Seneca on the Highest Good and Goal of Life

Seneca, like Epictetus, was a Stoic philosopher. But whereas Epictetus was a slave, Seneca lived at the highest echelons of power in the Roman empire, and was the personal tutor and advisor to the emperor Nero. Like Epictetus, the world in which Seneca lived was the Greco-Roman world of the New Testament. Indeed, Seneca was born about the same time as Jesus Christ, though unlike Christ, Seneca lived a long life until finally being forced to commit suicide by Nero in 65 A.D.

Towards the end of his life, Seneca composed letters addressed to a Roman politician named Lucilius, in which he discusses Stoic ideas and doctrines in a personal, meditative, and often hortatory voice. The letter for today opens with a question: how can we know how to live? If we ask others for advice, the advice can come too late, and besides, the best course of action is often something you have to know in the spur of the moment. Seneca’s answer is a classic Stoic one:
we have to pursue what he calls the Highest Good. He identifies the Highest Good as that which is honorable, which turns out to be virtue. As a eudaimonist, Seneca believes that life is all about happiness, understood as human excellence and flourishing. Virtue, he claims, is sufficient for happiness. Indeed, as the examples of other virtuous Roman statesmen before him show, even when being tortured or killed one can live a happy life, so long as one preserves one’s virtue. This is a hardcore teaching, but as Seneca reassures us “the greatest part of progress consists in becoming willing to make progress.”

But what is virtue? The Greek word for virtue is often translated as “excellence” and for good reason. To be virtuous is to be an excellent person. For the ancients, the virtues were like excellent character traits. More technically speaking, they are stable dispositions to act in the right way at the right time. Courage, for example, is having the disposition to stand fearlessly when you should, and run away from danger when it’s appropriate to do so. Generosity is the disposition to share your time or material goods in the right way—neither being stingy nor prodigal. Seneca here also points out a particular Stoic idea about virtue, which is that “by its agency every external appearance that stirs our impulses will be clarified.” In other words, virtue will enable us to appropriately react to externals, things that are out of our control. Sound
familiar? Just like Epictetus, Seneca’s view on the Highest Good in life is that it involves appropriately judging what is up to us, and focusing on that. What is up to us turns out to be our virtue. Luckily for the Stoic, virtue is the only good—as Seneca stresses here—and is enough to live a genuinely happy human life.

Text: Seneca, Letter 71, “On the Highest Good” 1