Seneca’s Advice About Reclaiming Our Past

the great Stoic philosopher Seneca on living with the past in the present

(this was previously published in Practical Rationality)

On The Shortness Of Life contains one of the most often-quoted passages by Seneca. It has to do with time. I’m sure you’ve seen people posting it in social media or even dropping it in conversation (often without saying what text it is from, and sometimes without even attributing it to Seneca!) Here it is, in its shortest form:

The present is brief, the future doubtful, the past certain.

You can find alternate translations, but they all basically convey the same basic idea. Past, present, and future each have their distinctive characteristics. People often use this passage, stripped from its context, to suggest that we should focus mainly on present or the future. And yet, that’s not Seneca’s point at all. One of the possibilities for us human beings is to not only dwell on but even to some degree dwell in the past. And to the contrary of those who tell us not to do that, engaging with our past can be a very good thing, as Seneca tells us, and as we’ll explore in detail here.

Going Past The Sound-Bite Quote

Let’s go back to the passage. Here’s a slightly longer and more robust form of it, right from Seneca’s text:

Life is divided into three parts: past, present, and future. The present is brief the future doubtful, the past certain.

The “three parts” referenced there are literally three “times,” tria tempora in the original Latin. We generally reference them in translation as” past, present, and future”, but what Seneca actually says is “what was” (quod fuit), “what is” (quod est), and “what will be” (quod futurum est).

He then shifts from this rather general and abstract language to center these temporal terms much more explicitly upon ourselves and our actions:

• what we do (quod agimus) is brief

• what we will do (quod acturi sumus) is doubtful

• what we have done (quod egimus) is certain

So it’s not simply the past, present, and future that Seneca counsels us about. He explicitly has in mind these times in terms of our own agency, in terms of what we choose, prioritize, plan, and do. Looking at the present and the future in this light can be helpful from a Stoic perspective. We have this all-too-brief present in which we can actually decide and do things, revise or persevere with our commitments, pay attention and act deliberately, or not. And we often do need reminders that the future is not entirely known to us, predictable and determinable , since we tend to forget that at times.

In a strict sense, we have almost no present at all. Seneca tells us:

The present time is very brief — indeed so very brief that to some people it seems to be nonexistent. For it’s always in motion, slipping by and hurrying on; it ceases to be before it arrives, and it no more suffers delay than do the firmament or the heavenly bodies, whose ever-tireless movement never lets them remain in the same position.

You might well expect that Seneca’s advice to us in this work would be to seize the present and to look solely to the future, the vector from which each present moment comes. But that’s not what he says here. Instead, he focuses on the dimension of time past, and he warns us by the example of the “preoccupied” (occupati, in Latin), who miss out on both their present and their past.

The Past As A Resource To Enjoy

The past is fixed, we often say. It is the time of what has already happened, what has already been done, what has already been suffered, stretching out beyond the present, far off into a distance that first eclipses our own lives, then extends further back into and past the lives of those older than us, along an often-dim trajectory we recover and call “history”, and yet further back than that.

In one way of looking at things, the past is simply gone. Every bit of it was a present moment when things existed and took place, did whatever they did, caused and effected, but all of those presents have disappeared. They’re now just past, no longer what exists, or what is real.

Of course, as we all know, while portions of the past might be forgotten, erased, denied, repressed, or just eroded, a good bit of the past remains “present” in a number of ways. One key aspect of this — which I won’t try to explore in detail here — is the complex interconnections of causes and effects between different things and moments. But there is another central way we access the past as well, one rooted in our own minds — memory.

Seneca points out that we have the capacity to look back into our past, not just to recall matters, but to enjoy the times that we no longer are living through. He writes as if we can even in a certain way inhabit this past. We can treat our own past as something like a lasting and secure possession. He tells us:

This is the part of our existence that is consecrated and set apart, elevated above all human vicissitudes and removed beyond fortune’s sway, and harried by no poverty, no fear, no attacks of disease. This part can neither be disrupted nor stolen away; our possession of it is everlasting and untroubled.

He goes on to reveal something very interesting about the times of the past:

Days are present only one at a time, and these only minute by minute; but all the days of time past will attend you at your bidding, and they will allow you to examine them, and hold on to them at your will. . .

By turning our minds back towards our past, we reawaken and gather together time we seemingly already left behind and lost. Time past filled by actions, events, and people from which we can derive enjoyment. We can remember those we loved, the things and places we delighted in or found inspiring, the events that made us who we are. We can linger at leisure over all these matters of the past. There is a catch, though. As Seneca tells us:

No one gladly casts his thoughts back to the past except for the person whose every action has been subjected to his own self-assessment, which is infallible.

This is admittedly a bit of hyperbole. No one, every, infallible. . . we need not follow Seneca in those qualifiers. Instead, we can take his point, which is that if we are going to dwell upon our own past, for that to be a positive experience, that past — or at least the portions we are recalling and reminiscing about — will have to be viewed by us as positive.

The Preoccupied Cannot Enjoy The Past

There are also many people who cannot enjoy this process of returning to their past, Seneca thinks. Although he could have talked about one reason that naturally comes to mind for some — a past that holds painful memories, traumas, disappointments, anxieties and sufferings — that’s not exactly what he focuses upon. It’s less what happened to us, or what we suffered, that holds us back from engaging the past, and more what we ourselves did that we don’t want to recall and dwell upon, he thinks.

We can also be deprived of opportunities to spend our present time connecting back to our own past. This occurs for those who are too busy in the present (and likely to remain so in their future). These are the “preoccupied,” in one important sense of the term. He tells us:

It takes a tranquil and untroubled mind to roam freely over all the parts of life; but preoccupied minds, as if under the yoke, cannot turn around and look backward.

