Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 065 - Anger Management - Seneca.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Anger Management, Seneca. Gnaeus Calpurnius Piso was a powerful man. He was born into the senatorial class of Roman society, and in the year 7 BC served as consul with his friend, the future emperor Tiberius. He also had a really bad temper. Two soldiers under his command were given leave, and one returned without the other. Piso leapt to the conclusion that the missing man had been murdered by the one who returned, and ordered his execution. A censurian was tasked to carry out the grim deed, but at the last moment the absent soldier turned up, and the execution was halted. When Piso learned of this, he was not relieved, but furious. His rash judgment had been exposed, his order countermanded without his authority. He announced that there would now be three executions. The first soldier would still die, as planned, as would the censurian, for failing to kill him, and also the soldier who was late in returning, since the whole thing was his fault. If only Piso had lived a couple of generations later, he could have found some good advice on curbing that temper in the works of Seneca. Seneca was born in Roman-controlled Spain between 4 and 1 BC, not long after Piso's consulship and right in the middle of the long rule of Augustus Caesar. Seneca came too late to meet such figures as Cato, Julius Caesar, and Cicero, but he tells stories about them in his works. In the writings of Seneca, we can see that the Roman aristocracy was still digesting the seismic shift from a republic controlled by the Senate to an empire controlled by a single man, first Augustus, then his successor emperors, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and, of course, Nero. Nero is of particular importance for our story, because Seneca served as an advisor to the young emperor. One of his philosophical works, On Mercy, stands as a written record of his attempts to moderate Nero's immoderate tendencies. That project was ultimately a failure, and Seneca paid for this failure with his life. Though Seneca remains an admired philosopher, his legacy is inevitably tarnished by his association with Nero. Before he moved on to fiddling while Rome burned, Nero had his own mother Agrippina assassinated in 59 AD. Presumably Seneca, being a paragon of unyielding virtue and valuing his life far less than his integrity, risked certain death by publicly denouncing Nero? Sadly, no. What he actually did was write a speech for the emperor to help him recover from this PR disaster. Clearly, this was not Seneca's finest hour. If he was motivated by the desire to exert some degree of beneficial influence on Nero, then his plan failed. In 65 AD, Nero accused Seneca of conspiring to assassinate him and ordered Seneca to commit suicide. This fatal command was not, incidentally, Seneca's first experience of the harsh realities of Roman politics. In 41 AD, in the reign of Claudius, he had been exiled to Corsica. A philosophical work of consolation addressed to Seneca's mother Helvia advises her on how to cope with this setback. Thus, Seneca was very much a philosopher in politics, to borrow the title of one of the more important studies of the man. In fact, his legacy goes beyond politics and philosophy. His philosophical writings are themselves a major landmark of Latin literature, and he also wrote dramas, of which eight tragedies survive. But as philosophers, what interests us is Seneca's stoicism. He is the first of three great figures to work in the imperial period, known collectively as the Roman Stoics—Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. They will be occupying our attention in the next several episodes. Of the three, Seneca was the only one to write philosophy in Latin, and it has been well remarked that Seneca obviously thinks in Latin, even if he is heir to ideas from the Greek tradition. Nonetheless, his philosophical works, especially a series of letters and so-called dialogues, display tendencies shared by all three Roman Stoics. He largely turns his back on the logical and metaphysical questions that fascinated the much earlier Chrysippus, and focuses relentlessly on the question of how to live. Seneca is at his most powerful when he dissects human weakness and advises us on how to rise above that weakness. His philosophical works are almost always addressed to a real recipient, whether it be his mother or one of his aristocratic friends. Yet, reading him, we ourselves are cajoled, chastised, and exhorted to take up a life of virtue. If not the perfect virtue of the ideal Stoic sage, then at least a life better than the one we are leading now. This is not to say that Seneca has abandoned more technical aspects of the Stoic system. The claim that an ideal sage is possible was itself a rather sophisticated notion, which presupposed the possibility of perfect and unfailing knowledge. Perhaps because he was not subject to constant harassment by skeptical philosophers, as Chrysippus and other early Stoics were, Seneca says little by way of defending the possibility of a perfect sage, but he does presuppose it. Still, there is a change of emphasis in Seneca, if not a change of doctrine. Chrysippus had worried about, for instance, how the sage would preserve his infallibility when confronted with paradoxes and illusions. Seneca is more interested in how real people, who are not sages, can improve themselves. Similarly, he alludes to Stoic determinism, but not in order to tinker with Chrysippus' theory of possibility and necessity. Instead, he urges us to reflect on the ethical significance of the Stoic idea that we live in a world where all things are fated, steered by a providential god. We can see even his most non-ethical philosophical work, The Natural Questions, in this light. On its face, a lengthy study of such phenomena as earthquakes and comets, this text is also an exploration of the divine forces that shape the cosmos, and of humans' relatively modest place within that cosmos. It's not earth-shattering to discover that Seneca's views on ethics have had more staying power than his account of earthquakes. Much of the advice he gives is genuinely useful, even for those of us who are not card-carrying Stoics. If you want to