much in their own right as for their apparent value as witness to a hotly-discussed problem in Stoic studies. Namely, scholarly opinion has sharply divided on how the Stoics understand moral reasoning or deliberation. How does an agent determine what to do in circumstances important for moral evaluation? At a high level of generality, Stoic prescriptions are clear : virtue is the only good, vice the only evil; we should follow nature; act from right reason rather than from the passions, and so on. Yet it seems clear that more determinate principles are needed in order to guide an agent seeking to live and act in accordance with these prescriptions. How, then, does one determine, in a given circumstance, what actions are consistent with virtue, with following nature, and with right reason? Stoic texts clearly bespeak an interest in moral injunctions and in law, where law is to be understood not as the laws enforced in actual human societies but rather as “cosmic law” or the “law of nature.” The proper interpretation of this notion is however unclear. Do the Stoics understand by “law” a system of rules, understood as universal commandments and prohibitions? Does the law of nature consist in such laws or rules, that is, individual statutes, obedience to which is virtuous? Or is the notion of law somewhat looser, metaphorical perhaps, intended to capture the normative force of correct ethical reasoning, however determined? These questions have been the subject of no little contention in Stoic studies.7 These two Senecan letters have been thoroughly investigated for evidence pertaining to these questions. For at the beginning of letter 94 Seneca reports that the dissident early Stoic Aristo of Chios rejected the “part of philosophy” which issues what Seneca calls praecepta, namely particular moral instruc5 Mazzoli 1989 is an excellent review of the much-debated issue of the genuineness of the letters. 6 Distinguished recent work on the letters from the literary side include Schçnegg 1999, Henderson 2004, Wilson 1987 and 2001, and Inwood 2007b. See also Too 1994, Habinek 1998 137 – 150, and Edwards 1997. 7 See White 1985, Vander Waerdt 1994 272 – 308, Annas 1993 302 – 311, Brennan 2003 and 2005, and Inwood 1999.

1.1 Background and Aims

11

tions, often specified in terms of actions appropriate for specific social roles (e. g. father, husband, and master). Seneca contrasts these instructions with what he calls decreta, namely the doctrines of (Stoic) ethics, the high-level principles of the school.8 According to Seneca, Aristo favored only decreta, considering praecepta useless in philosophy and fit only for children. Cleanthes, however, the second Stoic school-head, defended praecepta, but only when used in conjunction with doctrinal training, with the teaching of decreta. After setting up this opposition, Seneca reports a battery of objections to precept-giving, explicitly attributed to Aristo, before rebutting these objections, presumably in the voice of Stoic orthodoxy, point by point. Since Kidd’s article “Moral Actions and Rules in Stoic Ethics,” it has been common to see praecepta (and sometimes decreta as well) as rules, and to take these letters to reflect early Stoic debate about the role of rules in determining right action. The interpretation of these letters, then, and in particular the correct characterization of the key terms praecepta and decreta, have been considered crucial for understanding this aspect of Stoic ethics.9 One of the core aims of this work is to demonstrate that the debate that has arisen over these letters is misguided and that the tradition of interpreting praecepta as rules is misleading. Not only do these letters fail to yield the hoped-for Stoic doctrine on the role of rules, but investigating them for such a doctrine distorts and conceals Seneca’s actual purposes. Instead, the two letters are an exploration of method in philosophical education. The distinction between praecepta and decreta is not one between lower-level rules and higher-level ones, or between rules and the general principles that produce rules, but rather between non-technical instructions and other techniques of moral guidance on the one hand, and the teaching of philosophical doctrine on the other. As I will argue presently, the traditional interpretation is in large part motivated, and not unreasonably so, by the status of Aristo as Seneca’s opponent in letter 94. However, a closer look at the two letters together argues strongly against identifying their purposes with the modern debate about Stoic rules. Letter 94 introduces the praecepta/decreta distinction and immediately promises two different but related discussions: first, whether praecepta are useful, and second, whether they are sufficient, that is, whether it is decreta that are otiose or useless. 94 discusses the former problem, 95 the latter. Seneca’s position is that both are valuable; while he argues the case for praecepta against Aristo, he puts the case for decreta in letter 95 as against “certain people” (quidam), who argue that a collection of traditional maxims and homespun wisdom is all we need for moral guidance and development. The two letters, then, are very clearly a unitary whole; moreover, at least the 8 As we will see, the precise characterization of these two terms is much more complex than this preliminary sketch can account for. 9 Kidd 1978, Mitsis 1993 and 1999, Annas 1993 96 – 108, and Inwood 1999.

12

1. Introduction

second half of that whole is far removed from the theoretical issues which the tradition has wanted to see in it. For the defense of decreta is a defense of having (and teaching) a moral theory in the first place, not a defense of a certain kind of element within the theory. The debate about decreta is not an internal Stoic debate at all; within Stoicism, questioning decreta simply makes no sense. It therefore renders these letters bizarrely asymmetrical – in fact, it leaves letter 95 almost completely unmotivated – to approach praecepta and decreta as a distinction internal to the Stoic theory of deliberation. By contrast, I will argue, my reading, namely that the two letters defend non-technical or doctrinal and technical/doctrinal methods of moral guidance respectively, accords much better not only with the structure of the letters but with their content as well.10 Even more important, it uncovers deep and mutually reinforcing harmonies between these letters and the Epistulae Morales as a whole. It will emerge on my reading that these two letters, easily the longest in the collection, explain and defend Seneca’s persistent practice in his letters to Lucilius, namely of his constant variation of friendly banter, direct advicegiving, and emotional appeal on the one hand with sober, concentrated philosophical exposition on the other. The opponents in each letter stand in for a certain kind of possible reader, and a certain kind of critique of Seneca’s project: he uses Aristo in 94 to anticipate a (certain kind of) philosopher’s response, the unnamed quidam in 95 to anticipate that of readers drawn by the literary and rhetorical material whose attitude towards philosophy is ambivalent or hostile. Between these two rival critiques Seneca develops his own ideals as a philosophical writer and as a theorist/practitioner of moral guidance.

1.2 Conspectus of the Work This work, then, will pursue several aims: it will seek to explicate these letters in their own right and for their own sake; it will argue against the prevailing mode of interpreting them; and it will seek to situate them within the work of which they form a part. Accordingly, this introduction is followed by a synoptic overview of the structure and argument of the two letters (Part Two, “Letters 94 and 95: a Map”). Given the enormous historical importance of Aristo and his early Stoic interlocutors, as well as their importance for rival discussions of these letters, Part Three (“Historical Background”) will discuss Aristo and his role in the development of Stoicism. Once this background has been established, I turn my attention to the 10 In particular, my reading dispenses with a number of puzzling omissions, apparent conceptual confusions, and, worst of all, the need to posit for Seneca a “restricted philosophical capacity” (on which see Kidd 1978 251).

1.2 Conspectus of the Work

13

question of rules in Stoic ethics and the attempts to see such rules in these letters (Part Four : “Rules?”). In this section I canvass the contemporary debate about deliberation and rules in Stoicism first on their own terms, and then attempt to show how letters 94 and 95 cannot be made to sustain the theoretical weight which the literature has asked them to bear. Having disposed of this largely negative and polemical section, I turn to my positive portrait of the two letters, showing first in Part Five (“Contextualizations”) how the text fits into the project of Seneca’s letters, and finally (Part Six: “Education”) I draw out a positive interpretation of praecepta and decreta and Seneca’s defense of each.

2. Letters 94 and 95: a map 2.1 General What follows is intended to provide an overall picture of the structure of the letters. The following chapters will quote widely from the letters, of course: this analysis of their contents will enable the reader to place each citation within the point in Seneca’s argument at which it comes. Moreover, I will contend that selective quotations have vitiated rival discussions of these letters: the synoptic perspective shows what issues occupy the bulk of the discussion.1 These letters employ a signature element of Senecan style, namely the stating of and response to objections to the position being argued (often in question form), conveyed in oratio recta. In letters 94 and 95, however, the deployment of this device is formalized to a degree not seen elsewhere in the letters. In other letters, the imagined objector is sometimes a mere straw man and at other times the imagined reaction of Lucilius. The device allows Seneca not only to refute obvious counterarguments but also to meet the objections halfway, to introduce qualifications or reservations about a point just made. In these letters, by contrast, the voice of the objector (Aristo in 94, unnamed “certain people” in 95) leads the discussion, as it were: Seneca’s position emerges from a refutation of their claims, rather than their comments arising in order to refute Seneca’s claims. Furthermore, the objections in these two letters (and especially those in 94) themselves amount to a position, a credible point of view on the topic in question. In letter 94 the arguments of Aristo are given all at once (with a few exceptions), towards the beginning of the letter. After stating them, Seneca responds ad singula, point by point. This done, he draws various conclusions, ending with a rhetorical flourish. The structure of letter 95 is similar, except that Seneca’s rejoinders, instead of coming all at once after all the opponents’ claims are made, are put after each. Let us now look more closely at the contents of each of these sections.2

1 Bellincioni 1978(a) is a serviceable translation of and commentary on these letters. In general I have not made extensive use of it, however. 2 Here and throughout the work, I use the text and section numbering from Reynolds’s OCT edition.

16

2. Letters 94 and 95: a map

2.2 Letter 94 Introduction (1 – 4) The topic is introduced. Some people accept only the part of philosophy which “gives precepts to each persona.” This is explained in terms of social roles: how husbands should treat their wives, how a father should raise his children, how a master should rule his slaves. Aristo, on the other hand, rejects this part, preferring decreta philosophiae. A person who knows the truth about philosophy can tell himself what to do. Precepts, he says, give particular instruction, philosophy instructs us for all of life; the latter renders the former superfluous. Cleanthes, on the other hand, thinks that precept-giving is useful, utile, but weak unless accompanied by doctrinal training. This exposition sets up two quaestiones: whether precept-giving is useful (which letter 94 will affirm), and whether it is sufficient for making a person good (which letter 95 will deny).

Aristo’s arguments (5 – 17) The section is introduced as the arguments “of those who want this part [of philosophy] to seem superfluous,” but ends with “these things are said by Aristo.” The first stretch of argument (5 – 9) is by analogy with medicine. A blind person should be treated by removing the cause of his blindness so he can see for himself, not by telling him how to walk and move. The cause of the soul’s illness is false opinion: removing that requires inculcating the truth. This is further spelled out: the patient must be made to know that money is neither good nor bad, that virtue is the only good, wickedness the only evil. A person who knows this doesn’t need to receive particular admonishments, because her values are already well-formed. Next, (10 – 11), Aristo claims that precepts will only persuade if their correctness is obvious; but then, there is no need for them anyway. If they are not obvious, they will require rational argumentation, which by definition would not count as precept-giving. No one feels motivated to do what is just unless she understands why she should be just. 12 and 13 continue in an intellectualist vein: true opinions about value suffice for good action, and are inculcated by doctrinal instruction; the causes of wrongdoing are psychic illness resulting from false opinion, or susceptibility to the false allure of vice: in either case true opinions (and hence doctrines) are the cure. The next section (14 – 16) conveys a different sort of problem: there would have to be indefinitely many precepts to cover all cases. The role of husband has many subtypes, all of which would require their own precepts. Although the passage is too brief to be able to judge definitively, 16 seems to suggest the

2.2 Letter 94

17

claim that precepts are not only indefinite in number but indeterminate in their application, and that for these reasons they cannot be part of philosophy. Finally, at 17, Aristo returns to a medical (we would say psychiatric) analogy : the moral illness we all have is like the kind of mental illnesses which doctors treat. Giving precepts to the mentally disturbed is ludicrous; the cause of their illness (black bile is mentioned) must be removed. Likewise in the moral case, false opinion must be eliminated.

Seneca’s responses (18 – 36) Seneca says he will respond point by point. He first denies the analogy to sight (18 – 20). Removing the causes of blindness allows a person to see, but removing false judgments of value does not eo ipso make clear what a person should do. Moreover, ophthalmologists do give their patients advice or precepts in addition to treatment. To the claim that precepts cannot overturn false opinions (21), Seneca meets the point halfway : they do not suffice on their own, but help when combined with doctrines. Like consolation and exhortation, they refresh the memory and focus the mind on the relevant particulars of a situation. 22 again defends giving advice to the sick; 23 repeats that someone cured of false beliefs still needs to learn what he should do. 24 allows that precepts are not effective in the case of thoroughly corrupted people, but argues that they should not be rejected for that reason, because they do help some people. It often is helpful (24 – 25) to state the obvious. Precepts remind us of things we already know. The existence of hypocrisy and the failure to live up to one’s standards all but prove this point: sometimes we need to be reminded of obvious things. From 27 – 31, Seneca points out several ways in which behavior can be affected by instructions without the aid of arguments or evidence. The authority of the preceptor can be respected; fine words in poetry or cast as prose sententiae impress us directly. The reason for this is that our souls have an innate affiliation with everything morally fine, which can be activated by words, even if our souls are quite disordered (although there is a point at which one’s natural moral endowment can be irrevocably corrupted). 32 – 34 repeat the point that a morally healthy but inexperienced agent needs instruction to do the right thing, adding that acting on correct instructions strengthens the agent’s judgment that those instructions are right, thus making it easier for her to accept the arguments for the doctrines. 35 briefly refutes Aristo’s claim that precepts must be indefinite in number : situational differences only apply at a very low level of generality, but higherlevel precepts can dispose of lower-level indeterminacy. Lastly, 36 denies Aristo’s analogy between the mentally and morally ill. The morally healthy (again) still need training in what to do, and (again) are

18

2. Letters 94 and 95: a map

strengthened in their true opinions by precept-giving. Moreover, psychiatrists, like the ophthalmologists in the first example, in fact do give precepts as part of their therapy.

Additional arguments and refutations (37 – 51) To make the discussion easier to follow, or for variation, perhaps, a few additional arguments against precepts are given and refuted after the others. These are not explicitly attributed to Aristo, but there is no reason to suspect that their provenance is any different from the others. The first objection (37) is that laws do not make us good, and laws are precepts with threats attached. Seneca replies that laws are less persuasive because they are negative, telling us what not to do, rather than positive. But he also says that laws can make us act better, especially if they contain explanatory remarks stating why they should be followed. Seneca explicitly says (38) that he disagrees with Posidonius on this point. Seneca then likens precept-giving to other techniques of guidance: consolation, dissuasion and exhortation, praise and blame. In particular (40 – 41), the company of a good person exerts a good moral influence. The means by which this happens may be mysterious, but the fact of it is indisputable. Precepts work in the same way : whatever the precise psychological mechanism, we are immediately drawn to fine-sounding proverbs. In such cases, the truth is self-evident, and doesn’t require doctrinal exposition to persuade us (43). Moreover, there are effective means of behavior modification that are clearly less rational than precept-giving, such as shame, castigation, and the simple giving of orders (44). Finally, the fact that precept-giving can cause a person to do what is right shows that they lead to virtue: right action is, along with intellectual excellence (45), a part of virtue; precepts can make us believe what is right and feel confidence in that belief (46), and doing what is right strengthens our theoretical understanding of the right (47). The final objection to precept-giving (48) is somewhat obscure. Philosophy is divided into knowledge and the state or disposition of soul (scientiam et habitum animi). But precept-giving “is from both,” (ex utroque est) and hence otiose, since knowledge and disposition together are sufficient to be virtuous. The point seems to be that precepts can only be correctly given by someone who already excels in both respects. Seneca’s response (49) is that while precept-giving proceeds from an excellent state of soul, it also produces an excellent state of soul. Presumably, the idea here is that the person who issues the precepts already has this excellence, and the person who receives them can attain this excellence thereby. Otherwise (50), the student will continue to go wrong, and so become more corrupted, and hence unable to profit from any sort of instruction at all. Once a person reaches full and independent under-

2.2 Letter 94

19

standing, she can give precepts to herself, but in the interim (51), some direction and guidance is necessary.

Positive remarks: the role of precept-giving in the moral life (52-end) At this point the objections have been answered. Seneca recalls that the introduction promised another discussion, namely about whether precepts are sufficient by themselves. Adverting to letter 95, Seneca says that he will leave this issue for another day (52). At this point there is a sharp change in the letter. Before it, Seneca was refuting specific attacks on precepts; now he will give positive reasons for their use. Before, the prose was restrained and business-like; here the rhetorical fireworks abound. Most importantly, the earlier part of the letter, against the hyper-rationalistic Aristo, prioritized the arguments. This section begins with the phrase “arguments/evidence aside” (omissis argumentis), and is conducted as an open emotional appeal to acknowledge claims which Seneca hopes will be self-evident. The section begins with a portrait of the moral corruption of society (52 – 54). We receive bad moral influences from everyone around us, (including those who wish us well), do wrong ourselves, and spread our corruption to others. In this environment (55), we need a guardian (custos) to drive out popular influences and replace them with good ones. Bad moral influences are not natural for human beings, and precept-giving can avert them. The perfection of nature is urged at length (56 – 58). To prevent being alienated from our natural goodness, we need to hear a voice, that of the preceptor, urging us to reject the false beliefs that would corrupt us (59). Sections 60 – 67 instantiate the preceptor’s voice; that is to say, they are pure sermon. Removing our vices gives us true power (60). Arrogant and ambitious rulers (Seneca’s negative exempla are Alexander, Pompey, Caligula, and Marius) claim power for themselves through warfare and slaughter, but were themselves conquered by their vices, rendered miserable and insane (61 – 67). This sort of sermonizing (68 – 69) can return us from the corruption of social life to our natural states. It is the company of others that encourages us to vice (69 – 71): no one is greedy or ostentatious or power-hungry when alone. The good preceptor (72 – 74) is a substitute for this healthy solitude, a means by which we can keep our natures intact in an unnatural and corrupt environment.

20

2. Letters 94 and 95: a map

2.3 Letter 95 Introduction (1 – 3) The letter begins with Seneca claiming that Lucilius, presumably in his letter of reply to letter 94, requested the promised second half of the discussion. Seneca says he will comply, warns that the letter will be long, and jocularly adverts to the phenomenon of unhappily receiving what one had hoped for.

First objection (4 – 6) The objectors’ arguments are put again in direct speech, introduced by the plural form inquiunt. Happiness, they say, consists in right actions; precepts lead to right actions; precepts are therefore sufficient for happiness. Seneca replies that this is not always so, that false belief can obstruct precepts, and that even if someone does what is right by acting in accordance with a precept, she will not know that she acts rightly, will not act in precisely the right way, and will not be wholeheartedly (toto animo) committed to goodness. In 6 the objectors raise another objection, which is, oddly, almost identical to the first: moral action comes from precepts, and precepts are therefore sufficient for happiness. The summary answer to this is that moral action also comes from precepts, not only from them.

Second objection (7 – 12) The next argument is an analogy with crafts (7). Crafts other than philosophy, the craft of life, can be imparted by precept-giving; one teaches piloting by instructing the student “move the tiller like this” and so on. Philosophy can be taught the same way. Seneca undermines the analogy by pointing out differences between philosophy and other crafts. Other crafts concern particular parts of life, but philosophy concerns life as a whole. Only philosophy is exempt from being impeded by things extrinsic to it: it is internal to philosophy to be able to remove all obstacles to it. Only in philosophy is it worse to make a mistake knowingly than unknowingly : a teacher of another art can make a mistake on purpose for pedagogical purposes, but it is never right to make a moral mistake. Furthermore (9), some crafts also have decreta, such as medicine. Any theoretical or contemplative craft has decreta, and philosophy is both contemplativa and activa (10). In particular, philosophy includes physics (11). Seneca then (12) repeats the point from section 6, that a person ignorant of

2.3 Letter 95

21

the underlying reasons for a precept will not act in the exactly right way. Moreover, decreta provide tranquility and security by their completeness and their ability to explain and produce precepts.

Third objection (13 – 35) Judging by the length at which Seneca discusses this objection (roughly a third of the letter), this problem is particularly close to his concerns in this letter. In ancient times, the objectors claim, the equivalent of philosophy consisted only in instructions, nostrums of right conduct. Nowadays we have curiously wrought systems of doctrine, but people are much worse. Technical philosophy teaches us to be clever debaters, not good people (13). Seneca concedes the first premise: ancient wisdom (he pointedly calls it sapientia instead of philosophia) was not sophisticated. It did not have to be, for the vices of ancient times were much less intractable. Now that we are besieged by such an onslaught of wickedness, we need all the help we can get (14). From 15 – 29, this point is illuminated by a series of related claims about medicine. Ancient medicine was also a simple affair, but diseases were much less serious then. Modern excesses of food, drink, and sex, however, have had ruinous effects on public health. Eating sweets (15), vomiting excess food and drink (21), sexually aggressive women (21), pederasty (24), and the consumption of mushrooms and oysters (25) all receive lurid description and are linked to grave illness. At 29 the parallel to philosophy is drawn. The discipline was once simple, but in the face of such great turpitude more sophisticated techniques are required. From 30 – 33 examples of contemporary immorality are given; harkening back to the end of letter 94, they are particularly concerned with vicious public and collective acts: warfare, genocide, and gladiatorial combat. Double standards are again in play : crimes punishable by death when committed privately are publicly mandated (30). The perversion of our collective values requires decreta or doctrinal instruction (34), yoked to praecepta, to drive out the relevant false beliefs. Just as oaths and esprit de corps influence soldiers to do their duty at the cost of life and limb (36), so can philosophical decreta provide the emotional commitment necessary to ensure that an agent will do the right thing in difficult and demanding contexts.

Fourth objection (36 – 38) The final explicit objection is that some people become morally upright without doctrinal instruction (36). Seneca concedes the point, but claims that there is a range in different peoples’ moral endowment. Naturally less gifted

22

2. Letters 94 and 95: a map

people can be helped by instruction in decreta, and the more gifted can be made perfect thereby (37). The way they help is by removing the false opinions which produce our vices. The phenomenon of hypocrisy, which at 94.25 – 26 is argued to tell in favor of praecepta, here tells in favor of decreta: we can “know” in some sense that we should fight for our country, but the belief that injury and death are bad makes us cowardly and unable to live up to our sincere commitments. The truth, revealed by decreta, frees the soul to follow correct praecepta (38).

Positive remarks: the limitations of praecepta (39 – 46) The objections have now been met. The next section summarizes the case against instruction by precepts only : the agent who only follows them is not reliably good because he lacks a standard or regula by which to test his actions (39). He may do the right thing, but not in the right way or for the right reason (40 – 42). To ensure rightness in these regards, we need a commitment to virtue and a “persuasion concerning life as a whole” (which Seneca identifies with a decretum at 44). A doctrinal commitment provides the goal of one’s life, an allencompassing standard, a North Star by which to sail (45).

Praecepta derived from Decreta (47 – 59) This section demonstrates how doctrinal commitment can guide a life by deriving specific norms of action from an overall moral outlook. Although cursory, the passage does aim for a kind of completeness: 47 – 50 discusses how one ought to act in respect to the gods, 51 – 53 in respect to people, and 54 in respect to “things.” The discussion of religion uses Stoic reformed theology to urge the abandonment of superstitious and ostentatious religious practices, promoting instead the attempt to imitate the gods by pursuing virtue. The discussion of people argues for the superfluousness of spelling out individual precepts, showing how our duties toward each other can be summarized by, and derived from, the fact of our natural kinship to each other. The brief section on “things” claims that knowing the true value of a thing is necessary in order to know how to act in respect to it. 55 through 59 consider the virtues. Precepts urging us to embrace prudence, justice, and so on are ineffective without knowing the nature of these virtues. The disanalogy between the virtues and other crafts, already discussed at 95.7 – 12, is restated: other crafts lack the completeness of the virtues. Only in the case of the latter is it necessary to know the nature and importance of the craft in order to possess the craft (56). Moreover, the virtues require perfect disposition of soul, which is only possible with full understanding of the truth

2.3 Letter 95

23

(57). Only this knowledge is stable and certain; without it, individual moral instructions cannot flourish (58 – 59).

The union of praecepta and decreta (60-end) This concluding movement of the letter shows the two central notions to be closely and inseparably connected. At 60 Seneca claims that the opponents from both letters have incoherent positions: the ones from letter 95 have a doctrine that doctrines are useless; the ones in 94 advise us not to bother with advice. In 61 – 64 decreta are, through a variety of similes, argued to be the ultimate cause of praecepta. In 65 – 67, Seneca shows how one sort of doctrinal activity, namely describing each virtue, amounts to the same thing as preceptgiving. Describing a virtuous person provides an example of what precepts command. We are, in fact, naturally equipped to model ourselves after salutary examples (67: proponamus laudanda, invenietur imitator). This return to the theme of examples brings Seneca to the rhetorical flourishes with which he ends the letter. Virgil’s description of a noble horse in Eclogues 3 is cited for its equal applicability to a good man (68); Cato and a series of other exemplary Romans round out the letter (69 – 73). Exempla turn out to be as closely linked to decreta as they are to praecepta.

3. Historical Background: Aristo of Chios and Other Stoics 3.1 Introduction Letter 94 is quite extraordinary for the extent of its testimonia on Aristo of Chios and for the great length at which his views are discussed and refuted. For this reason alone, any account of these letters must include a discussion of this important figure. Potentially, moreover, these letters are a key text for our understanding of early Stoicism, since, as we will see, it was precisely from a debate between Aristo and his Stoic colleagues that the canonical articulation of Stoic moral theory arose. Accordingly, in this section I will offer a short account of Aristo’s philosophy, its relation to other early Stoic views, and its impact on the course of school history. That done, I will explore how certain assumptions about Aristo and his significance have colored interpretation of letters 94 and 95 and discuss how my own interpretation of this text will (not) confront the historical relationship between Aristo, early Stoicism, and Seneca.

3.2 The Early Stoic Debate The highly systematized edifice of theory referred to in contemporary discussions as “Stoicism” and attributed to “the Stoics” developed over the course of the third century BCE. There were clear divergences of opinion and a variety of philosophical influences among Zeno of Citium (335 – 263), the founder of the school, and his students and associates. In terms of its intellectual parentage, the movement always laid claim to the Socratic legacy – itself, of course, a highly contested notion1 – and there are many points of similarity between Stoic thought and the Cynics, as would be expected given the fact that Zeno himself had been the student of the Cynic philosopher Crates.2 In terms of doctrinal content, the precise formulation and relative importance of key ideas such as the centrality of virtue, the intellectualist analysis of human action, the rejection of conventional values and of “external goods,” and the normative importance of nature were the subject of intense debate both inside and outside the Stoa. 1 See Long 1988 and Vander Waerdt 1994 1 – 22. 2 Diogenes Laertius 7.12. The Cynics of course also claim Socratic provenance. See Long 1996.

26

3. Historical Background: Aristo of Chios and Other Stoics

There is considerable debate concerning the extent to which the “mainstream” or “orthodox” theory is already present in Zeno’s thought.3 What is clear is that what became the orthodox position was subject to deep and sustained opposition by Aristo of Chios, a student of Zeno’s (c. 320 – 250).4 Aristo’s views were opposed by Zeno’s successors Cleanthes (331 – 232) and especially Chrysippus (280 – 207). Chrysippus’ brilliance is typically given credit for establishing school orthodoxy by besting the charismatic and fashionable Aristo, who had no more adherents after his death. Aristo’s doctrine was austere in the extreme and clearly very close to Cynic Socraticism. He rejected two of the three traditional branches of philosophy, namely logic and physics. The former he held to be irrelevant, the latter “above” us (presumably in the sense that truths about it are beyond human capacity to discover). Only ethics concerns us. He reduced ethics, too, to a few central principles, above all the following: virtue alone is good, vice alone is bad, and everything “between them” is absolutely indifferent.5 Of course, this view sounds familiar : monon to kalon agathon (only the morally honorable is good) is perhaps the most distinctive slogan of Stoicism. The mainstream position, however, qualifies the “indifference” of things between virtue and vice in a crucial way : while both Aristo and Chrysippus would agree that e. g. wealth is indifferent, for the latter but not the former wealth is a “preferred indifferent” (adiaphoron proÞgmenon), and thus something we have reason to pursue, in spite of its indifference. Mainstream Stoicism does admit that some things are completely indifferent (a standard example is whether the number of hairs on one’s head is even or odd.)6 But the items conventionally considered goods (life, health, wealth, freedom, citizenship) and their opposites (death, sickness, poverty, slavery, exile) are not like that; rather, nature is so arranged that we come to recognize the former as things that are oikeion or proper to us, and the latter as things that are allotrion or foreign to us. Our actions, further, are – though exactly how this works is extremely controversial, as we shall see – at least to a large extent determined by reflecting not on what is really good (the virtue of justice, for instance) but rather what is not really good (i. e., money, and its use). That Aristo and mainstream Stoicism have a shared conceptual framework is clear ; it is also clear that their disagreement about the indifferents is of the highest importance. Both agree that virtue alone is good, and that the happy life is identical with the virtuous life. Both diagnose the unhappiness of humanity in terms of its false belief that health and so on are goods, and their opposites evils. And yet, to Aristo and his partisans the mainstream position 3 See Gould 1970 14 – 17. 4 Ioppolo 1980 is the most detailed account of Aristo’s philosophy. His testimonia are collected in von Arnim 1905 (SVF) as fragments 1.333 – 403. 5 Diogenes Laertius 7.160 6 Diogenes Laertius 7.104

3.2 The Early Stoic Debate

27

must have seemed an enormous betrayal of these fundamental principles. For agents acting on the mainstream position will generally pursue and avoid the same things as the wretched many, even though in some sense they agree that it is precisely the many’s pursuit of these things that makes them wretched!7 The mainstream response, that it is not trying to amass wealth that is mistaken but doing so under the belief that money is good, will have seemed to Aristo, as it did to so many detractors outside the Stoa, to bespeak a distinct failure of nerve.8 The statements of the telos or end of human life offered by Aristo and other Stoics also make plain what is at stake between them. We are told that Zeno defined the telos as “living in harmony,” to which his successor Cleanthes added, not as an addition but as a clarification, “…with nature”, and that Chrysippus further specified “to live in accordance with the experience of things that happen by nature.” Aristo, by contrast, opts for, “living indifferently to the things between virtue and vice, making no distinction at all between them, but instead treating them all alike.”9 While these look like widely divergent notions, each philosopher holds, recall, that virtue is the good, and thus that the goal of human life is identical with living virtuously and with living happily.10 Each formula is a specification of what it means so to live. Aristo, then, is claiming that living according to his notion of “indifference” is a necessary and sufficient condition for virtue. The Chrysippean formulation, by contrast, looks rather opaque as it stands. But we have enough context to uncover the underlying ideas: first, that provident Nature directs our actions by making some things proper to us and other things foreign and by fitting us with the rational capacity to understand this, and second, that understanding and following Nature’s charge are necessary and sufficient for virtue and happiness. Aristo, in whose formula, I think, one can clearly see the self-conscious and polemical rejection of these ideas (“…no distinction at all…”), is rejecting both the doctrine of Nature’s providential guidance (as he must, having rejected physics, the part of philosophy concerning nature) and the ranking of preferred and dispreferred things through which Nature’s guidance is alleged to operate.11 7 In parallel with their introduction of the terms “preferred indifferents” as distinct from “goods,” the mainstream Stoics distinguished the ideal agent’s pursuit or choice (hairesis) of virtue from her mere “selection” (eklogÞ) of preferred indifferents. 8 Plutarch De Stoicorum Repugnantiis 30, Cicero De Finibus 4.78. 9 Stobaeus 2.75.11 – 2.76.8; Diogenes Laertius 7.160. 10 That the telos is the human good and the human good is happiness is a shared assumption in debates about the goal of life. 11 It is safe to infer from Aristo’s rejection of natural philosophy or physics that he must have rejected the mainstream Stoa’s account of nature or the cosmos as a teleological, rational and divine whole. But it would be rash to deny that a less theoretically laden notion of “nature” may have played some role his thought; after all, the way of life recommended by the Cynics, to whom Aristo is correctly thought to be close, is largely founded on just this sort of interpretation of what it means to live “naturally.”

