Seneca, On the Happy Life 13: Pleasures of the Mind

"But," says our adversary, "the mind also will have pleasures of its own." Let it have them, then, and let it sit in judgment over luxury and pleasures; let it indulge itself to the full in all those matters which give sensual delights.

Then let it look back upon what it enjoyed before, and with all those faded sensualities fresh in its memory let it rejoice and look eagerly forward to those other pleasures which it experienced long ago, and intends to experience again, and while the body lies in helpless repletion in the present, let it send its thoughts onward towards the future, and take stock of its hopes.

All this will make it appear, in my opinion, yet more wretched, because it is insanity to choose evil instead of good. Now no insane person can be happy, and no one can be sane if he regards what is injurious as the highest good and strives to obtain it.

The happy man, therefore, is he who can make a right judgment in all things. He is happy who in his present circumstances, whatever they may be, is satisfied and on friendly terms with the conditions of his life. That man is happy, when his reason recommends to him the whole posture of his affairs.

—Seneca the Younger, On the happy life, Chapter 6 (tr Stewart)

The “adversary” here is the Epicurean. You need not worry about the history of it all right here, but you already know him, as the one who tells you to maximize your pleasure, and to minimize your pain.

Back then, it was Epicurus and his followers who defined you as a creature of desire. Hume, Bentham, and Mill kept that standard going. We now no longer need fancy philosophers to tell us that whatever feels good, is good. We now have corporate advertising to do that thinking for us, and which convinces us that the more of their products we consume, the happier we will be.

It would be a mistake to misrepresent the Epicurean as a mindless glutton, just as it would a mistake to misrepresent the Stoic as an emotionless mind. While the Epicurean doesn’t denigrate thinking, and the Stoic doesn’t denigrate feeling, the important difference between them is one of priority.

For the Epicurean, man’s highest good is about pleasure, about good feeling, and all other things must be ordered to that end. For the Stoic, man’s highest good is about virtue, about right action, and all other things must be ordered to that end. In the simplest sense, it’s about the difference between feeling good and being good.

There are times when Seneca can find common ground with the Epicureans, but in this most basic matter his opposition is very clear. Man is indeed a creature that feels pleasure and pain, but without the mind to judge soundly between what is true or false, what is right or wrong, no life can be considered good, or happy.

But surely, the Epicurean might say, the reason we pursue thinking is because it provides us with pleasure, and the mind therefore becomes the means by which we acquire those feelings of satisfaction?

I always suspect that Seneca takes something very seriously when his style becomes sarcastic, and this passage is no exception. By all means, he tells us, treat your intellect simply as a tool to pursue pleasure. What will your judgment tell you? You will look back at the faded pleasures you have lost, and you will entertain ridiculous hopes of somehow getting them again. In the meantime, you are stuck in the middle, between memory and expectation. All this time, your mind will be reminding you how shallow those feelings really are, and how they were never really satisfying at all, because they always left you wanting more and more.

The mind, Seneca tells us, would hardly ever recommend the life of pleasure as worthwhile, because the mind would clearly discern how empty and foolish such a life truly is. Only an insane man, a mindless man, would ever want to acquire what does him harm, and the most basic common sense teaches us that the pursuit of passion divorced from knowledge will never do us any good.

I need to think only of the most damaging choices I have ever made, and what they all shared in common was that they were all about feeling right, not doing right. If I had used my mind rightly, I would have spotted the difference right away. I would have been at peace with myself and with my world, not tossed around by my circumstances.

I once met a fellow who insisted he knew me better than I knew myself, and told me that the only reason I was so interested in philosophy was because it made me feel good. “Hey, I think it’s fun to get drunk and have sex, you think it’s fun to read a book. You and I aren’t really that different.” I smiled and bought him a drink, wondering within myself how long he could keep this up until he hit rock bottom.

No, he and I were quite different, not because we liked to do different things, but because we were starting from two opposing premises about what made life worth living. We had our heads and our guts stacked differently. 

Written in 8/2010