Seneca on restlessness, tranquility, and constancy of mind
As followers of the series know, in this blog the aim is to reconstruct the key claims of Ilsetraut Hadot (Pierre Hadot’s second wife)’s 2014 French-language book on Seneca, a book which (in its German 1969 original) has a claim to being the first book on philosophy as a way of life, as well as contributing greatly to the understanding of Seneca. Having given a preliminary account of philosophy as “paranesis” and “spiritual direction”, Hadot has situated Seneca’s idea of philosophical spiritual direction (we might say “coaching” today or “counselling”) within the ancient world, and within the Stoic school’s history. She then turned to the objective of philosophy, examining the ideas of perfected reason, the forms of knowledge the Stoic should cultivate, and then the idea of “securitas”. She turns now to “tranquilitas animi”, tranquility of mind, as another seeming description of the goal of philosophy, or one aspect [?] or part [?] of the same.
The great German scholar Max Pohlenz held that the term tranquillitas in Seneca is identical to that of securitas, the word we’ve been looking at in this blog series for the last couple of weeks and entries, as we examine Ilsetraut Hadot’s great book on Seneca (in connection with the labor of translating). He notes that the two terms often seem to be used indeterminately to describe the goal or objective…