28

3. Historical Background: Aristo of Chios and Other Stoics

Chrysippus famously attacks Aristo by arguing that the latter’s account of the end is circular and uninformative.12 The end is virtue, which is specified in terms of itself: virtue is indifference to things between virtue and vice. Aside from the absurd infinite regress this would apparently countenance (‘virtue is indifference to things between indifference to things between indifference…’) Aristo seems left with nothing substantial to say about the virtues; for instance, which sorts of actions are wise ones. Aristo countered by saying that this could not be done: most people consider it wise to look after their health, but if a tyrant were conscripting only and all healthy men to fight, it would be wise for a possible draftee to seek sickness rather than health.13 Though one could grant the apparent quaintness of this argument (and we should of course remember that our sources are too scanty for us to know exactly how Aristo used the example), Aristo’s view may be more sophisticated and defensible. First, Aristo presumably does not intend ‘indifference to things between virtue and vice’ as a definition of virtue; instead, he is making the substantive claim that a person who achieves indifference to such things will be virtuous. But then what is virtue? Like Zeno, Aristo holds – and this looks much more like a definition – that it is knowledge of goods and evils.14 Of course, this raises the circularity problem again, since virtue is the only good, and hence virtue will seem to be defined as ‘knowledge of virtue.’ What is needed, it seems, is some more concrete specification of virtue (or the good). When pushed by Chrysippus and others to offer some such specification, Aristo will respond that given the preponderance of situational variability, the only failsafe way to characterize virtue is in terms of the person who is virtuous, that is, the person who lacks all misguided and vicious motivations. In fact, the only evidence we have for Aristo’s “positive account” is a remark in Cicero that the wise person will do “whatever comes to [her] mind.”15 The passage, like all of Cicero’s remarks about Aristo, is hostile, and should be interpreted cautiously. Annas takes it, plausibly, as a “disingenuous misunderstanding” of Aristo’s “intuitionism,” the view that the virtuous person just 12 Striker 1991 14 – 24 is an excellent account of the Aristo/Chrysippus debate, and is particularly good on the circularity of Aristo’s account. See also Ioppolo 1980 142 – 170. 13 That certain surprising – and in some cases revolting – acts are appropriate in exceptional circumstances is a point common to early Stoics. Zeno, for instance, famously (and embarrassingly, for his later followers) claimed in his Republic that the wise person may correctly decide to engage in incest and anthropophagy. Such statements can be seen in the light of the Cynic/Stoic attack on prevailing norms and/or as an argument against (or at least problematizing) rule-following in ethics. (For Zeno’s Republic see Vander Waerdt 1994 272 – 308.) In the context of the preferred indifferents, the mainstream response to Aristo is to allow that e. g. sickness may be preferred to health in exceptional cases (kata peristasin). They correctly note, however, that Aristo’s argument provides no reason to doubt that on its own and in the absence of exceptional circumstances (aneu peristases) health is to-be-preferred and sickness to-be-dispreferred. 14 Galen, De Placitis Hippocratis et Platonis 7.2. 15 Cicero De Finibus 4.43.

3.2 The Early Stoic Debate

29

sees, in an immediate and uncodifiable way, what is to be done.16 Whether or not “intuitionism” is a helpful characterization of Aristo’s view, I think it is very likely that some such misrepresentation is in play here. Aristo, we also know,17 laid great stress on the doctrine that the wise person holds no opinions but rather knows what is to be done; and his elevation of “indifference” to the status of telos strongly suggests that, whatever the nature of right action, wrong action is exclusively motivated by the lack of indifference, that is, by caring about indifferent things. If Aristo holds these doctrines, it will in fact be the case for him that the wise person does “whatever comes to her mind,” or, at least, that nothing wrong will ever come to her mind. But of course it will not be the fact that something comes to her mind that will make the corresponding action the right one, but rather the fact that her mind is a virtuous one. This still leaves us uninformed about what right action looks like – unless, I suppose, Aristo could point to actual wise people – but his point will have been exactly that no such account can be made. If, as I think, this is his view, it is easy to see how the hostile parody attested by Cicero would have arisen. This is not to say that Chrysippus’ charge is misplaced; Aristo’s account, so reconstructed, still leaves us unable to see why a wise person would ever perform any particular act at all. Aristo points out that sickness may be preferable to health in some circumstances; but unlike his opponents he seems to have no justification for helping himself to this commonsense view. Perhaps he is arguing, one might respond, that the draft-dodging case is purely ad hominem, that “by Chrysippus’ own lights” sickness would then be preferable. But this defense too leaves Aristo with no substantive action-guiding values at all, except “indifference” once again. This may not in fact be incoherent: “do anything at all or nothing, so long as it is consistent with total indifference” is arguably not self-contradictory, and nor is “do what promotes your attaining and keeping total indifference,” to which Aristo might be entitled to help himself. But it is not surprising that this view proved not to be an enduring one. Aristo’s moral psychology was no less uncompromising or spare. Rationality is the only capacity or dunamis of the soul. The wise person holds no opinions, and her virtue is identical with her knowledge of what is good and evil. Virtue is therefore a unity, the same knowledge applied to one’s behavior towards others (justice), to situations involving danger (courage), and so on.18 Aristo rejected moral exhortation and advice-giving in philosophy, considering them more appropriate to “nurses and pedagogues” than to philosophers: these activities do not impart knowledge, and as such they do not produce virtue or make people good.19 16 17 18 19

Annas 1993 101. Diogenes Laertius 7.162. Galen De Placitis Hippocratis et Platonis 7.2. Sextus Adversus Mathamaticos 7.12; Seneca Epistulae Morales 89.13. After reporting Aristo’s

30

3. Historical Background: Aristo of Chios and Other Stoics

Regardless of the precise course this early Stoic debate took, the school’s rejection of Aristo is of crucial importance for determining its fundamental character. First, Stoicism emerged from an intellectual environment in which skepticism, or at least an anti-theoretical current, was prominent. While Aristo appears to have been thoroughly dogmatic in ethics, he urged the abandonment of logic and physics. The mainstream Stoa, by contrast, ultimately rejects this trend, not only developing highly detailed physical and logical doctrines, but also drawing on them (its physics especially) to support its ethics.20 Second, the doctrine of naturally preferred and dispreferred indifferents shifted the school’s vision of the ideal way of life away from the utter radicalism of the Cynics and closer to conventional norms. At the same time, of course, the Stoics held fast to the central claim that virtue is the only good; the complicated relationship between virtue’s transcendent goodness and the normative pull exerted by the preferred indifferents is perhaps the most distinctive and problematic feature of their ethics. And finally, their acceptance of advice-giving as part of the philosophical life had great consequences for their practice, and for what we might call the social reality of the Stoic life. Aristo came to be seen as an extreme and marginal figure. In Cicero, for instance, he is often grouped with Herillus and Pyrrho in a sort of rogues’ gallery of discredited philosophers.21 Cicero also uses Aristo’s name as a cudgel in anti-Stoic polemic: the Stoics should admit that what they call preferred indifferents really are a kind of “goods” (thus abandoning their central doctrine) or else admit that Aristo was right after all (thus marginalizing themselves.)22 Given this background, it is quite interesting and surprising that Seneca devotes as much attention as he does to discussing and refuting Aristo’s doctrines.23

3.3 Aristo, Seneca, and Letter 94 At this point a brief methodological point is in order. The aim of this work is to interpret these two Senecan letters; my interest in Aristo and early Stoicism is instrumental to this end. The aim of the scholarship I will be engaging in the

20 21 22 23

opinion Seneca criticizes him for distinguishing sharply between philosophers and pedagogues, “as if the wise person were anything other than the pedagogue of the human race.” (tamquam quidquam aliud sit sapiens quam generis humani paedagogus). Notably in their reliance on the notion of provident and teleological Nature. See Diogenes Laertius 7.85 – 86. De Finibus 2.35, 5.23; Disputationes Tusculanae 5.85; De Officiis 1.6. De Finibus 4.78. Inwood 2007a, 152 – 153 reasonably suggests a connection between Seneca’s interest in Aristo and his interest in Cynic thought, which enjoyed something of a renaissance in first-century Rome.

3.3 Aristo, Seneca, and Letter 94

31

next chapter is the other way around. Furthermore, my central claim about Aristo will be a negative one: that the letters, viewed on their own terms, do not constitute the sort of evidence for Aristo and early Stoicism that others have looked for in them. My opponents, then, bear potential burdens which I need not assume, such as that of investigating Seneca’s sources and of vindicating the accuracy of his testimony on Aristo.24 Nonetheless, the evidence shows that Aristo indeed does confront issues similar to those which, on my view, Seneca confronts in letters 94 and 95. This fact, in turn, strengthens my interpretation of Seneca, since it relieves me of the need to claim that Seneca misinterprets (or manipulates) his source material. Aristo is best remembered and most important for his divergent views concerning the core issues of moral theory : indifference as the human telos and the complete rejection of things between virtue and vice. He also famously appeals to situational variability in order to attack the mainstream Stoic account of the role of the indifferents in determining action. It is quite natural to see his rejection of praecepta in Seneca as being at least closely related to this issue. It is also very tempting, given the importance of this dispute for Stoic studies in general. As we have just seen, however, this core disagreement is not the only point of dispute between Aristo and his mainstream opponents. He also rejects the protreptic and hortatory “branch” of ethics. But we should not see this rejection as stemming from his account (or non-account) of the human telos, of indifference, and the good. Aristo upholds indifference as the human telos; whether exhortation is useful for achieving this indifference would seem to be a question of moral psychology rather than of the theory of value. It is obviously in terms of his moral psychology, his strict understanding of virtue as knowledge, that his rejection of exhortation is best illuminated. It will result from my reading of letters 94 and 95 that the dialectic concerning praecepta and decreta is far more relevant to this aspect of the Aristo/mainstream Stoic debate than it is to their core disagreement about the nature of the human telos and so on.25 In other words, there is no reason to suppose that the practical and educative question (how do we make people better?), which on my reading is the overwhelming focus of letters 94 and 95, is original to Seneca or represents a sharp change in focus from Aristo’s concerns. Of course, we do not know what Aristo and his interlocutors took to be the relationship between this question 24 My strong suspicion is that the former problem is insoluble; doubts have been raised on the latter : see Sedley 1999, 132 and Schofield 1984 86 – 76. In order not to beg this question, I have avoided using letter 94 in the preceding account of Aristo. 25 It is important to note that I am not assuming this point from the beginning. Questions of rulefollowing in ethics, with which the next chapter will concern itself, obviously involve both theories of value (what makes a thing or an action good or choiceworthy) and moral psychology (how we are affected, reason and act). Whether letter 94 is more relevant to rule-following or the effectiveness of exhortation remains to be discussed.

32

3. Historical Background: Aristo of Chios and Other Stoics

and the core theoretical issues. However that may be, if my interpretation is correct then this text will be of very limited value for understanding those issues.

4. Rules? 4.1 Introduction As chapters five and six of this work will explore, letters 94 and 95 do and say many interesting things. Recent scholarship, however, has inspected them all but exclusively for a single purpose, namely in search of evidence concerning the role of rules in Stoic ethics. This issue has of late been a weighty bone of contention in Stoic studies: one camp has seen rules as fundamental to the structure of Stoic deliberation, while the other has cast doubt on the importance or even the existence of rules for the same. Either camp has sought to enlist these letters (which are standardly dubbed “the most extensive discussion of rules in Stoicism”) into its service; indeed, determining which side of the debate the letters succor has seemed to be the central, if not the only, question of philosophical interest they pose.1 I contend that this focus has been mistaken. Both sides of the debate, it seems to me, have misconstrued Seneca’s text, which neither can nor was intended to sustain the theoretical weight they ask it to bear. To demonstrate this, this chapter will have to operate on two levels: it will have to show, from sources outside the letters, what sort of thing the Stoic theory of deliberation must be and what its rules might be like, if rules it has; and it will have to show that the subject-matter of the letters simply does not answer to those concerns. It turns out on my interpretation that the sort of rules that could structure Stoic deliberation are certainly not the praecepta of the letters, if such rules exist; but that the failure of these letters to specify such rules does not count as evidence that Stoic deliberation is not “rules-based.” The Stoics believe that proper reasoning about nature will correctly structure our values and priorities, and also that proper reasoning in a given situation will yield action in accordance with those values. Given the taxonomy of the letters, if praecepta do not provide the material for an agent’s reasoning in these regards, then decreta must fill that role. This they do, but the letters are not meant to spell out how they do so; Seneca, I take it, would be surprised by the thought that these letters should answer that question, and would have referred inquirers to Stoic texts of a quite different stamp. If I am right about these claims they will enable us to see our Senecan text in a less misleading light, by forestalling attempts to 1 The tradition of reading these letters for Stoic views on rules begins with Kidd 1978, whom I will not discuss directly, since I take it that the literature has superseded his more cursory discussion. See Mitsis 1993 and 1999 and Annas 1993 96 – 108 for the latest rounds from the “rules” side, Inwood 1999 for the opposition.

34

4. Rules?

force this particular peg into so allomorphous a hole. Thus unburdened, the letters, I think, will show themselves to be better argued, more thoughtful, and more original than the dominant mode of interpreting them until now has allowed us to see.

4.2 Recent Scholarship To begin, let us set out the terms of the recent debate, both globally (i. e. in terms of the various scholars’ views of how Stoicism in general works) and locally (in regards to how they seek to appropriate our Senecan text). Inwood may be taken as both representative of the side that seeks to downplay rulefollowing and as its best expositor ; Mitsis and Annas as the most important champions of rule-following. Inwood 1999 has advanced the following theses. The ‘law’ which enjoins moral action and forbids the contrary is to be identified not with a code of prescriptions and prohibitions but rather with the correct reasoning of the ideal moral agent, the wise person. The reasoning of such an agent is not deductive, rule/case reasoning; while rules have their place as a heuristic guide for identifying the sort of actions that are usually called for, they are defeasible under exceptional circumstances where following them would conflict with the background justifications of the rule or of other higher principles. Perhaps the greatest problem Inwood sees with understanding Stoic deliberation as rule-based is that Stoic texts do not appear to offer any examples of rules which are at the same time exceptionless and substantive. A rule such as “act virtuously” applies without exception, but since it does not specify what it means to act virtuously, fails to be substantive and hence offers no guidance to the deliberating agent. Rules like “thou shalt not kill” have informative content and are in fact capable of guiding our conduct; however, (for the Stoics) they admit of exceptions, and so moral deliberation cannot consist solely in recognizing the normative force of such rules and realizing that a contemplated course of action either conforms or does not conform to them. Inwood points out, with much justice, that Stoic sources in fact do not proffer rules or commands that pass both tests. Pointing to the praecepta of letters 94 and 95, Inwood argues that Stoic rules are meant to apply in general but not exceptionlessly : they are defeasible under extraordinary circumstances and are as such rules of thumb. Inwood relies on recent work in legal theory to show how a rule can exert normative pressure in virtue of its status as a rule, but still be defeasible by higher-level considerations.2 Key to this conception is the notion of “entrenchment”, that is, the reliance 2 Schauer 1991, which develops a rule-utilitarian conception of rules, much inspired by the pioneering work of Rawls 1955.

4.2 Recent Scholarship

35

on rules even in circumstances in which following the rule would conflict with the substantive justification for the law’s existence. To cite a trivial example, the rule “keep off the grass” is justified, say, by one’s interest in maintaining the beauty of the lawn. If, however, the lawn is strewn with trash, breaking the rule to remove the trash would promote precisely what the rule is intended to promote, while following its letter would leave its purpose unfulfilled. For a rule to be entrenched is for it to retain its normative force even in such circumstances. Of course, entrenchment can be a matter of degree; a rule may maintain its rule-ness in the face of some contrary pressure exerted by the rule’s justification, yet still be defeasible in particularly pressing circumstances. Schauer draws the quite interesting conclusion that entrenchment is in fact crucial for the existence of a rule: “keep off the grass” isn’t a rule at all if not entrenched to some degree. For if we are to ignore a rule whenever we judge that its purpose will not be served by obeying it, we may in fact dispense with it entirely in favor of directly reasoning on the basis of the rule’s justification. On the other hand, a rule can still be a rule even if not fully entrenched, that is, it can exert normative pressure just by being a rule, e. g. by compelling an agent who considers overriding it to justify her act by a stricter standard than would be required in the absence of the rule. Schauer’s work provides a number of interesting and sometimes surprising justifications for accepting the sub-optimal results which entrenching rules entails. On Inwood’s view, Seneca’s praecepta are the partially entrenched rules that guide the conduct of non-sages (sages being free to reason directly from the precepts’ justifications). This move provides an attractive way to understand the early Stoic doctrine that only the wise can commit suicide: there is a general rule against it, but it is called for in some circumstances. Given the finality, however, and gravity of the decision, fools cannot be trusted to make that decision. They would do better to follow the general rule, even though this will entail that some fools for whom suicide actually is appropriate will remain alive.3 Ideal moral deliberation, however, is not constrained in this way. Pointing to Zeno and Chrysippus’ notorious avowal that the wise may occasionally engage in cannibalism and incest, as well as a Senecan text discussing the various considerations that could override the presumption in favor of repaying a debt, Inwood argues that the reasoning of the wise person in such a context will consist not in the following of complex, hierarchical rules, but 3 It is important to note here that the Stoic justification for a fool’s following such a rule is not the utilitarian one which would be familiar to us – viz. that while the rule entails that some people who would “be better off” dead will remain alive, the absence of this rule would entail the greater disutility of having other people who ought to live erroneously killing themselves. The existence of greater welfare for a greater number of subjects is of course indifferent to the Stoa; the rule is instead justified by the relatively greater rationality for the individual fool, in awareness of her ignorance, of hewing to the general rule to remain alive rather than risk what must perforce be her final miscalculation.

36

4. Rules?

rather in “making intelligent situational exceptions to general rules” (111 – 112). As we will see, this formulation raises the question, what makes a particular situational exception an intelligent one? Inwood believes that the general normative context of Stoic ethics (that which is set out by Seneca’s decreta) frames but does not fully determine the appropriate outcome in problem cases. Adverting to the debate described by Cicero in De Officiis 3, in which Diogenes of Babylon and Antipater disagree about whether a merchant must disclose to his buyers that other merchants will soon be bringing more goods and hence lowering their price, Inwood claims that Stoic moral principles in fact do not solve the problem (123): “Here, two Stoic experts come to opposite conclusions in a concrete case without at any point [emphasis in original] disagreeing about the principles involved, only about the way they bear on the case in hand.”4 On this view, however, although Stoic principles do not solve problems of casuistry, they do impose the right sort of procedure to handle them. Inwood sees Cicero’s formula for resolving apparent conflict between utile and honestum at De Officiis 3.20 and Seneca’s formula humani officii at 95.52 as being the sort of procedure that allows an agent to act in particular situations in the light of the more abstract doctrines of Stoic ethics. The former of these asserts that harming another is more contrary to nature than death, sickness, or other dispreferred indifferents; the latter encompasses all praecepta advising fair treatment and generosity by remarking that human beings are both bloodrelatives and parts of a giant whole. To use such principles is not to engage in rule/case deliberation, but in a looser, “more dialectical and rhetorical kind of reasoning” (124). Inwood sees the famous definition of kathÞkon or “appropriate action” as “that which, when done, admits of reasonable defense”5 as giving succor to this view: this standard of retrospective explanation or justification is not so strict as to demand that the agent’s actions can be shown to be flawless in all respects. Rather, as Inwood venturesomely claims, the action may itself turn out to have been wrong, but still pass the “reasonable defense” test, a test whose criterion he takes to be that the agent should have acted under the guidance of the right sort of Stoic formula.

4 It is not entirely clear that Inwood means by this that two ideal Stoic agents might in fact act in contrary ways in this case, but that does seem to be his conclusion. At 123 note 80, he writes “If one wants there to be a single correct Stoic answer to such problem cases, then one must decide either that Diogenes or Antipater is wrong, or that they are not really disagreeing; but if, as I contend, Stoics can legitimately disagree on the application of principles which they share, then such maneuvers are not needed.” On the other hand, Inwood and Donini 1999 write, “Though the mainstream Stoic would assert and Aristo would deny that good health is something preferred, they would both agree that in a given individual case, with all relevant factors specified and known by the moral agent, the virtuous person would have but one correct choice…” (697) 5 Diogenes Laertius 7.107 – 109

4.2 Recent Scholarship

37

Turning to Mitsis,6 his central thesis is that the combination of praecepta and decreta allows us to develop an understanding of what to do that is purely rational and cognitive (290): “The Stoics… are convinced that moral development depends solely on a deepening cognitive grasp of both universal and more determinate moral principles; they hold, moreover, that moral rules can structure our understanding of a particular situation in ways that guarantee our sensitivity to its specific demands. For the Stoic, developing the requisite sensitivity to moral particulars is strictly a matter of cognitively grasping the application of such rules.” It is important to see what is at issue here. Mitsis concedes the point which animates much skepticism about rule-following, namely that particular situations demand from an agent widely divergent responses. The skeptic about rules may deduce from this fact the conclusion that rules could not account for this divergence. The question then arises, by what means does an agent determine what is to be done? One sort of answer holds that an agent, by correct training and habituation, acquires a dispositional aptitude for perceiving the morally relevant features of a situation. It is precisely this kind of solution that Mitsis sees as the wrong one for a Stoic to endorse. Indeed, all particular arguments aside it seems that the overwhelming thrust of Stoicism requires the Stoics to reject this sort of answer : their embrace of Socratic intellectualism; their explicit endorsement of the analogy of philosophy with craft; their monistic, rationalist analysis of the soul and their corresponding cognitivist psychology of action; their reduction of “moral” to “intellectual” errors, and vice versa; their elevation of the Wise Person, who assents only to true impressions: all these indisputable features of Stoic theory, it seems, would rest uneasily with an intuitionist account of deliberation. Accordingly, for Mitsis a Stoic agent, in correctly determining what to do, is recognizing that either (or both) a true decretum or (and) a valid praeceptum requires that action. Determining what is to be done is a matter of applying these high- and low-level principles. That said, Mitsis’s interpretation of the praecepta of 94 – 95 takes issue with the assumption that precepts, to be useful, must be both exceptionless and contentful enough to guide action in concrete cases. As he points out, Seneca does not appear to be overly interested in defending the claim that precepts are variable and capacious enough to deal with situational variability, nor does he expend much effort on schematizing and prioritizing the precepts he recommends; yet both of these would be pressing issues on the assumption that praecepta simply are the rules obedience to which constitutes appropriate action (295). On his view, the most important role of praecepta is their function in helping an individual to “acquire an awareness of the requirements of particular moral situations” (296). At 94.32, indeed, Seneca claims that even a person with sound decreta may be unaware of what each situation requires; for Mitsis, praecepta help such a person not by laying out infallible prescriptions for how to 6 Mitsis 1993

38

4. Rules?

act but by furthering, in a cognitive way, an agent’s understanding of and sensitivity to salient moral points, e. g. by reminding her of facts she has forgotten, warning her away from corrupt beliefs she has rationally committed herself to rejecting, and so on. They are fundamentally a tool for moral training: “Stoic praecepta offer a concrete and flexible strategy for acquiring the starting points for further moral development. They do so, however, without offering a completely codified set of moral priorities…” (298 – 9). For this reason the praecepta cannot be but a part of moral decisionmaking: what we need is of course decreta. As commentators on these letters frequently do, Mitsis here laments that Seneca does not provide us a clear picture of how a developing moral agent will use them in conjunction with praecepta: “Unfortunately, Seneca does not provide a list of such decreta, but if what we expect are very high-level evaluative principles, a decretum will presumably be something on the order of ‘one should always be virtuous’ or, perhaps, ‘one who is virtuous always acts in accordance with nature’” (301). He then proceeds to argue against the complaint of Inwood and others that principles at that level of generality are too indeterminate to “map onto” any particular constellation of factual circumstances, pointing out for instance that general instructions such as “look after your health” are often more informative than a list of particular instructions that are meant to secure good health, like “eat now,” “take this pill now,” and “go running for a half hour now.” Mitsis takes it that it is an unfair test of principles to require that they enjoin a fixed course of action in a given circumstance without the help of more determinate principles. Decreta, on Mitsis’s view, both collect the norms stated in praecepta into a rational whole and set out the rational constraints against which the rightness and applicability of precepts must be tested. The text which most clearly supports this claim is perhaps 95.51 – 53, where Seneca points out that precepts stating all the ways in which we are required to bring aid to others can be explained and encompassed by the fact that all rational beings are, qua rational, kin, members of the cosmic city, mutually dependent, and so on. Moral development and judgment, then, rely on a deepening understanding both of determinate moral instructions and of the deeper truths that ground them: without the former we would be unable to identify how the latter bear on individual situations, and without the latter we would be unable to test, systematize, and justify the former. For another view which emphasizes rather than downplays the role of rules in Stoic deliberation, let us now consider Annas’s contribution.7 On her view, the praecepta of the letters are rules, and the decreta, the high-level principles of Stoic ethics. Stoic agents are meant to follow praecepta but also to come to understand the doctrines of Stoicism that explain and justify those praecepta; in problem cases, for example when rules conflict, or when contemplating 7 Annas 1993 94 – 108

4.2 Recent Scholarship

39

acting at variance with a rule one usually endorses, a solution is to be found by appealing to principles. Stated thus, Annas’s position seems scarcely contestable; after all, the letters just are an affirmation that precepts (standardly understood as rules) are useful but need to be filled out by decreta (for which ‘principles’ is a very natural rendering) in order to lead to perfect wisdom. Her characterization, however, of the issues at hand in the dispute, about what Aristo’s objections to rules consists in, and how the “orthodox” Stoa met them, produces an interesting and articulated account of the role of rules in Stoicism. Annas groups Aristo’s arguments against praecepta into the following objections. Rules cannot be “internalized,” since they are unsystematic, and thus cannot be built up into a coherent grasp of what one ought to do, since they merely command that one act a certain way without explaining why one ought to act that way (94.2). Moreover, rules always have exceptions (94.14 – 15); she sees Aristo as claiming that rules would have to be “absurdly detailed” to answer to the situational variability of actual human experience. Rules are useless both to virtuous and to vicious people (94.11): for the virtuous person already knows how to act, and the vicious person’s vice prevents her both from seeing the rightness of rules and from being motivated to follow them. Annas’s interpretation of 94.16 is important, and deserves to be quoted extensively. The Seneca text is as follows: adice nunc quod sapientiae praecepta finita debent esse et certa; si qua finiri non possunt, extra sapientiam sunt; sapientia rerum terminos novit. And here is Annas: The virtuous person knows what to do; while the Stoics exaggerate this point, it seems a reasonable requirement on virtue that the virtuous person know what he is doing. But rules could only be the kind of thing that could be known if they were finite and exact; that is, if it were clear just from the rule itself what were the limits to its application, and if it were clear exactly what did and did not fall under it. This is only an objection to rule-following if Ariston is assuming that moral rules in fact do not have these properties; it seems reasonable to assume that this is what he had in mind, especially as it is something which has worried other moral philosophers. Ordinary moral rules are, to a certain extent, vague; when we apply a rule such as ‘Don’t lie’ we implicitly have in mind a kind of ceteris paribus clause: we shouldn’t lie unless… where what we have in mind is an open-ended list of circumstances which justify or even mandate lying, but which we cannot reduce to a finite, closed list of exceptions. This is just the way we normally proceed to apply moral rules; problems set in only when we demand, with Ariston, that the person who makes a decision and gets it right should be able to say why she gets it right. For appeal just to the rule will not provide a complete explanation of the application, since the rule applies only ceteris paribus, and there is no closed list of exceptions that could be appealed to in order to show that this application was not one of the exceptions. (100)

On Annas’s view, Aristo takes it that the virtuous person is virtuous, and hence does the right thing, solely in virtue of having internalized the most general

40

4. Rules?

principles of ethics. Adverting to 94.3, Annas writes that for Aristo, “the correct judgement is a product of the virtuous disposition in a very direct way, just as accurate shooting is the direct product of the javelin-thrower’s skill, and is not mediated by rule-following on a particular occasion” (102). Annas then sees the orthodox Stoic position as a response to Aristo’s challenge, understood thus. The doctrine of kathÞkonta kata peristasin, for instance, is intended to handle Aristo’s objection about exceptions to rules by allowing that certain action-types can be specified as correct absent exceptional circumstances, while others, like maiming oneself, are usually wrong, but appropriate in exceptional circumstances. It remains the case, as Annas concedes, that this allowance to situational variability does not answer (what she takes to be) Aristo’s objection about the unacceptable vagueness of rules. “The only direct answer to this that we find,” she writes (103) “is an unfortunately brief comment in Seneca.” She then quotes 94.35, which is explicitly meant to be Seneca’s answer to the objection in 94.16: ‘Infinita’ inquit ‘praecepta sunt.’ Falsum est: nam de maximis ac necessariis rebus non sunt infinita; tenues autem differentias habent quas exigunt tempora loca personae, sed his quoque dantur praecepta generalia. As an example of a “universal rule” or praeceptum generale meant to deal with exceptional circumstances, Annas considers the case of telling a white lie in a socially conventional situation, remarking, “…these problems, Seneca claims, fall under ‘universal rules’. Presumably, one brings the troublesome case under a more general rule, such as, ‘Put integrity before politeness.’” She rejects this kind of solution, however, on the grounds that the problem of exceptions to more specific rules could not be solved by appeal to more general ones, e. g. if a rule about “lying” leaves unclear whether saying “I’m fine” when you aren’t falls under it, then a higher-level rule stressing “integrity” would also fail to determine, on its own, whether the white lie constituted a breach of one’s integrity or not. The orthodox Stoic answer to this difficulty,8 Annas thinks, can be discerned from 94.31: quid enim interest inter decreta philosophiae et praecepta 8 It is unclear, to me at least, what Annas’s actual evaluation of the passage at 94.35 is. She assumes Seneca to have a certain solution in mind (notice the ‘presumably’), which she then claims to be insufficient; another passage is then adduced to reach a more satisfactory solution. Does that leave Seneca, or the Stoa in general, wrong at 94.35? After all, that passage is introduced with a peremptory falsum est to Aristo’s objection; Seneca just asserts that a class of praecepta can deal successfully with situational variability, namely his praecepta generalia. These ought not to be just the decreta again, or else Seneca would be declaring Aristo wrong but showing him to be right: Aristo says that praecepta are flawed because of situational variability (which is why we need decreta); Seneca retorts that praecepta are not flawed, because they can account for the tenues differentiae imposed by situations (never mind what decreta can do.) Moreover, the text at 94.31 is responding explicitly not to the 94.16 passage but to another of Aristo’s objections, namely that it is unnecessary to point out things that are already obvious. It does violence to Seneca’s quite explicit argumentation to disregard 94.35 as a solution to 94.16, but then to appeal to a different passage, responding to a different problem, as the “real” solution.

4.3 Initial Remarks on Rules

41

nisi quod illa praecepta generalia sunt, haec specialia? Utraque res praecipit, sed altera in totum, particulatim altera. Rules and principles both have prescriptive force; but principles have extra features (they are truth-evaluable and universal, and explain the point of the rules) that might help with problems of indeterminacy and conflict of rules by identifying where and how those rules fit into our overall moral viewpoint. The essence, then, of the orthodox disagreement with Aristo is that on the latter’s theory one merely imbibes the principles of ethics, and then relies on an uncodifiable skill, flowing directly from the agent’s virtuous soul, for hitting upon the right action in particular cases; while the former theory involves learning, following, and making use of rules, but doing so in the light of the higher-level facts which produce and justify the rules. The limitations of praecepta do not render them useless, and the necessity of decreta does not render the praecepta superfluous. Where Annas takes the Stoic position to differ crucially from Aristo’s, and her own interpretation of Stoicism to differ from Inwood’s, is that this appeal to principles is still rationalistic and in a way rule-like: “Virtue is structured by principles and rules, and does not depend at any point on non-rule-governed insight” (106).

4.3 Initial Remarks on Rules Before offering a positive position on the issues raised by this debate, it is necessary, I think, to scrutinize the basic notions involved. The concept of a rule is not initially a pellucid one, and work must be done to say what one means by a rule, what kind of rule one is talking about, and what it means to follow a rule. The relevant kind of rule for our purposes is a verbal formula, a sentence or phrase, commanding or prohibiting a specified range of action or behavior. As regards following a rule, the paradigm case is like this. An agent endorses some regulative and imperatival formula, for instance “don’t eat sugary food.” When offered candy, he realizes that candy falls under the description “sugary food,” that therefore eating the candy would conflict with the rule, and so he declines to eat it. It is a commonplace of philosophical psychology that one need not actually propose to oneself mentally, in temporal order, the series of thoughts “do not eat sugary foods,” “this is sugary food,” and “do not eat this.” Surely such trains of reasoning are actually quite rare; nonetheless, it may be that the correct explanation, whether it is retrospectively given or simply potentially could be given, of the agent’s behavior is like this.9 As we have already seen from the discussion of Inwood, the most relevant criticism of rule-following in deliberation is the following. Individual circ9 By this I mean, of course, that a theory of rule-following would argue so; whether such a theory is in fact a proper representation of our behavioral psychology is a further question.

