In a recent blogpost by jenn (https://jenn.site/in-my-misanthropy-era/), she starts her post with the following:
For the past year I've been sinking into the Great Books via the Penguin Great Ideas series, because I wanted to be conversant in the Great Conversation.
This has inspired me to do the same and I've now read through the first entry of the series: Seneca's On the Shortness of Life and I have some thoughts.
Before I go into those, I must admit that before reading this, I did not have a strong idea of who Seneca was, which is, perhaps, a strong indication of my prior knowledge about philosophy.
According to Wikipedia, Seneca the younger was an ancient roman stoic philosopher who lived from 4BC – AD 65.
I've come across the term stoicism on occasion and it's clearly something that people take seriously and try to live by, so I was interested in seeing how the writings of a 2000 year old philosopher would hold up today. My only other point of comparison for a 2000 year old book that people still think highly of hasn't held up well at all in my opinion (the bible), so I went in being quite skeptic.
On the shortness of life is separated into three chaptes. The eponymous first chapter; "Consolation to Helvia", a letter from Seneca to his mother about grief and sorrow after he was exiled, and "On Tranquillity of Mind", a letter to Serenus, another roman scholar who was asking for advice on his own struggles with stoicism.
All three chapters contain some interesting tidbits. Seneca looks at society and finds that the wealthy and famous often seem least happy with their place in life. That, on their deathbeds, the most accomplished realise how they have wasted their time. That their pursuits were in vain.
He notes:
It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing.
You will notice that the most powerful and highly stationed men let drop remarks in which they pray for leisure, praise it, and rate it higher than all their blessings.
What struck me about this is not the profoundness of the observation (although I can see how it might have been profound at the time), but that it is still applicable 2000 years later.
Whatever we have, it seems to never be enough and we are in constant pursuit of more. Seneca essentially observed what in 1971 Brickman and Campbell would name the Hedonic Treadmill
Unfortunately, this is kind of where the insight ends. Throughout the book he finds many different examples of people who died unhappy in an endless pursuit of some resource x and then goes on to give a counterexample who didn't have x, or who had x but gave it away on purpose and ended up more happy.
He makes one more observation that is sufficiently different that I want to note it, which is that it is seemingly more terrible to gain something and subsequently lose it, than to never having it in the first place. He writes:
Even their pleasures are uneasy and made anxious by various fears, and at the very height of their rejoicing the worrying thought steals over them: ‘How long will this last?’ This feeling has caused kings to bewail their power, and they were not so much delighted by the greatness of their fortune as terrified by the thought of its inevitable end.
This seems like a profound observation on first glance, for example we clearly see celebrities past their prime that desperately try to stay relevant and it looks like an agonising existence compared to never being famous at all.
However his conclusion to what should be done given this observation seems clearly wrong to me, or at least profoundly hypocritical and arrogant. Seneca writes that because he is seeing that wealthy people, famous people or powerful people are unhappy the only rational behaviour is to not pursue these things. In fact he goes a step further and says the only thing worthy of pursuit is a life of quiet studying.
He writes:
You must retire to these pursuits which are quieter, safer and more important. Do you think it is the same thing whether you are overseeing the transfer of corn into granaries, unspoilt by the dishonesty and carelessness of the shippers, and taking care that it does not get damp and then ruined through heat, and that it tallies in measure and weight; or whether you take up these sacred and lofty studies, from which you will learn the substance of god, and his will, his mode of life, his shape; what fate awaits your soul; where nature lays us to rest when released from our bodies; what is the force which supports all the heaviest elements of this world at the centre, suspends the light elements above, carries fire to the highest part, and sets the stars in motion with their proper changes – and learn other things in succession which are full of tremendous marvels? You really should leave the ground and turn your thoughts to these studies.
First of all, it seems quite intellectually dishonest to describe the occupation he views as lesser in a very sterile, matter-of-fact way, while using extremely eloquent and positively loaded language to describe the occupation he views as better, which is coincidentally the occupation that he himself is spending his time on.
Also, why is he suddenly hating on this basic job of keeping the grain safe, when all his prior observations where based on behaviour of people who are part of the upper echelons of society?
Presumably the guy who is keeping the grain dry is not living a life so full of debauchery that he'd kill himself when he finds that he only has 10 million sesterces in his bank account (which according to this reddit post was between 10 and 100 millions euro), a story that Seneca later tells about Apicius:
[...] then for the first time he was forced by the weight of his debts to look into his accounts. He reckoned he would have ten million sesterces left, and that living on ten million would be starvation: so he poisoned himself. What luxury, if ten million meant poverty! How then can you think that it is the amount of money that matters and not the attitude of mind?
This shift in narrative really undermines his otherwise excellent observations for me. If there is nobody to take care of the grain, Seneca would have a hard time spending so much time on his studies that he reveres so much. In fact, in Consolation to Helvia, a letter he sends to his grieving mother who has just lost her grandson (senecas son) and then seneca himself because he got exiled, he writes:
so I agree that this change of place brings with it the disadvantages of poverty, disgrace and contempt. I shall deal with these later; [...] As far as I am concerned, I know that I have lost not wealth but distractions. The body’s needs are few: it wants to be free from cold, to banish hunger and thirst with nourishment; if we long for anything more we are exerting ourselves to serve our vices, not our needs.
He writes this in an effort to console his mother; to show that exile isn't so bad after all, which is all well and good but he clearly deems poverty, hunger and thirst as problems that are easily solvable for him, which means he's probably not so poor after all.
He also isn't very self-consistent in his prescribed beliefs. According to his description, he wants to study and understand the nature of the universe. It is presumably a terminal goal for him; an end in itself, worthy of pursuit. But you cannot study the stars without developing telescopes. You don't invent telescopes without improving materials science to build better glassware, tools, techniques, etc. And the resources that are necessary to focus on these things are created by a society that pursues progress. They don't get invented by a society that is perfectly content with studying the things that already exist, thus immensely limiting the things that can be studied.
So if it is a great use of time to study the universe, then it must also be a great use of time to create the things that enable studying it.
This inconsistency doesn't invalidate his observations that debauchery and excess does not lead to happiness and it's fascinating how well those observations have held up. At the time those thoughts must have been truly profound and I would not be opposed to read more of them. But today, 2000 years later they are quite basic and I have a hard time understanding why so many people today care about his writings specifically to learn about their own lives as if he alone understood something about the world that was subsequently lost.