How to Have a Good Life

Meena Danishmal asks if Seneca's account of the good life is really practical.

- Meena Danishmal

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the adjective ‘stoical’ means “resembling a Stoic in austerity, indifference, fortitude, repression of feeling and the like”. This gives us some idea of what it is like to be a Stoic.

Indeed, the key teaching, arguably the fundamental point, of Stoicism, is that we should focus on controlling the things that are under our control, such as our thoughts, emotions, and actions, whilst accepting those things we cannot control, such as most things that are happening in the world. How did they get there?

To consider this question let’s look at the ideas of the Roman philosopher and statesman Lucius Annaeus Seneca the Younger (4 BCE-65 CE). As a top advisor to the paranoid and murderous Emperor Nero, he probably found Stoicism a particularly practical guide to life.

As a Stoic, Seneca believed the soul (Latin: anima or animus) to be a finer form of matter than the body; but matter it is. It was also described as a spark of the fire which had consumed the original matter. With such an understanding of the soul, where does the soul reside within the body? Stoics provided a rather simple answer: everywhere. The soul was considered to be a vital force that animates the whole body. The soul was also the source of reason, virtue, and moral character, which is what Stoic philosophy is built upon, as the rational soul guides individuals towards living in accordance with nature.