42

4. Rules?

umstances possess enormous richness and variability, thereby requiring a corresponding sensitivity of response on the part of an agent, and the ability to suspend previously espoused norms and standards which were perhaps appropriate for responding to ordinary situations and experiences, but which lose their point in the light of circumstances unforeseen by the rule. Morality and in fact action in general seem to require a flexibility which “mere” rulefollowing cannot provide.10 To what extent rule-following has the resources to deal with situational variability is controversial. What we may take as given is that if rule-following is to produce all relevant action within a given range, such variability as the rule or system or rules allows must be specified by the rule or rules. Stealing, for instance, will be generally prohibited by a rule; but there are circumstances, for instance when one is starving, where it might be allowed. Now suppose a starving person steals some food, and her actions are held to be correct or at least permitted within a moral or legal system of justification. One could say that her action was correct even though it constituted a breach of the rules. One could also say either that the rule on stealing itself accommodated her action or that obedience to some other rule allowed or required her to suspend obedience to the rule on stealing. In the former case, one is acknowledging that an agent may, at least some time, justifiably act on the basis of motivations and in accordance with a procedure that is not rule-governed. In the latter case, one is explaining the deviation from the normal result of rule-following by appeal to rules, whether to a more carefully articulated original rule (‘do not steal unless…’) or to other rules within the system of rule-following that license suspension of the original rule (‘rules about property yield to rules concerning the preservation of life’). Both in terms of the agent’s first-personal deliberation and an observer’s third-personal evaluation of the agent’s action, the latter sort of appraisal is rules-based while the former, regardless of how that appraisal in fact works, is not. As to what one means by a rule, it is of course not necessary here to rehearse the greater taxonomy of rules, on which an enormous literature exists. The kinds of distinctions I do want to draw are (initially, anyway) fairly straightforward. In what follows I will consider a particular way in which Stoic deliberation could be cashed out as a system of rules. One class of rules consists of those which enjoin (or prohibit) given types of actions, such as “thou shalt not kill,” “clean up after yourself,” and “pay your taxes.” Rules like this may also command or forbid in a way that leaves openended what sort of defined action-type (killing, cleaning, paying) counts as obedience to the rule: “take care of your children,” now means bathing them, 10 I mention this difficulty with rule-following not because there are not others but because this problem has been seen as the most pressing one in the debate on Stoicism. As I will argue later, the fact that this issue plays only a marginal role in Seneca’s discussion of praecepta is evidence that the focus of this text is other than is has been supposed to be.

4.3 Initial Remarks on Rules

43

now feeding them; “preserve your health” is likewise obeyed sometimes by eating, sometimes sleeping, exercising, taking medications, and so on. Let us call these rules “action-type rules,” further dividing them into specific and general.11 A system of action-type rules may include higher-order rules, rules which have as their objects not action-types like killing or preserving your health, but the rules that do act in that way. “Obey higher-level rules when they conflict with lower-level ones,” “rules about preserving life supersede rules about property rights” and so on. Let us call these ranking rules. One way Stoic deliberation might be rule-based would be for it to consist of action-type rules, possibly organized into a hierarchical structure by ranking rules. Many discussions of rules in Stoicism have implicitly assumed that this is what Stoic rules would be like. A few comments about this picture are in order. First, the evidence is clear and uncontested that the Stoics advocated considerable flexibility in the action-types that they endorse. For instance, they are not pacifists: while killing is of course ordinarily wrong, in fact paradigmatically so, there are circumstances in which it is appropriate. This immediately shows that on this understanding of Stoic deliberation either “do not kill” is not a Stoic rule as it stands, or it is subject to override by some other rule or rules. If one wants to avoid ranking rules, the Stoic rule about killing would have to be tailored to match actual Stoic prescriptions, that is to say, the rule would have to specify its own exceptions.12 This would be a difficult and not especially promising task. “Do not kill, unless in self-defense, or to save innocent third parties, or when fighting for your country, or when executing a guilty criminal after trial…” It seems unlikely that the circumstances that might legitimate killing could be stated with precision. Even if they could, the rule would in all likelihood be extremely long. For even within a case like “selfdefense” there are extraneous factors that come to bear on whether killing is appropriate. If the attacker is a stranger acting out of malice who would surely kill you, then killing her is appropriate. If however she is a temporarily deranged loved one, and she could be safely disarmed, killing her would be 11 There does seem to be a pronounced and articulable difference in kind between specific and general rules, but of course the boundary between them will be unavoidably fluid and imprecise. Cleaning after yourself might mean washing a dish or sweeping a floor ; not killing means not stabbing, defenestrating, and so on. Generality is a matter of degree; nothing I will say will require making any sharp distinctions here. 12 Talk of “exceptions” to rules is a common feature of ordinary language, but it should be noted that it is potentially misleading. Rules with exceptions are like any other rule: for a rule to be a rule it must have a scope; within its scope the rule applies universally. Rules can be wider or narrower in scope, but there is no basic difference between a narrower rule and a wider rule with exceptions. “No cameras allowed except ones without flashes” and “no flash-cameras” constitute the same rule. It is merely a feature of many rules that the only practical way to specify their scope is to name a class that is too wide and then narrow it down, as in “no dogs except seeing-eye dogs.”

44

4. Rules?

unspeakable. The more finely tailored the rule becomes, the more implausible it becomes to see an agent as deliberating on the basis of it. This is true in spite of the concession, made above, that rule-following need not take the form of an actual mental sequence preceding an action of the form “P is a rule/ action Q is prohibited by P/ I will not do Q.” The reason an extremely intricate rule cannot be the basis of deliberation is that an agent could not learn it and hence could not be said to act on its basis even retrospectively. Moreover, this case is merely one example: Stoicism forbids many things and enjoins many others, many of which are far more complicated than killing. No one would want to produce an exhaustive list of occasions in which it is appropriate or not appropriate to eat, for instance. For that reason, specific action-type rules could not constitute Stoic deliberation. For that matter, general action-type rules couldn’t do so either. While they certainly broaden our perspective, to the extent we endorse them they lead us to see how ubiquitous conflict of moral value is. What to do, for instance, with “respect others’ property” when the only way you see to obey the rule “take care of your children” involves throwing a brick through the window of a bakery? A person who espouses both rules will need some procedure for determining which rule to follow when both cannot be followed. One might try to stick to general rules that do not conflict with each other. We saw in the case of specific rules that any attempt to reconcile each to each would either be implausibly unwieldy or it would not generate the variability of actual Stoic prescriptions. In the case of general rules one finds that that is also the case, but for a different reason. “Give to each his due” is surely something that Stoics say ; whether it conflicts with any other Stoic prescriptions could be questioned. The problem arises, though, that the rule is too general to supply informative content about how it should be followed. What counts as his due? If you are returning money owed to a friend, and an emergency intervenes and forces you to spend it to save someone’s life, has the money ceased to be your friend’s due? Or are you determining that in this case there is something more important than giving your friend his due, that is, that the rule has exceptions? If the former, it is quite clear that the rule is too general and contentless to follow as it stands, and the same reasons that made it impossible to set out specific rules for all cases will render it impossible to set out, in a rider to the rule, exact criteria for determining when the money owed to the friend is not “his due.” And if the latter, the rule might be rendered exceptionless by adding “…when appropriate” or “…unless exceptional circumstances intervene.” But that obviously makes the rule too uninformative to produce definite action: when is it appropriate? What counts as an exceptional circumstance? For a system of action-type rules to work, then, there would have to be ranking rules, rules that structure and prioritize the other rules, specifying which rules must be suspended or broken in cases of conflict. Imagine a mother with a desperately hungry child and no money passing an unguarded

4.3 Initial Remarks on Rules

45

fruit-stand. She recognizes that she is bound by the rule “do not steal” as well as “feed your children.” Alas, it is not clear to me at least that the Stoa would endorse the humane conclusion and allow (command) the mother to take a pear, but in either case she may reconcile the rules by appeal to a higher-level rule. “Property rights before individual utility” would prohibit the theft, whereas “parental duty before property rights” would mandate it. Another model would rank rules in terms of where they come in the system, under a rule like “in cases of conflict, decide on the basis of the more fundamental rule.” Perhaps “protect your own” comes before “do not steal,” so that the former controls the case. Let us assume for the moment that a system of rules with this sort of ranking mechanism can account for the variability of Stoic ethical prescriptions. It would of course be a separate question whether the system in fact works that way ; but for the moment let us consider another possibility. Imagine this ranking principle, which has roots in recent discussions while not actually being defended as such in this crude version: “in cases of conflict, act in whatever way will secure for you the greatest amount of natural value.” An agent acting on this pseudo-utilitarian version of Stoicism might acknowledge, as lunchtime approaches, that “preserve your wealth” and “maintain yourself in good nutrition” are coming into conflict, and that acting on the basis of the latter will shortly maximize selective value for her.13 On that basis she walks toward a market or restaurant and buys herself lunch. If she is a sage and nothing goes contrary to her plan she will presumably make the transaction at the exact moment when the value of the nutrition outweighs the value of the money for her. Now what would we say about such a procedure? It offers a list of things with selective value which we are for that reason to pursue, specifies for each how much value they contain, and prescribes resolution of conflict on a maximizing basis. Is this a rules-based system? My formulation of it has made it try to sound like one, by putting its values into formulae in the imperative mood. But it looks like utilitarianism, which of course is not what one usually has in mind when one thinks of a rules-based moral system. But what violence is actually done to the concept of a rule if one said that (this caricature of) utilitarianism is adherence to the master-rule “maximize utility,” a rule that is then guided by a reference-book of goods with stated units of utility for each? Well, one might say, rather a lot of violence. The actual decisions an agent following this model would make would, it is true, aim to obey the rule “maximize utility,” but the principle for doing so would not be a rule, but rather a particular judgment, a calculation. On the other hand, if it is a rule – a constitutive rule – in American football that a field goal is worth three points, 13 The example is from Barney 2003. I am changing the example case to this one from the conflicted mother case not for nefarious reasons but because it is obscure how this kind of model could possibly deal with the latter case. What case you pick is in fact not germane to my purposes here.

46

4. Rules?

why not call the specification of friendship’s utility versus a nice poem’s utility a rule? And isn’t addition a matter of rules? Furthermore, the kind of rule systems I just sketched, namely that of actiontype rules organized by ranking rules, is far from the only possible system of Stoic rules. It could be that Stoic rules have as their object not action-types but values, so that a Stoic deliberator asks about any potential course of action what values are secured by it. One action type will make me healthy, another wealthy. Perhaps health is simply a more important value than wealth, so that, ceteris paribus, one should act to secure the former at the expense of the latter. If all values are ranked in this way, it might be possible to dispense with the inordinate complexity that comes from attempting to make rules about action-types. No doubt these remarks are a bit fast. My object is not (at this point, anyway) to critique a particular model of Stoic deliberation, let alone utilitarianism. The point is rather that the concept of a rule is, at least in practice, unclear, and perhaps not always the most helpful one. The concept of a “rulesbased system” is even worse. The point is also that in the case of Stoicism the far more illuminating and conceptually superordinate question is not “does Stoic deliberation go via rules?” but rather “how does Stoic deliberation work?” The models I have offered here are, and are supposed to be, overly simple, but if upon consideration one decided Stoic deliberation was like the system of numbered rules with a rule to follow the higher one in cases of conflict, one would likely conclude that the “system” is “rules-based.” Contrariwise, an advocate of the value-maximizing deliberator would probably avoid that characterization. However that might go, surely the determination of how the system works is what should interest us, and once that is done the answer to our question about rules will either be clear already or will depend largely on how we wish to use our terminology. If this is right it poses a large problem, but it is one that is imposed anyway by the nature of Stoicism and the state of our sources. The problem is that deliberation is an enormously tricky topic in Stoicism. Scholarship is, I think, only just coming to terms with the scope of the problem and beginning to deal with it adequately. While I will be defending certain claims about Stoic deliberation and attacking others, the issue in general is – of course – too large and underdeveloped for me to aspire here to anything like a definitive picture. Nonetheless, the task of demonstrating that Seneca’s praecepta and decreta are not primarily about Stoic deliberation requires some discussion of what Stoic deliberation might be like.

4.4 Deliberation in Stoicism

47

4.4 Deliberation in Stoicism For the Stoics, being virtuous implies doing some things and not doing others. But it does not imply this alone: it also implies that one do the things that one does for the right reason, from the right disposition, and in the right way. This basic distinction is pervasive in Stoicism, and understanding how it works is a matter of the highest importance. Seneca signals this distinction, at least occasionally, by alternatively asking what we are to do and how we are to do it. In honor of this practice, let us refer to these two aspects of action respectively as the nominal and adverbial specifications of human action. The nominal aspect is easier to achieve but harder to specify, while the adverbial aspect is relatively easy to specify but is so difficult to achieve that probably nobody has ever managed the feat. Consider the adverbial aspect first. We know tolerably well, for the theory spells it out, what it would be like to act rightly. It is for an act to be done by an agent from whose soul all emotions have been extirpated; who knows that virtue is the only good, vice the only evil, and that she is both a part and an ally of Nature or Zeus; who assents rashly to no impression; who understands that Nature or Zeus has a calling for her and is inerrantly disposed to carry it out; who possesses perfect happiness and experiences the unceasing joy that is its affective token. All this is simple to say, rather trickier to do. By contrast, one may be confident that one instantiates the nominal aspect all the time. When you sleep because you are tired, eat because you are hungry, and throw on another blanket because you are cold, you – in all likelihood – are doing the right thing. Even plants, as Zeno tells us,14 do the right thing. The Stoic term for “the right thing” is of course kathÞkon. This they define as, “that which, when done, admits of reasonable defense.” What comes next is obvious: but what does admit of reasonable defense? What counts as kathÞkon? This question is much harder to answer. In one sense it is impossible to answer : one action or type of action is appropriate or kathÞkon in a particular situation, another in another. “Situations” and “actions” are so numerous and admit of such heterogeneity that even if one knew what was appropriate in every case, one would grow old and die before coming close to producing the list. To try to answer the question in this way would be like answering the question, “what are the even numbers” by churning out a list. The comparison is helpful: of course the right answer to the question about even numbers is like this: “even numbers are the numbers that are multiples of two.” Suppose one were charged with the task of recognizing even numbers. If one were taught what numbers are, what the number 2 is, and what it means to be a multiple of two, one would then be properly equipped to carry out the 14 Diogenes Laertius 7.107

48

4. Rules?

task. That is to say, there is a fixed and definite procedure for determining, for any X, whether X is an even number. Now we are charged, the Stoics tell us, with doing what is kathÞkon, appropriate. We are also at least potentially capable of doing so. Without begging any questions, one may humbly assume that if we can do so, there must be some way we can do so.15 To deliberate is to decide16 what to do. For a Stoic, deciding what to do is deciding what is kathÞkon. It is nature, in the various senses of that most promiscuous of Stoic terms, that fully determines what is kathÞkon. This is clear from the further characterizations of kathÞkon that follow the “rational defense” definition: to akolouthon en tÞi zoÞi, and energÞma… tais kata phusin kataskeuais oikeion.17 Moreover, the Stoics tell us quite explicitly what sorts of things are accordant with nature. From the process of personal oikeisis we learn that our physical constitution is oikeion or “belongs to us” and that its maintenance is natural: it is natural to pursue being nourished instead of hungry, healthy instead of sick, and so on. Similarly, it is natural to seek wealth over poverty, strength over weakness, and well-functioning over defective powers of perception. Oikeisis, however, has a social and fundamentally other-centered role as well: as we develop nature impresses on us that our family members, friends, neighbors, fellow-citizens, and finally all fellow rational beings belong to us, and the maintenance of their constitutions is therefore natural for each of us, albeit in lessening degrees as they become more remote from us. It is therefore natural that we pursue, to a greater or lesser degree, the maintenance of their constitutions as well, and it is unnatural or contrary to nature to hinder them in their own pursuit of the same.18 But nature is also Cosmic Nature, whose other names are Fate, God, Zeus, the cosmos, and right reason. As we train our own share of Universal Reason to ascertain the truth, we discover that the objects of natural pursuit and avoidance are actually neither good nor bad, that what is (strictly speaking) good resides in reason alone, that the distinctive mark of the reasonable is consistency or harmony, and that that harmony is given fullest expression in the ordered governance of the providential cosmos. Since we are parts of that nature and endowed with the faculty to assent to impulse, it is in our power or eph’hÞmin to conform ourselves to that ordered governance. To recognize the absolute goodness of God’s or Nature’s order and our ability to conform to it is 15 Care not to beg any questions is crucial here. To say there must be a way to decide what is kathÞkon is not yet to say that there is only one correct way, or that it will be the same way in every case, let alone to say that it is a fixed method, statable in a formula, as it is in the even number example. 16 ‘decide’ is one of those words that is ambiguous between process (I’m still deciding…) and result (decide already!) Deliberation is of course deciding in the former sense. 17 Diogenes Laertius 7.107 – 109 18 See Striker 1983 for a full account of this crucial aspect of Stoic theory.

4.4 Deliberation in Stoicism

49

to recognize that that order constitutes a Law for us, bidding us to pursue such and so and to avoid thus and such, in spite of the indifference of those items, reflecting perfect consistency and harmony in doing so. All this is basic Stoic catechism. To decide what to do is to decide what is kathÞkon; nature determines what is kathÞkon; properly to decide what to do is to follow nature. The problem, of course, is that the sketch drawn above of what nature wants us to do is still quite indeterminate. For one thing, there are quite a few items we are told to pursue: how do we choose whether to pursue a good meal or more money now? Or our own soundness of body versus someone else’s? Now that is the issue in Stoic deliberation: of all the “things” – values or priorities, specified on the level of types not tokens – nature tells us to pursue and avoid, which do we pursue first, which second, and so on? Do some values override others? Is value somehow to be maximized? Perhaps we are merely to pursue the goal that strikes us as most urgent, provided that we are sensitive to other people’s projects and pursuits? Recent work in Stoic ethics has focused much attention on this question, and the dialectic on this issue has, I think, borne considerable fruit in the most recent discussion of Tad Brennan (Brennan 2005), in which he revises his previous view (Brennan 2003). I believe that Brennan’s later position is mostly right, and that the way in which his position has evolved reflects interesting points of contact with the debate over letters 94 and 95. As such it will be useful to consider in some detail both his former and his current positions, along with a paper of Rachel Barney19 which provides the point of departure for both his earlier and later theorizing. Brennan 2003 proposes two alternative characterizations of this aspect of Stoic theory. Pointing out that the various virtuous actions of the Sage all involve responding to adiaphora in some way, he asks what principles structure the Sage’s choice of indifferents. The first characterization, which he calls the salva virtute20 model, is taken from De Officiis 3.13: cum virtute congruere semper, cetera autem, quae secundum naturam essent, ita legere ut ea virtuti non repugnarent. That is to say, an agent will attempt to obtain preferred indifferents, but only when doing so does not conflict with the demands of virtue.21 Cicero, it should be noted, explicitly signals that this is his own formula for resolving cases of apparent

19 Barney 2003 20 The phrase is borrowed from Bonhçffer 1996. 21 Brennan calls this model “maximization with side-constraints.” This is not necessarily an improper characterization, but one should recall that Stoic attitudes about ta prota kata physin in many ways do not lend themselves to maximization. Just as in Epicureanism pleasure means “absence from pain” and hence is not the sort of thing that comes in units which one maximizes, even when its pursuit governs all correct action, in the same way many of the Stoic preferred indifferents are not naturally seen as candidates for maximization.

50

4. Rules?

conflict between utile and honestum; in part for this reason, Brennan takes it that this formula does not represent the authentic Stoic position. Brennan calls his alternative characterization “indifferents-only.” On this view, a Stoic agent determines what is kathÞkon from a consideration of the value and disvalue of indifferents only. A passage from the De Finibus appears to corroborate this view (3.60): sed cum ab his [i.e., indifferents] omnia proficiscantur officia, non sine causa dicitur ad ea referri omnes nostras cogitationes… Much, of course, remains to be said on this view: there are many different and incompatible ways in which indifferents could “exhaustively structure” deliberation. Maximization is a possibility, but not the only one, and the theory will look very different depending on how “other-regarding” a Stoic agent’s deliberations will be: does he seek to obtain value for himself alone, for himself and his near and dear, or for all agents impartially? At base, however, this model insists that thoughts about virtue (or about the virtues) do not enter into determining what action is kathÞkon in a given situation. Two considerations lead him to favor the “indifferents-only” model. First, it is generally agreed that the De Finibus passage has far more authority as representative of orthodox Stoicism than the third book of the De Officiis does. Perhaps more importantly, however, Brennan takes it that Stoicism does not endorse “rules of virtue” that could identify what is kathÞkon: “Stoicism simply does not espouse any rules of the ‘thou shalt not kill’ sort; instead, the question whether one should kill or not is always dependent on the question whether this act of killing is a fitting or appropriate one in the circumstances, and this in turn is not susceptible of determination by any more abstract but contentful rules.” He then mentions in a footnote the debate between Inwood and Mitsis which I have already discussed, asserting that Inwood’s side of the argument carried the day. His evaluation of the debate over letters 94 and 95, that is to say, makes up a considerable part of the grounds on which Brennan endorses some version of “indifferents-only.” The essay in question, again, does not propose any definite spelling out of how thoughts about indifferents result in action, but rather contains a frank avowal that this area is in need of future research. Likewise, Barney’s paper confronts the issue in a way similar to Brennan’s, and is left in aporia, with the rather strong suggestion that the Stoics in fact could not solve the problems their own theory raised. Barney starts by considering the various Stoic telos formulae, assuming that they are equivalent and consistent.22 The earliest formulae set out the telos only in the most general of ways, declaring it to be agreement with nature.23 Later versions, however, go some way toward spelling out what “agreement with 22 In other words, resisting a developmental account of Stoicism which implies the existence of a “middle Stoa” with views incompatible with Zeno’s and Chrysippus’. I too follow this assumption. 23 Diogenes Laertius 7.87.

4.4 Deliberation in Stoicism

51

nature” is; Diogenes of Babylon, for instance, cashes this notion out in terms of “reasoning well in the selection of things in accordance with nature,” his successor as scholarch Antipater goes for “doing everything in one’s power to obtain the things in accordance with nature,” and so on.24 Living in agreement with nature, then, has to do with proper selection. And selection, in turn, seems to be governed by the notion of value or axia. And the things that have value seem to be nothing else than the preferred indifferents. These identifications are both strongly grounded in our sources and extremely problematic when combined. For they seem to be able to explain why Stoic agents act in prudential, apparently “non-moral” ways – for instance, seeking food for themselves – but not self-sacrificing or heroic acts. It is scarcely contestable, however, that the Stoics in fact do endorse that sort of behavior, as Barney acknowledges. The hero-figure Regulus, who returns to captivity and certain death in order to preserve an oath to an enemy, is, the Stoics maintain, acting correctly in so doing. How, though, can this sort of action be understood as a selection of preferred indifferents? Surveying a number of possible solutions,25 Barney finds each unsatisfactory and ends up speculating that the Stoa, as a complex historical movement, may have held together a constellation of views which are not completely mutually reconcilable. The school, then, may have contained “constructive ambiguity” on this point: a number of different views could quite authentically count as “Stoic,” but each would require a downplaying or denial of some doctrinal elements in order to make sense of others.26 It is not possible here to consider in detail each of these possible solutions nor to weigh the strength of Barney’s arguments against each; for my purposes it will suffice to lay out the problem itself, in order to make clear what Brennan is responding to in formulating his current position. Brennan 2005 argues persuasively in favor of a particular path out of his and Barney’s earlier aporetic position. He begins by acknowledging the difficulty of explaining “moral” behavior in terms of selection of preferred indifferents alone. Furthermore, he quite rightly expresses disquiet with this position in light of the overall tone of later Stoic writers (Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius), who, in his words, “do not seem to know about the mercenary, 24 Stobaeus 2.75,11. 25 One possibility is to take the process of oikeisis to result in an agent’s selecting preferred indifferents for all people equally : on this model Regulus, perhaps, is selecting the preferred indifferents life and safety not for himself but for his community. Another suggestion is to deny that all actions are selections; some actions are direct fulfillments of virtue’s requirements (this is clearly akin to Brennan’s “salva virtute” model). A third is to deny the equation of “things in accordance with nature” with “things that have value.” Brennan’s current position, as will be seen, is like this. 26 Interpretively, as Barney herself would no doubt agree, such a position ought only to be adopted as a last resort; surely all attempts must be made to construct the Stoic theory as determinate, consistent, and defensible.

52

4. Rules?

calculating Indifferents-Only model, and… seem closer in spirit, at any rate, to the Salva Virtute agent who consciously puts virtue and its demands ahead of any market-basket of indifferents” (204). To support that feeling, Brennan adduces passages reflecting earlier Stoic views which weigh against indifferents-only deliberation. De Finibus 3.70, for instance, asserts that even Stoics who believe that the Sage’s concern to further his own interests outweighs his concern for others’ interests concede that “it is alien to justice to deprive someone else in order to acquire for oneself.” Also, at De Officiis 3.42, Cicero tells us that he is quoting Chrysippus, no less,27 in saying “runners in a race ought to compete and strive to win as hard as they can, but by no means should they trip their competitors or give them a shove. So too in life; it is not wrong for each person to seek after the things useful for life; but to do so by depriving someone else is not just.” Many other texts underline the point, and together amount to enormous evidence that the mere survey of indifferents is insufficient to generate Stoic action. Taking Chrysippus’ footrace simile to represent the heart of the Stoic position, Brennan (infelicitously, perhaps) dubs his new view the “No Shoving” model. The pursuit of indifferents still governs action, but does so in the framework of restrictions imposed by others’ pursuit of the same indifferents. In terms of the structure of the theory, this model denies the mutual entailment between “things in accordance with nature” and the preferred indifferents. In the De Officiis, in fact, Cicero explicitly makes this move in the key “salva virtute” passage considered above (3.13): cum virtute semper congruere, cetera autem, quae secundum naturam essent, ita legere… The cetera refer without question to the preferred indifferents; the word implies that they are not the only things which are secundum naturam. If Cicero is accurately reflecting Stoic theory here, the things “in accordance with nature” (and actions pursuant to them) form a genus of which the preferred indifferents (and the actions pursuant to them) are but one species. Moreover, the considerations arising from things in accordance with nature other than the preferred indifferents clearly trump the latter : many passages specify that acting unjustly, say, is more unnatural than being left without a preferred indifferent. This language implies the following sort of picture: going hungry is unnatural, and so a thing to be avoided; but depriving someone else of his food is more unnatural than going hungry, and so “following nature” implies abstaining from your neighbor’s food.28 27 While there is good reason to question the orthodoxy of De Officiis 3, Brennan 2005 204 – 205 argues, there is no particular reason to doubt that Cicero is accurately quoting Chrysippus here; by contrast, when Cicero is arguably going it alone, as in the formula at 3.21, he explicitly and candidly signals as much. 28 This sort of solution is one of the ones which Barney proposes (under the name “the degrees of nature model”) but finds wanting. Her first concern is that the text endorsing it seems to be Cicero’s own suggestion; I believe that Brennan has successfully adduced adequate textual evidence to answer this charge. Her more substantive criticism is that this model, in which an

4.4 Deliberation in Stoicism

53

The De Officiis goes on to specify exception-cases when “formal” considerations like property rights do not trump pursuit of preferred indifferents: it argues that to violate private property for one’s own “good”29 is unnatural, but to do so for the community’s “good” overall can be justifiable (3.29 – 30). Commenting on this scheme, Brennan remarks (208) “…this is a rule that will invite abuse. Nevertheless, it is at least a rule; it allows us to see how deliberation could have some sort of content. We can think about indifferents, but we can also think about the property-rights of other people, and we can think about the welfare of our country or humanity at large.” At this point the discussion returns to the debate about rules with which this chapter began. Brennan earlier saw what he took to be the non-existence of action-guiding Stoic rules to militate in favor of a decision-procedure governed by a calculus of indifferents; here he corrects himself, conceding that the De Officiis clearly endorses a rule-bound component in deliberation. Furthermore, higher-level rules explain the exceptions to generally valid ethical generalizations. It is generally speaking kathÞkon to honor one’s parents; but the “fundamentals of justice” derived by Cicero in De Officiis 1 (let no one be harmed, let the common good be preserved) can override that presumption in particular circumstances. Considering the casuistic example at 3.90 of a father who is a tyrant, where Cicero writes that justice requires putting one’s country before one’s father, Brennan observes “but far from giving proof that there will always be further exceptions to any ethical rule in Stoicism, this case turns out to be a fairly mechanical application of the ‘fundamentals of justice’ model, according to which the welfare of the community is always the overriding consideration.” To reiterate, I find Brennan’s current position to be highly attractive.30 The agent considers “nonmoral” indifferents alongside the requirements of justice and so on, considering the latter to trump the former, is actually the Peripatetic theory. The post-Aristotelian Peripatos, of course, grants some genuine value to what count only as preferred indifferents in Stoicism, but not enough that it could ever override a requirement of justice. But this view merely repeats the standard ancient criticism of the alleged “self-contradiction” of positing objects of pursuit the attainment of which is indifferent, a criticism which Barney correctly argues to be ill-founded. The Peripatetic theory has it that being warm is good for you but that stealing a blanket is, to a far greater degree, bad for you. The Stoic view is that being warm is natural but stealing a blanket is , to a far greater degree, unnatural. Nature, then, wants you to abstain from your neighbor’s blanket; the good, however, lies only in the correct performance of abstaining from the blanket from unshakeable knowledge, an inerrant disposition, and so on. The charge that the Stoa insists on a merely verbal disagreement with the Peripatos is as false on this account of Stoic deliberation as it is on any other. 29 Of course we are strictly speaking of preferred indifferents and not goods. It is in fact difficult always to maintain the distinction, as I think is reflected in Cicero as well. 30 My largest disagreement with him is over the proper characterization of this position. He thinks that his “no shoving” model is importantly different from “salva virtute” and convergent with “indifferents only.” I would claim that it is closer to salva virtute reasoning. On Brennan’s characterization, virtue is just the Sage’s inerrant disposition to act rightly, and it is true that thoughts about virtue so construed do not enter into the “first-round” identification of what is to

54

4. Rules?

indifferents-only model is clearly incapable of explaining how the Stoics endorse the actions which they endorse, as both he and Barney see. Reconsidering the De Officiis, he discovers how rule-bound considerations other than the calculus of indifferents function in Stoic deliberation. Far from being subject to exception, these rules are the stable fixed points which generate exceptions to ordinarily valid ethical generalizations. For my purposes, the key point is this: the De Officiis, for all the difficulties in using it as a source for Stoic theory, directly confronts the question of how high-level ethical principles determine right action in particular situations. It is, for that reason, the right kind of text to look to regarding this issue. As I will argue presently, our Senecan text is much less relevant to these concerns.

4.5 Letters 94 and 95 I now turn to consider how and whether Seneca’s purposes in the letters intersect with these aspects of Stoic theory. Recall first that the letters divide moral philosophy into praecepta and decreta, affirming that the former are important and useful but insufficient for producing virtue. As I have said elsewhere, Seneca the Stoic could not but defend both of these theses: the latter just because he was a Stoic, an adherent of an articulated body of doctrine; the former because he was Seneca, the author of so many non-technical, protreptic works of philosophy, the man whose Epistulae Morales begin with the words ita fac, a command which governs not only the sentence which follows it, but also the entirety of the letters. There is a notable asymmetry between the two key concepts. The careful period that opens letter 94: eam partem philosophiae… is about preceptgiving, a concept that is problematized as soon as it is introduced, paired off against the contrasting concept of decreta, and then defended in the remainder of the letter. The next letter in turn defends decreta, but does so in a question posed in terms of praecepta again: is precept-giving sufficient for virtue? The be done. But this, I think, is a red herring: the Stoics were always content to speak of virtue (and in particular, the virtues) also in terms of their “extensional” qualities. Justice is both the disposition to act justly and the systematic demands imposed by correct reasoning about communal life. In other words, justice just is the disposition of the Sage, but it is not the case that justice is just that. Identifying what to do involves thoughts about the latter aspect (as Cicero’s reference to the “fundamentals of justice” makes perfectly clear). The pressing issue between indifferents only and salva virtute reasoning is whether one only thinks about indifferents in formulating an action. Brennan’s current position comes down firmly on the salva virtute side of this question. It also resembles the salva virtute model in positing formal restraints on one’s own pursuits: on either model, that pursuing an indifferent for oneself unfairly impedes another’s pursuit rules out (at least ordinarily) pursuing it.

