(Ill. 14.1)
Unfortunately, the mental faculties which search so assiduously for alternatives are hard to arrest. They continue to play out scenarios of change and progress even when there is no hope of altering reality. To generate the energy required to spur us to action, we are reminded by jolts of discomfort – anxiety, pain, outrage, offence – that reality is not as we would wish it. Yet these jolts have served no purpose if we cannot subsequently effect improvement, if we lose our peace of mind but are unable to divert rivers; which is why, for Seneca, wisdom lies in correctly discerning where we are free to mould reality according to our wishes and where we must accept the unalterable with tranquillity.
The Stoics had another image with which to evoke our condition as creatures at times able to effect change yet always subject to external necessities. We are like dogs who have been tied to an unpredictable cart. Our leash is long enough to give us a degree of leeway, but not long enough to allow us to wander wherever we please.
The metaphor had been formulated by the Stoic philosophers Zeno and Chrysippus and reported by the Roman Bishop Hippolytus:
When a dog is tied to a cart, if it wants to follow, it is pulled
and
follows, making its spontaneous act
coincide with
necessity. But if the dog does not follow, it will be compelled in any case. So it is with men too: even if they don’t want to, they will be compelled to follow what is destined.
A dog will naturally hope to go wherever it pleases. But as Zeno and Chrysippus’s metaphor implies, if it cannot, then it is better for the animal to be trotting behind the cart rather than dragged and strangled by it. Though the dog’s first impulse may be to fight against the sudden swerve of the cart in an awful direction, his sorrows will only be compounded by his resistance.
(Ill. 14.2)
As Seneca put it:
An animal, struggling against the noose, tightens it … there is no yoke so tight that it will not hurt the animal less if it pulls
with
it than if it fights
against
it. The one alleviation for overwhelming evils is to endure and bow to necessity.
To reduce the violence of our mutiny against events which veer away from our intentions, we should reflect that we, too, are never without a leash around our neck. The wise will learn to identify what is necessary and follow it at once, rather than exhaust themselves in protest. When a wise man is told that his suitcase has been lost in transit, he will resign himself in seconds to the fact. Seneca reported how the founder of Stoicism had behaved upon the loss of his possessions:
When Zeno received news of a shipwreck and heard that all his luggage had been sunk, he said, ‘Fortune bids me to be a less encumbered philosopher.’
It may sound like a recipe for passivity and quietude, encouragement to resign ourselves to frustrations that might have been overcome. It could leave us without heart to build even a diminutive aqueduct like that in Bornègre, in a valley a few kilometres north of the Pont du Gard, a modest 17 metres long and 4 metres high.
But Seneca’s point is more subtle. It is no less unreasonable to accept something as necessary when it isn’t as to rebel against something when it is. We can as easily go astray by accepting the unnecessary and denying the possible, as by denying the necessary and wishing for the impossible. It is for reason to make the distinction.
Whatever the similarities between ourselves and a dog on a leash, we have a critical advantage: we have reason and the dog doesn’t. So the animal does not at first grasp that he is even tied to a leash, nor understand the connection between the swerves of the cart and the pain in his neck. He will be confused by the changes in direction, it will be hard for him to calculate the cart’s trajectory, and so he will suffer constant painful jolts. But reason enables us to theorize with accuracy about the path of our cart, which offers us a chance, unique among living beings, to increase our sense of freedom by ensuring a good slack between ourselves and necessity. Reason allows us to determine when our wishes are in irrevocable conflict with reality, and then bids us to submit ourselves willingly, rather than angrily or bitterly, to necessities. We may be powerless to alter certain events, but we remain free to choose our attitude towards them, and it is in our spontaneous acceptance of necessity that we find our distinctive freedom.
In February 62, Seneca came up against an unalterable reality. Nero ceased to listen to his old tutor, he shunned his company, encouraged slander of him at court and appointed a bloodthirsty praetorian prefect, Ofonius Tigellinus, to assist him in indulging his taste for random murder and sexual cruelty. Virgins were taken off the streets of Rome and brought to the emperor’s chambers. Senators’ wives were forced to participate in orgies, and saw their husbands killed in front of them. Nero roamed the city at night disguised as an ordinary citizen and slashed the throats of passers-by in back alleys. He fell in love with a young boy who he wished could have been a girl, and so he castrated him and went through a mock wedding ceremony. Romans wryly joked that their lives would have been more tolerable if Nero’s father Domitius had married that sort of a woman. Knowing he was in extreme danger, Seneca attempted to withdraw from court and remain quietly in his villa outside Rome. Twice he offered his resignation; twice Nero refused, embracing him tightly and swearing that he would rather die than harm his beloved tutor. Nothing in Seneca’s experience could allow him to believe such promises.
He turned to philosophy. He could not escape Nero, and what he could not change, reason asked him to accept. During what might have been intolerably anxious years, Seneca devoted himself to the study of nature. He began writing a book about the earth and the planets. He looked at the vast sky and the constellation of the heavens, he studied the unbounded sea and the high mountains. He observed flashes of lightning and speculated on their origins:
A lightning bolt is fire that has been compressed and hurled violently. Sometimes we take up water in our two clasped hands and pressing our palms together squirt out water the way a pump does. Suppose something like this occurs in the clouds. The constricted space of the compressed clouds forces out the air that is between them and by means of this pressure sets the air afire and hurls it the way a catapult does.
He considered earthquakes and decided they were the result of air trapped inside the earth that had sought a way out, a form of geological flatulence:
Among the arguments that prove earthquakes occur because of moving air, this is one you shouldn’t hesitate to put forward: when a great tremor has exhausted its rage against cities and countries, another equal to it cannot follow. After the largest shock, there are only gentle quakes because the first tremor, acting with greater vehemence, has created an exit for the struggling air.
It hardly mattered that Seneca’s science was faulty; it was more significant that a man whose life could at any time have been cut short by the caprice of a murderous emperor appeared to gain immense relief from the spectacle of nature – perhaps because in mighty natural phenomena lie reminders of all that we are powerless to change, of all that we must accept. Glaciers, volcanoes, earthquakes and hurricanes stand as impressive symbols of what exceeds us. In the human world, we grow to believe that we may always alter our destinies, and hope and worry accordingly. It is apparent from the heedless pounding of the oceans or the flight of comets across the night sky that there are forces entirely indifferent to our desires. The indifference is not nature’s alone; humans can wield equally blind powers over their fellows, but it is nature which gives us a most elegant lesson in the necessities to which we are subject: