Seneca, Moral Letters 5.3

Our motto, as you know, is "Live according to Nature"; but it is quite contrary to Nature to torture the body, to hate unlabored elegance, to be dirty on purpose, to eat food that is not only plain, but disgusting and forbidding.

 

Just as it is a sign of luxury to seek out dainties, so it is madness to avoid that which is customary and can be purchased at no great price. 

 

Philosophy calls for plain living, but not for penance; and we may perfectly well be plain and neat at the same time. This is the mean of which I approve; our life should observe a happy medium between the ways of a sage and the ways of the world at large. All men should admire it, but they should understand it also.

 

The pursuit of gratification can never be an end in itself, but then also the pursuit of deprivation can never be an end in itself. One fool thinks he is better for having more, while another fool thinks he is better for having less, and both are fools because the having is being confused with the living. 

 

I may have all sorts of misapprehensions and confusions about what is rightly meant by “Nature”, some of them because of my particular preferences, others on account of my unwillingness to look to a shared identity behind the impressions. 

 

Rocket science or cryptic metaphysics are not required to participate in Nature. My body is informed and ruled by a mind and a will, and so what is natural for me is to live according to the exercise of those powers, with understanding and with love. If I play my small part within the whole, I am then in harmony with the whole. 

 

All the rest can, and will, come and go as it may. Finding the mean involves ordering all circumstances, whether this involves receiving more or less, toward that intrinsic end. 

 

Deliberately mangling or abusing my body will not make me any more virtuous, no more than deliberately pampering or spoiling my body will do so. 

 

Some people like to tell me I should hate the flesh, and other people like to tell me I should wallow in the flesh, and I can only remind myself that I am not just a piece of flesh, but rather, as Epictetus said, a little soul carrying around a corpse. The baggage is only useful in how it serves the traveler on his journey. 

 

There is no shame in a good meal, or a pretty view, or the comfort of an innocent pleasure, as long as I can properly place them in the order of things. Simplicity is never opposed to appreciation, and the everyday world is not in a state of war with wisdom. 

 

If being a sage is being fully human, I will hardly become a sage by rejecting anything that is meant to be human. I will not be at peace with myself if I refuse to live in the midst of others, and thereby fail in helping them to be at peace with themselves. 

 

Fix it instead of throwing it away. 

Written in 3/2012