4.5 Letters 94 and 95

55

letters are about precept-giving and its role in philosophy ; the decreta are there to mark off that which is not preceptive; it is not the case that the praecepta are there to mark off what is not dogmatic. The point of these remarks is to affirm that since the letters are about praecepta, if the letters are about Stoic deliberation, that is, about how one finds out what actions are befitting, then praecepta must also be shown to be about finding out what is befitting. In the previous section I have attempted to show both what formal restraints on a Stoic theory of deliberation there must be, and to point towards what a characterization of the theory might look like. For my purposes here the former, formal part is more important. The method of determining what is befitting must focus on nature and how following nature means doing some things and not others; finding out what is befitting does not involve reference to the agent’s concern for his own virtue as such. The deliberative question is, what counts as a just (prudent, courageous) action. This question becomes relevant once one has already endorsed the instruction “act justly”; endorsing that instruction is a necessary condition for doing Stoic deliberation, but it is not itself a part of Stoic deliberation. The praecepta show scant evidence of answering to these concerns. Letter 94 includes multiple examples of precepts, most of which have very little to do with finding out what is befitting. In 94.27 – 8, Seneca tells us that fine-sounding precepts carry with them their own authority. His examples are ‘emas non quod opus est, sed quod necesse est’, ‘tempori parce’, ‘te nosce’, ‘iniuriarum remedium est oblivio’, ‘audentis fortuna iuvat, piger ipse sibi obstat.’ 94.43 gives a few more: ‘nil nimis’, ‘avarus animus nullo satiatur lucro’, ‘ab alio exspectes alteri quod feceris.’ Far from being the sort of instructions that could structure Stoic deliberation, these apothegms are, if pushed, of questionable compatibility with Stoicism. ‘Audentis fortuna iuvat’, for example, seems to suggest the very un-Stoic thought that one ought to be courageous because fortune will give us good things if we are. Of course no Stoic could seriously say that fortune helps anyone: fortune is indifferent, only virtue is beneficial. The proper inducement to be brave and enterprising etc. is most emphatically not the “goods” of fortune to be secured thereby ; in fact, to think so gets the point of Stoicism exactly wrong. That particular precept, admittedly, provides a rather easy target, and one might reasonably think that Seneca might have found better examples. But the point about that precept, which it shares with the others listed above, is that it is not meant to be pushed. These precepts are wispy things, vague when they are not misleading (think ‘te nosce’), misleading when they are not vague. It would be a mistake to make them bear any serious theoretical weight, for instance by giving them an official place in a set of rules, even if defeasible, out of which an agent is supposed to determine what is to be done. These instructions are clearly more similar to the unsystematic and intellectually hopeless remarks by which parents and teachers seek to guide the conduct of children: “honesty is the best policy”, “no one likes a tattle-tale”, and so on.

56

4. Rules?

There is good reason, surely, to say such things in particular circumstances; but they are not part of any theory, even when a theory endorses their use. Furthermore, even when precepts are clearer and more in line with actual Stoic doctrine, they are the wrong sort of instructions for the purpose of deliberation. In 94.60 Seneca, as he pushes toward the rhetorical peak of the letter, urges that we, in the face of the corrupted and corrupting values and beliefs of our culture, need a guide, in the form of precepts, to remind us that money, power, etc. aren’t goods. Plainly, this sort of precept is intended to encourage, to stiffen the spine of an agent so that she will continue to engage in moral deliberation, not to guide her in the correct way to do that; specifying what counts as the right use of money happens after you realize that it is not an object of pursuit in its own right. There are many other indications that praecepta should not be taken as structuring moral reasoning. Seneca defends the effectiveness of precept-giving by linking it to other non-systematic means of moral help (cf. 94.39: aut sic [i.e., if precepts are profitless] et consolationes nega proficere dissuasionesque et adhortationes et obiurgationes et laudationes.) He defends their use on the grounds that some people are dumber than others (94.30, 50). Precepts help the way the company of good friends does (94.30), the way familiarity with historical exempla does (94.42, et passim). Furthermore, even the passages which appear to give praecepta some role in determining what is befitting reveal themselves on closer inspection to have a different purpose. 94.23 may be taken as representative. In that passage, Seneca asserts that someone whose greed has been philosophically “cured” still needs precepts to tell her, say, how assiduously to pursue money-making: aliud est pecuniam non concupiscere, aliud uti pecunia scire. Several other passages make equivalent points: precepts can be useful even for someone without vicious commitments, if his soul is, as 94.32 puts it, inexercitatum ad inveniendam officiorum viam, quam admonitio31 demonstrat. These comments may seem to assert that praecepta are the part of Stoic ethics that sets out what the officia or kathÞkonta are. This appearance is false. Each time Seneca asserts that precepts can help determine what the befitting thing to do is, he has in mind a certain kind of case, namely that of the moral beginner. Such a beginner may be sincerely motivated, for instance, not to be greedy, and may not be tempted to act greedily in a given situation. But because she hasn’t received enough instruction in what nature requires, in a dubious situation she will be genuinely unsure of what counts as kathÞkon with respect to money. In that circumstance, she will gladly accept the advice of someone more experienced than she; and by accepting that advice (as well as by continuing her studies32) she will come to see how the advised course of action got things right, and so she will be 31 Seneca regularly uses admonitio as a synonym for precept-giving. 32 Seneca concedes in 94.50 that the person who has achieved wisdom will not need admonitio to discover what to do.

4.5 Letters 94 and 95

57

more capable of spotting relevantly similar situations in the future. By the metaphor of a teacher’s guiding a child’s hand to teach how to write individual letters, and by the sententia regi ergo debet dum incipit posse se regere (94.51), Seneca reveals that precepts are there to tell us what is befitting when we are not experienced enough to figure it out from our philosophical training: they are shortcuts, useful when such an agent, who wants to follow nature, lacks the time and the capacity to figure out nature’s demands on the spot.33 The confusion, I contend, arises thus. One role precepts can fulfill is to tell someone what is befitting for her now.34 In that sense, precepts “point out kathÞkonta.” Interpreters grappling with the issue of how to determine the befitting then assume, not unreasonably, that following precepts is how an agent discovers the befitting. But what makes an act befitting is that it 1) admits of reasonable defense, and (what amounts to the same thing) 2) that it is in accordance with nature. A moral guide can of course inform a novice what nature requires now; but it is not the fact that the precept commands the action, but that nature does, that makes the act befitting. The befittingness of precept-following is parasitic on the precepts’ tracking nature.35 The defense of decreta in letter 95 confirms these points. First off, this defense is a defense of technical philosophy in general: Seneca’s “opponents” here are people who think that handy advice is all we need, or the only thing that helps, to make people good.36 Seneca then goes on to insist that theory has 33 Unlike the De Officiis, which, on my view, is precisely where one ought to look for the official discussion of what counts as befitting, these letters show no interest in problems of casuistry and very little interest in exception cases. This is an oddity if one thinks that praecepta, whether or not accompanied by decreta, are meant to give the theory of how a Stoic agent determines what is befitting. Realizing that the praecepta are instead an educative and protreptic tool for beginners and backsliders makes the exclusion of these topics make perfect sense. I submit that this consideration is a major factor in favor of the latter reading. 34 This is far from being their only role, and Seneca does not portray it as their most important role. If precepts just were the rules by which we discover what nature demands, Seneca’s failure to distinguish the sort of precept that does that from the kind that encourages one to follow nature’s demands in the first place would be a grievous error, seriously misleading. If, however, Seneca is (as he explicitly says) defending precept-giving as a non-technical tool for aiding moral progress, simply mentioning these different types of precepts with their different functions and benefits is entirely sensible. 35 If one still thought remarks like et prudentia et iustitia officiis constat: officia praeceptis disponuntur (94.33) must be interpreted as meaning that precepts determine what is befitting rather than merely tracking it, it may be therapeutic to consider 94.39 again: aut sic [if precepts or monitiones are not beneficial] et consolationes nega proficere dissuasionesque et adhortationes et obiurgationes et laudationes. Omnia ista monitionum genera sunt; per ista ad perfectum animi statum pervenitur. Here it is, I trust, uncontroversial that things like obiurgationes only “lead to” moral perfection in the sense that they help us get there, not that obeying them is constitutive of achieving it. I would urge that “befitting acts are prescribed by precepts” is similarly to be understood as “precepts can prescribe befitting acts” rather than as “precepts are the means by which befitting acts are prescribed.” 36 I take it that the unnamed quidam against whom Seneca argues in 95 are simply to be understood as lay people skeptical about the value of philosophy.

58

4. Rules?

its benefits after all. This tells quite plainly against the view that praecepta are one part of Stoic ethical theory, and decreta another, which one must hold if one thought that precepts structure Stoic moral reasoning. This point is explicit enough; if it has not always been seen, I submit, the explanation is that the letters have not been read on their own terms and with sufficient attention to their stated agenda. Part of the defense of theorizing is given in 95.47 – 55, which is probably the most crucial passage of the letter. Seneca is concerned here with showing that decreta are more illuminating and action-guiding than a train of individual precepts. He does this by passing through the scala naturae and showing how philosophical truths produce demands on us as regards gods, human beings, and things respectively. For my purposes here the second of these is most relevant: we human beings are, philosophy tells us, parts of a whole and blood relatives. Because of this we ought to help each other. This high-level fact ties together and explains all the lower level precepts prohibiting malicious and commanding benevolent action (do not kill, share your food with the hungry, give directions to people who are lost). More than that, however, this sort of fact generates and justifies those precepts, as Seneca makes clear throughout the letters by means of various metaphors.37 95.58 is important and has so far, to my knowledge, been overlooked: bona et mala, honesta et turpia… rerum commodarum possessio, existimatio ac dignitas, valetudo, vires, forma, sagacitas sensuum – haec omnia aestimatorem desiderant. The context is, of course, the necessity of decreta. We won’t know how to live unless we know the proper value of things (Seneca is quite sure that the proper value of a thing is a fact about that thing). Now the first items on this list pick out virtue and vice, the only things that are strictly speaking good and bad in Stoicism. But the latter items unmistakably mark out the preferred and dispreferred indifferents, which are the dominant determinants of the befittingness of an action. I argued earlier that what Stoicism needs to structure deliberation is ranking principles for the various things that are in accordance with nature: here Seneca asserts that very point. More crucially, he makes clear that it is the role of decreta to provide that. And decreta are manifestly 1) the doctrinal content of philosophy overall, and 2) not praecepta. It follows that praecepta do not structure the determination of what is befitting, and for that reason they do not structure Stoic deliberation. One might make here the customary distinction between ideal deliberation and the sort available to non-sages. That is to say, perhaps we are to understand that the Stoic sapiens can determine what to do using decreta alone, but that we fools need praecepta to determine what to do. There is in fact textual support for this view. In 94.50, when Seneca concedes that the wise person may not need admonitio, he adds ad haec autem [sc. perfect happiness] tarde 37 In 95.59, for example, decreta are the branches of a tree, praecepta the leaves that hang on them: the leaves come from the branches.

4.6 Conclusions

59

pervenitur ; interim etiam inperfecto sed proficienti demonstranda est in rebus agendis via. A number of considerations, however, prevent the conclusion that praecepta are how we discover the befitting, decreta how sages do. Letter 95 insists that we ought to learn decreta as well as praecepta. This point is maintained on intensely practical grounds; Seneca is not making the doctrinaire contention that nature calls us all to sagehood and we are all perfectly miserable for not living up to this vocation. The imagined opponent in this letter is, again, not a Stoic but “the man in the street.” This much is clear, but what is often overlooked is that Seneca’s arguments meet him on his own ground: they show this person how it is that the “truth about ethics” (whatever it is) is helpful to learn, and how our actions are uncertain without it. The way this move works is classically Socratic: we agree that we should be courageous but we don’t know how to be courageous without a true account of what courage is; we agree that we ought to pursue health but we could only do so without infringing on other important values if we knew exactly how much health (in fact) is worth. One of the items we can get out of decreta is a true estimation of the value of things. This valuation, I take it, is what determines what is befitting; reasoning on this basis is possible for us. This rules out the suggestion that it is only ideal deliberation that proceeds from theoretical considerations. It is true that the ethical beginner needs precepts because her grasp of theory is inadequate, but that does not imply that the wise person alone deliberates from Stoic doctrine on what nature demands; rather, as we develop our grasp of philosophy we become progressively better at determining what nature demands and what actions are best suited to secure those demands. As that happens mere instructions fall away.

4.6 Conclusions If these remarks are correct, the following conclusions about the two letters obtain. The defense of praecepta is a defense not of a system of rules that structure correct moral action, but of an educational method whereby a moral guide, at least sometimes, tells her students what to do instead of explaining how one discovers what to do. The defense of decreta is likewise not a defense of “higher-level moral principles” but of teaching philosophical doctrines in general. Those doctrines include the theory by reference to which agents are meant to decide upon and justify their actions. Indeed, one of the grounds on which Seneca defends the teaching of decreta is that only thus does an agent know why his actions are right or wrong (95.5). To look to these letters for that theory, then, is to mistake Seneca’s purpose in letter 95: to defend the existence of the Stoic theory and the practice of teaching it to students, not to defend the theory itself. That purpose explains why Seneca talks so much about decreta, but scarcely says anything about what they are. It tells in favor of my inter-

60

4. Rules?

pretation and against previous ones that that absence is mystifying on their assumptions but perfectly reasonable on mine. This interpretation resolves other mysteries as well. Where do the precepts come from? How are we to feel sure that our precepts are the right ones? How could Seneca have failed to discuss the problem of conflicting rules in any detail? These questions are frankly embarrassing ones on the assumption that the letters are about high- and low-level rules by which an agent determines what to do. For one would have to conclude that Seneca just missed these points, or else was unconcerned with them. Neither conclusion would be very charitable. But the letters are in fact not about this at all: the point of view of the letters is the moral teacher’s not the moral agent’s. The moral teacher knows what is to be done, and is clever at giving his disciples the right advice at the right time. He is also capable of conveying his knowledge about how one determines what is to be done. Letter 94 argues that it is useful for him to give advice; letter 95, that it is useful for him to supply the reasons behind the advice. This methodological and pedagogical point is the critical issue for Seneca, regardless of whether it was so for Aristo. Without wishing to commit myself to a specific position on the surely insoluble source-critical problems which letter 94 poses,38 I do think that we can descry in 94 a gap between the philosophical agenda underlying the reported arguments of Aristo and that with which Seneca’s responses are concerned. Aristo’s objections in 94.5 – 17 fall into two basic categories: first, those that rely on a strongly intellectualist psychology to undercut the efficacy of guiding another’s behavior by preceptgiving (94.5 – 13 and 94.17), and second, an attack on the ability of praecepta to answer to the complexity of individual roles and situations (94.14 – 16). Those latter arguments in fact are an attack on rule-following in deliberation, as the scholarship on these letters has noted. But it is important to see that Seneca’s response to Aristo all but ignores that issue in favor of the psychological one. The only response given to the attack on rules, the peremptory (and obviously inadequate) falsum est of 94.35, is only about a quarter the length of the objection. By contrast, the response to the psychological objections runs on at much greater length than those objections do (in fact, from 94.18 to the conclusion of the letter at 94.74, excepting 94.35). The contrast is bizarre. My reading of Seneca’s use of praecepta gives us a way to make sense of this: he is clearly using the Aristo debate for purposes of his own. Seeing precepts as non-technical instruction answers to the uses Seneca puts them to, while seeing them as moral rules only does not. Seneca has no interest in proving that his praecepta are exception-proof, and capable of generating the correct result in all cases, as a defender of a rule-based morality would have to prove. Instead, he wants to argue that his precepts are useful, at least in some circ38 Setaioli 1988 277 – 287.

4.6 Conclusions

61

umstances, and he wants to show how philosophical education can be and must be conducted not by doctrine alone. The defense that can be made of Seneca’s peremptory dismissal “that’s false” is this: in light of his actual agenda, this objection, unlike the psychological one, is simply not to the point. This view also makes sense of why praecepta end up being so much more than the “rules for fathers/husbands/masters” under which description they are introduced. Seneca will have been aware of an attack Aristo made on the production of such rules as a philosophical activity. The psychology this attack rests on is relevant, and as a notoriously extreme thinker, Aristo will have seemed a tempting foil. Seneca, then, tailored the material to his own ends, but in such a way that not all of the seams are hidden. We may say that his doing so is unfair to Aristo, and bad history. But Seneca has a plausible defense: he will have felt that there was something right and useful about the original, narrowly conceived precepts. The exploration of what is right about them shows that it is more the preceptor than the precept itself, more the activity of precept-giving than its product, which conduces to moral improvement. But this interesting conclusion, Seneca will argue, best emerges from the defense of the precepts themselves.39 This reading also makes decent sense of Aristo. His intellectualism indeed seems rigid and implausible, if he avowedly opposed all of the techniques of guidance Seneca defends. Yet we can also see in Aristo’s original critique a reasonable criticism of a philosophical project, namely the churning out of “Thou Shalts”, to which very many philosophers would not be sympathetic. In fact Seneca, though he is disinclined to pursue the issue at length in letter 94, was not overly sympathetic with that project either. Letter 95 attacks the claim that precepts are sufficient for goodness; a central point there is that the various precepts we endorse need to be grounded in an overall commitment to principles which explain and justify them. And throughout the collection, Seneca’s didaxis to Lucilius, though it includes many instructions to him on how to make progress in philosophy, studiously avoids laying down rule-like edicts for particular facets of everyday life. A few examples will suffice: in 47 Seneca advises the humane treatment of slaves but is unwilling to discuss particular prescriptions and prohibitions:40 instead, he advises Lucilius to reflect that the shoe could be on the other foot: Lucilius could end up a slave himself. In discussing deliberation about suicide in letter 70, the stress is entirely on situational variability, with Seneca summarizing, non possis itaque 39 This point, I submit, is essential to understanding the project of these letters: the nature of praecepta and decreta, taken by themselves, is ultimately of little importance for Seneca, who focuses rather on their uses or functions. The distinction itself (see 6.3 “Destabilization and Convergence”) is problematized and arguably superseded in letter 95. I take this consideration to provide strong support to what one might call a functionalist reading of the praecepta/decreta distinction: they are what Seneca does with them. 40 47.11: nolo in ingentem me locum inmittere et de usu servorum disputare… haec tamen praecepti mei summa est: sic cum inferiore vivas quemadmodum tecum superiorem velis vivere.

62

4. Rules?

de re in universum pronuntiare, cum mortem vis externa denuntiat, occupanda sit an expectanda; multa enim sunt quae in utramque partem trahere possunt.41 Even more important is the following letter. The conceit there is that Lucilius has asked Seneca for specific advice; citing the physical distance between them and the complexity and variability of the matter, Seneca declines to give it. This recusatio is followed by topic-neutral advice on deciding what to do: when in doubt, consider the summum bonum, and, what is the same thing, the point of your life as a whole: do what is most consistent with your understanding of the sort of person you should be.42 Letter 95 has a nearly identical point at its rhetorical and philosophical climax (95.51 – 52), where Seneca states his formula humani officii: instead of listing all of the beneficent acts we should do for each other, we should come to know that cosmic nature has made us all kin to each other and parts of a living whole. In all of these contexts, Seneca insists on seeing the larger truths that generate the correct decisions in individual cases. It is now possible to see Inwood’s, Mitsis’s and Annas’s interpretations of the letters, and the debate about Stoic rules overall, from a broader perspective. Annas’s view, with its stress on Aristo’s critique of rule-following, leaves a misleading picture of these letters; it fails to see that that aspect of Aristo’s challenge is marginal to Seneca’s concerns. Accordingly, on her reading these letters are deeply unsatisfying, failing to consider those problems which on her view are the most crucial ones sufficiently (as in 94.35, where Seneca “answers” the problems about exceptions and the required number of rules), or at all (as in Seneca’s failure to spell out how appeal to a principle clears up difficulties with rules).43 In terms of the overall issues for Stoic deliberation, Annas’s view of the issues at stake is, as I hope to have shown in sections 4.3 and 4.4, too narrow. For her the issue turns on whether Stoic deliberation depends on rules or on “non-rule-governed insight.” While on my view she is right to resist any recourse to “insight,” the possible alternatives are far more numerous than she appears to see. Attempting to make these letters fit this topic (and vice versa) distorts both. Mitsis’s interpretation is actually much closer to mine than would appear at first sight. For he quite rightly stresses that the praecepta ought not be asked to pass tests of exceptionlessness and so on: their true function is to remind us of 41 70.11. 42 71.1 – 4. 43 Annas 1993 104: “It is unfortunate that we lack an example that might make it clear precisely how appeal to a principle could help a problem with a rule; but perhaps it is not accident that we have no such example, since it is clear from the many roles that principles fill that the notion is a complex one, and perhaps is not adequately to be shown in any one example.” It is both more economical and more charitable to attribute this absence to the fact (as I would argue) that Seneca did not intend to answer any such question in these letters.

4.6 Conclusions

63

things we already know, to strengthen us in the face of temptation, and the like. But in accepting the conventional account of decreta as “high-level principles” he is left with an account that, whether my rival interpretation is viable or not, fails in its own terms. For he has failed to show how decreta can combine with the more determinate principles to guide human action in (all) particular circumstances.44 Mitsis, it seems, has defended the usefulness both of praecepta (by insisting that they not be asked to pass tests of exceptionlessness and so on), and of decreta (by insisting that they not be asked to pass tests of fixity of prescription in particular circumstances); yet he has not shown how the two together can issue in actual human action, especially in difficult cases: nothing connects the ceiling with the floor. I would rather argue that he has shown how they cannot come together in that way : the high-level principles are insufficiently determinate and the low-level rules are insufficiently systematic. While the high-level principles arguably could help in systematizing the rules, the rules in their lack of rigor could hardly make the principles determinate. The question, how is an agent to decide what to do, remains unanswered. Inwood, by contrast, is quite right to insist that a theory of Stoic rules must be able to explain why a certain action is right in every case. He also sees clearly, as Mitsis does, that the praecepta contemplated in the letters cannot do that. His proposal, however, that they be treated as defeasible rules of thumb, is problematic. What is clear and correct in his account is that praecepta are not universally valid rules of conduct. On Inwood’s account, however, a defeasible rule maintains normative force. That is to say, it is not the case that the rule “do not steal” is revealed to be empty when an exceptional case justifies stealing. The justification of stealing in such a case is a justification of not following the rule, and to that extent the rule continues to be a part of the agent’s deliberative framework. By contrast, as I have argued, Seneca presents precepts as a ladder to be removed once they have been climbed (nor are they the only way to climb); we approximate correct moral reasoning to the extent that we reason from nature. Nature, in turn, determines correct action in such a way that broad regularities exist and can be described: pursue your health, help the needy, and so on. Those regularities, at both high and low levels of generality, can be cast in imperatival or “gerundival” form, and such formulations are in fact praecepta.45 But nature remains the source of normativity : no indepen44 He makes an important point in showing how higher-level rules can be more action-guiding than specific ones (i. e. “take care of your health” versus “run now,” “eat this,” “put that bottle down.”) What he has not done is to show how a proper synthesis of both high- and low-level principles can produce determinate action in every case. If praecepta and decreta together formed the theory of Stoic deliberation, it would be correct to demand of the theory that they pass this test. For each action performed by the wise person is a definite action: either his grasp of precepts and doctrines determined that action, or something else did. 45 There is considerable slipperiness in Seneca’s use of the two key terms. At its broadest, a precept is any command or virtual command, a doctrine any philosophical proposition (cf. 95.60).

64

4. Rules?

dent authority derives from the fact that nature’s prescription is stable enough to make a general instruction like “don’t steal” useful. So praecepta are not entrenched at all. They are mere epiphenomena of nature’s stability ; Inwood, in trying to downplay the role of rules in Stoicism, is actually treating praecepta as more rule-like than they are.46 Inwood might reply that precepts are in fact entrenched in the deliberation of fools, if not in the wise. And in a way that is right: moral neophytes who don’t know why stealing is usually wrong only have the instruction to work with and to weigh against other values. But this procedure is more a precursor to deliberation than it is deliberation itself. This much comes clear from letter 95, where Seneca continuously insists that it is we (not the ideal wise person) who need and benefit from the doctrinal side of philosophy, whose function it is to explain to us the correct ways to determine what nature commands. The case of the beginner who has only instinct, upbringing, and a disposition to trust her advisors is an extremely marginal one from the point of view of one studying the question, how does an agent deliberate. Whether or not his account of praecepta is mistaken, Inwood is right to see that the Stoics needs a procedure for dealing with difficult cases; his proposal for how to do that is a useful contribution to that difficult question.47 While I cannot pursue the issue in detail here, however, I want to close by suggesting that his misreading of praecepta and decreta has made him at best half-right in this case. For one thing, his notion of partially-entrenched praecepta relies on an interpretation of kathÞkonta which we have very strong reasons, independent of our Senecan text, to reject.48 Secondly, Inwood proposes that difficult cases be reasoned over in the light of Cicero’s formula in De Officiis 3 and Seneca’s formula humani officii in 95.51 – 2. Now the former of these is explicitly meant to provide a decision-procedure for conflict cases.49 The Se46 On Inwood’s view, “take care of your health” is a strongly entrenched yet ultimately defeasible rule. On my view, by contrast, a Stoic agent relies not on that but on a normative fact of the sort “health is pro tanto natural.” In cases where an agent should not take care of his health, my view takes it that it is more natural to pursue some other value that, given the circumstance, conflicts with pursuing health. This, however, is not an exception to a rule; the rule-like part of the decision procedure is invariable: ‘do what is most natural,’ or suchlike. The specification of how much natural value health, wealth, etc. have is likewise invariable. It is situations that vary. 47 Mitsis’s failure to show how his own view could account for such cases amounts to a major flaw in his argument. 48 Namely, Brennan 1996 very persuasively argues that the interpretation of the eulogos apologia or “rational defense” test for kathÞkonta on which Inwood relies is mistaken. For Brennan, “rational defense,” instead of pointing to a loose and fallible standard of reasonableness, means something like “in accordance with right reason.” Of the many considerations he adduces in support of this view, it will suffice to mention two: eulogos, in other Stoic contexts, clearly means “reasonable” in a strong, non-fallible sense; and the Sage is said to perform all kathÞkonta, which would be incompatible with contradictory actions in a difficult circumstance both being kathÞkon. 49 However, it is often thought that in De Officiis 3 Cicero is free-lancing, and that his proposal has little or no evidentiary value for orthodox Stoic views.

4.6 Conclusions

65

necan text, however, brings out not conflict in our values but the ways they converge: it is our universal kinship and the fact that we are parts of a larger whole that generate the various precepts commanding altruistic acts. Realizing this explains why right action is right and renders unnecessary spelling out every action that falls under the heading of altruism; it simply does not deal with, for instance, how to decide whom to help when you cannot help everyone. It is true that the De Officiis only get us so far in that regard as well; but, as I have tried to show here, that text, and the scattered fragments bearing on kathÞkonta, are the places to look for that part of Stoic theory. Seneca’s 94th and 95th letters have a quite different function.

5. Contextualizations 5.1 The Context of the Epistulae Morales Having argued that letters 94 and 95 are not about “the role of rules in Stoic ethics” or any such formulation, it is now incumbent upon me to say what they are about. The next two chapters will argue that the letters are a treatise on moral education and a defense of Seneca’s specific praxis as a moral guide and as a teacher of philosophy.1 As I hope to show, much – perhaps most – of the purpose of these letters must be inferred from them rather than simply read in them. These chapters, then, will investigate the concerns underlying these letters as much as the ones they actually discuss; they will evaluate the substance of the debate in terms of Seneca’s decision to conduct this debate, with these opponents, for the benefit of this individual, their putative recipient, Lucilius. Put in another way, these chapters propose that letters 94 and 95 are read aright only when read in the context of Seneca’s letters as a whole. Moreover, so great is the thematic importance of these twinned letters that the reverse can also be said: the collection as a whole can scarcely be seen in its fullest light without careful consideration of these programmatic letters. To make good these claims, I will first review certain features of the letters, features which, while well-known, are often underemphasized by interpreters bent on cutting right to Seneca’s “doctrine.” The letters represent Seneca’s half of a temporally sequenced correspondence between himself and Lucilius. The two correspondents are friends, but their friendship is of a very particular sort: centered on philosophy, directed towards moral improvement, their relationship is for their mutual edification, and especially that of Lucilius, the student to Seneca’s teacher, the less-progressed fellow-progressor towards goodness. The work as a whole depicts, dramatizes the developing relationship between its two principal characters, relaying details of their lives (travels, illness, meetings with friends, etc.) and deriving moral lessons from them. At the beginning of the collection Seneca’s instructions to Lucilius are 1 I would not want to leave the impression that the scholars criticized in Chapter One would deny the pedagogical aspect of these letters: the issue is too clear and explicit. Rather, I think, they would say that that issue shared space with the one regarding rules. Such older scholarship as exists on letters 94 and 95, knowing nothing of the debate over Stoic rules, accordingly focuses entirely on pedagogy : see esp. Bellincioni 1978b 87 – 116. Hadot 1969 7 – 9 et passim connects these letters with the topic of the guidance of the soul in ancient philosophy as a whole. Cancik 1967 42 – 45 sees them as part of a series of letters (89 – 95) intertwining theoretical and parainetic issues. See also Pire 1958 for Stoic pedagogy in general.

68

5. Contextualizations

overwhelmingly non-technical and philosophically ecumenical. The early letters each end with a pithy quotation for Lucilius to mull over, and most of these are from Epicurus. These letters focus on the care of one’s soul and practical issues such as Lucilius’ plan to retire from his public duties in Sicily. Over the course of the correspondence these themes noticeably recede as Lucilius becomes increasingly sophisticated in his philosophical understanding; the letters become longer, less chatty, and more technical. These details have often been seen as merely ornamental, as Seneca’s means of providing a literary and epistolary veneer to what is in fact a collection of philosophical essays.2 This view, of course, is methodologically handy : it allows us, if true, to get straight to the matter and to read the text straightforwardly. However, there are serious reasons to think this view an incorrect one and one which seriously handicaps our ability to see what Seneca is doing. For one thing, Seneca quite clearly signals that the sequencing of the letters matters.3 The education of Lucilius is dynamic not static. The first thirty-one letters end with sententiae for Lucilius to ponder. At 2.4 Seneca advises Lucilius to pick out (excerpe) quotations which he can use as moral aids against poverty, fear of death, and other psychic dangers, and remarks that he, Seneca, follows this practice as well; that letter’s sententia is then presented as the nugget of wisdom Seneca picked up “today.” At letter 32, however, Seneca drops this practice without comment. The next letter, then, begins with Seneca declining Lucilius’ request (inferrable to have been made in his notional letter of reply to 32) that he reinstate the practice. His justification is striking: Lucilius is now to take instruction from the entirety of his readings and to proceed to a level of intellectual maturity wherein mulling over fine-sounding quotations (disparagingly referred to here as flosculi, as opposed to the contextus virilis of proper Stoic philosophical texts) has been left behind. From this point on there is a clear shift in tone; references to Epicurus, for instance, become both less frequent and more negative, and the technical content of the letters increases. Seneca undoubtedly signals to us his conscientious decision that Lucilius ought to be prodded to advance in his philosophical maturation. Another danger of reading the letters without regard to their context is that it ignores the multiple ways in which the work is self-referential and selfapplicable. Letter 2 instructs Lucilius in what and how to read. Lucilius, obviously, is meant to read letter 2, along with the rest of Seneca’s letters to him. Letters 3 and 7 instruct on whom to befriend and how to act with one’s friends. The relationship between Lucilius and Seneca is presented as a successful instance of friendship. Similarly, Seneca repeatedly insists on the effectiveness 2 Campbell 1969 21. 3 That the sequencing of individual letters is important has been shown beyond doubt by Maurach 1970, passim. For different interpretations of how they order of the letters matters, see Wilson 1987 and 2001, Cancik 1967, and Hachmann 1995.

