On the Shortness of Life - Seneca (50 AD)
en.wikisource.org
en.wikisource.org
But being a Stoic has little to do with the standard cliche of suppressing your emotions.
It is a philosophy that emphasises a rational response to nature, your own and that of the universe. "Follow nature" is a common Stoic saying - unconditionally accept that which is the case and do not disturb yourself with emotional upheavals about that which one can do nothing.
The French philosopher Pierre Hadot summarised the four features that constitute the universal Stoic attitude in his book "Philosophy as a way of life".
These are:
- We are part of of a Cosmic Whole, made up of the totality of the universe and the totality of all human beings
- There is nothing evil in nature. The only evil is moral evil in humans. Realising this makes a person serene and free, the only thing that counts is the purity of your own conscience.
- The belief in the absolute value of the human person
- The concentration on the present moment through training and spiritual exercises. Through the present moment we have access to the entire cosmos.
Much of modern cognitive psychology owes it roots to the work of the Stoic philosopher Epictitus. Much of our beliefs about human rights, the basic ethical doctrines of Christianity and our notions of healthy psychological self sufficiency all come from the Stoics.
And yes, I am a fan :)
Bet you Seneca never said that. It's a highly evolved modern form of nonsense.
What about natural disasters and diseases? I would call earthquakes and smallpox evil. They've killed more people than people have. If you want to play games with definition and only count things as evil if they intend to do harm, well then I'd still say they're bad and I would prefer we fixed them.
I think most people reserve 'evil' as a moral judgment of intentional acts. Plate tectonics and viruses having no intention would thus not be considered 'evil'. (That's not a word game; that's the common meaning.)
Smallpox is pretty much conquered. What's your plan for fixing earthquakes?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil Evil is defined as something that is immoral, causes pain or harm, is offensive, or threatening.
The group of people I hang out with skew toward the definition I accept, but really it's just a definition. My real objection is that stoics (and many others) rationalize the current state of things as good. The alternative is to recognize that there are still a lot of big problems humanity needs to solve.
I consider the eradication of smallpox the second greatest accomplishment of humanity so far. The first is the green revolution, headed by Norman Borlaug. His new strains of crops saved about a billion lives in the 20th century.
With regards to earthquakes: Just because we can't solve a problem doesn't mean it's not a problem. I'm not offering a solution, just pointing out that earthquakes kill people. I don't want people to die, so that makes earthquakes bad in my book. It also makes disease, aging, and lots of other things bad. Is does not imply ought.
Smallpox has been around for over 10,000 years. In the 20th century it killed more people than all the wars in this list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War#List_of_wars_by_death_toll
Yes, but with the extra 1 billion humans on earth, how many more animal species will be pushed into extinction each decade? How many more acres of rain forest will be destroyed every week? How many more barrels of oil will be pulled from the earth and burned into the air?
I'm personally against mass-scale chopping, burning, and killing, which I know that more people on this planet leads to.
Maybe the meme "the human species must expand at all costs" needs an evil check.
I agree that pollution is bad, but I care about human lives more than I care about the environment. Plants can't feel pain or suffer.
If we had the means, this would do: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_(The_Culture) . Obviously, planets are not safe unless very dead, which is also inconvenient.
(Not that I think that 'fixing' mortality would necessarily be a good idea ...)
Ah, that you see is the challenge of Stoicism. A Stoic does not believe that there is anything evil in nature, impersonal perhaps, but not bad. There is nothing evil about death, earthquakes, viruses or asteroids. They just do their thing and sometimes happen to go against human interests. This does not make them evil.
This is a difficult way to think at first, but it makes sense to me. Stand out under the stars and look up. Take a look at the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Ultra_Deep_Field). The universe is just so much bigger than me, so much bigger than my species. Why would I be surprised that it does not always operate directly in my interests?
Think about an ant in a busy railway station. If she gets trod on, does that make the commuter evil, or just indifferent to the ant's interests?
That is one of the lessons I have learned from observing nature. The complete absence of self pity, ruthlessly so.
The short poem 'Self Pity' by DH Lawrence illustrates this well:
"I never saw a wild thing
sorry for itself.
A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough
without ever having felt sorry for itself."
Think about an ant in a busy railway station. If she gets trod on, does that make the commuter evil, or just indifferent to the ant's interests?
I'm going to say both, but that's a disagreement on definitions. To move this debate along, I'll use your definitions of evil and bad. OK, natural disasters aren't evil. Disease isn't evil. Aging isn't evil. They're all indifferent to us.
With that out of the way:
Would you prefer a world with more or fewer natural disasters? Would you prefer a world with more or less disease? Would you prefer a world where people lived shorter lives or longer lives?
