10.9.2006
1) One of the most striking points that Seneca makes, in his letters
to Lucilius, is the very first one (I, 3): that the only thing that is really
ours is our lifetime - everything else is at best a temporary possession, if
it is a possession of ours at all.
This gives rise to two questions: first, if actually only one thing is
ours, and nothing else, why is there such a widespread belief that we own
all sorts of things? Wouldn't it be strange that almost everybody is in
error about owning practically anything at all? And second, if it is
worth making this point, what does this reveal about the significance that
we put on owning things?
Seneca says, in effect, that whenever you think that something is yours,
you are wrong. (With the one exception of your lifetime, which actually
is the only thing you've got - but curiously, this is virtually never
recognized by anyone.) From your point of view, then, the two questions
from the previous paragraph can be rendered as, first, how can it be that
you are in error so often and with regard to almost everything, and second,
why do you nevertheless want to own these things, why do you put value on
them?
2) What does it mean to own something? For example, what is the
special thing about owning a house? Is the crucial aspect the freedom,
convenience, and perhaps the pleasure that it gives you? Is it the ability
to restrict the capability of others to act in some ways? (If you own a house,
then you are the one who can walk in and out freely, but it also allows you
to prevent other people from doing so.) And what is it that Seneca wants to
say when he claims that you may think that house is yours, but it
actually isn't?
There is a certain possibility of erroneously believing to own something:
sometimes there are situations when you are mistaken about the exact
situation. This is perhaps not very likely where house ownership is at issue,
but it is much more typical with respect to other things. You may
mistakenly think yourself entitled to use certain things because you think
they are yours, and then learn this actually isn't so: someone else might
deny it, or someone may put the same claim forward and be eventually
successful. Examples of this from everyday life abound: you purchased a
ticket to go to another city by the Express train; you understood this
would entitle you to a ride on the metro after your arrival, but it actually
didn't (maybe you misread an instruction on the ticket); someone wants to
check your ticket and there is an embarassment. On other occasions, such
situations may be even funny: you mistake someone else's glass of beer on the
table for yours and empty it; a few moments later everybody realizes your
'greediness'. But this sort of situation is not what Seneca has in mind when
he claims that things are not really ours of which we think they are. Your
claims may go unchallenged and still you will be wrong in that belief. How
is this to be understood?
Take the house example again. It sometimes happens that houses are
destroyed (think of natural desasters, or simply of dilapidation).
Although you may try to prevent this from happening, your powers to do so
are limited: such things happen, and they cannot be (or cannot be
completely, or cannot be always) controlled by you. This means that your
freedom to do what you are entitled to by virtue of your ownership and
your power to prevent others to do things you don't want them to do, is
limited. This gets even clearer once you consider that there is also a
temporal limit to any of your actions. You can only be in control as long
as you life; nobody is around forever, therefore your powers over whatever you
own are restricted. (And there is nothing you could do about that, not even
in a limited way as in the case of natural catastrophes.) If this line of
thought is generally correct, then nothing is yours except for a limited
amount of time, and nothing is completely yours, because there are always
powers stronger than you, which you can't control, and which can deprive
you of your property without notice.
3) Senecas letters (and other writings) are full of examples of
such 'external things' and the demonstration, over and over again, that they
are at best temporarily there for you to enjoy them. Still, one might argue,
this should be enough - owning a house is not worthless just because you
can't own it forever, after all. It makes sense to build or buy one, and
apart from extreme cases (where a hurricane destroys it just after you
bought it), you will usually be able to get something valuable out of it.
You could argue that every hour that you are able to live and own
your house (with all the freedom etc. that this state brings) is valuable;
the value of these hours adds even up with time, and your life will certainly
be richer and more valuable in effect if it includes these hours than if it
wouldn't. I shall return to that objection in a moment.
4) Where does this leave us with respect to the two questions
raised above? First, then, how can it be that you are in error so often? In
the house ownership example, to be able to see that the ownership is limited,
we had to think of natural catastrophes, and of our own death, in order to
become aware of the limits of every claim to such an ownership. This is not
something we often do in our daily lifes - and with good reason. We would
not be able to carry out all our projects if we were permanently to think
about obstacles that would destroy them. Being reminded of them continuously
would be lethal to the motivation and trust in ourselves that we need.
Moreover, it would not be practical at all to have these potential killer
events in view. Among all the happenings that might come about, they are
(although gravest in their consequences) among the least likely to actually
happen. When thinking about the future states of affairs that we might
encounter, we direct our attention (and correctly so) to those were we
will be able to do something about problems, and to those which have
a reasonable chance to happen (nobody can prepare for everything, so it is
wise to pick the possibilities that are most likely to become actual).
