Reading Seneca: Stoic Philosophy at Rome by Brad Inwood

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BRAD INWOOD: Reading Seneca: Stoic Philosophy at Rome. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2005. Pp xvi + 376.
Students of Stoicism often bewail the state of our sources. Of the works of Zeno
and Chrysippus, the two major early Stoics, we have only fragments and later accounts
whose distance from the original we can only guess. Our sources for early Stoic ethics are
in better shape than our sources for Stoic metaphysics or logic, but they are still gappy
and have the frustating feature that almost none of them are concerned to reveal the
argumentative structure of the theory.
So we turn to the later sources, Stoics writing under the Roman Empire, where we
at least have, if not the whole, a considerable part of the work in continuous original
prose. But here again we find much to complain about. Our major sources, Epictetus,
Musonius Rufus and Marcus Aurelius, write works which express Stoic ideas forcefully,
but again we look in vain for concern with argument and theoretical structure.
In this situation, Seneca surely ought to be a central author for someone trying to
understand Stoic ethics. While we lack some of his works, and have others only in part,
we have a great deal, and across a variety of genres – essays, dramas, letters and a treatise
on natural science. Seneca is thoroughly educated in Stoicism, yet writes in a non-
technical way accessible to the non-specialist. Indeed a large amount of his philosophical
work takes the form of letters to one Lucilius, whom he encourages on the path of
learning to be a Stoic. Whether or not Lucilius is an actual person is irrelevant to
Seneca’s educative (and, in the process, self-educative) project, one which we would
expect to make him the ideal author from whom to learn about Stoicism, or at any rate his
major focus, Stoic ethics.
Yet Seneca is not a favoured source in contemporary discussion of Stoic ethics,
neither the specialized secondary literature nor teaching collections (though he is
beginning to make more of an appearance in the latter). Seneca is problematic. Why is
this?
At all levels of studying ancient philosophy we are the (sometimes uneasy) heirs
to a general received view of Seneca, a view on which he is interested only in ethics, not
in the entire Stoic system in which ethics ultimately forms part of an organic unity with
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logic and physics. This supposed neglect of the more technical parts of Stoicism is taken
to undermine his grasp of the ethics itself; he is taken to be indifferent to the arguments
underpinning central Stoic ethical claims and structuring their interconnections. Being
concerned only with ethical doctrines, not their theoretical basis, Seneca, the story goes,
ends up preaching to us rather than either engaging with, or telling us much about, Stoic
ethical theory. Seneca is accessible, then, because he is shallow; to get to the heart of
Stoic theory we should return to the thorny texts of the earlier Greek heads of the school
like Chrysippus. And once Seneca’s philosophical commitment is seen as shallow, it is
tempting to many not to take him seriously as a philosopher (and his role as Nero’s tutor
has certainly done him no good here).
On the received view Seneca is also ‘unorthodox’ on various issues. He analyses
the emotions in a way unmatched in earlier sources, a way which can appear to abandon
the Stoic view of the soul as a rational unity and make concessions to a more Platonic
position that emotions belong in a ‘part’ of the soul distinct from and sometimes in
opposition to reason. Seneca is also often taken to have modified Stoic psychology by
introducing into it a new notion of ‘the will’, a mental event which brings about free
action in a way unparalleled in Stoicism. And he is also taken, especially by disciples of
Foucault, to have introduced an unprecedented view of the self. The received view in fact
sometimes presents an unattractive combination: Seneca is unorthodox and unreliable as
a presenter of Stoic theory because he is not interested in the technical structure and
arguments of the theory; he innovates because of his shallow preference for preaching
rather than arguing, which leads him to import, or not notice that he is drifting into, ideas
unsuitable to mainstream Stoicism.
In this collection of essays Brad Inwood challenges the received view so
effectively that it and any lingering effects of it should be thoroughly swept away. The
papers, written over the last fifteen years, give us a challenging and gripping view of
Seneca, which will doubtless be reinforced by Inwood’s eagerly awaited forthcoming
translation and commentary on selected letters by Seneca, in the Clarendon Later Ancient
Philosophy series. Reading Inwood should alter the way we engage with Seneca, and
hence what we get out of him. For according to Inwood the received view is wrong on
both counts. Seneca is not shallow; his writings are presented very consciously in literary
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and rhetorical form, but they emerge from and express real, tough philosophical thinking.
Nor is he unorthodox, or an innovator on major philosophical issues.
