Assignment

SENECA

On Liberal and Vocational Studies

[CIRCA 55 CE]

LUCIUS ANNAEUS SENECA (4 BCE–65 CE), sometimes called “Seneca the Younger,” was a member of the early Roman Empire’s most celebrated literary family. His father, Marcus Annaeus Seneca, or Seneca the Elder (circa 54 BCE–circa 39 CE), was a noted orator and writer. His nephew, Lucian (39–65 CE), was a celebrated poet who made important contributions to the development of satire. Seneca the Younger distinguished himself as a scientist, scholar, playwright, and philosopher—as well as a politician whose career rose and fell on the whims of three powerful emperors.

Seneca received a first-rate education and as a young man became a successful politician. But in 37 CE, he came into conflict with the emperor Caligula and barely escaped a death sentence. Four years later, in 41 CE, Seneca was accused of having an improper relationship with the niece of the emperor Claudius, who consequently banished him to the island of Corsica. Seneca remained there until 49 CE, when he was summoned back to Rome to tutor the twelve-year-old Nero, who would become emperor in 54 CE after Claudius’s death. Seneca became one of the young Nero’s most trusted and powerful advisors, but as the emperor became more corrupt, Seneca became less powerful. He received permission to retire in 62 CE, but three years later, Nero accused Seneca of conspiring against him and ordered Seneca to commit suicide by slitting his own wrists.

Seneca was a well-known member of the Stoic school of philosophy. Stoics held that people achieved the greatest good by living a life founded on reason and in harmony with nature. Stoics also believed that wealth and social position were ultimately unimportant because reason and virtue were available to everybody. In fact, two of the most famous Roman Stoics were the slave Epictetus (55–153) and the emperor Marcus Aurelius (121–180). As a Stoic, Seneca believed that excessive passions diluted the influence of reason, that the point of living is to live virtuously, and that one could be happy and virtuous in any physical or economic condition.

“On Liberal and Vocational Studies” is the eighty-eighth of 124 letters from Seneca that are collectively known as the “Moral Epistles.” In this letter, Seneca attempts to define liberal studies and separate them clearly from vocational training. During Seneca’s time, a “liberal” education was the kind of education appropriate for a liber, or a free person. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Seneca was unwilling to defend pursuits such as literature, music, geometry, and astronomy by arguing that they made people virtuous. This argument, Seneca believed, reduced the liberal arts to a sort of moral propaganda. They do not convert people to virtue, he insists; rather, they are the raw materials out of which a virtuous life can be built—and as such they are indispensible to the functioning of a free society.

Much of Seneca’s philosophical work comes to us in the form of letters to other people. As you read Seneca’s argument, consider how his use of the second-person address (“You want to know . . . ”, “You teach me”) creates a connection with the reader and constructs his own ethos as a writer.

Letter LXXXVIII

You want to know my attitude towards liberal studies. Well, I have no respect for any study whatsoever if its end is the making of money. Such studies are to me unworthy ones. They involve the putting out of skills to hire, and are only of value in so far as they may develop the mind without occupying it for long. Time should be spent on them only so long as one’s mental abilities are not up to dealing with higher things. They are our apprenticeship, not our real work. Why “liberal studies” are so called is obvious: it is because they are the ones considered worthy of a free man. 1  But there is really only one liberal study that deserves the name—because it makes a person free—and that is the pursuit of wisdom. Its high ideals, its steadfastness and spirit make all other studies puerile and puny in comparison. Do you really think there is anything to be said for the others when you find among the people who profess to teach them quite the most reprehensible and worthless characters you could have as teachers? All right to have studied that sort of thing once, but not to be studying them now.

The question has sometimes been posed whether these liberal studies make a man a better person. But in fact they do not aspire to any knowledge of how to do this, let alone claim to do it. Literary scholarship concerns itself with research into language, or history if a rather broader field is preferred, or, extending its range to the very limit, poetry. Which of these paves the way to virtue? Attentiveness of words, analysis of syllables, accounts of myths, laying down the principles of prosody? What is there in all this that dispels fear, roots out desire, or reins in passion? Or let us take a look at music, at geometry; you will not find anything in them which tells us not to be afraid of this or desire that—and if anyone lacks this kind of knowledge all his other knowledge is valueless to him. The question is whether or not that sort of scholar is teaching virtue. For if he is not, he will not even be imparting it incidentally. If he is teaching it he is a philosopher. If you really want to know how far these persons are from the position of being moral teachers, observe the absence of connexion between all the things they study; if they were teaching one and the same thing a connexion would be evident. . . .

