Philosophy: A Guide to Happiness - Seneca on Anger - Legendas Bilíngues
Thanks so see I'll guys Before I really knew anything about it, I was attracted to the idea of the of philosophy.
I thought of it as a practical subject that could make a real difference that might have wise things to say about everyday worries like being
rejected in love or failing in a job or not having any friends.
Philosophy promised something that might sound a little naive, but was in fact rather profound – way to learn to be happy.
And as I found out more,
I discovered that there were six philosophers I was particularly interested in,
the wisest things to say about the areas of life, I'd always found rather problematic.
The problem that I came to Rome to try and find an answer for was anger.
And only have to spend a few minutes in the city to realize that anger is a massive problem.
Modern life is full of frustration, and most of us don't seem able.
to respond very philosophically to it,
we're prone to losing our temples, anger seems as much a part of our lives today's bad driving and traffic jams.
So it's interesting to discover that in ancient times, Anger was felt to be an even greater problem than it is now.
Ancient Romans were, if anything, angrier than modern ones.
And we find one ancient philosopher who was particularly concerned with anger and wanted to calm people down.
He was born in Cordoba, the province of Spain, in 180, and his name?
was Seneca.
Seneca was the most famous and popular philosopher of his day,
the author of more than 20 books of practical advice about all aspects of life.
He came to Rome as a boy and spent most of his life here, becoming influential in politics.
and a member of the Roman Senate.
But that doesn't mean that his life was free from frustration.
He was naturally a rather melancholy man, who suffered from tuberculosis as a youth, and was prone to almost suicidal bouts of depression.
And he lived in very dangerous times.
His political career coincided with the reign of a series of despotic, violent, and unpredictable rulers.
Seneca was moving in a world where he literally couldn't know what would happen to him tomorrow.
The ground was unstable beneath his feet.
In 49 A.D.,
he had to take on,
against his will,
the most fateful job in the Imperial Administration, tutor to a 12-year-old boy called Lucios Domicios Ahenobarbus, the future emperor Nero.
It soon became clear that Nero was a murderous psychopath.
Knowing he was in extreme danger, Seneca attempted to withdraw.
draw from court.
Twice he offered Nero his resignation.
Twice the Emperor refused, embracing Seneca tightly and saying that he would rather die than harm his beloved tutor.
Nothing in Seneca's experience encouraged him to believe such promises.
It's by wandering around the rooms here in Nero's underground palace,
that you begin to get a sense of just why Seneca was so worried about anger.
Nero was a man who had absolute power.
People brought down to these chambers, and the most horrific mass murders went on.
He would have Romans thrown to the lions, decapitated, eaten crocodiles.
torn apart alive.
Virgins were seized off the streets of Rome,
were brought here murdered, gladiators who hadn't performed well, were disemboweled and thrown to wolves, all in these underground chambers.
It was because the consequences of anger were so great that Seneca was desperate.
at to assuage them.
An angry Roman emperor was not just an unpleasant sight, he was potentially a catastrophic phenomenon.
Right there, mate.
I Whoa, ducky.
Having seen so much of it at first hand, Seneca thought anger a terrible problem.
He even devoted a whole book entitled On Anger to the subject.
The most hideous and frenzied of...
all emotions he called it.
But crucially, he refused to see it as an irrational outburst, something over which we have no control of.
wouldn't be driving like cars but I mean the way they drive doesn't say that they've
got any idea about driving in England or driving on any road anywhere surely they
go across lanes they just suddenly have no regard for anybody else just pull up
apart they can't reverse you know they can't park so what are your favorite favorite insult If someone's done something really bad on the road,
what do you like to call it?
We've gesticulations.
Basically just explode for that moment in time, like clear me air, clear me air.
Have you ever got out of your car and actually hit someone.
I did threaten to educate him.
He his door to put his seatbelt on.
Yeah.
And crumpled his door but it cut my finger like that.
Wayne Allingham is a driver with a delivery company.
He finds it difficult to control his temper when he's on the road.
He doesn't think there's much he can do about it.
Seneca would have disagreed.
I can call the place to those when I'm in Perfect.
I myself to the hospital, put the needle food.
Oh, I've got squirt.
Oh, blood out.
That sort of soaked me up a bit as well.
Pretty angry.
Oh, here we go.
What's going on?
Seneca thought that anger was a philosophical problem, an amenable problem.
to treatment by philosophical argument.
Angaro rose from certain rationally held ideas about the world.
And the problem with these ideas is that they're far too optimistic.
Where are you going?
Can see that?
In Seneca's analysis.
People get angry because they're too think you've described as more as an optimist as a pessimist?
Oh, optimist.
Got be.
Anyway, don't you think?
We'll optimistic.
You're expecting that other people are going to drive in a better way.
Other people can't drive.
You can for days without an incident.
You everything is getting better.
You come out and you see someone's done your van.
If it's a little car and they cut, you think...
Especially when they've got kids in a van.
How long have we been driving a van?
A van, two years.
I've been driving a van.
two years,
every day,
every day someone cuts you up,
someone does something stupid,
and yet every time you get surprised and you get angry in a way, it's like you're surprised that this thing has happened again.