read a powerful discussion of how to make the most of your limited time on earth, you can hardly do better than Seneca's dialogue on the shortness of life. He reminds us that everything we do is a use of a scarce resource, namely time, and argues that even the briefest life will have been worth living if the time was used well. His writing is powerful because of his rhetorically charged style, his eye for vivid detail, and memorable anecdote. For instance, in this work on the shortness of life, he mentions a virtuous man named Julius Canus, condemned to death by Caligula. When they came to his prison to execute him, he was found playing a game with his guard, and as they dragged him off, he said to the centurion, You're my witness that I was ahead by one piece. If he could face his immediate and certain execution with such tranquility, why should we be bothered by the prospect that we will die some day? In this passage and many others, Seneca tries to help us make progress towards total freedom from disturbance, the goal of Roman Stoicism just as it had been for earlier Stoics. One of Seneca's most important philosophical contributions is his analysis of the chief threat to our tranquility, emotion. The Stoics had always argued that we should strive to avoid being controlled by our emotions. They use the Greek word pathos for emotion and related experiences, and this word emphasizes the passivity of emotion. To get angry or sad or frightened is to be affected somehow. The corresponding Latin term used by Seneca, ad factus, preserves this connotation. Seneca follows the traditional Stoic view, holding that emotion means surrendering one's self-determination and being controlled by what is outside us. No emotion fits this pattern better than anger, which is perhaps why Seneca devoted a lengthy and fascinating dialogue to the topic. In On Anger, Seneca offers up a particularly memorable range of anecdotes to illustrate his point, including the tale of Piso I mentioned at the start of this episode. Caligula features here, and in other works, as the vicious man par excellence, a kind of anti-sage. We hear of him inviting a man to dinner and then complaining loudly that the man's wife is lousy in bed. On another occasion, Caligula leads a man to think that he is being forced to drink the blood of his own son. At the other end of the spectrum are Seneca's heroes. Among the Romans, he has greatest admiration for Cato the Younger, whose noble suicide ended a noble life. He killed himself when Julius Caesar overthrew the Roman Republic, which prompts Seneca to a typically graceful aphorism, Freedom did not live after Cato, nor Cato after freedom. Seneca praises him as the closest thing we know to a perfect sage, at one point comparing him favorably to Hercules and Ulysses. Plato appears in a similarly glowing light. Seneca relates that Plato once began to strike a slave in anger, but mastered himself just in time. He let the slave go untouched, but stayed still, his hand remaining in the air poised to strike. Hours later a student of Plato's came upon him and was amazed to find him still in this awkward position. Plato explained that he was punishing an angry man. Seneca adds a second tale with a similar moral, in which Plato tells Spusippus to whip a disobedient slave because Plato is angry and one should never punish while angry. Now, I know what you're thinking. Doesn't anger often lead us to punish those who ought to be punished? And isn't it right to get angry some of the time? Suppose a tyrant comes and unjustly murders my family. Would it really be virtuous to react to this without a trace of anger? Seneca confronts these objections squarely. Like the other Senecan works called dialogues, On Anger is addressed to a specific recipient, and Seneca repeatedly imagines this recipient posing objections. Seneca's own view emerges as he replies to these objections. Of course, in On Anger, the most pressing objection is that anger can be appropriate and beneficial. If this is right, the virtuous man will get angry. As Aristotle might put it, he will get angry on the right occasions for the right reasons and in the right way. Seneca indeed refers to Aristotle here, as well as Aristotle's colleague Theophrastus. He quotes them as believing that anger is an inevitable part of human life and that we should aim for moderation in anger, as in all things. Seneca responds by painting a vivid picture of what it is like when we get angry. He points out to us the physical symptoms—flushed cheeks, rapid breathing, contorted facial expressions. These outward signs betray the violence of the inner emotional state. Anger, by its very nature, causes us to lose control over ourselves. Seneca compares the loss of one's temper to running off a cliff. Once you do lose control, it's too late to turn back. The idea of moderate anger is a contradiction in terms. That would mean anger under the restraining influence of reason, but anger is precisely a state in which reason is no longer exercising restraint. Hence another Seneca aphorism. Other vices impel the mind, anger overthrows it. To the objection that anger sometimes leads us to punish those who should be punished, Seneca replies that one should punish out of a desire to do justice, not for the sake of retaliation or revenge. If justice motivates us, we will have every chance of imposing just punishments, whereas if anger is our motive, we will wind up acting like Pisa. Aristotle would no doubt complain that Seneca's view sounds almost inhuman. He could insist that the tendency to become angry is natural, and that everything natural has some purpose. Certainly, Aristotle would see a man who never grew angry for any reason as cold or impassive. Such a man would fall short of moderation just as the easily angered man exceeds it. Neither man would be virtuous. To some extent, Seneca can avoid this result by insisting that anger is in itself excessive, because it is a loss of reason. On his behalf, I'd add that the way we talk about anger supports his view. We're given to saying things like, I totally lost it. But what about the point that anger is in some sense natural? Seneca can handle this objection too, by offering an interesting modification of previous stoic views on the emotions. To see his point, it may help to consider a perfect sage confronted with some outrage. Perhaps he is slapped suddenly in the street. Perhaps the tyrant murders his family. Perhaps someone says within his earshot that Buster Keaton's films are not all they are cracked up to be. We know that the sage will not actually be disturbed by this. His reason will remain in control and prevent him from lashing out in an undisciplined way. But that does not mean that he can avoid a natural, all-too-human initial reaction. He may flush, for instance, or his heart may start to beat more quickly. The story of Plato raising his hand to strike a slave and then stopping himself is a vivid example, though Seneca would probably say that a true sage would not even get as far as raising his hand or curling his fingers into a fist. Instead, he may simply twitch. Such instinctive, natural, and unavoidable reactions are called by Seneca first motions. Such motions accompany the initial impression we receive from our surroundings, for instance, that we have just been insulted, or, even worse, that Buster Keaton has been insulted. The sage cannot avoid them, but he will stop himself from endorsing these impressions in a second motion, an act of reason which judges that the impression is in fact true. This may then give rise to a third motion, in which reason loses control and we give in to anger. Here, Seneca is adhering to a long-standing Stoic idea about emotions, which is that they are ultimately grounded in reason. Emotional reactions, contrary to appearances, are judgments. Just as we might look at honey and get the impression that we see something sweet, so we might hear a man belittling the silent films of Buster Keaton and get the impression that if the man likes sound so much we should give him a sound beating. But we have the ability to withhold our consent to these impressions. We might realize that the jar seems to contain honey but actually could contain vinegar. We might see that the right thing to do would be to buy the uncultured buffoon a ticket to an open-air screening of Keaton's masterpiece, The General. What Seneca adds to this picture is a sensitivity to the involuntary reactions we initially have along with the impression, the twitching, the flushing cheeks, and also a vivid portrait of what it is like when reason loses control. There has been some discussion of how Seneca's view relates to that of an earlier Stoic named Poseidonius. According to some evidence found mostly in Galen, Poseidonius adopted a complex psychology according to which the soul has both a rational and an irrational aspect. This evidence has been questioned, but if Galen presents Poseidonius accurately, he must have been taking his cue from Plato. As we saw back in episode 25, Plato's Republic, too, posited both rational and irrational soul, and taught that justice in the soul is mastering the irrational part with the rational part. Some have suspected that Seneca has a similar idea, but I agree with those who see him as sticking to the traditional Stoic view. The soul is rational through and through, so our emotional reactions must involve some kind of judgment, an assent to the way things seem to us. It is precisely for this reason that it feels so alienating when our reason does judge that we should retaliate or exact revenge. Then anger takes over, and we lose control. This loss of control is what Seneca always wants us to avoid, whether it is occasioned by anger, pleasure, luxury, or grief. He exhorts us to face not only insult, but all turns of fortune, with as much serenity as we can manage. While the goal may seem modest, Seneca presents it as downright heroic. As he says at one point, in facing misfortune bravely, we perform a deed that even God cannot manage, since God never undergoes misfortune. Seneca adds a good deal of practical advice. For instance, he would approve of the widespread strategy of counting to ten when we get angry, since he too recommends waiting to act when we feel the flush of rage upon us. As for more general lifestyle advice, Seneca has told us that peace and tranquility are the highest possible achievement. So it is unsurprising to find that he's sympathetic to the idea of withdrawing from public life. It's clear that, for Seneca, the best life is a life of quiet study, and not a life of money-making or political achievement. In the moving work addressed to his mother on the occasion of his exile, he advises her to find comfort in this kind of life. At the same time, Seneca's own life shows us that he was willing to become politically involved—indeed, sometimes too willing. Seneca was pulled in two directions—towards the duty to engage with his fellow humans and the drive to seek wisdom through private contemplation. Here he's in good company. Plato too wrestled with the question of why the philosopher would return to the cave after beholding the real things in the sunlight outside. And the most famous tension in Aristotle is that between the life of practical virtue and the life of contemplation. Seneca concludes that it is fine to retreat from the pressures and stresses of public life so long as the retreat is an orderly one. But in a sense, Seneca's virtuous man will be engaged in a kind of retreat no matter what he does. He achieves lack of disturbance and total self-mastery by exercising his reason and yielding to nothing else, whether it is emotion, misfortune, or temptation. This is the hallmark of Roman Stoicism—not just an interest in ethics, but a relentless focus on our interior life, our reason and judgment. The power of Seneca's teaching lies in the promise that, with patience and practice, we can reshape ourselves so that we really are under our own control. But this requires us to renounce our obsessions with things that are not under our control. A final Senecan aphorism sums it up. We should not try to arrange what is up to fortune while neglecting what is up to us. This sentiment brings us to our next Roman Stoic, whose philosophy pivots around this notion that our interior life, and nothing else, is truly up to us. He is perhaps the greatest figure in the history of Stoicism apart from Chrysippus. Nonetheless, I'll try not to get upset if you unwisely fail to join me next time for Epictetus here on the History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.