I guess I'll end with a quote as well:
The Patrician took a sip of his beer. "I have told this to few people, gentlemen, and I suspect I never will again, but one day when I was a young boy on holiday in Uberwald I was walking along the bank of a stream when I saw a mother otter with her cubs. A very endearing sight, I'm sure you will agree, and even as I watched, the mother otter dived into the water and came up with a plump salmon, which she subdued and dragged onto a half-submerged log. As she ate it, while of course it was still alive, the body split and I remember to its day the sweet pinkness of its roes as they spilled out, much to the delight of the baby otters who scrambled over themselves to feed on the delicacy. One of nature's wonders, gentlemen: mother and children dining upon mother and children. And that's when I first learned about evil. It is built in to the very nature of the universe. Every world spins in pain. If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior."
-- Terry Pratchett, Unseen Academicals
"Life is short, art long, opportunity fleeting, experiment fallible, judgment difficult."
The original Greek of this is a sublimely succinct rendering of wonderfully expressed aphorisms. It is found here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ars_longa,_vita_brevis) along with a pretty good explanation of what it all means in the original.
Of course, the underlying philosophical issue concerns man's standing as what has been called a "cosmic orphan" in the universe, i.e., the one creature acutely aware of its own mortality even while striving and dreaming to make something out of life while it exists. The Stoics, like Seneca, essentially said that we are wise when we make the most of what we have, whatever its temporal duration.
However, did you consider the idea that we are no wise in any way and we are in need of more observational evidence?
Anyway, props to the people Seneca was disagreeing with, who managed to be more honest with themselves about the unfairness of the universe and how easily it could have been improved than Seneca and many other modern rationalizers.
AD 50?
I presume he meant Rome, in which case, no, polytheism was the way and Jesus was worshipped alongside Mars, Jupiter, Julius Cesar, Augustus Cesar, etc. Even people who explicitly believed in only one god casually acknowledged the other gods, it wasn't a big deal to go to a local temple in another province to say a prayer, get a blessing, or make an offering.
Modern monotheism started around 325 at the First Council of Nicea. Since then, the dogma of monotheistic religions has evolved to say that there's one God, we understand him, and anyone else making claims of deities is false. But it's a bit of revisionist history - the vast majority of people in the West were "casually polytheistic" prior to 325, even people belonging to faiths that are now strictly monotheistic.
So the Jews weren't monotheistic and the Torah never had "you will have no gods before me" in it? You might say, "that's not modern monotheism" but how can that be as Christians worship that same God.
That's henotheistic not monotheistic. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henotheism#Judaism
Example, in Exodus 3:6 (NIV)
'Then he said, "I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob." At this, Moses hid his face, because he was afraid to look at God.'
So Abraham, Jacob and Isaac were monotheists. Moses was a afraid to look at God, not to look at "a god". Monotheism.
The reference to the triune creator God as plural is not unsurprising.
And yet you suppose that Seneca was unaware about the "unfairness" of the universe. Ah, but you misinterpret the essay. The point is not to convince you that your life, or all human life, is unequivocally "fair" - as certified by some mystical fairy God dancing in the Cosmos - but to convince you that the only way to maximize the "fairness" of your own life is by the action of the individual, by the application of correct concepts of human morality: by proper ethics.
As pertains to the subject of this essay, this means to act as if your life is of sufficient measure for you to fulfill yourself only if you do not waste it.
Moreover, to respond to your general dismissal of the essay, Seneca is writing on a particular instance of "unfairness" - the shortness of life, not all "unfairness" (e.g. being born with a genetic disorder). Of course, the Stoics were keenly aware of this type of "unfairness" as a defining characteristic of the human condition. Indeed, much of their philosophy is devoted to it. But a discussion of this would take us much too far afield and I'm afraid you would not be interested ...
Rome in the days of Seneca and the other major Stoics was far from having a single unified religion. There was a "state religion" following the co-opted Greek pantheon we all learn about in school (Jupiter/Zeus at the top, etc.), but that's far from the whole story. I've got a book sitting next to me right now which just provides a survey and nutshell summaries of the important traditions and major concepts, and it runs around 300 pages; "religion" in the Empire was a huge tangled collection of monotheistic groups, polytheistic groups, pantheistic groups, arguably atheistic groups, and a vast cobweb of cross-pollinations between Roman, Greek, Egyptian, Jewish and Christian traditions.
So a short answer to one of your questions is: "yeah, they had monotheism, but also they didn't".
