This article has moved:
https://janniklindquist.substack.com/p/seneca-on-fear-18-12-20
This article has moved: https://janniklindquist.substack.com/p/stoicism-and-evil-governments-19-01-03
Thoughts and notes on the ancient Greek and Roman philosophy of happiness in general and on Stoicism and Seneca in particular.
Have a look at this passage as well:
ReplyDelete"when foolishness has something to fear, it is as tormented in its expectation as though the bad thing had already occurred: what it fears to endure, it endures already through fear. Just as with bodily illness there are advance warnings that precede a seizure—a listless heaviness, unexplained fatigue, yawning, and a tingling that runs through the limbs—even so is the unhealthy mind shaken by misfortunes long before it is actually confronted with them: it anticipates them and is afflicted before its time. Yet what could be more senseless than suffering over what has not yet happened? Rather than awaiting future trials, you are summoning them to your side! Better you should delay them if you cannot dispel them altogether. “Why,” you ask, “should a person not be tormented by the future?” Suppose one were to hear that in fifty years’ time he would be put to torture. The only way he would be alarmed would be if he were to bypass the intervening years and insert himself into the anxiety that is to come a lifespan later. The same thing happens with minds that deliberately make themselves ill by sorrowing over events long in the past. They are seeking out reasons for grief. Both the past and the future are absent; we have no sensation of either. And where you have no sensation, there is no source of pain."
- Seneca, Letters 74.32-34
"Both the past and the future are absent; we have no sensation of either. And where you have no sensation, there is no source of pain."
ReplyDeleteThis is so obvious that it often gets forgotten. =)