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PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHYTHE JOURNAL OF THE SOCIETY FOR PHILOSOPHY IN PRACTICEwww.practical-philosophy.org.uk www.society-for-philosophy-in-practice.org |
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PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHYTHE JOURNAL OF THE SOCIETY FOR PHILOSOPHY IN PRACTICEwww.practical-philosophy.org.uk www.society-for-philosophy-in-practice.org |
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The Spiritual Teachings of Seneca
Mark Forstater
2001 London: Hodder and Stoughton.
pp. 175 ISBN 0 340 73322 5 (pb) £ 6.99
Practical Philosophy (Book Reviews) Spring 2002 Volume 4.2
Reviewed by: Antonia Macaro
After The Spiritual Teachings of Marcus Aurelius, Mark Forstater brings us The Spiritual Teachings of Seneca, which, I imagine, aims at making Seneca’s teachings accessible to the general public.
Half the book is taken by a lengthy introduction, and the other half consists in a thematic arrangement of material from Seneca. The introduction is divided into three chapters, two of which provide some historical background about Seneca’s life and times. Stoic ideas, however, seem not to be always accurately represented, and there are a number of, at the very least, misleading statements, such as that if we have a problem with ‘reason’ we could legitimately substitute this with ‘consciousness’. If one wants a good basic introduction to Stoicism, this isn’t it. The other chapter seems to provide an opportunity for Forstater to rail against modern society and its evils – climate change, globalisation, cloning, advertising, the media, capitalism and adultery, let alone the spiritual vacuum, you name it. The general thesis seems to be that, just like Seneca, we live in troubled times, characterised by natural disasters, wars, inequality, political instability and moral confusion. Stoicism is identified as an ethos that could provide the answer to all these things, although the analysis displayed in this chapter seems at best superficial.
The second part is divided into chapters that cover topics such as wealth, health, anger, fear, friendship, living in the moment, death and so on. Each of these chapters contains a collection of relevant material from Seneca, from one-liners to short stories. Is this inspiring? Yes. And the advantage of this approach is that the material is conveniently sifted and pre-digested – no need to wade through the boring stuff in order to unearth the gems. And yet, this is achieved at a price. What is the aim of all this abridging and modernising? Presumably to provide some inspiring food for thought to spiritually starved people who would be unlikely to come across Seneca or the Stoics otherwise. So far so good. But it is also true that this approach reduces Seneca’s teachings to easy soundbites, cut off from the wider context that gave them significance. This may distort their meaning.
At this point one could say that a book like this could get people hooked and spur them to find out more. But this book proves to be less than helpful in this respect, since there is no reference in it to the original sources at all. Given that the translations are likely to be modernised and possibly idiosyncratic, this seems to be a serious failure, preventing keen readers from easily locating the original translations should they wish to compare the two or explore the wider context. There is something unsatisfactory about reading only isolated bits, always wondering in what context a particular point was actually made and how it was originally expressed. But perhaps diluted and isolated dollops of Stoicism are better than no Stoicism at all.
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