Seneca, On the Happy Life 24: Ill at Ease

. . . According to your school, virtue has the dignified office of preliminary tester of pleasures. We shall, however, see whether virtue still remains virtue among those who treat her with such contempt, for if she leaves her proper station she can no longer keep her proper name.

In the meanwhile, to keep to the point, I will show you many men beset by pleasures, men upon whom Fortune has showered all her gifts, whom you must admit to be bad men.

Look at Nomentanus and Apicius, who digest all the good things, as they call them, of the sea and land, and review upon their tables the whole animal kingdom. Look at them as they lie on beds of roses gloating over their banquet, delighting their ears with music, their eyes with exhibitions, their palates with flavors. Their whole bodies are titillated with soft and soothing applications, and lest even their nostrils should be idle, the very place in which they solemnize the rites of luxury is scented with various perfumes.

You will say that these men live in the midst of pleasures. Yet they are ill at ease, because they take pleasure in what is not good.

—Seneca the Younger, On the happy life, Chapter 11 (tr Stewart)

The problem here boils down to whether virtue is to serve our appetites, or if our appetites are to serve virtue. If the standards of right and wrong depend upon desire, however, one will hardly have any right or wrong at all. Morality will shift and change based upon the convenience of our feelings, and we can clearly discern the root of the moral relativism that we see all around us.

I was once speaking to a fellow who insisted that cheating on his wife was actually doing her a favor. I wasn’t at all sure what to say when he explained that his trysts, which were only occasional, mind you, as if that made them any better, helped him to be more calm and relaxed, and that this made her life easier. There you have the sort of man whose conscience is in the service of his passions.

Seeing how the pleasure seeker lives has long saddened me, and I am also deeply ashamed whenever I have lived this way. The objects of desire may be sex, food, drink, luxury, money, reputation, or power, but regardless of what it is that may gratify us, we inevitably become selfish, manipulative, entitled, dishonest, and disloyal. In desiring to possess and consume, in serving myself, it becomes impossible for me to serve. Life becomes about grasping, not about giving.

Nomentanus and Apicius were apparently Roman gourmets, perhaps gourmands, perhaps most accurately gluttons, well known for their elaborate and luxurious tastes. We like to frown upon the decadence of the past, though we are hardly any better. I have had two moments of epiphany about our own excesses, both of which are indelibly burned into my memory.

The first was one of those rare moments when I found myself in the world of other half, in a fancy corporate office on one of the top floors of a skyscraper in Boston’s Financial District. The cost of the marble and fittings in the restrooms surely cost more than I would ever earn in my entire lifetime, and the catered food was worth more than at least a year of my own grocery budget. I was in awe, but the important people took it all for granted, and one griped that the champagne was far below his standards.

The second was just a normal shopping trip with my wife, and we came across a mother and her two children. The woman was speaking loudly on her cell phone, complaining to someone about her manicurist. An obese boy sat in in the shopping cart, wolfing down handfuls of chips from a large bag, leaving a trail of crumbs behind him on the floor. A slightly older girl, perhaps eleven or twelve, wearing tight lycra stamped with the word “juicy” on her bottom, was singing along to Miley Cyrus on her iPod.

I don’t wish to think of the world as being full of such mindless gorging, not so different from animals feeding at the trough, but such experiences make it difficult not to lose hope. I must think not of the symptoms, but of the cure, and I must remember that the solution is never to simply complain about others, whether it is about champagne, or manicures, or even gluttonous practices, but to improve myself.

The reason I am ill at ease, as Seneca says, when I pursue pleasure as an end is that I am trying to fill myself with things that are not really part of my nature at all. I am made to understand, not to conform. I am made to do good things, not to consume them. I am made to love, not to be gratified. 

Written in 2/2006

Image: Georg Emanuel Opiz, The Glutton (1804)