Class Reflections: Seneca's Letters 33, 120, and 65
something excellent happened at the end of class, prompted by an idea Seneca proposes
Last week, we finished up our short study of classical Stoic philosophy in my Foundations of Philosophy class. I assigned them several of Seneca’s Letters to read, but as it turned out, we really only got to discussing the key ideas of three of them. That’s in part because, with the exception of one of them, I spent a good bit of our class time providing them examples and applications, and soliciting examples that we could use ourselves in discussion to illustrate Seneca’s key points.
We looked at:
Letter 33, which is officially about “maxims”, in which Seneca responds to Lucilius asking him to provide some Stoic maxims that he can remember and have ready to use.
Letter 120, which returns to a theme common in the letters and Seneca’s earlier works, the four cardinal virtues, why they are important for us to develop, and how human beings acquire conceptions of what they are
and Letter 65, which has to do with the notion of causes, in which Seneca finds a way to bring together Plato’s and Aristotle’s differing conceptions of causes, and then introduces an interesting wrinkle of his own
Working our way through these three letters in our class session, we were exploring three majorly important areas of philosophy. You probably already see that letter 120 has to do with ethics or moral philosophy, and that letter 65 fits solidly into the field of metaphysics. But you might not realize at first that letter 33 has some key implications for epistemology, particularly within our late modern, internet-permeated culture.
So let’s start there. “Maxim” is not a term that my students are familiar with. They’re too young to even recall there being a rather bro-oriented “men’s magazine” by that name back in the day. They do know the sorts of short statements Seneca is talking about by other terms, though, like “proverbs”, “sayings”, or even “principles”. And especially a term that has come to have much greater use and scope in our own current age than it did in the pre-internet era I grew up in: “quotes”.
They all know about these, and they’re generally familiar with ways to find quotes online from various writers and about particular topics. Or at least attributed to those writers, since as we discussed, many of the supposed “quotes” out there are actually fake, that is, not by those thinkers. The only way to really be sure of course, is to go and find the quotation in the author’s works somewhere. This is a matter with epistemological important.
Even if the quotes or maxims are actually by the author who they are supposed to be derived from, that doesn’t mean that they are actually true or good. I started them off with a facetious example, a line from a classic KISS song, which interestingly many of them know well enough to be able to fill in the blank. “I want to rock and roll all night,” I put on the board, and then ask them what comes next, and several of them blurt out “and party every day”.
We spend some time unpacking what this would involve as guidance for one’s life. Is this a possible course of action? Not really, since when does one sleep if both day and night are allotted to rock n roll and partying? Even more so once I explain to them that in rock music from the 1960s to the 1980s “rock and roll” is a euphemism for getting it on, having sex. Clearly the quote or maxim we could derive from it: “you should rock and roll all night and party every day” is not great life advice.
I ask them to think about other song lyrics that seem to provide ideas about how we can live our lives, make decisions, set ourselves priorities, deal with situations and problems. It turns out that there’s not a lot of very useful lines contained in most songs when we think them through. Another one we look at is a partial quote from Nietzsche, “what doesn’t kill one makes one stronger”, which leaves off the really important framing “the military mindset”. It’s a favorite line for many artists, and sounds really cool, but as life-advice, it’s pretty silly bullshit, isn’t it?
Shifting to letter 120, I ask them to recall the four main moral virtues we have been discussing, as we moved through Platonic, Epicurean, and Stoic philosophy (with Aristotle being an outlier in this), and they rattle off wisdom, justice, temperance and courage. And that’s good, that they do recall them at this point. Some stuff is sticking. Letter 120 is a good one for them, because of two key things Seneca is stressing, two things they need to read, hear, and think about.
One of these matters is why as human beings we need each of these virtues. It’s one thing for younger people to learn from an older professor in a class that there are certain character traits that are generally viewed as good, so it would be smart for them as younger people to either develop and act in accordance with them, or at the very least give lip-service to them and pretend to have or at least care about them. That might sound a bit cynical on my part, but that’s actually a starting point, and you do have to start somewhere. What Letter 120 drives home to them is what each of those virtues are for. Why do they need these virtues in order to have a shot at happiness? Seneca gives us reasons they can relate to bearing on why each of these virtues is something that they need in their lives and characters.
The other thing brings us back to an epistemological question. Where do we get our conceptions of these four virtues from. You could say: “Duh! Reading Seneca”. Ok, but where did he get his conceptions of them from? “Reading earlier Stoic philosophy”. Cool. Where did they get their notions of these from? You can’t just keep pushing it back forever, and at least in ancient Greek philosophy the answer isn’t going to be “a god told someone.” Seneca uses the term “analogy” (analogia) to explain a process by which someone does something(s) that seems remarkable and excellent to us, and from thinking and talking about this we get some imperfect conception of what a virtue is, for example courage or fortitude.
This isn’t just how people originally get their notions of the virtues, conceptions that are then improved upon, perfected, and taught to us in a systematic manner. It is how nearly all of us still in the present got and still get our conceptions of the virtues, experientially, through seeing or hearing about what human beings not only are capable of but actually do. The “official teaching” helps us to consolidate and systematize those notions we get through analogy, and that’s not nothing, but we do need those experiences to give those ideas some points of traction and attachment within the scope of our lives.
Shifting to the final letter we discussed in class, number 65, we go deep into the domain of metaphysics. We looked at Aristotle’s four causes (material, final, efficient, and final) as a metaphysical model a few weeks earlier, and before that we discussed Plato’s doctrine of the forms, which makes the forms, ideas, or archetypes in some sense the cause of the material and multiple things that “participate in” those forms. I even had my students engage in a discussion forum where they had to decide which metaphysical viewpoint makes the most sense to them and explain why.
But what if you could have both of them, and more? That’s what Seneca in effect pulls off in Letter 65. There he talks about 5 causes, four of them the familiar Aristotelian causes, and one of them the pattern or eternal archetype coming from Plato. He even uses the example of a sculpture to illustrate how all five of these interface with each other. And then he tells us that strictly speaking this isn’t the right number. It’s either too little, because there are other things that can be considered causes, or it’s too many, because there’s one other thing that is more genuinely a cause than them, namely God.
He adds another thing, to which I call the attention of my students. Where did Plato say those ideas or forms exist? In some other intelligible world, which is more real, more true, and better than the visible material world we inhabit. There’s also that one form that is still more true, real, and good than the others, the form of the good that is beyond being, described in Republic book 7 (AKA the form of the beautiful, or beauty itself in the Symposium). Seneca does something that later Christian thinkers will really get some mileage out of. He doesn’t identify God with the form of the good, as later thinkers will. But he places those Platonic ideas within the mind of God.
I occasionally will have a student come up to me after class, struck by the ideas we’ve discussed, wanting to talk about them a bit more. These class sessions, something new happened. Two of my most engaged students came up to me after class. One in the morning class session. One in the afternoon class session. Both of them wanted to know more about this notion of the Platonic forms existing in the mind of God. What sort of status would they have there? How does God know or understand these ideas by comparison to how we (much more dimly and imperfectly) do? Do all of us human beings have the same access to these ideas in God’s mind?
These were questions that they were motivated to ask, going beyond anything we were discussing in class, or that they might be asked about in their homework or later on an exam. These students were, for that space of time, captivated by an idea that they wanted to explore with someone who had thought a bit more than them about that same idea. It’s wonderful when that happens.