Some Spinozistic Themes in Seneca's Letter 58.
Seneca’s Letter 58 is rather long and has quite a bit of technical, philosophical discussion, and is also a discussion of translating philosophical vocabulary.* In addition, there is a lot going on with oblique references to Socrates, an anticipation of Pascalian wagers, and an explicit discussion of suicide. My mind is buzzing.
It’s too much for me to take in, especially because I have been dealing with a number of setbacks these past few weeks. So I focus on a detail:
My present aim with this attention to detail is not to show how much time I have squandered on grammatical commentators, but to help you understand how many words in Ennius and Accius have been overtaken by disuse—since some terms even in Vergil, who is studied daily, have been lost to us.—Translated by Brad Inwood.
I heard of Ennius in high school as the first important Roman poet. Accius was new to me. That even the preserved, written word in a living language isn’t sufficient to being read and understood is, of course, a haunting thought to someone so attentive to posthumous reputation. Living languages can evolve rather quickly we might say.
This is more noticeable in languages without a national academy guarding spelling and meaning than in languages that bring the state to bear on maintaining some constancy. It’s often easier for me to read 17th century French — despite my general lack of fluency in it — than reading (say) 18th century Dutch.
The really striking claim in the quoted passage is that even a text that is part of the (let’s say) imperial identity and widely studied (as Virgil’s work is) might end up being, at least, in part obscure when its vocabulary only is preserved through its poetry and not part of ordinary social discourse.
This is, we may notice, Spinoza’s territory: The Hebrew Bible is subject of continuous study and intrinsic to a people’s identity; yet Spinoza is quite clear that in many places it is fundamentally obscure: “in a great many places either we don’t know what Scripture really means or we’re just guessing about its meaning without any certainty.” (TTP 7.65, using Curley’s translation; see also Spinoza note accompanying the next paragraph.)
Seneca is mentioned explicitly by Spinoza in the Ethics (as the induced suicide victim of tyranny) and TTP (as an authority on the limited duration of tyranny).
It’s actually not entirely clear why Seneca is instructing Lucilius on the fact that the meaning of disused words becomes unclear. My trusty guide to this letter, Inwood, doesn’t comment on this fact.
There is another Spinozistic theme being anticipated in Letter 58, one that bothered Leibniz greatly:
according to Spinoza, at any given moment, a soul will be different, since, when the body changes, the idea of the body is different. Hence, we shouldn't be surprised if he takes creatures for vanishing modifications.+
I like explaining to my students how for Leibniz, Spinoza treats us like shadows on the cave’s walls. This is, for Leibniz, the effect of Spinoza’s doctrine that our minds are ideas of our ever-changing bodies (and so inherently fleeting or ephemeral).
In Seneca the thought occurred with reference to the proverbial river of Heraclitus (58.23) and Plato’s doctrines (58.22-26). As Seneca summarizes twice: “I referred to a human being, a fluid and perishable bit of matter prey to all sorts of causes.” (58.24; De homine dixi, fluvida materia et caduca et omnibus obnoxia causis;) and ‘We are weak and fluid beings amidst emptiness.’' (58.27; see also the closing point on 58.28: ut an sint omnino, dubium sit. It can be doubted whether we exist!)
Oddly enough, then, the fluidity of our material corporality is the same as the fluidity of linguistic meaning. As Seneca puts it (58:28), political authority tries to stabilize them, and can succeed for a while: “For all things endure not because they are eternal but because they are protected by a ruler’s [regentis] care [cura]; immortal things would need no protector.”
Seneca’s moral (that we need the mind to latch onto eternal things [quae aeterna sunt]) will also be echoed by Spinoza. (On eternal things, recall Letter 41; recall Letter 40, and the backward references to Letter 32 & Letter 13 back in the day.) To what degree Spinoza endorses the idea that reason conquers the imperfections of the body [ac ratione vitium corporis vincat] turns on to what degree one thinks the third kind of knowledge, called ‘intuitive’ by Spinoza, is rational in character or something distinct.
Okay, that’s it for today. And somewhat unusually for this series, I am committed to linger a bit longer on this letter.
* It is, in fact, the first of the ‘selected’ letters in Brad Inwood’s translation and commentary. I don’t know how I could have remembered that, since it was so long ago that I looked at it when I started this series. But somehow I was moved to take a peek at it.
+Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. “Comments on Spinoza’s Philosophy.” In Philosophical Essays. Edited by Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber, p. 277.