6.33: Roman Plow, Sovereign Tree: Seneca and Zhuangzi

 

The Beach, The Ships, The Trap of Time

 

Can I take us back in time, a bit? I’m thinking some 30 weeks ago or so, near the beginning of this long journey, and I was talking about—

Well, now, that’s not far enough back. Let’s go further. It was 1973, and Ursula K. Le Guin was revising a little short story called “The Ones Who Walked–”

Nah, still not far enough. 1891, then. WIlliam James, in “The Moral Philosopher,” said that we absolutely could not accept—

Or was it 1879, when Fyodor Dostoevsky has Ivan Karamazov argue that —?

Ehh. None of that. It was about 30 episodes or so ago, and I took you further back still. You may remember. It was a hot day, probably June or July of the year 32, and we were in Italy when. . . 

a philosopher named Seneca travels to the coast for a break from the political nonsense in Rome. He’s just returned from a long but not very restful stay in Egypt. There’s some guy on the frontiers around Jerusalem named Jesus who’s preaching to folks, but what is that to him? He’s been thinking about how even the Emperor Tiberius couldn’t tolerate Rome and has been pretending to govern from the island of Capri for the past several years, how that monster of a grandson Caligula was sucking up to be heir. Seneca doesn’t know that in a few years he’ll get himself in some real political trouble and exile. Right now he’s just managing the ugly politics as best he can as a senator. He hasn’t written anything of real importance, yet, either. When he can he’s been drawn to some writings of earlier philosophers like Zeno, Cleanthes, and some guy named Epicurus. And he is, and will become, one of the most popular Stoics of all time.

But not today. Today he’s wandering. Maybe near his villa near Campania. He can smell the ocean brine, the crash of waves below on lonely and rocky outcrops. Perhaps he seeks shelter from the blistering sun beneath the silvery olive trees of cliff pines. And ah, that sea! Vast and indifferent to him there, the eternal ebb and flow, the cycles of life and death, fortune and failure. The sea birds wheeling about and diving for fish, such freedom and simplicity compared to the absurdities of Rome. Myrtle and rosemary cling to the cliff soil: such resilience in such difficult and vulnerable conditions! He sighs at a crumbled villa up the slope, the transience of human work. The fish and gulls and myrtle will all outlast it, though humans strive as they do: he sees the white sails of distant merchant ships, all set about on their determined courses, ceaseless striving for more. And the light and shadow play upon the water: the contrasts of virtue and vice, reason and passion. 

He loves it all, the solace, the clarity, the solitude. He looks out to the seeming infinity of the sea without dread but with a sense of the sublime, of something powerful which he cannot name. Yes, the sea is rough today, but it is persistent, ever slow in its great work. He chuckles, thinking of the restlessness of humanity. No matter, he believes: salt, wind, and sun, none of these can be controlled. They are simply reminders that all that is in his grasp is his own inner calm, his personal sense of peace. In this way, he finds communion with nature, knowing that there is nothing about the future he need dread but accept what is to come, to embrace where he is.

It was here that two critical moments happened in our podcast journey. Well, maybe three. First, I promised that we would sometime soon return to this scene. And here we are again. More, we learned about the difference between otium and negotium. It was this division, a binary opposition, which created so many of our concerns: the early skepticism we have about the otium life of privilege and leisure, one where—like so many of the “Upper 10,000” from Metropolis, the Elders from The Giver, Andrew Marvell in his Garden estate, the Benefactor in We,  the Andrews family in the Gainsborough portrait, the Omelasians themselves, the “Normals” in Never Let Me Go—one where luxury and idle time and even a version of happiness are paid by the suffering of others. For the rest, those involved in negotium, the civic life or life of work, we came upon a thicker challenge. These folks are either themselves oppressed by those they work for or are at the least involved in the down side of a morality based on transaction. In other words, so long as we see morality based upon a model of economics, like capitalism, we can “sell” anything, even the lives of animals and slaves and suffering children. 

This has been a challenging trap, a cultural habitus, even an Iron Cage, a worshipping of the concepts of safety and rational order which allows us to excuse the suffering. 

