The Sublime Seneca: Ethics, Literature, Metaphysics by Erik Gunderson
By Erik Gunderson
This can be a longer meditation on ethics in literature around the Senecan corpus. There are chapters at the ethical Letters, asking how one is to learn philosophy or how you can write approximately being. relocating from the Letters to the common Questions and Dialogues, Professor Gunderson explores how authorship works on the point either one of the paintings and of the realm, the ethics of seeing, and the query of ways you can still surrender at the the following and now and behold as a substitute another, larger moral sphere. Seneca's tragedies provide phrases of warning: wish may possibly good subvert cause at its such a lot profound point (Phaedra), or humanity's painful separation from the chic should be a part of a few merciless divine plan (The insanity of Hercules). The ebook concludes via contemplating what, if something, we're to make of Seneca's efforts to enlighten us.
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Extra info for The Sublime Seneca: Ethics, Literature, Metaphysics
Sample text
That is, we see here the “authoring” of a metaphysical claim by means of what is effectively a literary gesture. Seneca posits that the “immaterial” res, the meaning of one’s act, is in fact the true substance to which the wise would attend. This is the meat of the matter, the stuff of philosophy, even as it is a quintessence that appears nowhere in the world. And yet the concrete has been correlated with the sublime. The meaning of a thing, that beyond to which it properly appertains, and its physical tangibility are not the same “thing,” even if the same word, res, is used of each.
13 Seneca is getting impatient: When will we become useful to ourselves and to others? Only when we learn that bodily desires lead us down the road to a living death (60). “Let’s stop wanting what we wanted,” opens the next letter. Getting your (abstract) will in order means you are prepared to meet (concrete) death (61). But the book ends with a new beginning (62): Seneca has always got time for friends and for books and for self-work. ” The 40 The Sublime Seneca journey is over when we discover the fundamental importance of the beingthere of the self, the proper object of our literary and moral works.
We have, then, a representation of philosophical reading written into this bit of philosophical writing, namely Letter 108 itself. Reading Vergil is appropriated to the task of reading philosophy. Reading Vergil philosophically also becomes an emblem of the poetics of Senecan epistolography. That is, Seneca makes and does philosophy by writing up reading. Poetics, poetry, poiein. Doing, performing, agere. Epic poetry, dramatic poetry, philosophical prose: all three are the same if you know how to read/write.