On Travel through Darkness; On Letter 57

I would like to think that encountering the prominent role of Seneca’s Letter 75 in Foucault’s argument on parrhesia as described by Daniele Lorenzini’s The Force of Truth: Critique, Genealogy, and Truth-Telling in Michel Foucault called me back to my series on Seneca’s Letters to Lucilius. But it seems more likely that I needed to procrastinate from grading 268 (!) final exams. There is nothing as revealing of one’s abject instructional failures than it. Some other time more on Lorenzini and Foucault.

It’s been nearly two years since my digression on Letter 56 (which was also (here) an entry in my long covid diaries). Like then, I am back in the mothership— the reading room of the British Library. A long road has been traveled since then: I am officially not disabled anymore; I haven’t had a migraine in 45 days, and I can enjoy many of the charms of sociality again. And yet, in other respects not so far, which is the official theme of Letter 57. (In what follows I use Richard M. Gummere’s translation with modest changes.)

Seneca starts the letter as follows, “When it was time for me to return to Naples from Baiae, I easily persuaded myself that a storm was raging, that I might avoid another trip by sea; and yet the road was so deep in mud, all the way, that I may be thought none the less to have sailed [navigasse].” A quick look on the map teaches me that this is a 25km trip over land. It might have been shorter, yet, because Seneca recounts he took a shortcut through a dusty tunnel, where torches were needed, but all they revealed was darkness [tenebras].

In its time Baeia was a resort to the very wealthy and powerful. These days — nihil perpetuum (as Seneca wrote) — it is partially submerged under the water. (The submersion started in the final days of the Roman empire so long after Seneca’s time.)

The Latin for return is repetere; which also can mean ‘to repeat’ and ‘to recollect.’ And, of course, a letter’s recounting of an event is a repetition and a recollection. We’re dangerously close to a Freud-inflected (a voyage back through a dark tunnel!) Deleuzian territory here, I recognize. But that’s for another time. Seneca himself suggests that the experience in the tunnel — where he was confronted by feelings not subject to his control — left him changed (mutationem) [Gummere has ‘transformed’, which makes Seneca anticipate Laurie Paul], while denying it was a disturbance [perturbationem]. (It’s easy to imagine Star Wars as originating in one’s translation choices.)

The insight Seneca has is that even the wise or truly self-sufficient person, that is, the “one over whom fortune has lost her control,” will have natural feelings or affections [naturalis adfectio] not subject to rational control, or literally unvanquishable by reason [inexpugnabilis rationi]. These natural reactions are triggered by features of the environment. Of course, how we go on to respond to such natural feelings is a sign of our character.

As an aside: lurking here in Seneca is a distinction between the natural feelings and cultivated feelings (or as the eighteenth century would say, ‘moral sentiments’). Seneca rejects the idea (often associated with Stoicism) that we can be absolutely unfeeling or have all our feelings under our immediate control.

Perhaps, Seneca implies that before the voyage he did think one could control all one’s feelings. Or, perhaps he discovered in that dank and dusty tunnel that he is naturally more fearful of death than he realized. (The letter goes on to hint at this fear.)

Once, when my then pregnant partner (we were not married yet) encountered an unfriendly bull in a field in Wales, and we backed off, I surprised myself with the unseemly speed by which I managed to get out over the gate of the field ahead of her. As Seneca puts it, “fear looks not to the effect, but to the efficient cause [efficientia] of the effect.” I learned, then, that while I can face fate that I do not control (airplane crashes, bullets flying, etc.) with relative equanimity this is nestled comfortably besides cowardice. A sordid glimpse into my soul.

The “question” of the “immortality” of the soul is, in fact, the official destination of the final paragraph of Seneca’s letter. (And, of course, this voyage takes us back to the beginning of our lives — that tunnel metaphor comes in handy after all! — when our soul joins us for our temporal voyage.) This question is not answered, yet.