Member-only story
Seneca to Lucilius: 31, the great potential of the human mind
Turn a deaf ear to those who love you most: their intentions are good, but the things they are wishing for you are bad. If you want to be truly prosperous, entreat the gods that none of the things they want for you may happen. Those are not goods that they wish to see heaped upon you. (XXXI.2–3)
Strong stuff from Seneca here! But before you run off thinking that the Roman philosopher was giving permission to teenagers to ignore their parents and live a life of sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll, take a look at what comes immediately afterwards:
There is but one good, and that is both the cause and the mainstay of happiness: trust in oneself. (XXXI.3)
According to classic scholar Liz Gloyn, in her wonderful The Ethics of the Family in Seneca, the Stoics recognized that, in most cases at least, the family is crucial to our initial moral development. We learn the basics of how to live our life and how to interact with others from our parents and other adults we grow up with. The problem is that such early teaching environment soon runs out of things to teach us, from a Stoic perspective.
You see, most parents want you to be successful, famous, wealthy, and so forth. But for Stoics those are all preferred indifferents, meaning things that have value (axia in Greek), but only if they are used for good. And those things themselves don’t tell you how to use them. What does? Virtue, of course. Which is why Seneca advises his friend to turn a deaf ear toward what his mother and father are saying, and trust instead himself, specifically his judgment as a student of Stoicism.
Seneca continues:
For it cannot be that any one thing is bad at one time and good at another, or light and easy to bear at one time and terrifying at another. Work is not a good. So what is? Not minding the work. (XXXI.3–4)
