The Good & the Necessary. Seneca, Epistles 5.45.10-11
Seneca
invites Lucilius to address life directly, without using the
arguments of others as a medium, and to avoid the very Stoic tendency
to confound good things with necessary things. Seneca is Stoic enough
to say that all good things are necessary, but he will not concede
that all necessary things are good. I wonder how Marcus Aurelius
would feel about this!
Quid
me detines in eo quem tu ipse pseudomenon appellas, de quo
tantum librorum compositum est? Ecce tota mihi vita mentitur: hanc
coargue, hanc ad verum, si acutus es, redige. Necessaria iudicat
quorum magna pars supervacua est; etiam quae non est supervacua nihil
in se momenti habet in hoc, ut possit fortunatum beatumque praestare.
Non enim statim bonum est, si quid necessarium est: aut proicimus
bonum, si hoc nomen pani et polentae damus et ceteris sine quibus
vita non ducitur. Quod bonum est utique necessarium est: quod
necessarium est non utique bonum est, quoniam quidem necessaria sunt
quaedam eademque vilissima. Nemo usque eo dignitatem boni ignorat ut
illud ad haec in diem utilia demittat.
Why
do you detain me with what you yourself call falsehood (†),
about which so many books have been written? Lo! My entire life is
telling lies. Convict it of this. Lead it back to the truth, if you
are keen. My life thinks that things are necessary, when in fact most
of them are utterly superfluous. Even the things that aren't
superfluous
have no power within themselves whereby they can overcome the gift of
fortune, the blessing of events beyond our control. If something is
only
necessary, then it
is not really good: if we
insist that it is, then we
end up banishing or demeaning
goodness,
when we invoke it
to refer to bread and barley-gruel, and other things without which
our
life becomes actually
impossible. Whatever is good
is surely also
necessary, something we need and must see, but the necessary is not
similarly bound to be good, since there are definitely some things
needful that are also utterly base,
or even disgusting. Nobody is
so ignorant of the good,
and its real
worth, that he would confound it with the means our mere existence
requires day to day.
---
(†)
The Greek ψευδόμενον
to which Seneca refers is any misrepresentation, but in contexts like
this it often refers to arguments which demonstrate conclusions
falsified by experience. It was a source of endless interest in
antiquity that human language and reasoning offer so much opportunity
to make plausible assertions that turn out to be false.