But now we also know this. Binary oppositions are not opposites and they are not absolute categories. Terms placed in opposition are always in relationship, and it’s up to us to investigate that relationship. Are otium and negotium opposites? Is Seneca right to be suspicious of otium? And if so, why is he hanging out on this shoreline with us?

To be sure, he’s got himself no small amount of privilege to live the life he has, dabbling with emperors and senators and the like, taking time to travel to this quiet space to think. Most of Rome’s people, let alone its slaves, are denied such luxuries. On the other hand, Seneca’s thinking is not as whimsical or poetic as we might imagine. His otium time is spent in a kind of preparation for his next round of negotium action, his call to public duty and civic engagement. He has work to do.

Which is why—and this was our third critical moment in visiting him—when we began our journey, I was a bit put out standing out in the sun and waiting for him to finish his thinking. So let’s test that scene. Let’s wrest him out of his otium philosophizing. And let’s get to work on seeing what he might (or might fail to) teach us.

Back to our scene:

Are we there with him? Can you sense him there? Us, too? Seneca, never in control of his health and seeming to offend constantly in court, finds a moment in nature to center himself. We are there, too, now, looking out at the Mediterranean, one of long ago, the hot sun on our brows, smelling the warm air. And me. I’m there. 

Seeing Seneca, I walk over and clear my throat, tap him on the shoulder. I say, because I speak Latin now, “Quid diaboli, vir? Calet hic foris!” . . . What the hell, dude? It’s hot out here!

 

Theme

 

This is Literary Nomads, where we wander through literature and language, near and far.

I’m Steve Chisnell, and I’m about to lose control and walk all over stoicism. 

 

Seneca On the Shortness of Life

 

Poor Seneca. It’s not enough that we have made him the primary classical philosopher voice for the Stoics. Listen to any number of podcasts, go to any number of 10,000 classrooms, read more than two books on Rome, and there he is, offering us a means of mental and emotional control which has contented millions. Surely, a visionary like him—one who sits quite apart from the epicureans who we visited in Journey 5—can offer us a way out of our Suffering Child mess, right?

Now, just to connect our dots, we noted last Journey that the Epicureans found happiness through pleasure. This isn’t hedonism, but it works from the goal of painlessness. Do nothing which creates pain: avoid fear, anxiety, politics. But it was also these same Epicureans who lowkey pursued pleasures at the expense of others, for instance, young women from the underclass. Just read a little of Horace or any of the Cavalier poets of the 17th century, or just go back to listen to Journey 5 on Andrew Marvell to get a sense of them.

So we might hope that a contrary school, the Stoics–founded by dudes like Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, and Seneca—will offer us a solution where happiness isn’t so . . . exploitative. And it begins hopefully when we see Seneca on his shore:

He looks out at those distant merchant ships and he is dissatisfied. Here, ceaselessly striving for more, the ships are literally the utilitarian machine of an extraction economy. It’s the gears of negotium; these ships are, in their “insatiable greed,” the world of negotium he has escaped temporarily. In his work On the Shortness of Life, Seneca describes them just this way, as vessels of “insatiable greed.” Every hour they must be useful, productive, profitable. 

But he also looks upon the crumbling villa and sighs at the transience of human work. This is the proof that “useful labor” is a delusion: look at the villa. Some unnamed and forgotten Romans sweated and labored to build it. Now, ruins. Seneca understands that we spend our lives too often on “useless tasks” and “political ambition” for societies that are ultimately as mortal as we are.

Remember that in our scene Seneca is taking a break from the political nonsense of Rome and the fear-mongering of Caligula, treason trials and political purges that of course today are completely unfamiliar to us. But Seneca isn’t daydreaming, then: he’s thinking about these outrages, these injustices, these nations where leaders sacrifice their citizens for power, and he finds it unbearable. His time in Campania is, perhaps, gathering his own sort of moral outrage before returning to public duty.

