inconstant, in conflict and contradiction with himself, someone, in short, utterly unlike the stick-figure representation of perfect integrity we find on display in Plato’s Apology.
This is something new. Seneca’s representation of inner experience in his Moral Letters occupies a pivotal place in the histories of autobiography and self-examination. As Michel Foucault put it, “The task of testing oneself, examining oneself, monitoring oneself in a series of clearly defined exercises, makes the question of truth—the truth concerning what one is, what one does, and what one is capable of doing—central to the formation of the ethical subject.” Because a Stoic is aiming for perfect integrity and often falling short, one is constantly reminding oneself of one’s failings. The result is an intransigently conflicted self, someone who must struggle to become better—someone worthy of comparison with Socrates.
And that is not all. By choosing to write a serious work of philosophy in Latin, and by choosing, unlike Cicero, to think in Latin, Seneca elaborates a new vocabulary for analyzing this protean self. It is Latin that allows him to link voluntas (the noun for “will,” “wish,” and “inclination”) and voluntarium (a noun for what is done by free choice) to volo (the verb for “willing,” “wanting,” and “wishing”), and to link all these terms to the philosophic quest for rational unity and moral perfection. Similarly, consistency of character, the cultivation of conduct that hangs together logically, is linked to constantia, perseverance (or constancy) in willing one thing, or, to gloss it differently, a resolute adherence to principle no matter the consequences, even death.
For the first time in Western thought, the concept of a will that is naturally free comes to play a central role in philosophy. In voluntary action, body and soul commingle, and in a good will, bodily impulse becomes subordinated to self-conscious purpose, in order to create (or forestall) physical motion; hence, the will is that part of the human being that one must struggle most mightily to control, by purging the body of irrational impulses, of needless desires, passions, and emotions, so that one becomes able to act, instead, only on reasonable impulses. “Conduct cannot be right unless the will is right, for the will is the source of action”—what we want determines how we conduct ourselves. “The will cannot be right unless the soul is right,” for animus, the soul, is what animates our being and what becomes manifest in what we want.
A life conducted according to the dictates of reason can be virtuous. And virtue becomes a synonym for a will that is strong, and healthy, and resolutely effective—the good will.
Such a will, according to the Moral Letters, ought to be good enough to be applied effectively in any, and every, conceivable circumstance. “So the wise man will develop virtue, if he may, in the midst of wealth, or, if not, in poverty … Whatever fate hands him, he will do something memorable.”
Here is a good example of Seneca applying a general rule of morality in specific circumstances. The particulars of a situation will alter the challenges that a man of virtue will face in his conduct of life: someone who is poor must steel his will to withstand privations serenely; someone who is lucky enough to be rich must develop the strength to resist the temptations of luxury. Whether he is pitiably poor or, like Seneca himself, enviably rich, does not finally matter, for a man with a good, strong will can be virtuous in any circumstances. Ergo, being rich is not, in principle, incompatible with philosophy as a way of life. This is how a good casuist proves consistency where others might perceive only a contradiction.
Anyone inclined to find fault with Seneca will probably hear in such passages special pleading or—to use another pejorative term given currency in the twentieth century by Freudian psychoanalysis—a rationalization.
To complicate matters, Seneca frequently confesses that though he praises virtue, and can describe the kind of life a wise man ought to live, he is not, like Socrates, a man whose talk harmonizes with his life. By his own account, he doesn’t yet hang together; he is still inconsistent in word and deed: “Listen to me as you would if I were talking to myself. I am admitting to you my inmost thoughts and, with you as my guest, I’m taking myself to task.” Whereas the reader of Plato’s Apology may behold Socrates as a model of perfect integrity, the reader of Seneca’s Moral Letters is invited to evaluate the author’s