Seneca: Letters

Kant's critique of Utilitarianism, to the effect that if everyone practiced it everyone would be miserable, seems to apply equally well to Stoicism as it is commonly perceived.  Self-abnegation, unremitting seriousness, and general tsking at life hardly seems like a way of life worth the effort, however virtuous it may be.  Virtue is its own reward, of course, but too often it is also its own punishment.  Such a Calvinist belief in the virtue of suffering ends up responsible for far more human suffering than it prevents.

Militant Stoics look rather askance at Seneca, accusing him of lip service to Virtue without actual practice of it.  How hard is it to resign oneself to life when life is affluent and sociable, after all? Isn't Stoicism serious business?  Isn't life itself serious, dreary, and grim?  What business does one have owning a vineyard in the midst of all this, after all?

Whether he intended to or not, however, it is exactly through this "lip service" that Seneca revealed the purest form of Stoicism.  A true Stoic knows and embraces that money, vineyards, love, and friendship are of only illusory worth.  Seneca takes that assertion a step further, and says that not only are they ultimately worthless, but they are laughable.  They are not important, and therefore why should one go to any lengths to avoid them?  If one sees such things for what they truly are, they become not pitfalls to be avoided, but illusions to be enjoyed or not, as the occasion demands.  If my vineyard is of no consequence, why should I go to the effort of ridding myself of it?  If love and sex and friendship are vain and illusory, why go to the trouble of avoiding them?  Is not the whole picture of existence, namely that "whether a hundred or a thousand flagons go through your bladder, all you are is a strainer," rather more hilarious than grim (LXXVII)?  In which case, why not face it with a smirk and a quip than a frown and an empty stomach?

There's nothing better or worse about good bread than bad.  If presented with the latter, one has the choice of relishing in the suffering, or taking the more realistic (and practical) decision to "wait, then, and not eat until I either start getting good bread or cease to be fussy about bad bread" (CXXIII).