Turning to the musical scholar I say this. You teach me how bass and treble harmonize, or how strings producing different notes can give rise to concord. I would rather you brought about some harmony in my mind and got my thoughts into tune. You show me which are the plaintive keys. I would rather you showed me how to avoid uttering plaintive notes when things go against me in life.

The geometrician teaches me how to work out the size of my estates—rather than how to work out how much a man needs in order to have enough. He teaches me to calculate, putting my fingers into the service of avarice, instead of teaching me that there is no point whatsoever in that sort of computation and that a person is none the happier for having properties which tire accountants out, or to put it another way, how superfluous a man’s possessions are when he would be a picture of misery if you forced him to start counting up single-handed how much he possessed. What use is it to me to be able to divide a piece of land into equal areas if I’m unable to divide it with a brother? What use is the ability to measure out a portion of an acre with an accuracy extending even to the bits which elude the measuring rod if I’m upset when some high-handed neighbour encroaches slightly on my property? The geometrician teaches me how I may avoid losing any fraction of my estates, but what I really want to learn is how to lose the lot and still keep smiling. . . . Oh, the marvels of geometry! You geometers can calculate the areas of circles, can reduce any given shape to a square, can state the distances separating stars. Nothing’s outside your scope when it comes to measurement. Well, if you’re such an expert, measure a man’s soul; tell me how large or how small that is. You can define a straight line; what use is that to you if you’ve no idea what straightness means in life?

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I come now to the person who prides himself on his familiarity with the heavenly bodies:

Towards which quarter chilly Saturn draws,

The orbits in which burning Mercury roams. 2

What is to be gained from this sort of knowledge? Am I supposed to feel anxious when Saturn and Mars are in opposition or Mercury sets in the evening in full view of Saturn, instead of coming to learn that bodies like these are equally propitious wherever they are, and incapable of change in any case. They are swept on in a path from which they cannot escape, their motion governed by an uninterrupted sequence of destined events, making their reappearances in cycles that are fixed. They either actuate or signalize all that comes about in the universe. If every event is brought about by them, how is mere familiarity with a process which is unchangeable going to be of any help? If they are pointers to events, what difference does it make to be aware in advance of things you cannot escape? They are going to happen whether you know about them or not. . . .

“So we don’t,” you may ask, “in fact gain anything from the liberal studies?” As far as character is concerned, no, but we gain a good deal from them in other directions—just as even these admittedly inferior arts which we’ve been talking about, the ones that are based on use of the hands, make important contributions to the amenities of life although they have nothing to do with character. Why then do we give our sons a liberal education? Not because it can make them morally good but because it prepares the mind for the acquisition of moral values. Just as that grounding in grammar, as they called it in the old days, in which boys are given their elementary schooling, does not teach them the liberal arts but prepares the ground for knowledge of them in due course, so when it comes to character the liberal arts open the way to it rather than carry the personality all the way there. . . .

In this connexion I feel prompted to take a look at individual qualities of character. Bravery is the one which treats with contempt things ordinarily inspiring fear, despising and defying and demolishing all the things that terrify us and set chains on human freedom. Is she in any way fortified by liberal studies? Take loyalty, the most sacred quality that can be found in a human breast, never corrupted by a bribe, never driven to betray by any form of compulsion, crying: “Beat me, burn me, put me to death, I shall not talk—the more the torture probes my secrets the deeper I’ll hide them!” Can liberal studies create that kind of spirit? Take self-control, the quality which takes command of the pleasures; some she dismisses out of hand, unable to tolerate them; others she merely regulates, ensuring that they are brought within healthy limits; never approaching pleasures for their own sake, she realizes that the ideal limit with things you desire is not the amount you would like to but the amount you ought to take. Humanity is the quality which stops one being arrogant towards one’s fellows, or being acrimonious. In words, in actions, in emotions she reveals herself as kind and good-natured towards all. To her the troubles of anyone else are her own, and anything that benefits herself she welcomes primarily because it will be of benefit to someone else. Do the liberal studies inculcate these attitudes? No, no more than they do simplicity, or modesty and restraint, or frugality and thrift, or mercy, the mercy that is as sparing with another’s blood as though it were its own, knowing that it is not for man to make wasteful use of man.

Someone will ask me how I can say that liberal studies are of no help towards morality when I’ve just been saying that there’s no attaining morality without them. My answer would be this: there’s no attaining morality without food either, but there’s no connexion between morality and food. The fact that a ship can’t begin to exist without the timbers of which it’s built doesn’t mean that the timbers are of “help” to it. There’s no reason for you to assume that, X being something without which “ Y” could never have come about, Y came about as a result of the assistance of X. And indeed it can actually be argued that the attainment of wisdom is perfectly possible without the liberal studies; although moral values are things which have to be learnt, they are not learnt through these studies. Besides, what grounds could I possible have for supposing that a person who has no acquaintance with books will never be a wise man? For wisdom does not lie in books. Wisdom publishes not words but truths—and I’m not sure that the memory isn’t more reliable when it has no external aids to fall back on.