Do you might be good idea to get more pessimistic about how the drivers,
because then you sort of calmed down about that drug,
like you told Whenever we get angry, there's an element of surprise in a sense of self-pitying injustice.
What Seneca would say to Wayne is that traffic jams and bad driving are neither unfair nor surprising.
They're a predictable feature of life.
The person who gets angry about them simply has the wrong expectations.
expectations of the world,
so Seneca's first piece of advice is to be more pessimistic,
to adjust our view of the world so as to be less surprised when reversals occur,
and he urges us to bear something else in mind too.
If we can accept that there's often nothing we can do about our frustrations,
we'll be less likely to lose our rag when we encounter them.
We indicate it's on mic, we indicate it.
that one of the reasons we get so angry is because we imagine that things should basically always go our way,
that we should be able to make the world conform to our wishes.
But actually, we can't.
There are many things that we just have to accept.
We're often not free to change things.
In order to try and make us understand this, in order to try and bring this image home, Seneca came up with an unusual idea.
all of us are essentially rather like dogs tied to the back of a moving chariot.
Now the leash is just about long enough to give us some freedom but it isn't long enough
to allow us to move wherever we want.
Now the dog quickly realises that in order to map maximize its chances of happiness,
it should at times follow the chariot, or this case the bicycle of the budget was limited.
So it's far better essentially to follow in a direction where you don't want to go and to kick against something that you can't change.
Because then you'll end up not only going where you don't want to go but also so being strangled,
but we do have one advantage over animals.
We have reason and dogs don't.
And this reason gives us a key advantage.
It means that we can realise what we can change and what we can't.
We may be unable to alter certain events,
but we can always change our attitude to what we can towards those events,
and it's this ability that Seneca believed gave us our distinctive form of freedom.
Come on, Flora, necessity commands you to come this way.
Come on, come on.
But Seneca isn't just useful for times when we're feeling fury.
His philosophy offers us a to stay calm and collected whatever life may throw at us.
You get a sense of the life Seneca would have led when you wander around the ancient Roman town of Pompeii.
He was a rich man, and you might be tempted to imagine that he and his patrician contemporaries enjoyed an easy, untroubled existence.
But read Seneca, and you realize how wrong that is.
In the midst of luxury, the Roman rich was seething with fury.
Seneca came to an interesting analysis of anger from looking at the people around him.
He moved in the wealthiest circles in Imperial Rome.
Many of his friends had large voices.
They would have had retinues of slaves to the food.
They would have been long banquets lasting into the night.
Guests would have been seated on gilded couches.
Seneca noticed a surprising thing in the world around him,
that being rich tended to make people angrier not calmer, as he put it, prosperity bad tempers.
Seneca knew of a man called Vedius Polio, a high imperial official who once hosted a party.
And he had a slave who was carrying a tray of crystal glasses and this unfortunate slave
happened to trip on a piece of marble and dropped the tray of crystal glasses all over the floor.
They shattered.
And it's so angered Vedius Polio that he did the slave to be thrown alive into a pool of lampreys and consumed by these fierce creatures.
And what was essentially going on in Seneca's analysis was that Vedius Polio believed in a world that in which glasses The wealthier you are,
the more expectations you tend to have.
And it's when expectations are dashed that fury breaks out.
The rich believe their money will insulate them from setbacks and frustrations.
And that's one of the absurdist expectations of all.
Seneca's philosophy isn't only relevant to those of us who lose our tempers.
He thought we all react badly to frustration and so can all benefit from lowered expectations.
I've only got like 10 minutes to get out.
So then I rush along and then at the bus stop,
usually kind of twitching,
waiting for the bus to come along because it never comes along, of course it never comes along when you want to.
Usually once I'm on the bus,
I can relax for a certain extent though there is always the traffic problem,
and I'll sit there and probably read in that manuscript,
and then finally get into work and open my emails,
look at the sales figures, and look at my diary, think, oh my god, obviously those are up to that, that's how the day starts.
Rickett, what kind of fiction planning meeting?
Phoenicia Butterfield is the marketing manager for a publishing company.
She finds the stress of her job difficult to cope with.
I wondered where the Seneca might help her too.
Okay, bye.
What's your average day like here?
Quite hectic, lots of meetings.
Publishers to be kind of quite verbose.
Authors up and they suddenly say, is this happening and then you'll have to check out to see whether it is or not.
And what kind of things stress you out most?
Meetings that drag on.
Like someone will say, can we a really quick meeting?
And only be half an hour.
And then you're sitting there kind of twitching because it's taking a hour and half.
And think, you've got to things you've got to do.
And what do you do when you get particularly stressed?
You your is overflowing with papers.
It to be now.
What you actually do to kind of?
What do I do?
I around and get bossy.
There could be one solution to all this, there might be one solution.
Well, our friend Seneca, he had this one idea that he says that what makes us most stressed
out is things that take us by surprise, that most stressed, most angry, if a kind of problem looms up that you haven't expected.
So if you've told yourself, okay, things probably will go wrong, the art department probably won't get the thing, my will be late, etc.
