Today Seneca says: "A man may be called 'happy' who, thanks to reason, has ceased either to hope or to fear: but rocks also feel neither fear nor sadness, nor do cattle, yet no one would call those things happy which cannot comprehend what happiness is. With them you may class men whose dull nature and want of self-knowledge reduces them to the level of cattle, mere animals: there is no difference between the one and the other, because the latter had no reason, while the former have only a corrupted form of it."
Socrates famously said, "The unexamined life is not worth living." And Seneca takes up this notion, but he doesn't say those lives aren't worth living, only that people who do not examine their lives won't ever find true happiness. But wait, you might say. I know lots of people who never think about any of this stuff and they seem perfectly content. And that points to the notion that ignorance is bliss.
But the more we examine our lives, the more we are able to ascend to a new level of happiness, Seneca says. A stable, permanent happiness that isn't jostled by the waves of good or bad fortune that wash through our lives. We do have to rise above the herd, though, and examine our lives. We do have to THINK about our existence, and allow our reason to transcend the base instincts that we fall into so easily.
What do you think about that? Seneca would say that as long as you ARE THINKING about it, you've taken a big step in the right direction.
See you tomorrow!
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