The opening paper, ‘Seneca in his philosophical milieu’, illuminates the book’s
sub-title: ‘Stoic Philosophy at Rome’. Inwood points out how distinctive was the
philosophical context in which Seneca developed, and in particular how different from
Cicero’s. Seneca grew up in a world in which Athens had lost its role as a philosophical
centre and in which ‘the importance to philosophers of private patronage in aristocratic
houses now rivalled that of organized school life’ (p 8). Seneca was, so to speak, a
‘home-schooled’ philosopher, who did not need to travel or go to academic institutions to
learn or do philosophy. He also knew of Romans who had already committed themselves
to the philosophical life, and who had done philosophy in Latin. For Seneca, unlike
Cicero, philosophy was ‘not something essentially Greek’ (p. 11); he could think of
himself as belonging without strain in a Roman tradition of philosophizing. One reason
we lose our sense of the importance of this, and tend to force him into the same mould as
academic philosophers, is that this tradition proved short-lived; after Seneca Musonius
Rufus and Marcus Aurelius revert to being Romans who do philosophy in Greek.
Seneca was writing for an audience which shared his interest in doing philosophy
in Latin. Inwood points out that, as well as his technical work on natural science, we find
Seneca frequently dropping into discussions of technical points of Stoic physics and
metaphysics (less so with logic and dialectic). While Seneca feels no need to write a
‘school’ work on Stoic metaphysics, he is thoroughly knowledgeable about it; the
unsystematic way in which he brings in detailed discussion of issues in it, and its relation
to ethics, reflects his interests and those of his audience, rather than gaps in his
understanding. This claim, that Seneca was writing for a philosophically trained
audience, is important for a proper estimation of his seriousness as a philosopher. Inwood
finds him to be someone who throughout his life read and engaged with serious
philosophical literature in Greek, but thought and wrote philosophically in Latin for an
audience of similarly educated Romans. The results of this work challenge anyone who
takes Seneca’s writings to be philosophically shallow, or mere ethical preaching without
argumentative underpinning.
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One point about Seneca’s philosophical easiness in Latin forms a contrast with
Cicero which Inwood underlines (pp 18 ff). When we read Cicero, we can usually
establish fairly confidently which Greek word corresponds to the Latin philosophical
terms he is using. This is not the case with Seneca, whose language is hard to ‘fit onto’
the language either of Chrysippus or of Cicero himself. This is a point which
philosophers have often found frustrating, and which can lead them to think that Seneca
is vague or confused. Inwood shows, brilliantly, that what Seneca is doing is thinking
philosophically for himself in Latin, in a way which goes beyond the term-for-term
linguistic dependence we find in Cicero. This is something new in Latin, and, like
Seneca’s own sophisticated writing for a philosophically educated Roman audience, a
short-lived phenomenon. Its brevity is one cause of Seneca’s being sidelined in our
reconstruction of ancient Stoicism, and sometimes unfairly discredited for his failure to
write in a way corresponding neatly to works written in academic institutional settings for
quite different kinds of audience.
Seneca’s originality, then, lies largely in the way he does philosophy and in
particular engages with Stoic ethics. To appreciate him as a philosopher, then, we have to
enter into his literary projects, rather than treating him as an academic text from which
useful evidence can be extracted for our reconstruction of Stoic doctrines. This is itself
something which modern philosophers are not terribly keen to do. We are, on the whole,
happier with fragments of Chrysippus’ clumsy prose or later doxography, because these
raise fewer intepretative issues than the writings of someone who is self-consciously
setting out to write in specific literary genres. There seems no reason, however, why
Seneca should receive less sympathy here than, say, Hume, who is endlessly forgiven by
philosophers for his overt seeking of literary fame and his conscious attempts, after the
failure of the Treatise, to write in literary genres and to exploit rhetorical effects.
Philosophers read Hume’s Essays as well as his Treatise because they recognize that in
different ways they are the products of a keen philosophical intelligence. In the
eighteenth century Seneca’s works were read in the same way, and it will be good if
Inwood’s work can help us to regain this way of reading him, one largely lost since the
nineteenth century set us on the road to a more professional way of doing philosophy and
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its history, and hence to a greater sympathy for ancient writers who are most like
professionals.
How ‘unorthodox’ is Seneca? Inwood thinks that, just as we tend to underestimate
his philosophical seriousness and competence, we tend to overestimate his originality and
urge to innovate. This issue is explored most fully in the long paper ‘Seneca and
Psychological Dualism’. Inwood points out something which should be obvious to us but
which we tend to pass over uncritically: ‘the picture which modern scholars have made
for themselves of an orthodox Stoicism teaching internally consistent doctrine, grounded
on clear general principles – this picture seems to me to be an artefact of our
reconstructive methodology’ (p. 25). We assume that the early heads of Stoa held a set of
views which were determinate and consistent, and which were motivated in ways which
allowed little or no divergence of position or of emphasis. Yet a great deal of this comes,
understandably enough, from our own attempts to make coherent sense of our
fragmentary materials, and we know that it is controversial to read the whole corpus of
Plato or Aristotle with these assumptions. Clearly, Stoicism was a fairly determinate
philosophical tradition, but Inwood takes Seneca at his word (in de Otio (On Leisure)
3.1): he is not bound to say exactly what Zeno and Chrysippus said in order to be a Stoic.