As to Seneca and the Stoic view: the Stoics like to toss around the word "λόγος" (Logos). But every other philosophy and practically every mystery religion of the day also used the term (plus it got co-opted into Christianity early on), and though the intended meaning is similar in a lot of cases there are also crucial differences. Plus, λόγος and its root λέγω are extremely overloaded to begin with even in everyday Greek. Though you'll often see the basic translations as "word" or "speak", the original concept was "gather", with a further sense of "count/enumerate" (an artifact of this meaning in modern English is "catalogue": καταλέγειν/"count" gives κατάλογος, the list of things counted) and "order/arrange", and from there you can dive off not only into gathering words but also gathering thoughts, and off into much more abstract ideas such as repetition/succession of things or events.
So λόγος can embody a huge number of concepts, but within the context of Stoicism a good approximation is of an all-pervading rational order in the universe, exemplified by the succession of events under natural law. You will find Stoic philosophers who identify this with a god or gods -- typically Jupiter/Zeus -- but it can be difficult to figure out whether they're doing that because they really believe it, or because (as was common at the time) they were simply trying to tie into or co-opt already-familiar ideas, because what they meant by λόγος was something quite different from the personal, corporeal gods of the Roman state religion.
Ultimately, Stoicism -- if it's theistic at all -- is pantheistic, because λόγος by its all-pervading nature must be everywhere and in everything. And since the ordering of things in nature follows rational, predictable principles they argued by analogy that λόγος, the source of those principles, must similarly be rational. They also argued that it must (as a consequence) be deterministic; and thus Stoicism advocates acceptance of things as they happen. To the Stoic, this is the only real choice: to fight, pointlessly, to turn the course of events one way or another, or to accept and make peace with things as they are, and devote yourself to philosophy and reflection and the life of the mind. Even if you can't improve the lot of society, you can improve yourself.
So questions of "fairness" don't really come into it; what Seneca's trying to get at is not that lifetimes have been allotted by some intelligence to serve some purpose, but that so many people waste so much of their lives on a fight they cannot possibly win and end up neglecting the one thing they can genuinely do to improve themselves and find contentment.
The Stoic thought process would simply reject the exceptionalism of Man and the maxim naturally follows without recourse to a higher entity.
After all, we do observe that all other life forms seem to have just enough time to do their thing. And when we speak of "properly" (or "wisely"), naturally it is only meaningful given that we have the ability to make choices. (c.f. "to thine own self be true")
Edit: Human history is full of interesting "posts". If only we had the time to absorb all the wisdoms of times passed.
If you like the Art of War at all, you simply must read von Clauswitz's On War:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_War#Synopsis
At least read the first 20 pages. An incredibly clear, insightful thinker. He was an utter perfectionist, he worked on the book for decades and died with it incomplete, but the beginning in particular is precisely accurate and insightful like almost nothing else I've read.
It is better to create than to learn! Creating is the essence of life.
It is not these well-fed long-haired men that I fear, but the pale and the hungry-looking.
As a rule, men worry more about what they can't see than about what they can.
Cowards die many times before their actual deaths.
and that's between 100BC and 44BC
"Cowards die many times before their deaths. The valiant never taste of death but once." - William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act II, sc. ii (1599)
Of course, given that we are on the cusp of this new era of longevity science, rejuvenation of the old, and greatly enhanced life spans, we look around and see only the past. It takes a bold, one might even say entrepreneurial, soul to recognize what might soon be, were people to put their shoulder to the wheel.
Even if you live to be 2000, you cannot bypass suffering and you cannot stop change. Our attention span is between 5 and 15 seconds and you will have to share that present, that moment with all other human beings, just the same as if you only had six months to live.
The point is not how long you live, but how well.
As Marus Aurelius says in his Meditations:
"For a man can lose neither the past nor the future; for how can one take from him that which is not his? So remember these two points: first, that each thing is of like form from everlasting and comes round again in its cycle, and that it signifies not whether a man shall look upon the same things for a hundred years or two hundred, or for an infinity of time; second, that the longest lived and the shortest lived man, when they come to die, lose one and the same thing."
I'm not especially enthused about the prospect of major life extension. Gerontocracy is already far too common and in the US the older demographic seems oblivious to the fact that the generations following behind are going to be stuck with an absolutely massive bill so the boomers can enjoy their retirement. At least Japan is trying to address the problem by developing better robots, while we are heading for spending 20% of GDP on health care.
"Everyone hurries his life on and suffers from a yearning for the future and a weariness of the present. But he who bestows all of his time on his own needs, who plans out every day as if it were his last, neither longs for nor fears the morrow."
This is the gist of the essay. I don't know, I find it terribly vague and subjective. Seneca defines 'waste' as not living in the present and doing things for others as opposed to, for yourself. Is there a right or wrong way to live? I'm not so sure. I think you should live the way you want, complain about the shortness of life, be idle, do nothing, if that's what you really want to do. The only restriction is not to impose on anyone else's quality of life or right to live the way they want. I would argue Seneca is trying to impose, as am I.