There is nothing small or cramped about wisdom. It is something calling for a lot of room to move. There are questions to be answered concerning physical as well as human matters, questions about the past and about the future, questions about things eternal and things ephemeral, questions about time itself. On this one subject of time just look how many questions there are. To start with, does it have an existence of its own? Next, does anything exist prior to time, independently of it? Did it begin with the universe, or did it exist even before then on the grounds that there was something in existence before the universe? There are countless questions about the soul alone—where it comes from, what its nature is, when it begins to exist, and how long it is in existence; whether it passes from one place to another, moving house, so to speak, on transfer to successive living creatures, taking on a different form with each, or is no more than once in service and is then released to roam the universe; whether it is a corporeal substance or not; what it will do when it ceases to act through us, how it will employ its freedom once it has escaped its cage here; whether it will forget its past and become conscious of its real nature from the actual moment of its parting from the body and departure for its new home on high. Whatever the field of physical or moral sciences you deal with, you will be given no rest by the mass of things to be learnt or investigated. And to enable matters of this range and scale to find unrestricted hospitality in our minds, everything superfluous must be turned out. Virtue will not bring herself to enter the limited space we offer her; something of great size requires plenty of room. Let everything else be evicted, and your heart completely opened to her.

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“But it’s a nice thing, surely, to be familiar with a lot of subjects.” Well, in that case let us retain just as much of them as we need. Would you consider a person open to criticism for putting superfluous objects on the same level as really useful ones by arranging on display in his house a whole array of costly articles, but not for cluttering himself up with a lot of superfluous furniture in the way of learning? To want to know more than is sufficient is a form of intemperance. Apart from which this kind of obsession with the liberal arts turns people into pedantic, irritating, tactless, self-satisfied bores, not learning what they need simply because they spend their time learning things they will never need. The scholar Didymus wrote four thousand works: I should feel sorry for him if he had merely read so many useless works. In these works he discusses such questions as Homer’s origin, who was Aeneas’ real mother, whether Anacreon’s manner of life was more that of a lecher or that of a drunkard, whether Sappho 3  slept with anyone who asked her, and other things that would be better unlearned if one actually knew them! Don’t you go and tell me now that life is long enough for this sort of thing! When you come to writers in our own school, for that matter, I’ll show you plenty of works which could do with some ruthless pruning. It costs a person an enormous amount of time (and other people’s ears an enormous amount of boredom) before he earns such compliments as “What a learned person!” Let’s be content with the much less fashionable label, “What a good man!” . . .

I have been speaking about liberal studies. Yet look at the amount of useless and superfluous matter to be found in the philosophers. Even they have descended to the level of drawing distinctions between the uses of different syllables and discussing the proper meanings of prepositions and conjunctions. They have come to envy the philologist and the mathematician, and they have taken over all the inessential elements in those studies—with the result that they know more about devoting care and attention to their speech than about devoting such attention to their lives. Listen and let me show you the sorry consequences to which subtlety carried too far can lead, and what an enemy it is to truth. Protagoras 4  declares that it is possible to argue either side of any question with equal force, even the question whether or not one can equally argue either side of any question! Nausiphanes 5  declares that of the things which appear to us to exist, none exists any more than it does not exist. Parmenides 6  declares that of all these phenomena none exists except the whole. Zeno of Elea 7  has dismissed all such difficulties by introducing another; he declares that nothing exists. The Pyrrhonean, Megarian, Eretrian, and Academic schools 8  pursue more or less similar lines; the last named have introduced a new branch of knowledge, non-knowledge.

Well, all these theories you should just toss on top of that heap of superfluous liberal studies. The people I first mentioned provide me with knowledge which is not going to be of any use to me, while the others snatch away from me any hopes of ever acquiring any knowledge at all. Superfluous knowledge would be preferable to no knowledge. One side offers me no guiding light to direct my vision towards the truth, while the other just gouges my eyes out. If I believe Protagoras there is nothing certain in the universe; if I believe Nausiphanes there is just the one certainty, that nothing is certain; if Parmenides, only one thing exists; if Zeno, not even one. Then what are we? The things that surround us, the things on which we live, what are they? Our whole universe is no more than a semblance of reality, perhaps a deceptive semblance, perhaps one without substance altogether. I should find it difficult to say which of these people annoy me most, those who would have us know nothing or the ones who refuse even to leave us the small satisfaction of knowing that we know nothing.