A critical look at Stoic ‘orthodoxy’ may make us less inclined to find Seneca
‘unorthodox’. In several papers in the book Inwood gives assumed orthodoxy – and
hence Seneca’s supposed innovation - a long hard look, with interesting and subtle
results.
In the ‘Psychological Dualism’ paper Inwood examines closely the passage at the
opening of the second book of De Ira (On Anger), where Seneca has been thought to
innovate by introducing new ideas into the ‘orthodox’ Stoic view of the emotions. In
contrast to the Stoic understanding of emotions as excessive impulses of the rational soul,
ways in which we go wrong as a whole, it is sometimes claimed that Seneca moves here
towards thinking of emotions as forces opposing reason, edging nearer to the Platonic
position that they belong to a ‘part’ of the soul distinct from reason. Inwood carefully
gets us to take two important factors into account which are often neglected when this
passage is taken out of context and put together with other evidence for the theory, such
as the crabbed and scholastic passage on Stoic ethics in Stobaeus, or the polemic of
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Galen. One is that Seneca is consciously writing in a way which uses images to convey a
vivid idea of his points about psychology. Inwood examines in detail passages which if
pressed literally in a tin-eared way would seem to present a less psychologically unified
soul than Stoics accept. But why should we take such passages literally, or take Seneca to
be committed to psychological dualism by his metaphors (especially since he is quite
explicit about the pedagogical force of images)? The second point is that Seneca is
perfectly aware of Platonic positions on a number of issues, and is even prepared
sometimes to acquiesce for the sake of further argument in positions that taken more
strictly Stoics do not share with Platonists. This is a common feature of argument
everywhere, and good evidence that whatever Seneca is doing he is not carelessly sliding
into occupying a position that he should on Stoic grounds reject.
After carefully discussing Seneca’s establishment of perfectly standard Stoic
ideas about the emotions in the first book, and his declaration at the start of the second
book that what follows will be trickier, Inwood takes us through the controversial passage
in a way which brings out the point that Seneca is certainly innovating in one way: he is
giving us an account of emotion which is finer-grained than anything in our earlier
sources, Moreover, it is in one way surprising: Seneca allows some of our reactions and
responses to things and events to count as pre-rational even when they are phenomena
which can clearly be expressed in a lekton, and so would count as rational for earlier
Stoics. For Seneca the criterion of rationality here ‘appears to be suceptibility to change
by a conscious rational decision’ (p.54). Seneca is interested in conscious control of our
emotions, and this concern leads him to give a more nuanced account of emotion, and
possibly to introduce a new emphasis, or draw a distinction in a different place. Still, this
does not show that he is putting forward ‘unorthodox’ ideas which earlier Stoics would
have ejected from their tradition. Still less does it show what some scholars have thought,
that Seneca is here merely importing someone else’s ideas into the mainstream tradition.
Here Inwood’s Seneca is original, but legitimately within the mainstream of Stoic
thought. His own take on an issue differs in emphasis from that of Chrysippus, and this
leads to a distinct perspective of his own, underlined by the literary presentation. But this
is not a deviation from an orthodoxy, and it comes from thoughtful reflection on
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fundamentals, not carelessness or copying someone else or failure to notice that he was
joining the opposition.
In two other papers in the book Inwood comes to similar conclusions about the
way in which Seneca does and does not innovate about the will and the self. These two
papers, ‘The Will in Seneca’ and ‘Seneca and Self-Assertion’ belong together
thematically, and exhibit the same scrupulous and subtle methodology. The first article
begins by noting the frequent assumption that it is in Seneca that we first find what
Inwood calls ‘traditional will’ – a mental event which brings about free action. There is
no room for any such item in early Stoic psychology, but it appears to be present in
Augustine and mediaeval philosophy. Since there is no term plausibly corresponding to
‘will’ (or the corresponding words in other modern languages) in ancient Greek, and
since Seneca makes distinctive use of the term voluntas and the related verb velle, it is
often thought reasonable to find at least the beginnings of a theory of traditional will in
his writings. Inwood argues, via subtle analysis of the most striking passages, that Seneca
is not in fact committed to any version of traditional will; his psychology and account of
deliberation are simply those of the Stoic tradition, and Seneca adds nothing to this
ontology.