Consider the analogy he provides:

Their life therefore disappears into an abyss; and just as a it does no good to pour any amount of liquid into a vessel if there’s nothing at the bottom to receive and keep it, so it makes no difference how much time we are given if there’s nowhere for it to settle, and if it’s allowed to pass through the cracks and holes in the mind.

If we are too preoccupied in the present, we aren’t really present, and we fail to retain that present as it slips into the past. Being too busy with matters, placing our focus on the wrong matters or concerns, keeps us from, as we say these days “making memories,” in the sense of generating pleasant or positive memories we can then recall and go over later on. We’re left just with a few words, the proverbial “bullet-points”, maybe a few photos or videos we recorded and then posted in social media. We lose the richness of the reality we experienced and took part in.

Consider how many people in the present this applies to:

Even the leisure of some people is preoccupied: in their country retreat or on their couch. in the midst of their solitude, and even though they’ve withdrawn from everyone, they are troubling company for themselves; their existence is to be termed not leisurely but one of idle preoccupation.

In this part of On The Shortness of Life, Seneca provides a wealth of examples of people who render themselves “preoccupied” in their leisure or “time off”. I highly suggest reading the text to see how relatable many of them remain today. One contemporary example many of us are guilty of would be habitual binge-watching of shows in streaming platforms. If you do that, think of a series you doled your time out to a while back, and ask yourself: how much do you really remember from that show you gave hours of your life to?

There is another sense to “preoccupied,” in the way that Seneca uses it in this work — and that also keeps us from being able to enjoy our past, but for different reasons.

Another Sort Of Preoccupation

Some people cannot have positive connections to their past — or at least to long and important portions of it — because their memories about that past are largely negative. This is different than having only hazy and disconnected recollections of what took place or what one did. For this sort of “preoccupied” person, they do — or can — remember what they did, but they don’t want to, because it makes them feel bad.

Seneca tells us that when these people have time to themselves,

there’s no pleasure in recalling something regrettable. And so, they’re unwilling to turn their minds back to times badly spent, and they dare not revisit the past because their vices become obvious in retrospect — even those that insinuate themselves by the allurement of momentary pleasures.

He provides us with a few perennial and general examples:

A man who has been ambitious in the scale of his desires, arrogant in his disdainfulness, unrestrained in prevailing over others, treacherous in his deceptions, and lavish in his prodigality — such a man must inevitably be afraid of his own memory

Of course, a person might misremember, perhaps even deliberately lie to themselves, about what they did, what attitudes they displayed, what values and motivations drove them, what lines of practical reasoning they followed. Human beings have a vast capacity for self-deception, particularly when facing the truth of things means feeling emotions one would rather not. Accurate judgements about one’s past self, the vices one had and displayed, bad and foolish decisions one made, how one wronged others, the damage one did to oneself — those are difficult for many to deal with. And so they might turn their own past into more pleasant, but false, recollections. They might even get other people in on the game.

What they have at their disposal in doing so, however, will not only be a false past, fake memories, deceptive recollections. It will be an impoverished past, one that lacks the robustness a genuine connection to reality provides. And whatever positive emotional responses can be generated by dwelling on a past that never really existed, one that might be the opposite of what one experienced, are going to be correspondingly weaker and less satisfying.

Many other people don’t rewrite their past by deceiving themselves about it, but simply avoid engaging with it. They might repress it entirely. They might tell themselves “no point thinking about the past — everything back there is not in my control” (something you see some would-be “Stoics” saying). They might become quite hostile with those who do want to discuss it. Why?

Because the past that they have available to them is one in which they did things wrong. They didn’t just make mistakes, or fall into errors. Like it or not, they actually did wrong. They wronged other people, or perhaps other things. They behaved viciously, for example doing the opposite of what the virtues of justice or temperance would have directed them to do.

In a way, the person who at least can be honest with themself about the bad things they did is better off than the self-deceiver, since at least they are in contact with the truth of those actions past. But facing what one did, and dealing with it as something that is past, and therefore is certain, something that will always and evermore be the case, that can be very painful. And if you’ve lived your life more or less badly up to this point, your past is liable to contain far more of these negative than positive experiences.

So the “preoccupied” in this second sense don’t have the past at their disposal, because they don’t have the kind of past that would be pleasant to think about. They are preoccupied with bad memories when they do approach them, and they are preoccupied in not recalling them the rest of the time. In fact, this may provide them with a motivation for being preoccupied in the first sense, finding ways to distract themselves.

A Conclusion For Now

We have obviously just scratched the surface here in this post. There is a lot more to say about the topics and issues we’ve raised, both from Seneca’s writings and from our interpretation and engagement with them in our contemporary 21st century situation.

One immediate takeaway is that, as Seneca stresses, we do possess our past through our memory, and we can enjoy it again through reminiscing over its moments, that is, if we have a stock of real and positive memories to draw upon.

Another point worth considering has to do with the present and how we use it. We should be mindful of the interconnections between the three times, present, future, and past, and about the fact that the present moment offers us — if we avoid wasting it through preoccupation — a time in which to deliberately, thoughtfully, and prudently create additional positive memories for ourselves.

I’ll return to this passage from Seneca down the line, and mine some of the further implications we can draw from it. But that’s it for the present (which by the time you read this, is already my past)!

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Gregory Sadler is the president of ReasonIO, a speaker, writer, and producer of popular YouTube videos on philosophy. He is co-host of the radio show Wisdom for Life, and producer of the Sadler’s Lectures podcast. You can request short personalized videos at his Cameo page. If you’d like to take online classes with him, check out the Study With Sadler Academy.