And why do I think so? Because of the fragile myrtle and rosemary on the cliff face. He sees the same “necessity of care” which Adriana Cavarero talks about when meeting l’inerme, the defenseless. The world is a harsh and indifferent place, a place of brief life and rough seas, and he knows that it is virtue which compels him to engage it. And it is virtue which creates happiness.

Self-discipline; focus; duty; calm. These are the StoicPoorly understood as being without emotion, the stoic philos... More qualities which allow us the reason and freedom to act in the civic world for good. And it is this devotion which satisfies. 

So I forgive Seneca a bit. He’s not loafing, but he’s also not in Rome working. He’s re-charging perhaps, reflecting, considering. He’s involved in what Cicero calls “otium honestum,” which you can guess means “honest leisure.” (We’ll come back to Cicero in a bit.) If you’d rather, we can call Seneca’s time here a kind of “Vigilante Reason.” It’s a necessary pause we all must make, on our terms, to reflect and strategize. Seneca sees how hard the Roman marketplace of greed is; and he’s not abandoning those who suffer from it; just sharpening his mind for the next round.

But this can only go on for so long, yes? Eventually we must turn to action, and if it means getting out of the Italian summer heat, let’s get back to the city.  Seneca gets this. He says in On the Shortness of Life that “It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it.” And he didn’t even have a smartphone. 

Seneca argued that we squander our existence on “useless tasks,” “insatiable greed,” and “political ambition.”  Yup. From the sound of it so far, he’s our kind of guy. I’m certain his wisdom will prevail as we apply it to our Suffering Child.

 

Negotium and Utilitarian Traps

 

Even when in his otium leisure, then, Seneca has a foot or eye or ear or something-or-other still inserted in the world of negotium. He can’t look off the sea shore without thinking of those ships; he can’t do anything but turn the waves and broken villas into metaphors. These two terms are not cleanly divided. 

It’s like when we take a vacation from work, our minds can’t help but occasionally fall back to a responsibility or project status or payment benefit still untethered, unfinished. And when we’re at work, of course, we dream of far-away locations where we will not have a care. And even that daydreaming is a form of therapy. I’ve solved some of my most difficult creative challenges in sudden surges of imagination during vacation travel. And downtime has always re-energized me for new classroom adventures. 

Have you heard of the parable of Cincinnatus? Same kind of idea. 500 years before Seneca, Rome was in trouble. A neighboring people were attacking, having surrounded Rome’s army, and the Senate knew that only a great dictator with complete powers might save the state. And so they sent a messenger to the once-high-Consul of Rome who was now retired, Cincinnatus. Hard times and a delinquent son had bankrupted the old noble, and he was now reduced as a senior to pushing his own plow on a tiny four-acre farm. But they knew his experience, and they called on him to become dictator of Rome and save civilization.

He wiped the sweat from his brow, put on his old Senate toga, and agreed. According to the parable, he raised a new army in a single day, marched to the war front and crushed the invaders. He returned to accept the celebration of victory, but then—even when the Senate had promised him six months of complete power—he stayed only 15 total days. Then he returned to his plow and retirement. 

You might remember a similar story with Oliver Cromwell being pulled out of Ireland for the same purpose back in Journey 5, with a Horatian Ode about it written by Andrew Marvell. You also might remember four increasingly bad movies and a comic series called The Expendables where Sly Stallone and friends still pretend they’re bad-asses even when being pulled from retirement—but all this is to say that Cincinnatus and the otium/negotium relationship continue.

But for now, let’s think of it this way. Cincinnatus is the Roman Plow. And Seneca must love this story. Just like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Dolph Lundgren, it’s active, boots-on-the-ground engagement to public duty, fight the system, save the innocent. Um, I guess. I mean, do those terms all sound like they’re in sync to you? 

I mean, here’s the issue, I think. Seneca and Bruce Willis and Cincinnatus are all thinking that their world needs them, that the preservation of the world order as they know it is virtuous. I mean, yeah, it’s true that Jason Statham and the rest of the Expendables team are most often fighting terrorists and are quietly being double-crossed by Mel Gibson, but in the end, they are working to stop World War III. I think. Anyway, all these guys are coming out of retirement and working to protect the status quo utilitarian societies they once served and will serve again. And what happens—what happens?—when it’s this very society that is creating the injustices, the suffering? The horrorism of a Caligula? The contempt and arbitrary justice of a Charles II? The treachery and corruption of a Jean-Claude Van Damme? The two-faced carousals of the Omelasians?