Now, this sounds very much like a reasonable attitude. But note that it
presupposes that you act with a goal. You have to already know what you
want if you are to take this stance. If you are thinking of buying a house,
you would of course not count the mere possibility that it may be destroyed
in a natural desaster as a reason against that plan. (Although you may
consider such a possibility as a good thing to consider when choosing the
location: if you are concerned about earthquakes, you will perhaps try to
avoid California, if you don't trust the sea, you will put a distance
between you and the shore. But this only affects one aspect of the project,
it does not make you abolish it altogether). The reasons for and against
the plan will include facts about your financial and marital situation that
have a practical influence, pondering the possibility of complete
destruction does not figure as a sensible reason for anything. Yet this
means that you have already made up your mind about a number of things (you
are willing to invest a lot of money into a house - and not in travelling
around the globe, for instance), which means that a lot of decisions about
how to use your money in general have already been made. Perhaps you are
trading some flexibility and mobility for more settledness - this indicates
also a number of decisions. In short, your decision to buy a house is heavily
influenced by your ideas of what sort of life you would like to live.
This consideration helps us to see a second reason why we are largely
in error when we think we own things (the first reason being the one
developed above, namely that our ownership is temporally limited and
subject to forces that are not completely under our control). If your
desire, and decision, to build or buy a house are shaped by your ideas
of how you should live your life, then we have to ask next where these
ideas might come from. For example, if your ideas are dominated by what
your parents thought to be a good life for you, if you grew up into a
mindset that thinks of being a house owner as a necessary condition for
being successful in the world ("A man must do three things in his life:
Plant a tree, build a house, and give the world a son." is a saying that
comes to mind as a nice illustration), then your ideas are thereby formed
and they would (among other influences) play a role in your decision.
Of course this does not imply that you are determined by what
others have taught you. Everybody is free to make up his own mind, and
it may well be that someone who grew up in such an environment as in the
example above later distances himself from these ideas. Sometimes this
happens as a process of increasingly independent thinking; sometimes just
as an instinctive opposition (children may take a contrary stance to what
their parents have tried to impose on them, not for any particular reasons
related to the matter at hand, but in order to find a distinctive view for
themselves). Depending on how these things develop, your ideas of a good
life, and in particular about the role that owning a house should play in it,
will be more or less shaped by other people. It will be more shaped by other
people's ideas the more you have just accepted them and less shaped insofar
you have questioned them and made up your own mind (even if the result of
this thinking coincides with what was doubted in the beginning). And to the
degree that your house ownership (and anything else that you think is yours)
has been generated by an external influence, I think it can be said it is
also not actually yours. You are just enacting a plan that was not made by
you, you are owning (as one might put it) something for someone else.
As I mentioned, this applies only insofar your decisions are not
the result of your own rational stance. And it would be very difficult indeed
to correctly determine how much of your life is under your own control
and how much of your course has been set by someone else and remained so
just because you never switched off the automatic pilot. But I think
nonetheless that this is a legitimate sense in which it can be said that
all the things that we think are ours actually aren't (or are at least not
as much so as we usually think). If this is correct, then it is a further
argument in support of Seneca's point.
5) And there is a third one; but it needs a bit more preparation.
Remember that I did leave (in the discussion above) an objection standing.
It was made against the argument that if you own a house, it is not actually
yours because it might be taken from you at any time (by a natural desaster
or misfortune), and indeed it will be taken away from you necessarily, at the
very latest by the time of your own death. The objection against this
argument was that, although your ownership lasts only for a limited period of
time, this doesn't make it valueless (except in rare cases where that period
is extremely short). For it is not house ownership in the abstract that we
value. What must be compared is a life in which you don't have your own
home with a life in which you have, and the second version is more
valuable because it contains stretches of time during which you can enjoy
the convenience and freedom that results from having your own home. House
ownership, then, is identified with the period of time in which you actually
own the house, and that period, although you can't completely control its
length, is yours. (And by the way, it is arguably yours in the same sense in
which Seneca thinks that your lifetime is yours.)
Related to this objection is the second question that I formulated above:
why do we see it as important that some things are 'ours'? People strive
for fame, riches and other things all the time, so they obviously put some
value on them. But if Seneca's point is correct, this ascription of value
is wrong. Why?