5.1 The Context of the Epistulae Morales

69

of exempla: lessons take much better when they are shown rather than merely said. The letters represent a teacher, Seneca, rendering instruction to his student, Lucilius. The work itself is an exemplum of its own doctrine. Our experience of studying this exemplified course of moral training is, by Seneca’s own stated doctrine, supposed to convince us of its value more fully than any argument in its favor could. Simply reading what Seneca writes in the letters as his “doctrine,” to be sure, will for the most part not actually mislead: after all, Seneca takes the philosophical claims he makes to be true. But it obscures his purposes to a surprising extent. As noted above, a major theme of the letters is the dialectic between the matter and the modalities of philosophy, of teaching, of right action. Seneca is an adherent of a centuries-old body of doctrine, a selfconscious system. This system bills itself both as revealing the deepest truths about the universe and as providing for our escape from wretchedness and vice to achieve perfect happiness. While proclaiming, and occasionally demonstrating, his willingness to innovate or dissent from his school on doctrinal matters, Seneca sees himself as standing decisively inside this system. In letter 64, while discussing the great names of philosophy’s past, Seneca expresses the wish that he might provide some contribution to wisdom: sed agamus bonum patrem familiae, faciamus ampliora quae accepimus. But in what field might his contribution lie? A suggested answer follows immediately : sed etiam si omnia a veteribus inventa sunt, hoc semper novum erit, usus et inventorum ab aliis scientia ac dispositio. Puta relicta nobis medicamenta quibus sanarentur oculi: non opus est mihi alia quaerere, sed haec tamen morbis et temporibus aptanda sunt. The medical analogy, ever useful for putative healers of souls, fits Seneca’s purposes exactly : philosophy is the salve; how to apply it depends on circumstances. Since these are always fresh and new, so is the task which Seneca sets for himself, of exploring how one goes about improving another’s soul. Within the dramatic frame of the letters, this means that when Seneca conveys any particular point of his – Stoic – belief to Lucilius, he does so because he judges that this is what Lucilius needs to hear now. Outside of the dramatic frame, Seneca’s readers are afforded a privileged view, like hospital interns following a veteran doctor’s rounds, of an advanced Stoic therapist treating his patient.4 It is within this dramatic context that letters 94 and 95, along with their programmatic importance for the letters as a whole, are most comprehensively understood. To bring this context into view, it will be helpful to look more closely into the represented Seneca-Lucilius relationship and the development of Lucilius’ education. The dynamics of this relationship are established quickly, in the first book of the letters (1 – 12). The story begins with Lucilius asking Seneca for moral 4 Inwood 2005 322 – 352 and 2007b have many interesting thoughts about the significance of the letters’ form. See also Scala 2001, Wilson 2001, and Russell 1974.

70

5. Contextualizations

guidance.5 Seneca replies with an exhortation to Lucilius to consider the course of his life as a whole and to use his fleeting remaining time wisely. From the second letter on, it is clear what a wise use of one’s time consists in, by Seneca’s lights: studying philosophy, reading edifying works of literature, perfecting one’s soul and overcoming one’s vices.6 Persevera ut coepisti et quantum potes propera, quo diutius frui emendato animo et composito possis (4.1). The improvement of Lucilius’ soul is not only the purpose of his correspondence with Seneca, but the only project that really matters, that is really worth doing: quod pertinaciter studes et omnibus omissis hoc unum agis, ut te meliorem cotidie facias, et probo et gaudeo (5.1). Seneca presents himself to Lucilius as a fellow-progressor towards wisdom, and his relationship with his friend as a shared, cooperative enterprise. Letter 6 begins with Seneca stressing how their friendship is transforming his own soul. Yet perfection is clearly far from reach: intellego, Lucili, non emendari me tantum sed transfigurari; nec hoc promitto iam aut spero, nihil in me superesse quod mutandum sit. Seneca is enthusiastic about sharing his progress with his friend: ego vero omnia in te cupio transfundere, et in hoc aliquid gaudeo discere, ut doceam… nullius boni sine socio possessio iucunda est. In this letter, a discussion of progress leads immediately to a discussion of friendship. Friendship, already focalized as the theme of the third letter,7 is further explored in letter 7, which relays Seneca’s instruction to Lucilius on whom to befriend, and why : cum his versare qui te meliorem facturi sunt, illos admitte quos tu potes facere meliores. Mutuo ista fiunt, et homines dum docent discunt. The introductory letters also stress that moral improvement is hard work, and only achieved by total immersion. The reading Seneca assigns in the second letter is unending (cotidie), deliberate, and stresses quality over quantity.8 The first word of letter 4 is persevera; Letter 5 begins with quod pertinaciter studes. Letter 6 warns that merely reading philosophy will not suffice to help Lucilius: plus tamen viva vox et convictus quam oratio proderit; in rem praesentem venias oportet (6.5). The followers of Zeno, Socrates, and Epicurus profited as much from their personal association with their teachers as from their words. The obvious point, that Lucilius should read Seneca daily,

5 This much is clearly inferrable from letter 1, which opens with the phrase ita fac, and then a bit later continues fac ergo, mi Lucili, quod facere te scribis, omnes horas complectere. The letter flatly asserts that Lucilius has written, and for a letter of reply to begin with the phrase “do this,” it is all but necessary that the initial letter asked “what should I do.” 6 The connection between reading and moral improvement is made immediately in letter 2 and never lets up. The first determinate specification of what it means to “use one’s time wisely” is to read “approved authors” (probatos ergo semper lege, 2.4), to read them slowly and deliberately, and to read them for moral enlightenment (aliquid cotidie adversus paupertatem, aliquid adversus mortem auxili compara, nec minus adversus ceteras pestes.) 7 Specifically, the unbridled intimacy of Senecan friendship (cum amico omnes curas, omnes cogitationes tuas misce, 3.3) 8 And rereading (2.4): et si quando ad alios deverti libuerit, ad priores redi.

5.2 Tracing the Progress of Lucilius

71

assiduously, and that he should absorb as much of his life and personality as possible, is tactfully left to be inferred.9 Taken together, these introductory letters establish a series of close conceptual associations that govern the collection. The reform of the soul through philosophy is the purpose of our lives. The value of everything we do, including the making of friendships, derives from its contribution to the health of our souls. This project requires constant study, which is to say, constant reading. It also requires friendship, which is not genuine if not completely intimate, and the study of a teacher’s life along with her words. Although a philosophical friendship has a teacher and a student, a more and a less advanced participant, both parties benefit: teaching itself is learning. The letters instantiate all these points. Within the correspondence, Seneca and Lucilius center their lives around the study of philosophy. Seneca presents himself as reading and writing constantly, and the letters themselves are meant for Lucilius’ careful study. The intimacy of their friendship is clear throughout, and there is ample evidence for the benefit both parties derive from the friendship. In all these respects, Seneca can be seen to be following his own advice on the effectiveness of teaching by exempla. Seen globally, moreover, the entire work is itself a master exemplum of philosophical friendship and moral reform.10 Within the exemplum, the entirety of the letters is an attempt by one of the characters to teach, to morally benefit the other.

5.2 Tracing the Progress of Lucilius Lucilius is a late middle-aged, high-ranking Roman official in Sicily (letter 19). In his spare time he is a poet, and he is obviously interested in philosophy and other liberal studies. At the beginning of the correspondence he is trying, with difficulty, to extricate himself from his political and financial negotia in order to devote himself entirely to philosophy. Seneca repeatedly (7, 8, 14, 17, 19, 20, 22) encourages Lucilius’ retirement and offers advice on how to go about it. In letter 68 we infer that Lucilius has made a final decision to retire; it seems afterwards that his retirement is complete.11 We can discern little else about his 9 Although, of course, Lucilius and Seneca’s physical separation renders impossible the viva vox and convictus which Seneca stresses here. While I cannot consider the matter in depth here, I want to suggest that Seneca’s awareness of the distance between author and reader, and his interest in shortening this distance, is a central part of his motivation to write philosophical letters: letters are exactly the means by which one seeks to overcome physical absence. Epistolarity is a metaphor for the temporal/spatial conveyance of the author to his reader. 10 Nussbaum 1994, 340 ff. 11 The evidence for this is partly ex silentio: Seneca, after persistent cajoling, no longer mentions Lucilius’ attempts to free himself from official duties. But Lucilius also becomes more interested in technical matters of philosophy in the latter half of the collection, repeatedly asking for Seneca

72

5. Contextualizations

personal life, but we do discover that he is prosecuted (presumably unsuccessfully) by an enemy (24), that he completes a new book of poetry, which Seneca admires (46), that he suffers the loss of a close friend (63), falls seriously ill (78, 96), suffers financial reversals (96 again) and loses his slaves to flight (107). Much more information is provided, naturally enough, about the course of Lucilius’ progress. In fact, the issuing of “report cards” is a central feature of Seneca’s didaxis. Thus in letter 2 Seneca tells his student bonam spem de te concipio. By 16 his assessment is intellego multum te profecisse… iam de te spem habeo, nondum fiduciam. In 31 he writes that Lucilius is beginning to live up to his promise. In 34 Lucilius is told in quite florid terms that he is even surpassing his former potential, and that the two are approaching a position of equality. The next letter, significantly, qualifies and tones down this assessment: Lucilius is not Seneca’s friend, since (true) friendship cannot be harmful, and Lucilius has not yet reached the stage where his influence on Seneca could not be a bad one. In 37 it appears that Lucilius has made – with Seneca’s retrospective endorsement – some sort of personal commitment, under oath, to moral goodness. In 48 the cautionary remark about Lucilius’ not yet being Seneca’s friend is arguably annulled: mihi vero idem expedit quod tibi: aut non sum amicus, nisi quidquid agitur ad te pertinens meum est.12 Consortium rerum omnium inter nos facit amicitia… Finally, in the last explicit report card of the series, Seneca writes in letter 82: desii de te esse sollicitus… in tuto pars tui melior est. Potest fortuna tibi iniuriam facere; quod ad rem magis pertinet, non timeo ne tu facias tibi.13 The report cards on Lucilius’ progress contain mostly good news: the course of instruction proceeds largely to Seneca’s satisfaction. But throughout the letters there are episodes in which Seneca chastises14 Lucilius for this or that reason; his moral weaknesses – as Seneca sees them – can thus be inferred. For instance, in 17 Seneca writes that Lucilius’ hesitancy about retirement betokens his failure to understand the true nature of philosophy’s benefits. In 28 Lucilius’ failure to be emotionally aided by his travels is attributed to the disordered soul he packed with his luggage. In the later letters, Lucilius’ failings center around his inability to put aside concern for material goods, to to expound on specific and vexing issues; it is natural to infer not only that he knows more philosophy at that point, but also that he has more time to devote to it. 12 But note: the condition is present general, not counterfactual. 13 This formulation suggests that Lucilius has firmly reached the lowest rung of moral progress discussed in 75. Someone on this level iam non concupiscit, sed adhuc timet, et in ipso metu ad quaedam satis firmus est, quibusdam cedit: mortem contemnit, dolorem reformidat. Seneca avers that it is quite an achievement to reach this status, even though it is the lowest of the three levels he posits, and that reaching a higher level is more something for the two of them to wish than to promise. 14 The chastisement is almost always less prominently placed than the praise; this is how Seneca teaches, and how Seneca the author teaches us to teach.

5.2 Tracing the Progress of Lucilius

73

become fully convinced that death, sickness, and so on are neither good nor bad. Thus in 60 Lucilius’ apparent confession that he hoped for financial gain is answered with Seneca’s harshest words to him, the brash opening line queror litigo irascor. In 93 and 96 Seneca, with varying degrees of forcefulness,15 remonstrates with Lucilius for lamenting the death of a beloved philosopher and for bearing misfortune with difficulty. Finally, when Lucilius’ slaves flee from him in letter 107, Seneca’s response is largely one of (feigned?) surprise at his friend’s distress: tam pusilla res te tangit? Lucilius’ growing intellectual achievements parallel his moral progress.16 As seen already, the first 29 all end with a “thought for the day” for Lucilius to ponder. From 30 this practice is dropped, and in 33 Seneca declines Lucilius’ request to revive it. There are many other indications of Lucilius’ philosophical maturation. At 6.5 Seneca promises to send Lucilius unspecified philosophical books. For Lucilius’ benefit, he will underline the important parts: imponam notas, ut ad ipsa protinus quae probo et miror accedas. From 33 on it is clear that this sort of shortcut is no longer appropriate for Lucilius; in 39, for instance, Seneca only with reluctance agrees to send him some unspecified commentarii; a full-fledged treatment is needed actually to teach, while summaries of doctrines only remind. Likewise, when Lucilius asks for copies of Seneca’s own writings, Seneca agrees to send his entire opus (45.2): quoscumque [sc. libros] habeo mittere paratus sum et totum horreum excutere.17 He warns, however, against Lucilius’ reading them dogmatically, treating Seneca’s writings as divine writ. Lucilius’ philosophical questions to Seneca become more frequent and more sophisticated as the series progresses. To the extent we can infer Lucilius’ questions and remarks in the first fifty or so letters, he is more interested in practical advice than issues of doctrine.18 At 72 Seneca has to ask for time to consider a particular philosophical issue (we aren’t told what), saying that he had once studied the matter carefully but hadn’t thought about it in some time. 85 answers a request to discuss certain Stoic syllogisms, 89 a request to discuss the division of philosophy into discrete disciplines, 106 a particularly recherch question lying at the intersection between Stoic ethics and onto15 The opening of 93 is the very picture of gentle reproach: in epistula qua de morte Metronactis philosophi querebaris, tamquam et potuisset diutius vivere et debuisset, aequitatem tuam desideravi, quae tibi in omni persona, in omni negotio superest, in una re deest, in qua omnibus: multos inveni aequos adversus homines, adversus deos neminem. 16 The distinction between intellect and moral character is a highly problematic one for any writer in the Stoic tradition, which never relinquished its cherished affinity with Socratic intellectualism; however, Seneca himself uses this distinction, often expressed by the contrast of ingenium with animus to represent the intellectual and moral faculties respectively : cf. 75.5: aliae [i.e., other than philosophy] artes ad ingenium totae pertinent: hic animi negotium agitur. 17 It is clear that we are to understand this to refer to Seneca’s actual philosophical works, including those which have come down to us. This much is implied in 81, where Seneca explicitly refers to and expands upon the De Beneficiis. 18 An exception is letter 9, where Seneca replies to a question about the autarky of the sage.

74

5. Contextualizations

logy : is to agathon a material body? In 117 a searching question of Lucilius’ forces Seneca to make a – rare – explicit break from official Stoic doctrine.19 The opening of 124, the last surviving letter in the series, remarks that Lucilius is not deterred by any amount of intellectual subtilitas.

5.3 Letters 94 and 95 in Context These letters, then, are situated at a particular point in the education of Lucilius. The early stages, with their non-technical exposition, frequent protreptic, and prominent use of sententiae, are past. The technical and Stoic content of the letters has been gradually increasing. Most importantly, Lucilius has been persuaded to retire from his duties in Sicily (though he is still physically present there) in order to devote himself fully to philosophy. Some of this devotion consists in moral exercises of various sorts,20 but there is little doubt that, in terms of quantity of time expended, most of what Lucilius does consists in reading philosophy. His reading is clearly far wider than just the Epistulae Morales themselves. At letter 6 he is sent unspecified “books,” at 39 (again unspecified) commentarii, at 45 Seneca’s entire philosophical opus. An anecdote of Lucilius’ gives rise to a discussion, in 81, of an issue in the casuistry of benefaction. Seneca remarks that the question has already been discussed, though insufficiently, in the De Beneficiis; it is evident that Lucilius is expected to have read this work already. Lucilius is also reading other authors: at 100, for instance, Seneca discusses a work entitled Civilia by Fabianus Papirius, which Lucilius admitted to disliking.21 Most of the technical letters in the latter books of the collection are represented as an answer to a question by Lucilius. This fact indicates that he is competently absorbing his readings on his own, and need only trouble Seneca for help on particular details.22 Lucilius’ inferrable competence in absorbing philosophical texts is one of several indications in the later stages of the letters that Lucilius is approaching the completion of the technical side of his instruction. He is also asking probing questions, even to such an extent as to cause Seneca intellectual discomfort (letter 117). Another indication is given at the beginning of 106. Seneca apologizes for taking an unusually long time to reply to Lucilius: tardius rescribo ad epistulas tuas. Not because he has been too busy, mind you, 19 The question is whether the Stoics are right to say that “wisdom” is good but “being wise” is not good. 20 As for example is indicated at 18.5, where Seneca instructs Lucilius occasionally to practice selfimposed poverty by dressing and eating poorly for three or four days at a time. 21 Of course this comes after the letters in discussion, but only by a few letters: surely it is safe to use it as evidence for Lucilius’ reading habits at the dramatic point of their composition. 22 This thought explains, I submit, the idiosyncrasy of the later letters; their content is dramatically governed by chance questions beyond the control of the authorial “I” of the work.

5.3 Letters 94 and 95 in Context

75

but because Lucilius’ question was one which Seneca was planning to consider anyway (106.1 – 2): id de quo quaerebas veniebat in contextum operis mei; scis enim me moralem philosophiam velle conplecti et omnes ad eam pertinentis quaestiones explicare. Seneca is working on a master work, a project to encompass all of ethics, and was in doubt over whether to make Lucilius await its completion before receiving an answer to his question. Ultimately, he decides not to make his friend wait: the rest of the letter consists in his answer. The same situation reappears two letters later (108.1): id de quo quaeris ex iis est quae scire tantum eo, ut scias, pertinet. Sed nihilominus, quia pertinet, properas nec vis expectare libros quos cum maxime ordino continentis totam moralem philosophiae partem. This work, known to us as the Moralis Philosophiae Libri, was never finished by Seneca. For our purposes, questions about the true nature of this project, including whether Seneca actually intended to write it, can be left aside; within the Epistulae Morales, however, it is clearly meaningful that Seneca depicts himself as working on such a project and as planning to send it to Lucilius (whose questions are beginning to anticipate the content of the Libri) at the earliest possible opportunity. In particular, Lucilius is clearly ready for a work representing the ne plus ultra of Seneca’s instruction.23 Letters 94 and 95 are intended, then, for an advanced, highly engaged, and philosophically sophisticated recipient. But they are also remarkable for features that set them apart, as letters, from the other letters in the series. To take the most obvious such issue, they are the two longest in the collection. This is not simply incidental: length is an important variable for the letters.24 Seneca’s reproaches of Lucilius, for instance, occur almost exclusively in the shortest letters: the clear pedagogical lesson imparted is that criticism should be stated firmly but quickly, and the recipient should be allowed to reflect on the criticism by herself. Moreover, Seneca often apologizes for longer and more technical discussions. In 58, for instance, he goes so far as openly to doubt that the material he has been discussing (namely, Platonic ontology) will be of any use to Lucilius (58.25); at 47.11 he cuts short his discussion of the proper treatment of slaves lest he bog down in minutiae: nolo in ingentem me locum inmittere et de usu servorum disputare. Many of the longer letters are also polythematic; 94 and 95 are an unrelenting treatment of a unified nexus of issues. 23 Lana 1991 has pointed out that 106 and 109 (Seneca defers the discussion promised at the beginning of 108 until the next letter), are, taking Seneca’s remarks at face value, “chapters” he has “excerpted” from the Moralis Philosophiae Libri. It is also interesting that Seneca suggests in 106 that he has already sent Lucilius portions of the work: itaque et hoc ex illa serie rerum cohaerentium excerpam. Lana suggests that 94 and 95 themselves may constitute a book of the Libri. For more background and speculation on this work of Seneca’s, see Leeman 1953. 24 According to the computations assembled in Lana 1991, letter 94 consists of 4164 words and 95 in 4106. The next longest letter is 90, with 2919 words. Besides 94 and 95, only ten letters contain 2000 words or more. 62, the shortest letter, comes in at a mere 149 words.

76

5. Contextualizations

The two letters are indubitably twinned: at 94.4 the question proper to either letter is raised: in duas ergo quaestiones locus iste dividitur : utrum utilis an inutilis sit, et an solus virum bonum posit efficere. The first quaestio is answered in 94, while the second is deferred. 95.1 then represents Lucilius, in his letter of reply to 94, as requesting that Seneca send the other half. The letters also share, in broad outline, the same form: after a brief introduction, objections are stated and refuted, following which Seneca draws overall conclusions interspersed with historical Roman exempla. While there are connections between other pairs of letters,25 these usually occur in short letters and are more often concerned with the dialectics of the Seneca-Lucilius relationship than with matters of philosophical content. There is no other pair of long, thematically unified letters in the collection. Letter 94 is also the only letter with no epistolary touches at all (save the formulae Seneca Lucilio Suo Salutem and Vale, which begin and end all of the letters). 94 names its topic in its opening phrase: eam partem philosophiae quae dat propria cuique personae praecepta. Unlike every other letter, Seneca’s I and Lucilius’ you make no appearance. Letter 95, of course, opens with some friendly banter which clarifies that Lucilius requested the other half of the discussion and that 95 in fact is to be understood by reference to its pair. Nonetheless, it remains the case that these letters, taken as the unity that they undoubtedly form, are highly marked within the collection for this lack of epistolary connection. The discussions of theoretical issues which fill the later letters are mostly in reply to requests from Lucilius. This is particularly so of the quibbling and minor issues often stigmatized as quaestiunculae. By contrast, Seneca gives no indication that the contents of 94 and 95 are anything less than crucial.26 Given his usual care to avoid unnecessary verboseness, it can safely be inferred that these letters are of central importance both within the dramatized education of Lucilius and for our understanding of the letters. On the line that I am urging, that 94 and 95 are a treatise on and a defense of the letters’ techniques of philosophical guidance, there is another important thematic difference between these letters and other ones discussing theoretical questions. Seneca’s didaxis is a variegated affair. It includes both technical and non-technical methods, hard doctrine and personal, situationally sensitive instruction. The letters themselves instantiate the latter far more than the former, but, as we have seen, they also show that the former is a large part of the overall picture. A letter like 113 – whose topic is an iustitia fortitudo, 25 34 – 35, 7 – 8, 108 – 109. 51 through 57 are linked not in content but dramatically, as each is written during Seneca’s travels around the Bay of Naples. 26 At 95.1 – 3 Seneca does lightheartedly apologize for the length of the letter, joking that Lucilius only asked for it out of politeness or to indulge Seneca. But the joke is on Lucilius: ego me omissa misericordia vindicabo et tibi ingentem epistulam impingam, quam tu si invitus leges, dicito ‘ego mihi hoc contraxi.’ Lucilius may not want to hear what his friend has to say, but Seneca clearly thinks he should hear it.

5.4 Why This Debate?

77

prudentia ceteraeque virtutes animalia sint – exemplifies this side of Lucilius’ education, while 91, which is about the recent fire at Lugdunum, exemplifies the other. 94 and 95, by contrast, falls squarely between these camps. It is not so much a theoretical discussion as a defense of conducting theoretical discussions; its non-technical elements are contained within an argument defending them as well. If, as I claim, the technical/non-technical dialectic is fundamental to the didactic method of the letters, and if 94 and 95 are Seneca’s teachings on these matters, their programmatic importance for the work is clear. Moreover, if how the letters are to be read and what they are meant to do are also, by frequent intratext, shown to be central issues in the work, the importance of these two letters’ programmaticity will be substantial.

5.4 Why This Debate? On the position I am defending, that the Epistulae should be read both inside and outside their dramatic conceit, the question divides in two: one, why does Seneca, as teacher and guide to Lucilius, assign 94 and 95 for his pupil to read, and two, why does he, as author of a series of letters intended for publication, frame his teachings on philosophical pedagogy in the manner he does. In other terms, why does he mean for Lucilius to read these letters, and why does he mean for us to do so? The first question has an interesting and surprising answer : Lucilius is himself a moral guide, and as such he must be as versed in the “philosophy of education” as Seneca must be. Let us recall Seneca’s instruction to Lucilius, on whom to associate with, in letter 7, cum his versare qui te meliorem facturi sunt, illos admitte quos tu potes facere meliores. The first of these imperatives obviously amounts to a self-recommendation; the second tells Lucilius to find his own Lucilii. And in fact, Lucilius can be seen to carry this command out.27 In 36 Seneca seems to respond to a request for advice on how Lucilius should advise a friend, reaffirming that Lucilius should strive to make his friend as good as he can. At 42.5, Seneca recalls Lucilius saying a certain person was “in his power.” Seneca disagreed, and ended up being right: Lucilius’ patient fell off the (moral) wagon entirely.28 No surprise if Lucilius’ efforts should have 27 Hence, ‘homines dum docent discunt’ can also be inverted: Lucilius dum discit docet. Seneca of course insists that he learns from teaching Lucilius, and in 76.3, where he writes that he is attending philosophy lectures, he remarks that he is teaching, namely that old men should learn too: Seneca dum docet discit et dum discit docet. 28 Seneca’s reference to himself saying Lucilius was mistaken cannot be located in the letters. This is sometimes the case; similarly, not every promise Seneca makes to discuss something is kept. It seems that the letters do not exhaust Seneca’s communications with Lucilius: we are to imagine either other letters, verbal messages entrusted to couriers, actual meetings at some point, or some such device.

78

5. Contextualizations

failed: he is less experienced in instruction than Seneca is, and the students it is appropriate for him to take even less so, and accordingly more ensnared by vice. Seneca also remarks in several passages that Lucilius both wants to and should become a full-fledged philosopher himself (cf. 33.7: ‘Hoc Zenon dixit’: tu quid? ‘Hoc Cleanthes’: tu quid? Quousque sub alio moveris? Impera et dic quod memoriae tradatur, aliquid et de tuo profer.) In 44 Seneca suggests that Lucilius should aspire even to be Plato’s equal. Moreover, on Seneca’s reading of history, there is no strong distinction between the great philosophers’ technical and pedagogical/therapeutic roles (6.6): Zenonem Cleanthes non expressisset si tantummodo audisset: vitae eius interfuit, secreta perspexit… Platon et Aristoteles et omnis in diversum itura sapientium turba plus ex moribus quam ex verbis Socratis traxit… Moreover, the teacher-student relationship is, for Seneca, not a different sort of relationship from friendship. By letter 7 Lucilius has already received preliminary instruction (in letter 3) in whom to befriend. Diu cogita an tibi in amicitiam aliquis recipiendus sit, he says there; this passage in 7, then, provides a criterion for this judgment: receive someone as friend if either you can improve him or he you. Lucilius frequently asks Seneca about mutual friends; letter 29,29 for instance, represents Lucilius as having asked about the condition of one Marcellinus (vis scire quid agat). It turns out he’s not well, and then it turns out that the way he’s not well is not physical but moral: Lucilius’ question had been about his moral state.30 Letters 94 and 95, then, provide Lucilius a theoretical grounding for and defense of the instruction he is expected to provide to others. Of course he will have learned philosophical pedagogy in the first instance by noticing how Seneca teaches him; that this example is reinforced by arguments, by theoretical reasoning, lines up exactly with the point of the two letters, namely that proper method in philosophy includes both technical and non-technical elements. That this is true for the part of Senecan philosophy that is concerned with the teaching of its other parts is a consequence, an application of its own doctrine. The second question, why Seneca presents the debate in these letters to “us,” raises a much larger set of issues. On the most obvious level, the fact that Lucilius is himself a moral guide provides a justification for Seneca to include an explicit statement of his “teaching philosophy” as part of his instruction. This justification internal to the Seneca/Lucilius drama allows us to see, much more fully than would otherwise be possible, how central questions of pedagogical method are outside that perspective. This point is related to one of the most important themes of the letters, namely the extroversion of the inner life of the soul conducted both by Seneca the teacher and (this we must infer) by 29 Schçnegg 1999, 61 – 64. 30 cf letter 25.

5.4 Why This Debate?

79

Lucilius the student. This extroversion, which is first recommended, recall, in terms of proper conduct towards one’s friends,31 is both a part of Seneca’s didaxis and an interpretive key for the reader : the motivation behind any particular teaching of Seneca’s can be expected to emerge, sooner or later, as a teaching in its own right. More broadly speaking, the question arises, why are Seneca’s teachings in 94 and 95 framed as they are? Why, in particular, does Seneca position himself against Aristo on the one hand and the anti-theoretical “certain people” on the other? In either case, the answer is to be found by considering these letters within the collection as a whole. Regarding letter 94, the choice of Aristo as foil is wellmotivated. For the letters portray a course of Stoic education, but one which is, though not heterodox, at least latitudinarian in its treatment of certain notorious points of doctrine. Seneca repeatedly asserts his intellectual independence (and encourages Lucilius to do the same), at least once flatly disagrees with official doctrine, and in many places takes issue with the ways in which Stoicism is conventionally taught. The most important example of this critique of traditional Stoicism is surely Seneca’s repeated attacks on “logic.” In fact, these attacks are not on pars rationalis philosophiae itself, but on the syllogistic arguments for central points of doctrine devised by Zeno, Chrysippus, and the other heads of the Old Stoa. Sometimes he reluctantly deigns to discuss them, other times he brings the matter up himself in order to refute and ridicule them; throughout, he insists that these are not the means to moral improvement. Of course, we infer what Seneca does take to be proper practice in these matters from how Seneca ministers to Lucilius. In many particulars, his methods are ones which we know to be practiced in Epicurean circles (withdrawal from the crowd, imagining a moral guide is watching what you do, repeating pithy expressions to yourself). The first thirty letters, which almost invariably quote Epicurus, do more than simply show this; they boldly, ostentatiously flaunt Seneca’s appropriation of the methods, and a little of the doctrine, of his school’s most prominent rival. The early letters include several anticipatory defenses of this appropriation: Seneca slips into the enemy’s camp as a spy not as a turncoat, and anyway he may be free to use truth, no matter by whom it is discovered. It seems overwhelmingly likely that the letters promote, and knowingly so, Stoic pedagogy in a way that will be surprising to many of his readers. The school was widely considered, in antiquity as well as in modern times, unattractively dogmatic, narrow, and harsh; in Seneca’s hands, care is always taken to promote it as generous and flexible.32 Given this background, it is quite

31 3.3: cum amico omnes curas, omnes cogitationes tuas misce… quid est quare ego ulla verba coram amico meo retraham? 32 To my knowledge the clearest example in the Senecan corpus of this concern is De Clementia

80

5. Contextualizations

clever for Seneca to embed his methodological self-defense in letter 94 within a dialectic in which he sides with Cleanthes against Aristo. The name “Aristo,” it is clear, is a byword for absolutism in ethics. Furthermore, Aristo, though a student of Zeno’s, and though identified at 94.2 as Ariston Stoicus,33 was felt to have departed from the mainstream of Stoicism. Cleanthes, by contrast, as Zeno’s successor and Chrysippus’ predecessor, represents the mainstream. Seneca’s appropriation of this debate and insinuation of himself on the prevailing side emphasizes that his sensitive and broad-minded practice is in fact standard within the school. If the Stoic movement considered implausibly rigid views on education, it did so in order to reject them. Moreover, the association with Cleanthes resonates with other concerns of Seneca’s. In the traditional history of the Stoa, Cleanthes is not regarded as a brilliant and original theoretician, but rather as a competent steward and expositor of his predecessor Zeno’s doctrines and school.34 As we have already seen, in letter 6 Seneca attributes Cleanthes’ achievement in philosophy to his intimacy with Zeno ([Cleanthes] vitae eius [sc. Zenonis] interfuit, secreta perspexit). It is only appropriate for Seneca to associate his defense of moral improvement by non-doctrinal means with a figure he regards as a paradigmatic case of such improvement. Letter 95, on the other hand, is not presented as a historical debate between famous thinkers from the past. The objections in 94, introduced in oratio recta with Aristo as implied subject of the verb inquit, are paralleled in 95 by objections introduced with the plural inquiunt. The subject of this verb can only be the “certain people [who] have received [the preceptive part of philosophy] alone” from 94.1. Attempting to identify these people as actual personages in the philosophical tradition is futile. Their position is a strange one for a philosopher to hold, and none of the schools, (certainly not the ‘dogmatic’ Stoa, or Garden, or Peripatos, and not the skeptical Academy either) come naturally to mind as adherents of their views. Giusta proposes the Cynics,35 on the basis of Diogenes Laertius 6.11, where Antisthenes is said to have held that virtue consists in deeds, and does not need many words or studies. This is shaky ground on which to rest an identification of Seneca’s opponents; we cannot infer from it, for instance, that the “deeds” in question are to be recommended by precept-giving rather than, say, a telos formula. Also, it is Aristo, presented as the polar opposite of the certain people in question, who is, with good reason, thought to be close to the Cynic position. Rather, it will be useful to consider what Seneca’s opponents say. Five 2.5.2 – 2.5.3: scio male audire apud imperitos sectam Stoicorum tamquam duram nimis…sed nulla secta benignior leniorque est, nulla amantior hominum et communis boni attentior… 33 Though the reading is disputed; Madvig prints Ariston Chius, presumably doubting the appropriateness of the adjective Stoicus, and on the authority of 89.13, where Seneca refers to the philosopher as Ariston Chius. I follow Reynolds in accepting the manuscript reading. 34 Diogenes Laertius 7.37. 35 Giusta 1964 vol. 2, 328.