When these things happen, you're kind of prepared for them.
And he said, the greatest thing, the greatest way to combat anger and frustration.
And that's why he advised this kind of premeditation.
But then you might also kind of stress your out your self out even more by imagining all the terrible things that could happen.
So before you even get there, you're kind of panicking thinking, oh my god, this could happen.
Sure.
With my initial reaction is to kind of think, well, no, it's to be fine, it's going to be okay.
So you can't really prepare yourself in, not in a sort of in a manic way.
We usually try to reassure people by saying things like,
don't worry,
it'll be fine,
but Seneca believed such cozy advice to be potentially very cruel, because it leaves us unprepared if things turn out not to be okay.
So he recommended an opposite strategy,
a dangerous,
daily meditation on all the things that might go wrong and I think what he was
trying to do was simply get us to structure those thoughts which we sometimes have so that we'd actually do them every morning.
So you do it every morning.
I mean that's something you'd like to try maybe.
Give a try.
Well, I'm going to be late for work because I'll get to the bus stop and I'll wait until
time for the bus and it will finally come and then what will happen is that the bus
travel will be in a bit of a hurry.
So he'll slam the brakes down and he'll probably crash into somebody and so then I'll be late for work and then I'll be late for a meeting
which starts at nine and I'll walk in and 20 people will be As I kind of predicted,
the bus didn't have a crash,
but it was really late,
so I was late and everyone did kind of go, but luckily I wasn't too depressed, I didn't get any more cashfits.
I've got a lot of disappointments,
I'm just to check out, but I'll probably say that I've got 10 more brain cancer or something like that.
Hi, I'm a bit late because I have a which is really annoying, so I'm trying to
get in early and write a presentation for an order, so that's going to skip at that point.
I've got a cold, so you probably need it.
develop into the million years of it,
and we're meeting with the UIP,
the film distributor,
by the film Tye and the wedding, and they're probably demanding us, which we don't have, and we'll end up having an album.
Well, I thought I'd kind of sum up my week.
of being deep, pessimistic every day.
I think in a way it can be useful,
probably you prepare a bit more and realise that you're washing around a little too
much and I think a little bit too last minute and it makes you aware probably of
the things that you cannot affect in your life and things that you can't
you can't and if you think you can't affect like the bus or like other people not
doing their jobs or other people screwing up or not doing them in one time.
It makes you perhaps more philosophical about those kind of things.
Of course, Seneca wouldn't suggest to Venetia that she shouldn't ever expect things to go to plan.
He would just ask her to be psychologically prepared for a day when they didn't.
Seneca believed that we actually frequently overestimate our capacity to change what is occurring, to change a frustrating situation.
And it was in order to remind us constantly of just how many things lie outside of our control that he invoked a goddess.
Her name was Fortune.
She was to be found represented on the back of many Roman coins, and there were also statues of her throughout Italy.
She was represented holding two objects.
In one hand, she was holding a cornucopia, a symbol of her power to bestow favours.
She in this cornucopia many of the best things in life.
But Fortune also held another object, a darker object, a rudder, which was a symbol of her power to shift our destinies for the worst.
If she was feeling fiendish and...
she frequently was, she could, just at the touch of the rudder, destroy our lives, destroy our jobs, she cause untold headaches for us.
She is a symbol of everything that we must accept,
both good things but also bad things,
that when things go wrong we shouldn't rant and shout,
we should remember that many of our frustrations are in fact the work of this fiend goddess whose actions we cannot change.
Most of the inhabitants of Pompeii, a small town on the foothills of Mount Vesuvius, believed themselves to be the masters of their own destiny.
But there's perhaps no starker reminder of what lies outside our control than the forces of nature.
At mid-day, on August 13, AD 79, they were to discover that Fortune had plans of her own for them.
It was a horribly graphic illustration of Seneca's point that we are never immune from fortune.
Even when things look safe, they may rapidly take a disastrous turn for the worse.
And the best way to protect ourselves is to be psychologically prepared.
We tend to think that the most important thing about philosophers is the books they've written,
that this is where all the consolation and wisdom must lie.
But the ancients held to the far richer idea that we should also be guided in moments of trouble.
And way philosophers actually lived and died.
And it's the moment of Seneca's death, which has most inspired people ever since.
It's been endlessly depicted throughout the centuries in art, literature and music.
In April 65 AD, there was a conspiracy against the Emperor Nero in which Seneca was implicated, though he was probably innocent.
Nero sent a centurion to Seneca's villa to command him to kill himself immediately.
When his family and friends heard the news, they broke down in tears.
But Seneca did not,
and his attitude to this disaster has helped to define what we mean when we say that we should take something philosophically.
He calmly took a knife and began slitting his veins.
Seneca died in the way he urged us all to live.
of her son, what need is there to weep over parts of life, the whole of it calls for tears.
With any luck,
nothing so terrible will happen to us,
but bad things can happen, and the best way to soften the blows if they come is to be prepared.
and frustration are essentially irrational responses to setbacks, and the only rational strategy is to stay calm about the fact that things do go wrong.
That way will be, in the truest and best sense of the word, philosophical.
I'll be back.
You
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