In the formulation of the objection, the question what exactly is valuable
in owning a house had already a function. It deflected the original argument
by making the value in owning things consist in enabling other valuable
states. It may be just the pleasure of arriving at your own home in the
evening, or it may be you are proudly feeling that being the owner of a
(maybe impressive) house displays a certain status, that this makes you an
important or admirable person in other people's eyes. If your owning a house
can bring these feelings to you, and if you value them, then there is an
indirect or instrumental value in owning a house. Moreover, these feelings
are of a sort that clearly does not depend on a certain duration, at least
not as much as house ownership does. If you manage to be happy by building
a house, this is something that no later event can take back from you. You
may lose your house, but your having been happy can't get lost by that, or be
destroyed with it. Collect as many of these happy states as possible, and
your life will be all the better for it.
If this sounds plausible (a big 'if', I think), then it all boils down
to pursuing everything for the eventual goal of some pleasant feelings.
I'm not going to argue agaist that view, although I think it is seriously
flawed. But I shall try to show that taking this view is no safeguard
against Seneca's point: even on this account it still holds good that
nothing is yours but your lifetime.
(To be fair it has to be said that this is not the only way the objection
might be developed. The more general idea behind it is that owning things
has instrumental value, and that the pursuit of what has value in itself
might be supported, or at least not hindered, by going after such
instrumental values. This general line could be taken in more convincing
directions than the crudely hedonist one that I suggested above).
6) Your beliefs and actions are yours: you decide what to do, and
you make up your mind about what you accept as true and what you doubt or
even hold to be false. At least in most cases this is so. There are
situations where you are tricked into beliefs which you would not accept
if properly considered, and there are actions that you take intuitively,
without any conscious thought at all. But these beliefs and actions are
still yours, and you can be held responsible for their consequences.
(Interestingly, if the consequences are beneficial, this is somewhat
different: while you can still claim credit for an intuitive action that
turned out to be exactly the right thing to do, if someone tricks you into
a belief which turns out to be good for you only a while later, then you are
not plausibly credited with endorsing the right view - rather that other
person will be the one who gets the praise.)
On the other hand, feelings and moods are involuntary. Although you
can employ a broad range of tactics in order to induce certain feelings,
this is only indirect. You cannot decide to be proud, or sad. When
you are, this comes about because of a mix of circumstances (are you in
a cloud of people who are looking at you, or are you by yourself?), your
present bodily fitness (have you been drained out by a long day of work
or travel, or did you just get up and are fresh and well rested?), the recent
thoughts that have occupied your mind, perceptions that you made, and other
factors.
There is another important dimension to feelings: they are involved in
emotions, and emotions are tied with values. (Think about it: typically
emotions are about something, and that something that they are
about is always something that has some value, either positive or negative.)
But emotions are notoriously evasive of one's control. You may notice that
you are getting angry every time a relative gives you 'good advice'; you may
think about it and rationally decide that this anger is ridiculous and that
you will stop getting angry - still, when the next occasion arrives and he
starts talking that way again, it starts again, just as if that resolve had
never been made.
Therefore, of all the episodes that happen in your life, those where
you are in control can be seen as, in a certain sense, those which are
yours, whereas everytime you are directed by circumstances, bodily
fitness, emotional stances and other conditions that leave you not much in
charge of the situation, this might be well seen as a chunk of your lifetime
that does not really belong to you. I think it is this sense (in addition
to those pointed out above) in which Seneca's point has to be taken.
There is nothing, in this sense, that can be said to be yours except the
pieces of your lifetime which are consciously formed by you. If you let all
the time that is given to you just drift by and don't do anything with it,
then you have wasted it all; if you make good use of at least some of it
(the stress here is on you making good use of it, it is your activity
that counts), then there is something that can be properly said to be owned
by you.
From this it should be clear that putting instrumental value on
something for the eventual end of having pleasant feelings doesn't help at
all. It still leads into a dead end. If Seneca's point is valid, and if
it is to be taken in that last sense developed above, then it is valid
also against proponents of the objection that can be made against it if
taken in the first sense (in the sense that all owning of things is
temporally limited and can be taken away from us by force).
7) Let's re-examine the two initial questions. Seneca's point is
expressed in terms of what is ours, of our 'owning something', but if it
is understood in the way that I developed above, it is mainly about what
we should see as our achievements and what we should see as happenings
influenced by external factors (external, that is, to ourselves, to our own
deliberative actions). Thus, the reason why we should think of almost
nothing as really ours (the first question) is that, as things are,
many (if not most) of what we think of as our achievements actually
weren't that much influenced or controlled by us.
If we start viewing things from that angle, something will change in the
picture that we have of values (the second question). We would probably
ask a lot more questions about what views people entertain, and what
actions they take - and for which reasons; and we would be far less
interested in such 'goods' as riches, or fame, and other externals.
Should reflecting about Seneca's point have that effect, I think it was
worth making it.
