Seneca on whether it is always better to live a retired life?
We left things last time in this blog series with Seneca’s advice to adopt some rule of life, to follow it, in order to cultivate tranquility.
You should lay hold, once for all, upon a single norm to live by, and should regulate your whole life according to this norm … (Seneca, Letters, 20, 3)
Sounds simple, right? It does however raise the question of just which rule of life we should adopt.
The ancient topos
This question was addressed by many ancient texts, in terms of divisions of different possible forms or kinds of life.
In Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics book I, for example, we are given the division between the life given over to pleasure, the active or political life, and the contemplative life. As Hadot observes, Seneca is conveying this older talking point when he declares in De otio, his text On Leisure, 3, that:
There are three forms of life and one has a custom of seeing the best amongst them: one given over to pleasure, the other to contemplation, the third to action.
As she goes on to say, however, once Stoicism enters the mix, a fourth possibility is…