5.4 Why This Debate?

81

objections are attributed to them: 1) happiness consists in right action, and precepts produce right action, therefore precepts are sufficient for happiness, 2) right action comes from precepts, and therefore precepts are sufficient for happiness, 3) other crafts are taught by precept-giving alone, and therefore philosophy or the art of living can be so taught as well, 4) old-fashioned philosophy was less doctrinal, and men were better then, so doctrine isn’t practically effective, and 5) many people end up being morally admirable without formal study of philosophy. These claims form a puzzling whole. 1) and 2) at least sound like philosophical positions. Oddly, 2) is in fact merely a restatement of 1); the conclusion of 2) requires the major premise of 1), or something like it, to be valid. If pushed, the argument is at least superficially similar to the Aristotelian characterization of happiness as activity of the soul in accordance with virtue. 3) also contains a genuine philosophical proposition (that moral philosophy is craft-like). It too is invalid as it stands, and, as Seneca quickly points out, unsound as well. 4) and 5), by contrast, are an attack on philosophy and its pretensions as such rather than an attempt to vindicate a position in philosophy. Aside from holding that precept-giving is the correct method in philosophy, the objectors in 95, then, believe that moral action is sufficient for happiness, that philosophy is the art of living, and that instruction in doctrine is ineffective at making people good. Seneca’s presentation gives them nothing else to say. Unlike the objections put in Aristo’s mouth in 94, these do not amount to a coherent, let alone an important, philosophical position. In fact, it is evident from Seneca’s treatment of the objections that his objectors’ “philosophy” is unimportant to him, and to the function of the letter. As noted, claims 1) and 2) are really the same claim, and the only one which unambiguously takes a position on an issue in moral philosophy. Furthermore, they are made and refuted in the most peremptory way : 1) is stated at 95.4 and refuted at 95.5; 2) is both stated and rebutted at 95.6. Claim 3), which has limited doctrinal content, is stated at 95.7; its refutation continues up to 95.12. By contrast, 4) is stated at 95.13 and discussed up to 95.36. It is not entirely clear where the discussion of 5) ends; this last objection is directly refuted at least up to 95.40, but related points about the effectiveness of decreta continue all the way up to the rhetorical flourishes which close the letter, at 95.73. The point of all this is that it if we assume that the issues to which Seneca devotes the bulk of the letter are the ones which really matter for its interpretation, the dialectic he conducts in it is not with rival philosophers so much as non-philosophers and man-in-the-street skeptics about philosophy. That objections 1) and 2) are doctrinally contentful and stated in quasi-syllogistic form can be very economically attributed to Seneca’s stylistic and rhetorical desire that 95 should mirror 94 formally as well as in content. That these two objections are in fact the same objection is even stronger warrant for this interpretation: Seneca is a careful tailor, but the seams are clearly showing.

82

5. Contextualizations

It is important to notice that the views of the non-philosophical opponents of letter 95 are actually quite serious and relevant to contemporary contexts. Objection 4 is stated in terms of the traditional Roman assumption that one’s own age is worse than the ones before it: philosophy is more curiously wrought now, but men are far more vicious. Whether one is sympathetic to this view or not – and we should not forget, the Senatorial class under Nero saw at least its share of enormities, and the mores of this group will have constituted our author’s sense of “the times” in general – Seneca has his finger on a serious charge against the philosophical culture of his day. The issue is of course the confident claim made by the Hellenistic schools, that living one’s life in accordance with them will make one virtuous and happy. After several centuries in which a significant share of the population (or at least of the elite) had professed allegiance to these schools, it will not have been unreasonable for a critic to question the entire project, to suspect that the schools have been unable to live up to their self-billing. If philosophy makes us good, why are we so bad? It is interesting to consider how the Stoics stand in relation to this charge. They could say, of course, that all people are vicious apart from the sapiens, and that the reason why widespread nominal Stoic allegiance has not brought great improvement to public morals is that sagehood is so rare. In that sense, Stoicism, like certain strands in Pauline/Augustinian Christianity, insulates itself rather well from the charge of practical inefficacy, albeit at the cost of extreme pessimism about human nature and the pervasiveness of vice or sin.36 Seneca could not in good conscience completely reject this sort of answer. In fact, he does insist on the dangers of even mild disturbances in the soul and the inherent risk of backsliding which they pose. Accordingly, his teachings stress eternal vigilance, assidua intentio. Seneca, however, also takes great pains to insist on the value of even a moderate amount of moral progress.37 It would therefore not be open to him to defend his own brand of Stoicism in this way, and it is instructive to see that he does not attempt to do so. Seneca shares considerable common ground with his imagined objectors. Both agree that the times are bad, that the point of philosophy is moral improvement, that homespun maxims are helpful for that purpose, and that many people can attain great moral progress without any indoctrination at all. Implicit in that last point is that ordinary goodness or wisdom is both a real phenomenon and something of great value; this rules out a doctrinaire insistence on the misery of all non-sages, and frames the debate in a very practical way : how can we make more people “good” in the way that many people in fact are good, and how can we make them as good as possible? The defense of decreta is conducted within these parameters, and the arguments 36 Both ideologies also face the difficult prospect of squaring this pessimism with the commitment to a providentially ordered universe. 37 75.15

5.5 Summary

83

adduced are ones whose force one can acknowledge without a prior commitment to the truth of the doctrines which Seneca in point of fact endorses.

5.5 Summary This chapter has explored the place of letters 94 and 95 within the Epistulae Morales as a whole and argued that the larger context illuminates our understanding of them in important ways. In so doing it has made large claims about the nature of Seneca’s project: in short, it sees the letters as an overarching exemplum of philosophical pedagogy and moral guidance. Inside the exemplum, the individual letters are the means by which the teacher Seneca guides his student; outside of it, the work amounts to a theoretical position on and an articulated vision of the proper sort of instruction in philosophy. The next chapter will attempt to demonstrate how Seneca uses the praecepta/decreta distinction to develop an explicit statement of the pedagogical principles which govern the work as a whole. There is, as we have seen, ample justification within the exemplum for these letters to be sent to Lucilius: he is at this point an advanced student, and he is himself a teacher. (Indeed, for Seneca it is essential to the philosophical life that one be both student and teacher). However, the importance of this text lies for the most part outside of the portrayed education of Lucilius; Seneca the author is speaking more to his audience here than Seneca the character is speaking to his friend. In their length, their sustained focus, and their submersion of the personalities of sender and recipient, these letters are the most treatise-like of, and the least similar to, the other letters; in their content, however, their connectedness to the series emerges: they discuss and defend what the entire work does. Finally, the rhetorical strategy of the letters parallels Seneca’s polemic with his audience. The letters are a pedagogical via media; they are both philosophical and accessible. They can be, and Seneca wants them to be, read both by committed and knowledgeable philosophers and by literate and thoughtful non-philosophers and opponents of philosophy. These letters are an appeal to both audiences. To the former, especially to Seneca’s more doctrinaire Stoic comrades (and to critics of Stoicism put off by its seeming doctrinal rigidity), they defend a subtler and more varied pedagogy ; to the latter they defend a pedagogy which is philosophical at all.

6. Education 6.1 Praecepta For the Stoic, man is born to be good, but everywhere he is in the chains of vice. False opinions about what is good for us besiege us; our parents’ hopes for us, coming as they do from perverse judgments of value, are as bad for us as any curses.1 All of us fall grievously sick before we can become well. Though for different reasons, both the doctrinaire opponent in 94 and the commonsense opponent in 95 agree with Seneca on this point: we are quite bad. Moreover, our badness is an active hindrance to improvement in a special way : ignorance of geometry does not itself prevent a motivated student from learning geometry, but moral badness and perverse belief both act against the motivation to become better and dissuade an agent from assenting to the true beliefs about value which a good person has. The teaching of philosophy (or, if the objectors in 95 are right and philosophy is not practically efficacious, the teaching of action-guiding maxims) is therefore far more problematic than any other kinds of teaching. The problem is that one must find methods of moral therapy which will work not for good people but for bad ones. This problem poses itself not only on the practical level but on the theoretical one as well. That is to say, all hands will want to agree that it is possible to teach people to be better :2 what must be true of us, of our moral psychology and the structure of our motivations, if it is to be possible to make us, in our wickedness, both aspire to be better and actually be capable of becoming so? For Seneca, these methods must also be shown to be intrinsic to our natures: provident Nature could not have called us to virtue but also made us utterly incapable of heeding its call. Our letters demonstrate careful thought and intense engagement with these issues. Late in letter 94, after his response to Aristo’s challenge has been given, Seneca sketches his overall vision of the human moral condition.3 The values of people at large are perverse, we are surrounded by bad moral influences (94.53): 1 Cf. 60.1: Etiam nunc optas quod tibi optavit nutrix tua aut paedagogus aut mater? nondum intellegis quantum mali optaverint? O quam inimica nobis sunt vota nostrorum! eo quidem inimiciora quo cessere felicius. 2 The contention that virtue cannot be taught, familiar in Socratic and sophistic contexts, is not even considered by Seneca or his imagined opponents. 3 Bellincioni 1978b convincingly shows how Seneca’s educative method proceeds from his views on our nature qua moral agents, and extracts these views from the letters as a whole (passim, and especially 15 – 72).

86

6. Education Nulla ad aures nostras vox impune perfertur : nocent qui optant, nocent qui execrantur. Nam et horum inprecatio falsos nobis metus inserit et illorum amor male docet bene optando; mittit enim nos ad longinqua bona et incerta et errantia, cum possimus felicitatem domo promere.

The curse of an enemy fills us with unreasonable dread; more insidiously, the desires of those who love us, who pray for us sub specie boni, inculcate false and corrupt judgments of value. Our parents hope for us to be wealthy ; we learn from them to consider wealth as a good, as the good. In fact it is not a good for us, but something indifferent, and its pursuit comes so easily in the way of virtue, of happiness. Moreover, the pernicious effect of corrupt values is self-reinforcing (94.54): trahunt in pravum parentes, trahunt servi. Nemo errat uni sibi, sed dementiam spargit in proximos accipitque invicem. Dum facit quisque peiorem, factus est; didicit deteriora, dein docuit… We are contaminated by the opinions of people of lesser status as well as of greater status; my vices make you worse and you make me worse in turn. For Seneca to remark that we learn evil and then teach it is highly resonant within the Epistulae Morales: the learning/teaching dialectic is fundamental, as we have already seen, to the Seneca/Lucilius relationship, their mutuality is an oft-repeated theme. It is disheartening to reflect that these twin honorable concepts are so easily and so pervasively perverted. Rhetorician that he is, Seneca follows this bad news with good, showing us the path out of our self-imposed imprisonment (94.56): Erras enim si existimas nobiscum vitia nasci: supervenerunt, ingesta sunt… Nulli nos vitio natura conciliat: illa integros ac liberos genuit. Our vices are human invention; the impulse to goodness is human nature. The verb conciliare and the corresponding abstract noun conciliatio are, since Cicero, the Latin for the key Stoic concept of oikeisis, the process by which provident Nature equips us to recognize the Good. Nature, of course, has a dual significance, referring both to Cosmic Nature and to our own individual natures. The two come to the same thing: Nature or God has provided all we need to be good, and all we need to be good is within us. What follows is emotionally charged rhetoric meant to illustrate the purity and goodness of Nature and the appalling extent to which we have perverted it. The precious metals which provoke our greed are hidden below the earth, out of sight; the grandeur and mystery of the heavens have been placed above us and in plain view. Astronomy is beautiful, geology ugly : gold cannot be used until it is cleared of the filth that clings to it.4

4 This rhetoric does not perhaps amount to sober philosophy. It is appropriate, however, not only artistically (as it is something of a peroration capping what has been a long and difficult discussion), but also in terms of the methods in teaching which these letters propound, as we will see (cf. 95.35). Additionally, the claims Seneca makes in this section (essentially, that Nature is

6.1 Praecepta

87

The answer, of course, is to withdraw: recede in te, turbam vita. This moral is drawn as the letter comes to a close (94.68 – 69): hoc est enim sapientia, in naturam converti et eo restitui unde publicus error expulerit. magna pars sanitatis est hortatores insaniae reliquisse et ex isto coitu invicem noxio procul abisse. This is where praecepta come into play. We have already seen that Seneca likens precept-giving to exhortation; here exhortation is shown to be effective in harming our moral state. What, then are we to do? 94.71 – 72 gives the answer : Ambitio et luxuria et inpotentia scaenam desiderant: sanabis ista si absconderis. Itaque si in medio urbium fremitu conlocati sumus, stet ad latus monitor et contra laudatores ingentium patrimoniorum laudet parvo divitem et usu opes metientem.

The role of the precept-giver is to restore the student to his natural moral and intellectual state; the teacher is a countermeasure to the urbium fremitus which we find unavoidable. This passage also makes clear that the defense of praecepta is a defense of the activity of precept-giving, of the practice of seeking and heeding moral advisors. This defense works not so much by discursive argument as by appeal to shared experience and common sense. At 94.52 Seneca has concluded his point by point rebuttal of Aristo and given notice of his intention to conduct further disputation in the next letter. The section we have been considering is introduced by the rhetorical question interim omissis argumentis nonne apparet opus esse nobis aliquo advocato qui contra populi praecepta praecipiat? The visual metaphor in apparet, I take it, is not purely accidental: the description of how the depraved values of the community harm us is one that we can recognize, the need for better influences is clear to us. The monitor who will remind us of our better natures is meant emotionally to strike the reader, terrified by the parade of ambitio, luxuria, and so on, like a harbor, oasis, or hero appearing in the nick of time. It would not be logically valid to contend, and Seneca does not in fact so contend, that if we can be harmed by bad precepts then we can be helped by good ones. Nonetheless, his depiction of corruption through non-doctrinal methods is highly effective in undermining the notion that moral improvement can only be effected by the technical teaching of philosophy. Rhetorically, this is clearly so, and important. The fact that a reader can feel drawn to Seneca’s depiction of the good preceptor is itself very nearly a pragmatic refutation of Aristo: no one will be tempted to believe that only doctrinepeddling can turn us toward goodness if she herself is made to feel the tug of another sort of teaching. But it is not in emotional and rhetorical terms alone that the depiction of moral corruption helps Seneca. Aristo (along with like-minded advocates of perfect) could also be stated in a theoretically punctilious way, so they are not in that sense misleading.

88

6. Education

“sober disputation”) will want to agree that people are influenced by the bad moral values around them. The means by which this influence takes place, of course, are not strictly cognitive ones. By their own lights, then, human behavior can be influenced in these ways. What reason do they have for thinking that these methods can only bring about bad moral effects? None, really. The Stoic theory of human action is thoroughly cognitive in the sense that all actions are the immediate result of assent to a propositionally contentful impression: we do everything we do because (at the time we do it, anyway) we believe that that is the thing to do. It is not the case that we have non-rational action-producing faculties potentially subject to rational control. On that sort of model, it would be far more plausible to hold that bad moral influence is conveyed by irrational means (operating, say, on the appetitive part or faculty of the soul) while good influence is conveyed by rational ones (operating on the rational part or faculty of the soul). By contrast, for the Stoic/Socratic intellectualist model of human action to save the phainomena, it must rely on a relatively weak notion of rationality : it is fine to say, as the Stoics do, that all action should proceed from a systematized grasp of the nature of the cosmos, achieved by reflection and argumentation, or reason strongly conceived; but it is not sustainable to suppose that every adult human action does follow that sort of activity.5 Nor did the Stoics ever maintain such a travesty of intellectualism; instead, the necessary and sufficient condition for rationality in the weak sense, and the element common to all voluntary action, is just the soul’s assent to and rejection of impressions, however arrived at. Seneca, then, has laid the theoretical basis for a program of moral therapy that includes non-technical pedagogical methods. It is not enough, however, for him to show that people can be aided by such methods; he must show that (and how) they are adequate for the task of aiding bad people, people who are not only threatened by corrupt values but who have already been deeply affected by them. Letter 94 devotes much attention to this issue. For one thing, Seneca is careful not to oversell his techniques: they are, he says, literally not a cure-all (94.24). The medical craft is not rendered useless by the fact that it cannot overcome all diseases, because it does cure some people, and at least provides relief to some others. Similarly, (and here Seneca takes aim ad hominem at Aristo) some psychic disorders are too deeply insinuated to be removed by any and all philosophical tools. Still, philosophy is not rendered worthless by its inability to help all those in moral need. One of Aristo’s arguments against precepts is by analogy with mental illness (94.17). The sort of mental illness which doctors treat has a different cause than moral illness has, but is otherwise similar. Such patients are not treated by 5 That is to say, while it is reasonable to understand a person’s pursuit of money with reference to her belief that “money is a good,” rather than as the product of her desire for money, it is obvious that such a theory must make allowance for an agent’s thinking that money is a good without ever having heard or formulated arguments to that effect.

6.1 Praecepta

89

instruction in how to walk, talk, and behave, but rather by removing the physiological cause of their disease: bilis nigra curanda est et ipsa furoris causa removenda. Seneca’s response to this objection at 94.36 will deny the analogy (dissimile est); even someone whose vices have been contained needs to know what to do next. But Aristo’s contention is not even true for the insane: illud quoque falsum est, nihil apud insanos proficere praecepta. nam quemadmodum sola non prosunt, sic curationem adiuvant; et denuntiatio et castigatio insanos coercuit – de illis nunc loquor quibus mens mota est, non erepta.

This response subtly shifts the focus of praecepta. They are not, Seneca insists, merely commands, or the observation that a healthy or good person does thus and so. They are appeals to the person needing help, whether issued gently or harshly (castigatio). They can work – when given in conjunction with medical curatio6 – on patients whose minds are not completely gone. Implicitly, of course, this point applies to the morally ill as well. How can it do so? Because, Seneca claims, the moderately bad person retains her natural impulse to goodness, which precepts stimulate. At 94.28 Seneca gives several examples of solemn apothegms like te nosce, remarking that they don’t need any defense (advocatum ista non quaerunt). Once again, the reader who recognizes the effectiveness of such sententiae feels much less need for an argument that human souls can be touched by sententiae. Nonetheless, Seneca does advert to the theory, presumably shared by his doctrinaire opponent, within which this effectiveness can be explained (94.29): omnium honestarum rerum semina animi gerunt. A person may be ignorant of the true nature of goodness but still retain the capacity to be persuaded by it; of such a person Seneca says (94.31) non enim extincta in illo indoles naturalis est sed obscurata et oppressa. Goodness is achieved by, and is identical to, following nature. The process by which we come to understand what it means to follow nature is itself provided for by nature: we are made to see it. Reason, for the mainstream Stoic, is the summit and perfection of this process, but it is not the only part of it. Famously, the Stoics appealed to the behavior of pre-rational children, to their natural instinct for self-preservation, for social behavior, and so on, to make this case. In the present context, in which he is concerned with adults already equipped for rationality, Seneca’s task is to show how the “instinct” for goodness is still present and active in adults. As we have seen, for Seneca the fine-sounding principle, whether in prose or poetry,7 can activate our instinct to virtue. Letter 94 mentions many similar 6 It is interesting to reflect that Seneca is addressing precisely the same issue which remains so controversial in psychiatry to our day, namely the effectiveness of talk-based guidance to the mentally ill versus medical interventions, and that Seneca’s position also reflects contemporary orthodoxy in recommending both techniques together. 7 94.27: praeterea ipsa quae praecipiuntur per se multum habent ponderis, utique si aut carmini intexta sunt aut prosa oratione in sententiam coartata…

90

6. Education

means, which are likewise intended to persuade the reader merely by being recognized as experiential data. Many of these means can be grouped as instances of the motivational force of respect for authority. At 94.27 this point is put explicitly : quid quod etiam sine probationibus ipsa monentis auctoritas prodest? In that passage Seneca says that the responsa of jurists can be persuasive even if their reasoning is not given. His other examples are similar. The law itself (94.37 – 39) is persuasive, though of course not for all.8 The mere company of a good person (94.40 – 41) is morally helpful: est aliquid quod ex magno viro vel tacente proficias.9 Religious experiences, such as frequenting temples and hearing oracles, restrain our vices by imposing reverentia (94.42 – 44). Castigatio (94.44) restrains us with pudor. Merely receiving orders (94.44: proficitur imperio) is effective. Precept-giving by a respected guide works the same way. Perhaps the most distinctively Senecan extension of this point arises in this passage (94.42). After asserting that the company of good people is morally advantageous, Seneca rhetorically asks what the relevance of that point is: ‘quorsus’ inquis ‘hoc pertinet?’ His answer is that precepts work the way exempla do: aeque praecepta bona, si saepe tecum sint, profutura quam bona exempla. In this context, exempla suggest not only the historical and literary kind (so often and so insistently used throughout the Epistulae Morales), but also one’s individual models. The less experienced student, in admiring an authority figure, comes to model her behavior on the authority’s. Likewise, precepts, whether respected because they themselves are issued by authorities or because of their self-evident grandeur, are models which our behavior can match or fail to match. This connection is not only persuasive in its own right to anyone who has respected and sought to emulate a role-model, it also explains something of the motivational psychology of Seneca’s examples of “instinctive” habituation towards goodness: imitation, respect, and self-modeling are paradigmatic forms of natural, pre-rational behavior in children, and their persistence in adulthood is perfectly familiar and uncontroversial. It is interesting and informative to compare Seneca’s comments about the exemplary function of praecepta at 94.42 with letter 6, which was discussed above (5.1: “The Context of the Epistulae Morales”). To reiterate, that letter, like the others at the beginning of the collection, helps to establish how the nascent correspondence and friendship between Seneca and Lucilius will work. The letter begins with Seneca reflecting how much he, as a relatively progressed lover of wisdom, is being transformed by his studies; each day, he claims, he sees the difference. This reflection leads immediately to a desire to share with Lucilius the tools of his transformation, to send Lucilius the philosophical books which have helped him, Seneca. The mention of reading, however, is followed directly by the warning that real philosophical progress 8 Law is less persuasive than precept-giving because it is mostly negative and threatening. 9 Cf. the (apocryphal?) motto of Francis of Assisi: “preach always, sometimes use words.”

6.1 Praecepta

91

requires lively and intimate familiarity with an actual person who can demonstrate what philosophical progress looks like; the do-it-yourself method of reading only is missing that element. We have already seen the quote which clinches the point (6.5): longum iter est per praecepta, breve et efficax per exempla. Compare that now with 94.42, which in rhetorical terms functions in a similar way, as a pithy summary consummating a line of argumentation: aeque praecepta bona, si saepe tecum sint, profutura quam bona exempla. While the former passage contrasts precepts and examples, to the detriment of precepts, the latter defends precepts by equating them with examples. Of course, care must be taken in adducing this passage in letter 6 as a relevant comparandum, not least because it is dangerous to assume that Seneca means the same thing by praecepta in the two passages. In general Seneca is quite free in his use of technical terms, and in particular praecepta is not a technical term for the letters until it is introduced as such in letter 94.10 Nonetheless, the similarity of the two contexts is striking. In letter 6, Seneca will send Lucilius the books, in spite of the limitations of merely reading fine principles; in 94, Seneca again acknowledges the limitations of fine principles, but creates space for them in his educational theory. His identical practice in the two contexts shows that the two quotes are not in as much tension as they seem. The wording of either passage is careful: longum iter est per praecepta sounds disparaging, but it is not in fact so; there is a path to improvement by precepts. And again, the equation of precepts with examples in letter 94 is stated conditionally : aeque praecepta bona, si saepe tecum sint, profutura quam bona exempla. Precepts are effective, to some extent and under some conditions. When those conditions are met, precepts allow an agent to model herself on them. The essential point, however, is that the agent must work; she must make the precepts her own, and bring them to her own attention frequently. Once again, the thematic consilience between this point and the depicted education of Lucilius (in whose initial stages sententious precepts play so prominent a role) is to the point. Letter 120 demonstrates another respect in which exemplarity and models are crucial to Seneca’s understanding of moral development. The theme of that letter is how we come upon a conception of the good and the morally honorable (quomodo ad nos boni honestique notitia pervenerit.) This letter, which is among the most technical and philosophically interesting of the letters, deals with a serious problem: the Stoics seem to have difficulty explaining how non-sages can acquire an accurate conception of the good towards which they should strive, given their commitment both to a thoroughly empiricist account of concept-formation and to the utter scarcity (if not total non-existence) of

10 Setaioli 1988, 11 – 46.

92

6. Education

actually good people or sages.11 Seneca’s solution to this problem is that we come to admire not only culturally sanctioned historical exempla, but also (common and flawed examples of) great and courageous deeds (120.5), and are naturally impelled to exaggerate their greatness and conceal from ourselves their imperfections. Furthermore, we recognize the similarities between virtues and the vices which counterfeit them (120.8: courage and recklessness, generosity and prodigality), and are lead to inspect these qualities themselves and the agents who seem to exhibit them. We find that some people only rarely or inconsistently act admirably, and so we withdraw our praise from them (120.9). Others, however, are admirable consistently, and across the different kinds of situations: they are generous, self-controlled, pious, and so on. We recognize virtue and goodness from such a person’s self-consistency and fittingness (ordo eius et decor et constantia et omnium inter se actionum concordia et magnitudo super omnia efferens sese., 120.11). Returning to precepts, the existence of the preceptor qua role-model therefore plays an important, and importantly rational and intellectual, role in the progressor’s moral development: the moral student does not merely accept the excellence of his model, but instead he questions and tests the model’s apparent virtues; this testing and this discernment between true virtues and their deceptive likenesses are performed by the progressor himself, but they are made possible by precept-giving, by the preceptor making himself available as a model for emulation. Performed successfully, this discernment provides the progressor with an ever more determinate and accurate conception of the good overall. Seneca is, however, also aware of the limitations of precept-giving as narrowly conceived, and he carefully insists on the dignity of the individual’s reason and the necessity for the one who obeys to come to understand why he obeys.12 Again, his stated aim in letter 94 is merely to vindicate some role for precept-giving in moral education. Moreover, Seneca certainly does not hold that praecepta function in a purely sub-rational and non-cognitive way. To take the simplest example, precepts remind us of things we have already learned (94.21, memoriam renovant). Secondly, by dealing with separate issues individually, individual precepts allow an agent to focus on the relevant moral features of a case at hand.13 11 For Seneca’s treatment of the problem, see Inwood 2005 271 – 301. The letter is translated and commented on at Inwood 2007a 79 – 84 and 322 – 332. 12 At 94.38 Seneca defends Plato’s Laws from Posidonius’ criticism that a law should merely command and not try to argue. Seneca thinks laws work better if they teach as well as order. At 94.44, just after arguing that precept-giving is effective, he immediately adds that precept-giving with argument is more effective. 13 94.21: quae in universo confusius videbantur in partes divisa diligentius considerantur. I take this to be largely an educative and developmental point: it would be both intellectually overwhelming and psychologically implausible for a moral agent in training to reason morally only from what will inevitably be his imperfect understanding of the highest-level principles he endorses.

6.1 Praecepta

93

Seneca demonstrates these points with a series of arresting images. His objector asks quid prodest… aperta monstrare? (94.25). Seneca’s response focuses on cases of hypocrisy and the failure to live up to one’s own moral standards. We know that friendship imposes serious obligations (94.26), but we don’t live up to them. We know it is wrong for a husband, who demands fidelity of his own wife, to be an alienarum corruptor uxorum. The importance of friendship and the wrongness of double standards are agreed upon by all; precept-giving works by reminding the agent of his commitment to these principles, by “stirring”14 his soul to awaken the dormant belief. In a concrete case, an agent whose behavior is modified by timely precepts in this way may not seem merely to have “remembered” her own principles. Shame and the threat of social sanction can also be in play. Seneca shows that he is aware of this by quoting the orator Calvus in his prosecution of Vatinius15 for fraud (94.25): factum esse ambitum scitis, et hoc vos scire omnes sciunt. When a lawyer tells a jury “everyone knows you know that the defendant is guilty”, he is clearly hoping that the jurors will be made to fear the reproach of their peers if they acquit. On the other hand, Seneca also very clearly has in mind another sort of case as well, namely that of an agent who, as it were, issues the precept to himself. Saepe animus etiam aperta dissimulat (94.25); the tendency actively to conceal one’s better principles or speciously to deny their applicability is a familiar and entrenched feature of the human soul. Against this, Seneca thinks, the frequent and sincere repetition of one’s moral commitments is a useful tool. The two cases are similar : in either, an agent’s hypocrisy and failure to live up to his own standards are brought to light, whether to his peers or to himself. The latter case, in which the agent’s self-appraisal is the appraisal that matters, and his self-condemnation the one he truly fears, is of course the morally more important one. The external sort of case, however, is more familiar, and accordingly Seneca uses it to illuminate the internal case. This appropriation of language familiar from social life to the inner life of the soul, along with the attendant rhetorical division of the self into subject and object, is only one example of an important Senecan theme. It begins in the opening line of the letters, vindica te tibi, “assert ownership over yourself.” Other examples are friendship or strife with oneself (6.7: quaeris quid profecerim? amicus esse mihi coepi), the self as partner in conversation (10.1: ‘mecum’ inquit ‘loquor.’ Cui Crates ‘cave’ inquit ‘rogo et diligenter adtende: cum homine malo loqueris) 14 94.26: quaecumque salutaria sunt saepe agitari debent, saepe versari, ut non tantum nota sint nobis sed etiam parata. Cf. 27.9, where Seneca apologizes for quoting a sententia of Epicurus: ‘divitiae sunt ad legem naturae composita paupertas.’ hoc saepe dicit Epicurus aliter atque aliter, sed numquam nimis dicitur quod numquam satis discitur : quibusdam remedia monstranda, quibusdam inculcanda sunt. The constant repetition and reaffirmation of precepts is a crucial element of Seneca’s didaxis, and one he is at pains to defend. 15 Cicero was counsel for the defense, and won.

94

6. Education

and the self as travel companion (28.2: quaeris quare te fuga ista non adiuvet? tecum fugis). Perhaps Seneca’s most important, and most rhetorically daring, extension of this theme is to the judicial sphere: Seneca instructs Lucilius to play every role in the criminal justice system, to be police, prosecutor, judge, and finally defense counsel towards himself (28.10): ideo quantum potes te ipse coargue, inquire in te; accusatoris primum partibus fungere, deinde iudicis, novissime deprecatoris; aliquando te offende. When we endeavor to play the role (it bears observation that this is Seneca’s metaphor not mine: see above, partibus fungere) of prosecutor towards ourselves, we are treating it as our job or function to do something which we are actually quite good at, namely looking for evidence of guilt. Similarly, the agent who issues a precept to himself is assuming the familiar (and often quite gratifying) task of moral instruction and guardianship. The common retort of the person chafing at being preached to, ‘tu me’ inquis ‘mones? iam enim te ipse monuisti?’ (27.1) is actually taken in all seriousness by Seneca: we can heal ourselves. Up to this point we have seen how Seneca illustrates our capacity to guide and modify our behavior through means other than rational demonstration of ethical truths. While many of the ways in which this guidance occurs are nonrational and pre-rational, it is clearly not the case that they are entirely so. It is important to see that the rational component of the way praecepta work grows as the agent’s rationality itself grows: the entirely untrained can be shamed into doing what is right by a precept, while a more advanced student can be reminded of what he should do by one. To conclude this discussion of the role of praecepta, let us see why Seneca sees this process as an ineliminable component of moral education. In the (perhaps deliberately) nave conception of Seneca’s objector, human action is generated purely by belief, and for that reason behavior modification should be conducted entirely through belief modification. Without renouncing the moral and psychological analysis of action latent in this position, Seneca maintains that what one does, while produced by one’s beliefs, itself helps to shape and reform those beliefs. This idea is quintessentially Stoic: in the school’s analysis of the emotions, anger and the like are mistaken judgments, and hence rationally in our power to avoid. Indulging in them, however, leads to a vicious circle: our vicious actions reinforce the vicious beliefs which gave them rise to such an extent that it is actually impossible to reject the vicious beliefs all at once (just as, in Chrysippus’ famous simile, a runner cannot stand still all at once). At 94.34 Seneca turns this analysis around: ipsum de malis bonisque iudicium confirmatur officiorum exsecutione. By doing the right things, our judgment that they are right is strengthened. If precept-giving can modify our behavior, then, it can also help to modify our beliefs. In practical terms, it is abundantly clear that this is not a marginal phenomenon, but rather one that is indispensable. If one’s beliefs are to be

6.1 Praecepta

95

changed by the study of philosophy, one must first be motivated to study philosophy. Learning philosophy is difficult, takes time: one must be motivated to persevere. If there is no important source of true moral opinions other than high-level, theoretical instruction, it is hard to see how anyone could even begin to obtain them. Seneca expresses this point at 94.50 – 51. Referring to the intellectualist picture of the practically infallible agent with a perfect grasp of moral principles, he says: ad haec autem tarde pervenitur ; interim etiam inperfecto sed proficienti demonstranda est in rebus agendis via. Hanc forsitan etiam sine admonitione dabit sibi ipsa sapientia, quae iam eo perduxit animum ut moveri nequeat nisi in rectum. Inbecillioribus quidem ingeniis necessarium est aliquem praeire: ‘hoc vitabis, hoc facies’. Praeterea si expectet tempus quo per se sciat quid optimum factu sit, interim errabit et errando inpedietur quominus ad illud perveniat quo possit se esse contentus; regi ergo debet dum incipit posse se regere.

