For Seneca, taking care of our own property means defeating your passions, being steadfast in the face of adversity, resisting temptation, setting your own mind as your objective, and being ready to die. It is not about reading the chronicles of historians who recount the exploits of kings.
Seneca: "What is great is having one's soul at one's lips, ready to depart; then one is free not by the laws of the city, but by the law of nature." For him, to be free is effugere servitutem. It is to flee servitude, servitude to the self. To be the slave of oneself is the most serious and grave of all servitudes, and it is an unremitting servitude, weighing upon us constantly. We can stop it on two conditions: 1) we stop demanding too much of ourselves, which means giving yourself difficulties, imposing great effort and toil on yourself. 2) we can free ourselves from this self-servitude by not granting ourselves what we usually give ourselves as salary, reward and recompense for the work we have done. You must stop "mercedem sibi referre" (making profit for yourself) if you want to free yourself from the self.
We impose obligations on ourselves and we try to get back some profit. We live within this system of obligation-reward, of indebtedness-activity-pleasure. Study of nature will help us to liberate ourselves.
Natural Questions: there are two parts of philosophy. There is the part that is concerned with men. This part says what we must do on earth. The other part of philosophy does not examine men, but the gods. It tells us what happens in the heavens. The difference of the two parts is as great as that between the ordinary arts and philosophy itself. the incompleteness of the first with regard to the second, and by the fact that only the second can complete the first. The concerning of men allows us to avoid errors. It casts the light on earth that enables us to discriminate between life's ambiguous paths. The second, however, is not content with using this light to light up life's paths, as it were. It leads us to the source of light by dragging us out of the shadows: it leads us to teh place from which the light comes to us. What is involved then is a real movement of the subject, of the soul, which is thus lifted above the world and dragged from the shadows made by the world here.
From the first part: you have escaped the vices of the soul, you have stopped composing your features and your speech, you have stopped lying and deceiving, and you have renounced greed, lust, and ambition. And yet, you have escaped many things, but you have not escaped yourself. It is then this flight from ourselves that knowledge of nature can ensure. It leads us to the source of light, leads us to God, but not in the form of losing ourselves in God but in the form that allows us to find ourselves again. By penetrating the innermost secret of nature, we rise towards the highest point.
What is involved is not an uprooting from this world into another world. It is not a matter of freeing oneself from one reality in order to arrive at a different reality. It is a movement going towards the point from which the light comes, which places us a the very peak, the highest point, and at the same time, opens up to us the secrets of nature, which allows us to look down to earth from above. By grasping the secret of nature, we can grasp how small we are.
Platonic movement consisted in turning away from this world in order to look towards another. The stoic movement defined by Seneca is completely different. It involves a sort of stepping back from the point we occupy. This liberation enables us to reach the highest regions of the world without ever losing ourselves from sight and without the world to which we belong ever being out of our sight. We reach the point from which God himself sees the world and, without our ever actually turning away from this world, we see the world to which we belong and consequently can see ourselves within this world.
It will enable us to grasp the pettiness and the false and artificial character of everything that seemed good to us before we were freed. Wealth, pleasure, glory: all these transitory events will take on their real proportions again when we reach the highest point where the secrets of the whole world will be open to us. When looking down from above, we are then able to despise all the false splendors built by men. We see how few things matter and endure. Reaching this point enables us to dismiss and exclude all the false values and all the false dealings in which we are caught up, to gauge what we really are on the earth, and to take the measure of our existence and of our smallness.
All armies are no more than ants. Like ants, they move around a great deal, but over a very small space. "You sail on a point, and you share out empires on a point, and only on a point."
To Marcia, ON Consolation: Here is the threshold of entrance rather than departure into life. You could see the stars, their regular course, the moon, and the planets whose movements govern men's fortune. You will find mountains, and towns, the ocean, sea monsters, and the ships which cross the sea. But at the same time, you would see that in this world there will be a thousand plagues of the body and the soul, wars and robberies, poisonings, bad weather and illness, and the premature loss of those close to us, and death, maybe gentle or maybe full of pain and torture. Consider and weigh carefully your choice; once you have entered this life of marvels, you must pass through these things to leave it. It is up to you to accept it on these conditions.
Seneca is shown the world not so that he can, like Plato's souls, choose his destiny. He is shown the world precisely so that he clearly understands that there is no choice, that nothing can be chosen without choosing the rest, that there is only one possible world, that we are bound to this world. The only choice is this: Consider and weigh carefully your choice; once you have entered this life of marvels, you must pass through these things to leave it. The only choice given to the soul on the threshold of life, at the moment of being born into this world is: Consider whether you want to enter or leave, whether or not you want to live. We have here the point symmetrical to, but as it were prior to, what we will find as the form of wisdom, precisely when it is acquired at te end of life and life is completed. When we reach that ideal completion of life, in ideal old age, then we will be able to ponder whether or not we want to live, whether we want to kill ourselves or go on living.
If you choose to live, you will have to choose the whole of this world spread out before your eyes, with all its marvels and sorrows. In the same way, at the end of life, when he has the whole world before his eyes---its sequence, and its sorrows and its splendors---thanks to this great view from above that ascent to the summit of the world, in the consortium Dei, has given him through the study of nature, the sage will then be free to choose whether to live or die.
What prescribes for the sage at the end of his life when one is at the frontier of life and death.
Why such foolishness, effort and sweat? Why plough the soil and besiege the forum? I need so little, and for a short time.
What we find in Seneca is that, by looking from above, he is able to penetrate into the innermost secret of nature, and then at the same time, allows him to gauge the infinitesimal size of the point in space he occupies and of the moment in time in which he lives.
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