But there is something different in Seneca which has led people to think that he
employs the notion of traditional will. Inwood argues that we can find this only if we
widen our view beyond passages using words like velle and bring together a cluster of
interests which characterize the writings as a whole. Seneca is far more interested than
earlier Stoics (or perhaps is the first to express the interest in a literary form adequate for
it) in self-shaping and self-formation, not just in the traditional form of concern for the
shaping of one’s character but in a sharper version which stresses self-command and self-
control. Moreover (a topic enlarged on elsewhere in the book) he uses the notion of
judgement readily in ethical contexts, a point which Inwood stresses is one worth
making, though we may fail to notice its importance because of the way that for us the
notion of moral judgement has become weakened to the point of our not noticing the
judicial ideas that it imports.
All these points converge to show Seneca as having an interest in himself which
is ‘second-order’ by comparison with traditional concern for character education. Ethical
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improvement is seen as a formation of the self; the traditional idea that it is hard work is
seen in terms of controlling and overcoming aspects of oneself. This does not, however,
lead Seneca to recognize second-order concern as such, still less to introduce a new
entity, the will, to explain just how he can control, order and judge himself as he does.
Seneca does not belong in the development of thought that results in the notion of
traditional will; the appearance that he does is due to his increased focus on himself.
This takes us to the second paper, which examines the extent to which Seneca can
be said to have introduced a new conception of the self and one’s concern for the self (a
theme in Foucault and his followers, who are here discussed). Again Inwood is sceptical
of the claim that either Seneca or Plato in the Alcibiades is introducing a new item to our
metaphysical or ethical ontology, and also of the claim that Seneca is doing anything that
can reasonably be taken as a transformation of Stoic ethical psychology. Seneca’s
originality lies, again, in the way he does philosophy, a way which lays more weight than
do other Stoic authors on the assertion of the authorial self. Rather than argue in the dry
manner of the professionals, or hector us as Epictetus does, Seneca makes his points
through a vivid presentation of an authorial self. This is particularly obvious in the letters,
which present the author’s interchange with another person, Lucilius, who may or may
not correspond to a real person, but is in the writing a crucial partner for the author to
develop his own self-presentation.
Inwood is interesting about the prospects for taking Seneca’s strategy to be a
philosophical one, introducing a distinctive way of philosophizing, rather than a creative
literary achievement. Where the philosophical conception of the self is concerned, his
approach is somewhat more tentative than elsewhere, in a way which reflects the
difficulties offered by the texts. Certainly this chapter should lead to a more sophisticated
discussion than we have seen hitherto of Seneca’s authorial self, the way the author is
presented as both instructing Lucilius and improving himself in the process. As Inwood
rightly stresses, this is not to be confused with autobiography of the kind we find in
Augustine. About Seneca the individual man we know very little, and his philosophical
writings tell us almost nothing more. That is not what they were for.
I have dealt here only with a few of the papers in this rich collection. Among the
other papers, ‘Rules and Reasoning in Stoic Ethics’ continues Inwood’s exploration of
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Stoic ethics as involving a flexible and situation-sensitive account of ethical reasoning,
rather than a rigid and unsympathetically applied set of rules. ‘Getting to Goodness’
points up the problem raised for the Stoics by their combination of a strictly empiricist
account of concept formation with an account of goodness which makes it highly ideal.
Here Inwood uses Seneca’s Letter 120 to suggest that for the Stoics it is built into our
natural development that we grasp, and are attracted to, the virtue rather than the vice in
the behaviour that we experience around us; we ‘privileg[e] the praiseworthy over the
defective in our understanding of things’ (p.286). Inwood ascribes this to the Stoic
tendency to see nature in a providential way, but surely many non-providential forms of
naturalism can share the claim that our cognitive development is biassed in ways that
further our existence as social animals. The remaining papers are: ‘Politics and Paradox
in Seneca’s De Beneficiis’, ‘God and Human Knowledge in Seneca’s Natural Questions’,
‘Moral Judgement in Seneca’, ‘Natural Law in Seneca’, ‘Reason, Rationalization and
Happiness’ and ‘Seneca on Freedom and Autonomy’. In all these papers Inwood finds a
challenge in Seneca’s work, namely to engage with him philosophically while
appreciating the implications of the literary forms in which his argument is presented.
Inwood’s original and careful approach encourages the reader to join in this challenging
activity, and to find Seneca philosophically richer, and also tougher, than we have tended
to assume. Anyone interested in Stoicism, ancient ethics or the resources that ancient
ethics can offer to us will want to own this collection.
JULIA ANNAS
Department of Philosophy,
University of Arizona
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