It is interesting to compare this picture of moral development with that suggested by Aristotle in Book 1 of the Nicomachean Ethics. For Aristotle, the starting-point of ethical reflection is the collection of ethical phenomena one brought up in good habits will have; the impetuous young and those poorly habituated, then, cannot benefit from moral theory. It is clear, both from this passage and others, that Seneca also lays great stress on something similar to this notion of moral habituation. The difference, however, is that Aristotle not unreasonably conceives of habituation as, if not an entirely non-intellectual activity, at least something different from philosophy ; for Seneca, the techniques of moral training are, or at least can be, part of philosophy. On one level, this divergence reflects a difference between Aristotelian and Stoic conceptions of philosophy : for the Stoics, philosophy is the road to happiness tout court, the completely autarkic ars vivendi; as a result, they have an obvious incentive to assimilate anything morally edifying to philosophy. Yet it is clear that this explanation is not exhaustive. For Seneca, guidance through praecepta does not precede doctrinal philosophy in the sense that the former stops before the latter begins; rather, technical and non-technical instruction share a complex and ongoing interaction. Moreover, as we have seen, it is not the case that the work of praecepta is entirely sub-rational. Seneca thus has strong justification for treating precept-giving as a part of the same activity as doctrinal instruction: the two modes are pursued at the same time, toward the same end, and by the same person, the philosopher-teacher. Still, the final verdict on precept-giving assigns it a subordinate, instrumental, and temporary role. Perfect wisdom is entirely independent; the perfectly wise person reasons directly from her inerrant knowledge of the good. In the famous Stoic paradox, only the wise person is a king, because only he makes and issues the law we all must follow: the rest of us are only subjects

96

6. Education

of that law. Regi ergo debet dum incipit posse se regere: the proper sort of preception amounts to instruction in how to give instruction. Its terminal point is independence, kingship, and godlikeness.

6.2 Decreta We have already seen, in Part Five, both how Seneca’s letters themselves invite us to doubt the effectiveness of doctrinal instruction and why they must ultimately affirm that effectiveness. To recall, Seneca repeatedly signals his impatience with logical and metaphysical issues of dubious relevance for moral improvement; he openly and boldly mocks traditional Stoic syllogismarguments; and his practice as a moral guide is in the main non-technical. On the other hand, Seneca is a committed Stoic; the letters do include technical issues; and, most importantly, the doctrines at issue in letter 95 are primarily ethical doctrines, and so of more evident relevance for conduct than logical or physical doctrines. We have also seen that the objectors in 95 are anti-theoreticians. An argument against them cast in theoretical terms might be satisfactorily pitched to third parties, but would necessarily be unpersuasive to the objectors themselves. It is important to reflect that Seneca’s answer to them meets them on their own ground, making a plausible case to people who are themselves ignorant of technical philosophy that they might find something of value in it. Interestingly enough, this dynamic lends a constant protreptic cast to the defense of technical didaxis; the techniques of preceptive philosophy are used to justify non-preceptive philosophy. One of these justifications is that philosophical doctrines or decreta tie the various moral instructions which we rely upon into a unity. This point had already been anticipated at the beginning of 94. First, precepts are introduced as pertaining to particular social roles (94.1, quae dat propria cuique personae praecepta), while decreta are said to be all-encompassing: Cleanthes utilem quidem iudicat et hanc partem [sc., preceptive philosophy], sed inbecillam nisi ab universo fluit [i.e., from decreta]. 95.12 echoes this language in defending decreta: inbecilla sunt per se et, ut ita dicam, sine radice quae partibus dantur. This characterization of precepts as intrinsically partial and doctrines as universal is actually more problematic than Seneca sees or admits: some precepts, including some quoted by Seneca in letter 94 (such as ab alio expectes alteri quod feceris) are intended to apply universally, nor is it clear that each point of doctrine, taken individually, applies to the entirety of one’s life in any meaningful sense. It is clear that to some extent Seneca’s defense of precepts shifts the focus away from the strictly role-based conception of them which Aristo attacks in 94 (sic vives cum patre, sic cum uxore). It must be admitted that Seneca is not consistent here: while in 94 he defends precept-

6.2 Decreta

97

giving by assimilating it to non-technical guidance at any level of generality, in 95 he maintains that precepts are limited in their usefulness qua intrinsically specialized. Nonetheless, there are other ways in which Seneca is justified in speaking of the totality of decreta. In the most obvious sense, the body of technical doctrines forms a unity in a way that precepts do not: as has been clear since Plato’s “early” dialogues, the sum of an untutored person’s normative beliefs will not be self-consistent, let alone systematic, without rational scrutiny. Secondly, precepts are logically dependent on doctrines: the latter explain and justify the former. This point, it should be noted, is essentially true by definition; moreover, it would be accepted by opponents of doctrinal instruction as well. That is to say, an account of why just precepts are just is eo ipso a doctrine, and the objectors in 95 do not present themselves as philosophical skeptics about the existence of such accounts. Accepting this point means conceding that, in some passages and to some extent, Seneca’s opponents are composed of straw. Decreta tell you why just things are just; surely that is worth something. Looking more closely, though, Seneca’s discussion provides an interesting account, and one framed in practical terms, of what that is worth. At 95.5 Seneca says that an agent lacking the totality of moral education (ab initio formatus et tota ratione compositus) cannot be entirely committed to doing what is right: non potest toto animo ad honesta conari, ne constanter quidem aut libenter, sed respiciet, sed haesitabit. There are several claims here: precept-giving can in fact motivate an agent to pursue morally correct actions, but the fact that a person has a positive motivation to do right does not mean that he is not subject to perverse motivations; the doctrinal content of Stoicism, by contrast, will prove to the agent that such sources of motivation (emotional disturbance, the corrupt value-judgments of ordinary people) are entirely vain and specious. Decreta, then, are not only one source of virtuous motivation, as praecepta are; rather, they also immunize an agent against contrary sources of motivation. For the objectors, whose central concern is to ensure that people behave well, Seneca argues that the technically educated are more reliably good. Furthermore, to do the right thing not only after it has been commanded but also because it has been commanded is not to do it because it is right; the moral value of a good action is at least compromised if the agent does not act willingly (libenter). Of course this point is of fundamental importance within the Stoa, but it will also be persuasive to the presumed interlocutors outside of it. The objectors contend (95.7) that philosophy, the ars vitae, can be learned by non-technical instruction as much as other skills can. Seneca’s response focuses again on the comprehensiveness of philosophy in comparison to other crafts: omnes istae artes circa instrumenta vitae occupatae sunt, non circa totam vitam; itaque multa illas inhibent extrinsecus et inpediunt, spes, cupi-

98

6. Education

ditas, timor. At haec quae artem vitae professa est nulla re quominus se exerceat vetari potest; discutit enim inpedimenta et iactat obstantia. An analogy is implicitly drawn: as other crafts are to philosophy, so are praecepta to decreta within philosophy. Knowledge of seamanship (the objectors’ example) does not guarantee that a pilot will practice it successfully, or at all: circumstances other than the pilot’s knowledge contribute to his result. Philosophy, by contrast, is superordinate to all crafts, it is itself completely autarkic (since it includes knowledge of how to overcome barriers to itself, as the phrase ‘iactat obstantia’ makes clear), and its correct performance is its own goal. Similarly, knowledge of (or allegiance to)16 a precept is defeasible, and can potentially be overcome (by spes, cupiditas, timor) by extrinsic factors. Decreta, by contrast, are indefeasible, total, and logically prior to praecepta.17 As such, the teaching of decreta provides a feeling of certainty and freedom from anxiety (95.12: decreta sunt quae… securitatem nostram tranquillitatemque tueantur). They are a yardstick, a straightedge (regula) by which to measure our actions. This feature commends decreta in two ways. From the perspective of an agent who receives them, they provide confidence that her life as a whole is on the right course. From an external or social perspective (presumably the more pressing one for Seneca’s imagined opponents, though by far less important for Seneca himself and for his school), they make the performance of good actions more reliable, more precise (95.39): Putemus aliquem facere quod oportet: non faciet adsidue, non faciet aequaliter ; nesciet enim quare faciat. Aliqua vel casu vel exercitatione exibunt recta, sed non erit in manu regula ad quam exigantur, cui credat recta esse quae facit. Non promittet se talem in perpetuum qui bonus casu est. Seneca’s arguments about the comprehensiveness18 and autarky of philosophy, fronted at the beginning of the letter, play the same role as many of his remarks to Lucilius towards the beginning of the course of training. At 6.1 – 3, for example, Seneca makes large claims about the benefits he is reaping from philosophy : intellego, Lucili, non emendari me tantum sed transfigurari… concipere animo non potes quantum momenti adferre mihi singulos dies videam. To Lucilius and at that point, these claims will have amounted only to personal testimonial and implied promise; it remains for Seneca to convince his friend by actually leading him through the philosophical life, as the remainder of the letters portray. Similarly, Seneca’s claims that philosophy or the craft of life is in principle insuperable by things outside of it are at the same time important for him to make and unlikely, on their own, to be persuasive to his imagined audience. 16 Knowledge of a precept qua normative fact would have to include its rational justification and would therefore necessarily count as knowledge of a decretum. 17 As 95.12 claims: hoc interest inter decreta philosophiae et praecepta quod inter elementa et membra: haec ex illis dependent, illa et horum causae sunt et omnium. 18 These comments include a relatively uncommon (in the letters) insistence on the importance of pars naturalis philosophiae (95.10).

6.2 Decreta

99

The promise of invulnerability is an appealing one; this appeal may encourage the skeptical but curious “reader” to delve further into Seneca’s presentation of his case. Nearly a third of the letter is concerned with answering the opponents’ observation, uncontested by Seneca, that the complexity of philosophy seems to be inversely correlated with the moral hygiene of the community. As was claimed earlier, (5.4, “Why this debate?”) this issue is actually quite serious, and its inclusion here a mark of some intellectual courage on Seneca’s part. His answer, that philosophy must be more complex to treat ever more serious psychological illness (95.29: adversus tantam morum eversionem omnia conanda sunt), may seem doctrinaire and implausible, but from the internal or first-personal perspective, I suggest, it is rather more resonant. Attention to Seneca’s rhetorical strategy is important here. For several pages we are treated to a lurid, almost grotesque portrait of contemporary moral temptations and failings. We have little reason to doubt Seneca’s obvious calculation that his Neronian readership will have recognized what he was talking about, and felt the appeal when at last Seneca offers his philosophical therapy as solution. Yet even if we remain skeptical about this discourse of moral decline, Seneca is undoubtedly writing for a Roman audience with a historical memory of almost two centuries of upheavals political, social, and economic. In the face of these upheavals, Seneca argues that a simple return to mos maiorum is untenable, that people in an advanced, sophisticated culture need an ideology of right and wrong, a sense of the purpose of their lives, which matches the sophistication of their circumstances. Under the guise of accepting and himself engaging in traditional moral conservatism, Seneca actually challenges that conservatism. This section is a sort of captatio benevolentiae; the opponents will have heard a moral critique with which they identify, but the conclusions drawn from this critique will lead them away from their original position. In fact, what we might call the emotional aspect of Seneca’s defense of doctrinal philosophy is pervasive in letter 95. There is a clear motivation for this strategy : Seneca’s objectors are skeptical about the value of dry and overly subtle disputation. How does one try to change such a person’s mind? Surely not, by dry and overly subtle disputation. This dynamic recapitulates in miniature the problem with which Seneca wrestles in these letters, and with which, as I argued in Chapter Five, the letters as a whole wrestle: how does the philosophical life get started, and how can it be sustained? By the middle of letter 95, Seneca has provided both positive and negative incentive for his opponents to be converted to doctrinal philosophy : on the one hand, philosophy provides utter certitude and tranquility ; on the other, prevailing contemporary mores have reached such an intolerable state that we need something powerful to lift ourselves out of depravity. For Seneca, what allows decreta to function in this way is simply that they are true, while the allure of vice is false; an agent can learn the truth, understand it, and rely on it

100

6. Education

to guard against temptation (95.35): si volumus habere obligatos et malis quibus iam tenentur avellere, discant quid malum, quid bonum sit, sciant omnia praeter virtutem mutare nomen, modo mala fieri, modo bona. If people learn what is truly valuable, if they know what is right, the result will be not only to cure their souls but also to instill confidence, to make them committed (obligatos) to moral goodness. Seneca’s opponents may still at this point maintain a reasonable skepticism about whether, in practical terms, philosophy students really do grasp the truth about ethics in so thorough a way as to render them impervious to vice. They can scarcely, however, deny the possibility that an emotional commitment to goodness might be morally spine-stiffening for them. That is to say, the service which decreta accomplish can be rendered even if an agent’s grasp of their truth is imperfect. 95.35 continues: Quemadmodum primum militiae vinculum est religio et signorum amor et deserendi nefas, tunc deinde facile cetera exiguntur mandanturque iusiurandum adactis, ita in iis quos velis ad beatam vitam perducere prima fundamenta iacienda sunt et insinuanda virtus. Huius quadam superstitione teneantur, hanc ament; cum hac vivere velint, sine hac nolint.

The analogy is striking. A soldier’s commitment to duty, underwritten by feelings of religious awe and taboo, is the first tie that binds him to his duty. The simple fact of having such a loyalty is effective in ensuring continued adherence, even when difficult; the freely chosen act of declaring this loyalty, of explicitly binding oneself to one’s principles, adds further commitment in the same way that a soldier’s oath does. The implications of this analogy are far-reaching. The Stoa, an actually existing community of adherents, is a kind of army. Virtue is its flag. Valuing virtue alone, following nature, subsuming all other objects of pursuit to virtue: in these tasks is our endless, hard campaign. Eventually, Seneca believes, an agent can do the right thing in a completely dispassionate way and from his total and systematic knowledge; until then, he needs a deep, emotional commitment to safeguard his attempts to progress in his understanding of the system. Seneca’s bold diction here (quadam superstitione teneantur) leaves no doubt that he is thinking in developmental terms: one needs significant motivation both to continue to study philosophy and to be good in a bad moral climate. The more developed one’s rational understanding the less one needs emotional commitment; but getting to the former is much more likely with a healthy quantity of the latter. It is evident that the letters as a whole include a great deal of this sort of instruction, of Seneca’s attempts to create in his student just such an emotional commitment to his principles. It is less obvious, though arguably as important, that Lucilius also makes an explicit act of self-commitment. Letter 37, as was noted earlier (5.2), begins with Seneca applauding Lucilius for

6.2 Decreta

101

taking an oath to moral goodness. The text reads thus (37.1): quod maximum vinculum est ad bonam mentem, promisisti virum bonum, sacramento rogatus es. Deridebit te, si quis tibi dixerit mollem esse militiam et facilem. One might, I suppose, resist the inference that the two passages form a deliberate intratext. I do not insist; but the pairing of both the chain metaphor and the military metaphor in both contexts is, I think, at least suggestive.19 Just as Seneca’s defense of precepts involves a broadening of the notion of precepts to include all non-technical tools of suasion, part of the defense of decreta involves insisting on the salutary psychological impact of the phenomena which tend to accompany the existence of philosophical schools, such as a shared name and vocabulary, a corpus of canonical literature and principal beliefs, a history, and officially sanctioned lists of Great Men. At this point Seneca has his opponents point out that some people don’t need the benefits which formal doctrinal commitment brings (95.36). He accepts their contention, saying that a naturally good moral disposition makes this possible in some cases. But decreta can make such people even better, and can help those with a less admirable character to improve (95.37): ceterum, ut illos in bonum pronos citius educit ad summa, et hos inbecilliores adiuvabit malisque opinionibus extrahet qui illis philosophiae placita tradiderit.20 Everyone, whether naturally more or less virtuous, is subject to the false beliefs assent to which is the cause of vice; only knowledge of the truth is reliable against this threat. The point, initially at first, sounds decidedly Aristotelian (95.37): quaedam insident nobis quae nos ad alia pigros, ad alia temerarios faciunt; nec haec audacia reprimi potest nec illa inertia suscitari nisi causae eorum eximuntur, falsa admiratio et falsa formido. An individual might be predisposed to a deficiency of a virtue in one respect but an excess of it in another. The use Seneca makes of this point, however, is classic Stoic cognitivism: only a therapy of one’s beliefs can cure this disease. This appropriation of a framework better known from another school is par for Seneca’s course (as the use of Epicurus in the early books makes clear), and also recapitulates the argumentative strategy instantiated throughout the letter, in which the commonsense objections are not refuted but agreed with, but in such a way that they end up ultimately serving Seneca’s Stoic ends. The next movement in the argument works in a similar way (95.40 – 46). It’s not enough to do the thing commanded by a precept; one must also do it in the right way and for the right reason (95.40): faciet quod oportet monitus, con19 Neither vinculum nor militia appears as metaphor more than a handful of times in the letters. 20 It is impossible, I think, for contemporaries to follow this debate without being reminded of the similar debate about whether adherence to a religious ideology makes a person better in practical terms. In this passage, Seneca has anticipated the objection familiar to us, that many people who profess the ideology are nonetheless quite bad. Yes, he says, but without it they might be worse. Cf. Evelyn Waugh, who when confronted with the apparently vast gap between his personal viciousness and his devoted Catholicism, is said to have remarked “that may be true… but without my faith I should scarcely be human.”

102

6. Education

cedo; sed id parum est, quoniam quidem non in facto laus est sed in eo quemadmodum fiat. This point, cast in a very particular and maximalist way, plays an outsized role in Stoicism, but it also has resonance to the philosophically untutored. Accordingly, at 95.43 Seneca gives an example of this phenomenon which is instantly recognizable: amico aliquis aegro adsidet: probamus. At hoc hereditatis causa facit: vultur est, cadaver expectat. To ensure that individual actions line up with the correct moral motivation, then, we need an all-encompassing commitment to morality (95.43 – 44): Eadem aut turpia sunt aut honesta: refert quare aut quemadmodum fiant. Omnia autem honeste fient si honesto nos addixerimus idque unum in rebus humanis bonum iudicarimus quaeque ex eo sunt; cetera in diem bona sunt. Ergo infigi debet persuasio ad totam pertinens vitam: hoc est quod decretum voco.

It is possible to see this argument as ignoratio elenchi: having promised a defense of technical instruction in philosophy, Seneca not only serves up a defense of an overall moral commitment instead, but also redefines the former as the latter (hoc est quod decretum dico). However, Seneca does have substantial justification for this move: an effective overall moral commitment, he is arguing, would have to be one an agent really believes in, and believes on well justified grounds (persuasio ad totam vitam pertinens). One could not so believe without learning decreta under their original description. The argument, rather than switching the terms of the debate to more easily defended ground, shows how the debate’s initial terms lead appositely to that ground. At this point, if his arguments are deemed persuasive, Seneca has accomplished many of his initial goals in letter 95. He has shown that it is important to know the reasons lying behind one’s ethical beliefs. He has vindicated the importance of working these beliefs into a whole, showing how even fine principles, if rationally ungrounded and piecemeal, can easily fall victim to the flash and dazzle of vice. He has motivated his audience to agree that people in their own flashy and dazzling milieu stand in particular need of just such a complete moral persuasion. Finally, he has also shown the value and the power of the prospect of such a persuasion, to guide and to fortify the early stages of one’s philosophical development. These achievements set the stage for the next movement in the letter (95.47 – 56). In this brilliant, stirring, and highly compressed passage Seneca moves from the general level to the particular, demonstrating how all of the points rehearsed above can be actualized. The passage shows how high-level facts produce particular normative results (how decreta generate praecepta). It shows how a collection of such facts forms a whole. And most importantly, it motivates the skeptical objector, who has by now perhaps been persuaded of the value of having some overall moral persuasion, to persevere in the study of the overall persuasion which Seneca in point of fact endorses. The passage does not seek discursively to prove the truth of these principles. It could not be

6.2 Decreta

103

expected to do so; that task, for Seneca, can only be carried out by the lifelong course of philosophical education as a whole. Rather, what the passage achieves is to defend and to promote technical philosophy to a doubter as much as one can without actually engaging in it. The passage begins with the phrase quomodo sint dii colendi solet praecipi. What follows is an interplay of claims about the nature of the divine along with the consequences for religious practice which follow from them. There is no reason to light lamps for the gods: they don’t need light. There is no reason to bring them gift-offerings: completely self-sufficient, it belongs to their nature to help us. It is incorrect in principle to try to appease the gods by such means: qua gods they are perfect, and perfection is incompatible with causing harm. The gods do punish and coerce, but for our own good (95.50, specie boni). To prevent them from punishing us, then, the only effective means is not to deserve punishment: Vis deos propitiare? bonus esto. Satis illos coluit quisquis imitatus est. Proper religious practice is far from being a central concern of the letters; in fact, this is the only extended discussion of the question in the collection. Though an oddity, several factors explain its inclusion. For one, Seneca wants to show how decreta tend towards totality. To that end, the passage shows how knowing them generates correct conduct in respect to (what he takes to be) an exhaustive list of entities: gods (95.47 – 50), people (95.51 – 53), and “things” (quomodo rebus sit utendum, 95.54). Secondly, religious issues are perhaps the clearest case of an area of human conduct in which what we ought to do importantly depends on the correct answer to difficult and controversial questions. The Epicureans promise to free us from fear by proving to us that the gods are unmoved by human affairs; Seneca’s reformed theology offers the same security, but with (perhaps) greater emotional reassurance: the gods only want what is best for us, and moreover provide models21 for our behavior. Third, the topic provides another opportunity for Seneca to engage in dialectic with his conservative imagined objectors. Just as accepting their contention about the corruption of contemporary mores led to a defense of contemporary intellectual activity, Seneca’s discussion of religious practice leads here not to traditionalism but to a progressive and humane form of worship, shorn of ritual and of practices grounded in fear (95.48, molestis superstitionibus), and reinterpreted along purely intellectual and ethical lines. These themes receive further development in the next section, in which Seneca turns from gods to human beings, showing how the (presumed) truth about human nature produces general ethical injunctions (95.51 – 53). This crucial passage deserves to be quoted in full: Ecce altera quaestio, quomodo hominibus sit utendum. Quid agimus? 21 Role-modeling, so integral to Seneca’s defense of praecepta, is thus shown to be relevant to decreta as well.

104

6. Education quae damus praecepta? Ut parcamus sanguini humano? quantulum est ei non nocere cui debeas prodesse! Magna scilicet laus est si homo mansuetus homini est. Praecipiemus ut naufrago manum porrigat, erranti viam monstret, cum esuriente panem suum dividat? Quare omnia quae praestanda ac vitanda sunt dicam? cum possim breviter hanc illi formulam humani offici tradere: omne hoc quod vides, quo divina atque humana conclusa sunt, unum est; membra sumus corporis magni. Natura nos cognatos edidit, cum ex isdem et in eadem gigneret; haec nobis amorem indidit mutuum et sociabiles fecit. Illa aequum iustumque composuit; ex illius constitutione miserius est nocere quam laedi; ex illius imperio paratae sint iuvandis manus. Ille versus et in pectore et in ore sit: homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto. Habeamus in commune: nati sumus. Societas nostra lapidum fornicationi simillima est, quae, casura nisi in vicem obstarent, hoc ipso sustinetur.

The fact that we are kin to each other imposes requirements on how we treat each other. The fact that gods and human beings qua rational are parts of a coherent whole renders it senseless to aggrandize ourselves at the expense of others. Equally, these facts render it superfluous, to some extent, to specify all the actions which are in accordance or at variance with them. The passage seeks to create the sort of moral vision described at 95.35 (prima fundamenta iacienda sunt et insinuanda virtus), the sort that a person might commit herself to, in advance of discovering it to be true. It is thus an emotional appeal, but one underwritten by a theory Seneca thinks can be rationally defended. There are several ways in which this emotional appeal works. First, there is the role of Nature (Natura nos cognatos edidit… haec nobis amorem indidit mutuum… illa aequum iustumque composuit). Nature functions here as a source of external sanction, a semi-personalized normative principle, and an uncorrupted ideal beyond and greater than ourselves. Seneca’s use of this concept is very much in his favor here, for Nature also, since the Presocratics, refers to the totality of the universe and to the sum of facts about it. (Meta)physics, the pars naturalis philosophiae: accepting Nature’s guidance means committing oneself to discovering what it is, and hence to technical philosophical study. Most importantly, its grandeur is intended to serve as motivation to do so. Another aspect of Seneca’s appeal in this passage is his attempt to arouse a feeling of identification with this grand and attractive principle. Nature and the gods are beyond us and grand. Yet we are also part of nature, we and the gods are limbs of a giant body. The laws which Nature issues are therefore our laws as well: they come from something of which we are parts. Moreover, they are issued not only to us but for us as well; the phrase miserius est nocere quam

6.3 Praecepta and Decreta: Destabilization and Convergence

105

laedi indicates that it is also incorrect in self-interested terms to transgress this law. Finally, and most strikingly, the passage appeals to solidarity and fraternity with all other people. Like the stones in an arch, we must stand together to stand at all. This is striking for several reasons. For one, although Stoicism clearly has the resources to promote itself in this way, this appeal in terms of the interests of others is in tension with, and usually yields in prominence to, the interior and solitary focus on the individual soul, the promise that virtue saves us (as individuals) from what makes us wretched. In this passage Seneca chooses to emphasize the external, other-centered side, however, in seeking to motivate an outsider to be interested in Stoicism. This choice is both noteworthy and, I think, admirable. Seneca’s thumbnail survey concludes with a brief discussion of “things” (95.54), to which is appended an equally brief discussion of the virtues (95.55 – 56). Having shown with some forcefulness how particular facts about the divine and about humanity entail important normative consequences, he is content merely to state that proper conduct concerning other matters (which he enumerates, in typical Stoic style, in a list of paired opposites: de paupertate, de divitiis, de gloria, de ignominia, de patria, de exilio) will depend on what their true nature is: aestimemus singula fama remota et quaeramus quid sint, non quid vocentur. By contrast with the grandeur promised by studying divine and human natures, the study of external advantages and disadvantages feels little more stirring than a bookkeeper’s calculations. Still, it is reasonable for Seneca to expect that an audience won over to the study of decreta by the preceding rhetoric will have been prepared to acknowledge their importance in less exciting contexts as well. The rhetorical order of exposition mirrors the pedagogical order, in this as in many other ways.

6.3 Praecepta and Decreta: Destabilization and Convergence Previous discussions of these letters have noticed that there is a basic problem concerning the two key concepts themselves. We have already seen examples of how both praecepta and decreta are introduced under a particular and fairly straightforward description, only to see their signification shift as Seneca’s defense of them develops. For this reason, approaching these letters under the assumption that each concept is and must be univocal is frustrating and, I think, ultimately futile. It is possible, of course, to interpret this fact about the letters uncharitably (see above, p.102). On the whole, I think it much more illuminating to treat the two basic concepts as subordinate in intent to the dialectic in which they are contained; if their meanings shift it is because Seneca develops throughout the text a portrait of philosophical education for which the original notions be-

106

6. Education

come increasingly inadequate. In other terms, the ultimate purpose of these letters is not to explore the distinction between praecepta and decreta, but rather the nature of the philosophical life and of philosophical training which the distinction allows Seneca to trace. Yet another way to put this same point is to say that, in the strictest sense, the distinction itself belongs more to Seneca’s opponents in the two letters than to his own conception of the philosophical life. If this is true it further undercuts the motivation, criticized at length in Chapter Four, to see the distinction as representing a part of the apparatus of Stoicism. To show that it is true, I will now conclude this lengthy discussion of the letters by tracing how 95 in particular deliberately destabilizes the praecepta/decreta distinction, bringing the two notions ever closer until ultimately they converge into a unified conception of philosophy. Already in 94 there are indications that the distinction is not hard and fast. At 94.31, for instance, Seneca claims that praecepta can help us, provided that our natural impulse to goodness (indoles naturalis) has not been irrevocably corrupted by vice. Against Aristo’s claim that only decreta can achieve this, he retorts: quid enim interest inter decreta philosophiae et praecepta nisi quod illa generalia praecepta sunt, haec specialia? Utraque res praecipit, sed altera in totum, particulatim altera. This passage is obviously problematic,22 since as it stands the point is much too strong: surely there are more differences between the two concepts than simply a difference in generality. Nonetheless, Seneca clearly intends to blur the distinction, and the following sentence does provide a sense in which they are similar : utraque res praecipit. The point is that both sorts of instruction produce (or convey) normativity ; conduct can either match them or conflict with them, and both insist that conduct ought to match them.23 Of course it is tendentious for Seneca to use the verb praecipere to express this contention for both praecepta and decreta; the fact that he does so, however, is clear indication that part of Seneca’s strategy is to defend praecepta from defenders of decreta by attacking the comprehensiveness of the distinction between them. Furthermore, just after this passage, at 94.35, Seneca rejects Aristo’s contention that precepts would have to be infinite in number to match the variety of circumstances and social roles by saying tenues autem differentias habent [praecepta] quas exigent tempora, loca, personae, sed his quoque dantur praecepta generalia. This further confuses the distinction: the earlier passage likened praecepta and decreta while claiming that the former are special rather than general; this one shows that even that difference is problematic. It is mostly, however, in letter 95 that the tensions underlying the praecepta/ 22 Annas 1993 100 – 102. 23 Similarly, at 94.37 Aristo attacks precepts by likening them to laws, which, he says, do not make us do what we should. Part of Seneca’s reply is to liken philosophy in its entirety (which must therefore include decreta) to law (94.39): Quid autem? Philosophia non vitae lex est?

6.3 Praecepta and Decreta: Destabilization and Convergence

107

decreta distinction come to light. It has already been remarked that the latter letter mirrors the former one in many ways; each argues for the inclusion of one sort of instruction against proponents of the other, each has a dialectical format in which objections are stated and then refuted, and so on. One particular way in which the letters are twinned strongly signals to us the fluidity of the basic concepts: considerations which in 94 tell in favor of praecepta end up, in 95, telling in favor of decreta as well. For instance, at 94.25 praecepta are said to guard against hypocrisy and the failure to live up to one’s own standards: scis amicitias sancte colendas esse, sed non facis. Scis inprobum esse qui ab uxore pudicitiam exigit, ipse alienarum corruptor uxorum… et non facis. Precepts help you activate the principles which, in some sense, you already know. 95.37 turns this around, saying of someone in the grip of falsa admiratio et falsa formido, and thus in need of doctrinal instruction, sciet pro patria pugnandum esse, dissuadebit timor, sciet pro amicis desudandum esse ad extremum usque sudorem, sed deliciae vetabunt, sciet in uxorem gravissimum esse genus iniuriae paelicem, sed illum libido in contrarium inpinget. Not only is the agent once again said to act against his knowledge, but two of the three examples match exactly those from the previous passage. Likewise, at 94.30 – 31 precepts are defended as useful for those of lesser natural endowment: hoc qui dicunt non vident alium esse ingenii mobliis et erecti, alium tardis et hebetis, utique alium alio ingeniosiorem. Ingenii vis praeceptis alitur… At 95.36, the existence of harder cases tells in favor of decreta; some people become good without careful instruction, Seneca admits, adding at illis aut hebetibus et obtusis aut mala consuetudine obsessis diu robigo animorum effricanda est. For a third example, both precepts (at 94.46) and doctrines (95.12, 95.39, 95.57, et passim) impart moral confidence and certitude to those who follow them. Finally, one of the most important functions of praecepta is their ability, when cast into noble sententiae (such as te nosce) to serve as self-generated exhortations to virtue. Strikingly, at the rhetorical peak of the defense of decreta (95.53), where Seneca is demonstrating how truths about humanity generate ethical norms towards other people, he expresses the point by recourse to one of the most famous sententiae of all: homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto.24 It is also worth noticing that the two clauses of this sententia effectively bridge the praecepta/decreta divide all by themselves, moving from fact to value, from description to prescription, from theoretical to practical. I am human: understanding this truth requires knowing what it is to be human; understanding that produces the realization that one is a part of an organic whole, and that therefore one must take care to respect and promote 24 Terence, Heauton Timorumenos 77. In the original context, the joke is that Chremes, the character who delivers the line, is abusing the high-sounding principle to justify being nosy about another character’s private business. The line is also quoted by Cicero, De Officiis 1.30, likewise in regards to sympathy for other people’s projects and interests.

