Thinkers and their private lives

How much weight should we give to unpleasant revelations about the private lives of thinkers? It partly depends on what kind of thinker we’re talking about. When it was discovered a few years after his death in 1983 that Paul de Man had written for Nazi-controlled newspapers in Belgium, a debate began on whether this had any bearing on the deconstruction he propounded

The new revelations rooted out by Evelyn Barish in her biography of de Man last year – bigamy, fraud and an unserved prison sentence – further fuelled the discussion.​＊ Similar questions circle around Heidegger: it had always been known that he was a member of the Nazi Party, but his Black Notebooks, recently published in Germany, contained new evidence of anti-Semitism. Revelations like these trouble the writers’ acolytes, but it isn’t clear that they damage their work (not clear, but possible: a case has been made that there are connections between Heideggerian Dasein and Nazi ideology). Heidegger, after all, like de Man, made no claim to be a philosopher of ethics: he claimed in his ‘Letter on Humanism’ that ethics begins ‘to flourish only when originary thinking comes to an end’.

Yet the charge of hypocrisy can legitimately be levelled at any ethical philosopher, ancient or modern, who doesn’t abide by his own teachings. A mathematician who solves a famous problem may be a known scoundrel and liar, but mathematicians don’t come up with ethical injunctions for others to follow. If we were to discover that despite his exaltation of the rational part of the soul, Plato spent his days getting drunk and ogling young boys in the gymnasion, what would we think of the moral philosophy he puts in Socrates’ mouth? Still, simply noting the presence of hypocrisy doesn’t answer the question of whether hypocrisy matters, or when it should make a difference. It merely raises more questions: if an author doesn’t follow his own recipe for the happy moral life, can it still be a good recipe? If he’s too weak to follow it, can we assume others will be stronger? Should we be grateful that he can state philosophical ideals even if he can’t live them?

We don’t get many opportunities to try out these options. Summon up a list of great ethical thinkers: they are all exemplary figures, even if that is because their lives were cleaned up ex post facto by the tradition that passed on their teachings. The Buddha was moved by human suffering to seek enlightenment; Socrates was self-abnegating and wise in his knowledge of his own lack of wisdom; Confucius left politics to teach the importance of duty, self-cultivation and personal example. They all seem to have abided by their own teachings, which has made the teachings more persuasive – imagine a hypocritical Jesus, and you get a sense of the devastation that would be wrought on the faithful. Even Marcus Aurelius belongs in this company: he held a degree of political power unusual for a moral philosopher but his apparently private notes to himself, the Meditations, show him to be troubled by the exercise of empire and keen to rid himself of any signs of a weakness for wealth or power.

There is one figure whose writings set more of a puzzle: Lucius Annaeus Seneca. Along with Marcus Aurelius, he is the best-known representative of Roman Stoicism, and its most prolific author. The many works Seneca left behind and the details about his career recorded by Tacitus, Dio Cassius and others present us with the starkest of contrasts: an apparent double standard which raised eyebrows in his own time. His essays and letters repeatedly advocate the superiority of Stoic wisdom: the good Stoic is indifferent to material goods, concerned above all with improving the state of his psyche through introspection and self-correction, and able to subordinate his emotions to Stoic rationality. Whether your child has died or a tyrant is stretching you on the rack, the goal is unshakeable equanimity. These circumstances are ‘externals’ that can’t affect the virtue of your soul, which depends on living according to reason (itself conceived of as a state manifested in the existence of the universe). Seneca never claims he’s become the unshakeable person who pursues virtue alone, but presents himself as constantly striving towards this goal, and his prose writings focus on the endeavour and its challenges.

But Seneca didn’t maintain a philosophical detachment from politics or ambition: his life resembles that of any enterprising but unfortunate senator under one of the later Julio-Claudian emperors. Already noted for his literary and philosophical talents under Caligula, he was recalled from eight years of exile in Corsica (where Messalina’s ill will had sent him in 41 AD) by the emperor Claudius’ new wife, Agrippina, who wanted a tutor to help her son outshine his half-brother, Britannicus. 

The new biographies by James Romm and Emily Wilson explore the tensions generated by Seneca’s life and legacy without resorting to the reductive choice between saint and hypocrite, Stoic idealist or stony practitioner of realpolitik.

Seneca may have been thinking about his role in politics even as he argued for uncompromising moral positions. On Anger invites us to reflect on Caligula; in On Benefits Seneca’s wealth is indirectly linked to his identification of the problem that gifts given by kings and tyrants can’t be refused; Agrippina’s behaviour is mirrored in the actions of the Medeas and Phaedras of the tragedies; the Thyestes offers a backwards look at Nero’s fratricide of Britannicus. All these texts offer reasons to be a Stoic: the world is a violent and soul-rending place.

At his death, Tacitus shows us Seneca effectively rebuking his friends for not learning the lessons of his writing. Why did he try to avoid the suicide that he so often presents as a release from intolerable conditions? Romm argues that such suicide could show an acquiescence to autocracy rather than defiance. It’s more likely Seneca still hoped when he wrote the Letters to Lucilius to outlive the more and more deranged and unpopular Nero and then to help reshape his own career for the eyes of posterity. In the absence of that opportunity, there will always be two images of his life: the court Seneca, marred by the great error of thinking that compromise was possible, and the idealised author of his writings, the imago vitae suae that Tacitus has him claim is his legacy to the future

How tainted is that legacy? Wilson makes the point that while these days we think in terms of hypocrisy and integrity, Seneca judged himself on constancy and inconstancy. He said that ‘the greatest empire is to be emperor of oneself’; Wilson observes ‘the paradoxes that emerge … through his attempt to gain “control” or “empire” in both the public and personal senses’. In this too he failed. But it’s interesting that in Senecan drama, constancy is the hallmark of his most successful protagonists – and they are not the philosophers, but the tyrants. While the moralisers go to and fro, the Atreuses and Medeas take revenge. Seneca proves in both biographies to be not so much an inconstant hypocrite as a tragic figure. He was an idealist with stained hands: a man whose life demonstrated the view that philosophers and rulers are best off keeping their distance from one another.