108

6. Education

other human beings. Seneca’s literary artistry reveals his concern to show that the two concepts are thoroughly imbricated. By themselves, these thematic and verbal echoes of letter 94 in letter 95 would perhaps be merely suggestive. Towards the close of 95, however, the convergence of the concepts is explicitly put. According to Posidonius (95.65), both non-technical (suasionem et consolationem et exhortationem) and technical instruction (the example he gives is aitiologia, the analysis of causes) are useful. One example of the latter is the branch of study he called ethologia and others call characterismus, which is the technical description of each virtue. Of this discipline Seneca says (95.66): haec res eandem habet vim quam praecipere; nam qui praecipit dicit ‘illa facies si voles temperans esse’, qui describit ait ‘temperans est qui illa facit, qui illis abstinet’. Already this brings the two concepts very close. The only difference is this: alter praecepta virtutis dat, alter exemplar. In 94 it was precepts which were defended by likening them to exempla; here, technical instruction is like that. Here as there, good examples incite our inborn propensity of goodness: proponamus laudanda, invenietur imitator.25 The surprising connection between decreta and the emotions represents another area of convergence. Aristo, as opponent of precept-giving, is portrayed in 94 as a rigid hyper-rationalist, to whom Seneca unsurprisingly insists that reverentia and pudor can work beneficial effects on our behavior. Yet doctrinal philosophy is far from bloodless when defended in 95, which shows us the cosmos as a force larger than ourselves, a beautiful ideal to strive towards, a mission for us to identify with. Moreover, the doctrinal content of Stoic philosophy, when limned but not yet fully understood, fills us with amor, even with superstitio, and provides us with the needed motivation not to blanche at the many “hard sayings” of Stoic ethics, and to reach the point of learning and rationality from which pre-rational and emotional commitment is no longer necessary.26 Finally, the indivisibility of praecepta and decreta is asserted at 95.60, where Seneca charges both sets of opponents with practical incoherence: Praeterea non intellegunt hi qui decreta tollunt eo ipso confirmari illa quo tolluntur. Quid enim dicunt? praeceptis vitam satis explicari, supervacua esse decreta sapientiae. Atqui hoc ipsum quod dicunt decretum est tam mehercules quam si nunc ego dicerem recedendum a praeceptis velut supervacuis, utendum esse decretis, in haec sola studium conferendum; hoc ipso quo negarem curanda esse praecepta praeciperem.

25 Here we see, on the side of decreta, the same process of study and discernment of apparent virtue which was argued from letter 120 (p. 91 – 92) to be an important part of the value of preceptgiving. 26 This paradoxical inversion of cool argument and heated rhetoric is enacted on the rhetorical level by both leaders taken as wholes: 94 is far more buttoned-up and restrained than 95.

6.4 Summary

109

“Doctrines are useless” is a doctrine. “Don’t bother with precepts” is a precept. This move suggests two different points: praecepta and decreta are too closely related consistently to reject one in favor of the other, and anyway in practical terms it would be absurd to try. Naturally one might feel that if Seneca’s opponents are really susceptible to so easy a refutation then all this effort may have been misplaced; coming as it does, though, at the end of a dialectical process which has shown us precisely how and why the objectors’ initial positions were nave and inadequate, the argument effectively signals that the force of the distinction itself has been spent. This destabilization is ultimately harmful not to Seneca but to his opponents: it is they not he who need the distinction in order to exclude one or the other kind of instruction.

6.4 Summary Nonetheless, in exploring the distinction Seneca finds occasion to defend his pedagogical method. To close, I will briefly summarize what I take to be the most important results of the defense of either side. The defense of precepts is primarily a defense of the preceptor. A decent moral guide is a lone good influence in the face of the many bad influences from a wicked community and its perverse values. The preceptor’s influence is a useful but limited one; not everyone will be aided by it. But even someone with quite serious defects retains the vestiges of his naturally good moral personality, and so can be reformed by this influence. Such a person recognizes in his moral superior something of value, and so comes to respect the guide as an authority figure. This respect motivates the student not only to obey but (more importantly) to imitate the preceptor. The effectiveness of the precept itself can be understood in terms of an agent’s self-precepting. A person who endorses and internalizes good moral maxims has an internal standard to measure himself by, an internal model of authority to respect and to imitate. This sort of guidance is most important in the early stages of moral reform; the way it works is at first pre-rational. As the agent’s understanding increases, precepts increasingly engage his intellect, by reminding him of his commitments, by focusing his attention on what is morally relevant. Without the prerational aspect, moral reform would be unlikely to get started in the first place; the general run of people is simply not ready for lectures on moral theory. Once progress is well established, however, precept-giving begins to give way to the force of rational conviction of the truth, as delivered by decreta. Doctrines or decreta are the truth about moral philosophy, the reasons why we ought to do what is right. One would scarcely need a defense of that, if it were agreed that one could come to know it. Since a skeptic could only be convinced of that by actually being persuaded by a system of doctrine, the

110

6. Education

defense of decreta is largely a pragmatic one. It is also protreptic, an advertisement of what one might gain from allowing oneself to do the doctrinal study which will provide the actual persuasion. For Seneca the most important point about decreta is their unity and comprehensiveness. This unity imparts confidence and reliability to an agent: a person with systematic understanding will not be tempted to act against his principles, since he knows why it would be mistaken to do so. A precept can motivate a person to do the right thing, but the good influence it provides can be overridden by extrinsic bad influences; decreta, if fully internalized, provide the same positive motivation and also render the agent impervious to contrary, pathological sources of motivation. Furthermore, their comprehensiveness allows the agent to understand not only what the right thing to do is, but also how and why : decreta insure correctness of motivation, and in general are more thoroughly action-guiding than mere precepts. Most affectingly, finally, decreta provide something which Seneca feels we badly need: something to believe in, a vision of the meaning of our lives. Before (and while) our rational understanding takes shape, such a vision gives us a strong emotional commitment to goodness. Best of all, thinking our way through this vision and reasoning within it give us powerful tools for querying and reforming accepted values towards ever greater decency and humanity.

7. Conclusion The preceding study has, I hope, uncovered many interesting features both of these letters and of their author’s thought. Much of it has been corrective, of course. In fact, to a certain (and by no means contemptible) cast of mind, my results will be found disappointing, even if they are accepted. That is to say, exegetes of early Stoicism have no choice but to find relevant evidence where they can, since no complete work from the founding generations of the school survives. It is in fact a signal achievement of scholarship to have reconstructed as much of the system as it has, and to have proven, in the face of the many hostile witnesses to Stoicism, the essential brilliance and philosophical sophistication of its founders. Nonetheless, the gaps in our knowledge are large and important. When Seneca, therefore, casts his 94th letter as recapitulating a debate between Cleanthes and Aristo, and then follows up with so long a discussion, carried out with actual arguments and counter-arguments instead of mere doxographical reportage, scholars keen to reconstruct this fascinating period of intellectual history could not reasonably have failed to notice. Unfortunately, as Chapter Four argued, there is less there for them in this text than they will have hoped. It would be doubly disappointing, but to many minds not surprising, if the story ended there, in a failed attempt to prospect for Hellenistic gold in muddy Imperial waters. Instead, as Chapters Five and Six would have it, these letters are fascinating in their own right. Reading them closely and in the light of the Epistulae Morales as a whole reveals their author to be far more original and subtle a thinker than is often appreciated. It also shows Seneca to be a literary artist of the first rank, and it shows that (and how) this artistry does not merely share space with the philosophical material but reinforces it as well. For Seneca positions his genius where these two domains, the literary and the philosophical, converge.1 To them one may add, the pedagogical. All three endeavors require, and in different ways find sublime expression in, the understanding of humanity, of the nature of the human person. In literature this is a truism, and needs no elaboration. In philosophy, at least in the Classical tradition, there is no possibility of an ethics divorced from moral psychology, no escape from the core questions about the soul, its works, and its ends: how we should live is framed by who and what we are. So, too, in pedagogy : you must know what people are like in order to teach them effectively. The letters pioneer the

1 This distinction is not only not anachronistic but crucial to Seneca’s own self-portrayal of his project, as we have seen.

112

7. Conclusion

literature of philosophical pedagogy ; letter 94 and 95 are the part – the most important part – where Seneca defends and explains this endeavor. Perhaps the most impressive result of this sort of reading is the demonstration of Seneca’s remarkable awareness of and control over his project. Harmonies and consiliences abound. A book which is intermittently technical and non-technical divides philosophical education into these two sides, defending both in both ways. A book which insists on the value of teaching by example is itself an exemplum of a teacher-student relationship. A moral message urging us to dwell within ourselves, to make ourselves transparent to our friends, to strive for self-consistency, is delivered in the rich voice of Seneca’s I, the creator and subject of the letters, the brilliant literary creation whom we observe attempting to do just those things. This study has traced a particularly important aspect of Seneca’s selfreinforcing method in the letters; my hope is that it will encourage similar thinking in respect to other texts, topics, and techniques in Seneca’s philosophical opus. At the very least, I hope to have undermined the impulse merely to graze in Senecan texts: there is more to be taken from them than that method allows, and what you do take from them in that way is likely to be incomplete. None of which, it deserves to be stressed, compromises Seneca’s interest as a Stoic thinker. Although I have rendered a negative verdict on the relevance of these letters for Stoic views on rules in deliberation, I would not want to leave the impression that Stoic and Senecan studies are separate things. Rather, it is a testament to the enduring vibrancy of the Stoic movement that the school counted so thoughtful an exponent, and one of such independence of mind, so long after its founding. The breadth of Seneca’s knowledge and appreciation of philosophical traditions other than his own is abundantly clear ; his allegiance to the Stoa is, as the defense of decreta in letter 95 especially shows, the result of his ethical intuitions nearly as much as it is the source of them. He shows both that his techniques are effective for conveying Stoicism, and that Stoicism can sustain the psychological complexity which his techniques require. This, I propose, is exactly the kind of knowingness one would hope to see in a thoughtful adherent of a mature tradition. Maturity, in fact, is exactly the right note to close on. Seneca the senex, the theorist and practitioner of adult education, the septuagenarian author and character of the letters, is an adult writing to an adult, for the benefit of adults. By contrast, Epictetus, the other great Stoic teacher, is a lecturer to teenagers;2 his alternate portrait of the philosophical life is stirring for its courage, its idealism, its utter assuredness, but those same qualities are also, in their way, limitations. Let us say that Epictetus knows his audience. Seneca, in the letters at least, writes in a quieter and more qualified tone; he distrusts bombast and refuses to force his meaning. Plurimum proficit sermo, quia minutatim inrepit 2 I do not mean this to disparage either Epictetus or teenagers.

7. Conclusion

113

animo: disputationes praeparatae et effusae audiente populo plus habent strepitus, minus familiaritatis. Philosophia bonum consilium est: consilium nemo clare dat (38.1). Perhaps as much as the pedagogical principles defended in 94 and 95 and practiced throughout the letters, it is Seneca’s respectful and demanding writing which little by little steals into his readers’ minds and continues to give good counsel.

Bibliography

Algra, K., Barnes, J., Mansfeld, J., and Schofield, M. (e+ds.) (1999) The Cambridge History of Hellenistic Philosophy, Cambridge Annas, J. (1993) The Morality of Happiness, Oxford Barney, R.(2003) ‘A Puzzle in Stoic Ethics’ Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 24, 303 – 340 Bellincioni, M.(1978a) Lettere a Lucilio: Libro XV: le lettere 94 e 95, Brescia — (1978b) Educazione alla Sapientia in Seneca, Brescia Bonhçffer, A. F. (1996). The Ethics of the Stoic Epictetus transl. W.O. Stephens, New York Boyle, A.J. (ed.)(1987) The Imperial Muse, vol. 1, Berwick, Victoria Branham, R.B. and Goulet-Caz, M. (eds.) (1996) The Cynics: The Cynic Movement in Antiquity and its Legacy, Berkeley Brennan, T.(1996) ‘Reasonable Impression in Stoicism’, Phronesis 41(3), 318 – 334 — (2003) ‘Stoic Moral Psychology’ in Inwood, B. (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to the Stoics, 257 – 294, Cambridge — (2005) The Stoic Life: Emotions, Duties, & Fate, Oxford Brunschwig, J. and Nussbaum, M. (eds.) (1993) Passions and Perceptions, Cambridge Cancik, H.(1967) Untersuchungen zu Senecas Epistulae Morales, Hildesheim Campbell, R.(1969) Seneca, Letters from a Stoic, Harmondsworth Cooper, J.M.(2004a) Knowledge, Nature, and the Good: Essays on Ancient Philosophy, Princeton — (2004b) ‘Justus Lipsius and the Revival of Stoicism in Late Sixteenth-Century Europe’ in Bender, N. and Krasnoff, L. (eds.) New Essays on the History of Autonomy, New York, 7 – 29 Cooper, J.M. and Procop, J.F. (eds.) (1995) Seneca: Moral and Political Essays, Cambridge Edwards, C.(1997) ‘Self-scrutiny and Self-transformation in Seneca’s Letters.’ Greece and Rome 44: 23 – 38 Elsner, J. and J. Masters (eds.) (1994) Reflections of Nero, Cambridge Giusta, M.(1964) I Dossografi di Etica, Turin Gould, J.B.(1970) The Philosophy of Chrysippus, Leiden Graver, M.(2007) Stoicism and Emotion, Chicago Habinek, T.(1998) The Politics of Latin Literature: Writing, Identity, and Empire in Ancient Rome, Princeton Hachmann, E.(1995) Die Fhrung des Lesers in Senecas Epistulae Morales, Mnster Hadot, I.(1969) Seneca und die griechisch-rçmische Tradition der Seelenleitung, Berlin

116

Bibliography

Harrison, S.J. (ed.) (2001) Texts, Ideas, and the Classics. Scholarship, Theory, and Classical Literature, Oxford Henderson, J.(2004) Morals and Villas in Seneca’s Letters: Places to Dwell, Cambridge Hijmans, B. L., & Grimal, P. (1991). Snque et la prose latine: neuf exposs suivis de discussions, Vandœuvres-Genve Ierodiakonou, K. (ed.) (1999) Topics in Stoic Philosophy, Oxford Inwood, B.(1999) ‘Rules and Reasoning in Stoic Ethics’ in Ierodiakonou, K. (ed.) Topics in Stoic Philosophy, Oxford, 95 – 127 — (2003) (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to the Stoics, Cambridge — (2005) Reading Seneca: Stoic Philosophy at Rome, Oxford — (2007a) Seneca: Selected Philosophical Letters, Oxford — (2007b) ‘The Importance of Form in Seneca’s Philosophical Letters’ in Morello, R. and Morrison, A.D. (eds.) Ancient Letters, Oxford, 133 – 148 Inwood, B. and Donini, P. (1999) ‘Stoic Ethics’ in Algra et al. (eds.) The Cambridge History of Hellenistic Philosophy, 675 – 738, Cambridge Ioppolo, A.M.(1980) Aristone di Chio e lo Stoicismo Antico, Naples. Kidd, I.(1978) ‘Moral Actions and Rules in Stoic Ethics’ in Rist, J. (ed.) The Stoics, Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 245 – 258 Lana, I.(1991) ‘Le ‘Lettere a Lucilio’ nella letteratura epistolare’ in Hijmans, B.L. & Grimal, P. Snque et la prose latine: neuf exposs suivis de discussions, Vandoeuvres-Genve: Fondation Hardt, 253 – 311 Leeman, A. D.(1953) ‘Seneca’s plans for a work “Moralis Philosophiae” and their influence on his later epistles’ Mnemosyne 6, 307 – 313 Long, A.A.(1988) ‘Socrates in Hellenistic Philosophy’ Classical Quarterly 38, 150 – 171 — (1996) ‘The Socratic tradition: Diogenes, Crates, and Hellenistic Ethics’ in Bracht Branham, R. and Goulet-Caz, M. (eds.) The Cynics: The Cynic Movement in Antiquity and its Legacy, Berkeley, 28 – 46 Mazzoli, G.(1989) ‘Le “Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium” di Seneca: valore letterario e filosofico’, ANRW II. 36.3: 1823 – 77 Mitsis, P.(1993) ‘Seneca on Reason, Rules, and Moral Development’ in Brunschwig and Nussbaum (eds.) Passions and Perceptions, Cambridge, 285 – 312 (1999) ‘The Stoic Origins of Natural Rights’ in Ierodiakonou, K.(ed.) Topics in Stoic Philosophy, Oxford, 153 – 177 Morello, R. and Morrison, A.D. (eds.) (2007) Ancient Letters, Oxford Nussbaum, M. C.(1994) The Therapy of Desire, Princeton Pire, G. (1954) ‘De l’influence de Snque sur les Essais de Montaigne’ Les tudes Classiques 22 270 – 286 — (1958) Stoicisme et pdagogie. De Znon  Marc-Aurle. De Snque  Montaigne et  J. J. Rousseau, Paris Rawls, J. (1955) ‘Two Concepts of Rules’, Philosophical Review, 64, 3 – 32 Reynolds, L.D.(1965) The Medieval Tradition of Seneca’s Letters, Oxford Rist, J. (ed.)(1978) The Stoics, Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London Russell, D.A.(1974) ‘Letters to Lucilius’ in Seneca, ed. C. D. N. Costa, London 70 – 95

Bibliography

117

Scala, M.(2001) ‘Lector in Seneca. Appunti per una lettura ipertestuale delle Ad Lucilium’ in Scienza, cultura, morale in Seneca, ed. P. Fedeli, Scrinia, 269 – 84 Schauer, F.(1991) Playing by the Rules: A Philosophical Examination of Rule-Based Decision-Making in Law and in Life, Oxford Schofield, M.(1984) ‘Ariston of Chios and the Unity of Virtue’ Ancient Philosophy 4, 83 – 96 Schçnegg, B.(1999) Senecas Epistulae Morales als philosophisches Kunstwerk, Bern Sedley, D.(1999) ‘The Stoic-Platonist Debate on kathÞkonta’ in Ierodiakonou, K. (ed.) Topics in Stoic Philosophy 128 – 152, Oxford Setaioli, A.(1988) Seneca e i Greci: citazioni e traduzioni nelle opere filosofiche, Bologna Striker, G.(1983) ‘The Role of oikeisis in Stoic Ethics’, Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy I, 145 – 167. Reprinted in Striker (1996) 281 – 298 — (1991) ‘Following Nature: A Study in Stoic Ethics’, Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 9, 1 – 73. Reprinted in Striker (1996), 221 – 280 — (1996) Essays on Hellenistic Epistemology and Ethics, Cambridge Tarrant, R.J. (ed.)(1976) Seneca: Agamemnon, Cambridge Too, Y.L.(1994) ‘Educating Nero: A reading of Seneca’s Moral Epistles’ in Elsner, J. and Masters, J., (eds.) Reflections of Nero, Cambridge, 211 – 224 Trillitzsch, W.(1971) Seneca im literarischen Urteil der Antike. Darstellung und Sammlung der Zeugnisse, Amsterdam Vander Waerdt, P.A. (ed.) (1994) The Socratic Movement, Ithaca, New York White, N.P.(1985) ‘Nature and Regularity in Stoic Ethics’ Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 3, 289 – 305 Williams, G.D. (ed.)(2003) Seneca: De Otio and De Brevitate Vitae. Cambridge Wilson, M.(1987) ‘Seneca’s Letters to Lucilius: a revaluation’ in Boyle, A.J. (ed.) The Imperial Muse, vol. 1, Berwick, Victoria, 102 – 21 — (2001) ‘Seneca’s Epistles reclassified’ in Harrison, S.J. (ed.) Texts, Ideas, and the Classics: Scholarship, Theory, and Classical Literature, Oxford, 164 – 88

Acknowledgments This monograph is the revised version of a Harvard dissertation, which was accepted in 2007 for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. I am grateful to my readers, Professors Richard Tarrant and Raphael Woolf, and in particular to my advisor, Professor Gisela Striker, for the excellent guidance they provided me. Professor Striker recommended this work for publication in Hypomnemata and has been tireless in her assistance to me. It is not that this work would be incalculably worse but for her supererogatory efforts; rather, it would not be at all. Nor do these efforts exhaust my debt to her. Her emotional support during the drafting and revising of this work, the intellectual tutelage which began years before that, and the friendship she has shown are to me unpayable beneficia and the source of an immense but effortlessly light burden of pietas. I have many other debts of gratitude as well. The Department of the Classics at Harvard was not just a place of study but an emotional and intellectual home, supporting me both during and after the completion of my dissertation. The Department of Classical Studies at Duke University, where I was Visiting Assistant Professor in 2008 – 2009, was likewise most congenial, both as a first academic appointment and as locus for my revisions. These revisions were finished, to come full circle, in the summer of 2009 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, once again among the incomparable people and resources of Harvard Classics. Professor Brad Inwood has read much of my work over the years, including the dissertation, and has made many probing comments and suggestions. I am most grateful for his intellectual generosity and his collegial encouragement. Other scholars who have read and commented on aspects of my work on Seneca include Professors Kathleen Coleman, John Henderson, Timothy Joseph, Justin Lake, Richard Thomas, and Benjamin Tipping. I thank them all, as well as Andy Miller, my former colleague as graduate student and lasting friend. Nor will I ever forget my intellectual engagement, and above all friendship, with Isaac J. Meyers, may his memory be for a blessing. A portion of this work was presented at the University of Toronto; related work was presented in lectures at Bucknell University, Duke University, and Northwestern University, where I will shortly take up the position of Assistant Professor of Latin. I thank all who participated, and especially my future colleagues at Northwestern, for their helpful comments. One saves the best and dearest for last, and accordingly I thank my parents, John and Laura, my aunt Frances, and my sisters and brothers for their long

120

Acknowledgments

years of love and kindness. And above all, my wife Julie and our daughter Madeleine, the constant causes of and companions to my indecently fortunate life.

Index

Aristo of Chios 7, 9–12, 15–19, 25–32, 36, 39–41, 53, 60–62, 78–81, 85, 87–89, 95f., 101, 106, 108, 111 Aristotle 95 authority 17, 55, 90, 109

happiness 20, 27, 47, 58, 69, 81, 86, 95 health 21, 26, 28f., 36, 38, 43, 46, 59, 63f. Herillus 30 hypocrisy 17, 22, 93, 107

Chrysippus 26–29, 35, 50, 52, 79f., 94 Cicero 27–30, 36, 49, 52–54, 64, 86, 93, 107 – De Officiis 30, 36, 49f., 52–54, 57, 64f., 107 Cleanthes 11, 16, 26f., 78, 80, 96, 111 Crates 25, 93 Cynicism 25–28, 30, 80, 115f.

indifference 26–29, 31, 49 intellectualism 37, 61, 73, 88

decreta 11–13, 16, 20–23, 31, 33, 36–41, 46, 54f., 57–59, 61, 63f., 81–83, 96–110, 112 deliberation 10, 12f., 33–65, 112

law 10, 18, 34f., 49, 90, 92, 95f., 104–106 life, philosophical 16, 19–22, 26f., 30, 61f., 70f., 78, 82f., 98f., 106, 112 logic 26, 30, 79 Lucilius 10, 12, 15, 20, 61f., 67–79, 83, 86, 90f., 94, 98, 100

education 11, 13, 61, 67–69, 74, 76f., 79f., 83, 85, 91f., 94, 97, 103, 105, 112 Epictetus 51, 112 Epicureanism 49, 79, 103 Epicurus 68, 70, 79, 93, 101 exempla 9, 19, 23, 56, 69, 71, 76, 90–92, 108 Fabianus Papirius 74 friendship 46, 67f., 70–72, 78, 90, 93, 119

justice

kathÞkonta 40, 56f., 64f. knowledge 18, 23, 28f., 31, 53, 60, 95, 98, 100f., 107

medicine 16.f, 20f., 69, 88f. moral psychology 29, 31, 85, 111 nature 10, 19, 25–27, 29–31, 33, 36, 38, 46–53, 55–59, 61–64, 82, 85–89, 100, 103–106, 111 Nero 82, 99 oikeisis

gods 22, 58, 103f. good, concept of 91f.

22, 26, 29, 52–54

48, 51, 86

personae 40, 76, 96, 106 philosophy : – benefits of 64, 72, 95, 98, 101

122

Index

– commitment to 22, 61, 72, 82f., 93, 100, 102, 110 – compared to crafts 20, 22, 37, 81, 88, 97f. – completeness of 22, 95, 98 physics 20, 26f., 30, 104 Plato 78, 92, 97 platonism 75 Posidonius 18, 92, 108 praecepta 10–13, 21–23, 31, 33–42, 46, 54–64, 76, 83, 85–98, 102–109 preceptor 17, 19, 61, 87, 92, 109 preferred indifferents 27f., 30, 49, 51–53 progress 57, 61, 70–73, 82, 90–92, 100, 109 Pyrrho 30 Quintilian

9

rules 10f., 13, 33–46, 50, 53–55, 57, 59–64, 67, 82, 112 – entrenchment of 34f. Seneca – De Beneficiis

9, 73f.

– De Clementia 79 – Epistulae Morales 10, 12, 29, 54, 67–77, 83, 86, 60, 111 – Moralis Philosophiae Libri 75 – Tragedies 10 slaves 16, 61, 72f., 75 Socrates 70 soul 16–18, 22, 29, 37, 41, 47, 56, 67–72, 78, 81f., 88f., 93, 100, 105, 111 Stoicism 9–13, 15–23, 25–32, 33–65, 67–69, 73f., 79f., 82f., 85f., 88f., 91, 94–96, 101f., 105f., 108, 111f. telos

27, 29, 31, 50, 80

vice 10, 16, 19, 21f., 26–28, 31, 39, 47, 58, 69f., 78, 82, 85f., 89f., 92, 99–102, 106 virtue 10, 16, 18, 22f., 25–31, 34, 39–41, 47, 49–55, 58, 80f., 85f., 89, 92, 100f., 105, 107f. Zeno of Citium 78–80

25–28, 35, 47, 50, 70,

123

Index

Index of Passages Cicero De Finibus 2.35 3.60 3.70 4.43 4.78 5.23 De Officiis 1.6 1.30 3.13 3.20 3.21 3.29-30 3.42 3.90

30 50 52 28-29 27, 30 30

30 107 49, 52 36 52 53 52 53

Disputationes Tusculanae 5.85 30 Diogenes Laertius 6.11 7.12 7.37 7.85-86 7.87 7.104 7.107-109 7.160 7.162

80 25 80 30 30 26 36 26, 27 29

Galen De Placitis Hippocratis et Platonis 7.2 28, 29 Plutarch De Stoicorum Repugnantiis 30 27

Quintilian Institutio Oratoria 10.1.125-131

9

Seneca De Clementia 2.5.2-3

79,-80

Epistulae Morales 1 2 2.4 3 3.3 4.1 5.1 6 6.1-3 6.1 6.5 6.6 6.7 7 7.9 10.1 16 17 19 24 25 27.1 28 28.2 28.10 29 31 32 33 33.7 34 36

70 72 68, 70 68, 78 70, 79 79 70 74 98 70 70, 73 78 93 68, 78 70, 77 93 72 72 71 72 78 94 72 94 94 78 72 68 68, 73 78 72 77

124 37 38.1 39 42.5 44 45 45.2 46 47.11 48 58 60 60.1 64.7-8 68 70.11 71.1-4 72 75.15 76.3 78 81 82 89 91 93 94.1-4 94.1 94.2 94.3 94.4 94.5-17 94.11 94.14-15 94.16 94.18-36 94.21 94.23 94.24 94.25 94.26 94.27-28 94.29 94.30-31

Index 72, 100-101 112-113 73, 74 77 78 74 73 72 61, 75 72 75 73 85 69 71 61-62 62 73 82 77 72 74 72 73 77 73 16 54, 96 80, 39 40 76 16-17, 60 39 46, 107 39, 40 17-18 48 56 88 93, 107 93 55, 89, 90 89 109

94.31 94.32 94.33 94.34 94.35 94.36 94.37-51 94.37-39 94.37 94.38 94.39 94.40-41 94.42-44 94.42 94.43 94.46 94.50-51 94.50 94.51 94.52-74 94.52 94.53 94.54 94.56 94.60 94.68-69 94.71-72 95.1-3 95.1 95.4-6 95.5 95.7-12 95.7 95.12 95.13-35 95.29 95.35 95.36-38 95.36 95.37 95.39-46 95.39 95.43-44

40, 89, 106 37, 56 57 94 40, 60, 62, 86, 106 89 18-19 90 106, 107 92 56, 57, 106 90 90-91 56 55 107 95 56 57 19 87 85-86 86 86 56 56 87 76 76 20 59, 97 20-21 97-98 96, 98, 107 21 99 86, 100 21-22 101, 107 101, 107 22, 101-102 98, 107 102

125

Index 95.45-59 95.46 95.47-56 95.51-53 95.53 95.57 95.58 95.60-73 95.60 95.65 95.64 96 106 106.1-2 107 108.1 113 117 120 120.5 120.8 120.11

22-23 107 58, 102-105 38, 62, 64-65 85-86, 107 107 58 23 63, 108-109 108 108 72, 73 73-74 75 72, 73 75 76-77 74 91-92 92 92 92

124

74

Sextus Empiricus Adversus Mathematicos 7.12 29 Suetonius De Vita Caesarum 4.53

9

Stobaeus 2.75.11-76.8 2.75.11

27 51

Tacitus Annales 13.42

9

Terence Heauton Timorumenos 77

Wenn Sie weiterlesen möchten ... Serena Zweimüller

Lukian »Rhetorum praeceptor« Einleitung, Text und Kommentar Hypomnemata, Band 176

Kommentar zu Lukians Satire »Rhetorum praeceptor« mit einem Einleitungsteil zu rhetorisch-literarischer Gestaltung und Intertextualität, zum soziokulturellen Hintergrund der Zweiten Sophistik und zur Verortung der Schrift im zeitgenössischen Bildungsdiskurs. Lukians Satire setzt sich mit der Deklamationskultur der Zweiten Sophistik und mit Fragen rhetorischer Bildung auseinander. Serena Zweimüller untersucht in einem Einleitungsteil die rhetorisch-literarische Gestaltung, das dichte Geflecht intertextueller Bezüge sowie die Verortung des Textes im zeitgenössischen Bildungsdiskurs. Der Lemmakommentar behandelt neben philologischen und historischen vor allem narratologisch-interpretatorische und stilistisch-rhetorische Fragen. Den einzelnen gedanklichen Einheiten der Schrift sind jeweils einführende und zusammenfassende Analysen vorangestellt.

Johannes Breuer

Der Mythos in den Oden des Horaz Praetexte, Formen, Funktionen Hypomnemata, Band 178

Durch die eingehende Analyse von Praetexten, Formen und Funktionen der Mythologumena in neun ausgewählten Gedichten entwirft Johannes Breuer eine Phänomenologie des Mythos in den horazischen Oden. Mythen sind ein konstitutives Element der horazischen Oden. Während sich die ältere Literatur zum Mythos bei Horaz vor allem Detailaspekten zuwandte oder sich mit dem Zusammentragen von Stellenbelegen begnügte, untersucht Johannes Breuer Praetexte, Formen und Funktionen der Mythologumena in neun ausgewählten Gedichten und macht diese Erkenntnisse vor dem Hintergrund der literarischen Tradition, der Spezifika des römischen Mythos und der Intertextualitätstheorie für die Interpretation fruchtbar. Die eingehenden Einzelanalysen münden in eine Phänomenologie des Mythos in den horazischen Oden.

Hypomnemata

Untersuchungen zur Antike und zu ihrem Nachleben

Band 183: Silvio Bär

Band 180: Euree Song

Quintus Smyrnaeus »Posthomerica« 1

Aufstieg und Abstieg der Seele

Die Wiedergeburt des Epos aus dem Geiste der Amazonomachie. Mit einem Kommentar zu den Versen 1–219

Diesseitigkeit und Jenseitigkeit in Plotins Ethik der Sorge

2009. 640 Seiten, gebunden ISBN 978-3-525-25293-2

Diese Arbeit stellt den erstmaligen Kommentar zu einem Teil des ersten Buchs der Posthomerica des Quintus Smyrnaeus, eines lange verkannten Epikers der Kaiserzeit, dar.

2009. 184 Seiten, gebunden ISBN 978-3-525-25290-1

Dieses Buches bietet eine systematische Erschließung der Ethik Plotins am Leitfaden der doppelten Sorge, nämlich der eudämonistischen Sorge um das Selbst und der providentiellen Sorge um die Welt.

Hypomnemata

Untersuchungen zur Antike und zu ihrem Nachleben

Band 179: Thomas D. Frazel

Band 177: Christos Simelidis

The Rhetoric of Cicero’s »In Verrem«

Selected Poems of Gregory of Nazianzus

2009. 264 Seiten, gebunden ISBN 978-3-525-25289-5

I.2.17; II.1.10, 19, 32: A Critical Edition with Introduction and Commentary

Während die Reden Ciceros meist im Blick auf die rhetorische Theorie (vor allem Aristoteles; Cicero, De inuentione) analysiert werden, wählt Thomas D. Frazel einen neuen Weg.

2009. 284 Seiten, gebunden ISBN 978-3-525-25287-1

Dieser Kommentar von vier Gedichten des Gregor von Nazianz (I.2.17; II.1.10, 19, 32) enthält eine Einführung in seine Dichtung, ihren Inhalt sowie ihre literarischen und formalen Eigentümlichkeiten