It’s odd. Seneca, as I said, is much admired. And his devotion to negotium, public service and duty, is fairly absolute. Though, to be fair to him, he never confuses that ideal virtue with the corruption and vice that were so much part of the political life around him. Even so, he’s always finding himself dedicated to that civic cause, one he calls virtue, in the pursuit of his happiness and life satisfaction.

As I said, it was the Roman orator Cicero in his work De Officiis who coined the term “otium honestum” to describe this sort of Senecan framing. He said that when a citizen retreats into solitude, his garden otium, he must still have “something to show for this leisure” which will “benefit his fellow men.”  Otium is suspect, otherwise; a waste. For Cicero, there is never a true escape from our public duty; the plow is unconditional. If you and I are involved in activities not in service to the Public Good, that is life stolen from the community. 

Let’s hang onto this for a moment. How utilitarian of him! And I mean this quite literally. If we are not always of some “use” to the society, we are a waste, thieves of community. Our job is to serve, and this is called noble. Parables and action movie franchises are built on it. If this is a society that is built on injustices, avarice, a habitus of greed, on punishing children in basement closets, and marking it all as a reasoned Iron Cage of safety and order for everyone . . . why are we doing this, again?

Seneca’s virtue of public duty only works, therefore, if that public duty virtue is entirely separate from the society it serves. It can’t be allowed to overlap without risking its corruption. StoicPoorly understood as being without emotion, the stoic philos... More virtue can’t be both on public duty and on protecting against injustice; not unless that society is a utopia. 

In other words, this is an Iron Cage–er, an Iron Plow–which gives us absolutely no room to breathe. Even our rest must be monetized and made useful for the state, and this must be done regardless of its foundation in corruption. Once again, utility over humanity. 

And if you’re a stoicPoorly understood as being without emotion, the stoic philos... More: Stay calm in the chaos, moderate your emotions of anger and grief, focus on duty and discipline, release those things which are outside of our control, and praise the wisdom and temperance of our actions. Stoicism doesn’t “fight back” against injustice exactly, but it believes that being useful and maintaining personal integrity is itself a balance against the injustice of others. 

 

The Garden Wrecker: Zhuangzi

 

Frustrated that the West seems a bit deficient in satisfying answers to our dilemmas, I turn instead to the ancient Chinese Daoist philosopher Zhuang Zhou or Master Zhuang, who actually lived around the time of Aristotle, in the 4th century BCE. His Zhuangzi is a self-named work of philosophy that works for the same goals as Seneca and others: how do we find happiness and justice in the world? 

To answer, let me offer you a parable from the Zhuangzi. Here, near an old shrine, is a massive, gnarled oak tree. A carpenter happens by and looks at the tree, but quickly dismisses it. “Look at this tree,” he says. “It is completely useless. It is too twisted and gnarled to be used for making boats or even making coffins.” That night, though, the carpenter has a dream. The old tree appears before him and whispers to him: “If I had been of some use, how could I have ever grown this large?” Ah. A lesson here, yes? The opposite of Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree. The Zhuangzi seems to be telling us that the key to survival is refusing to be useful, refusing to be made into a commodity.

And indeed, this is the Daoist lesson from the Master Zhuang; he sees the trap for Seneca and the Stoics. He’d look at our Seneca on the shore, sweating and fretting over his usefulness and point out that pretty terrifying paradox: the Empire’s demand that we be “useful” is the exact utilitarian logic that locked the Suffering Child in the basement in the first place. . . . And the only answer? 

Be useless. Uselessness, what Zhuangzi called wuwei. It is non-doing, actionless action. Think of it as a version of otium quite apart from Seneca’s: a radical, sovereign uselessness. The tree makes itself so far outside of reasoned participation that it escapes the carpenter’s ax. Step away from it. Get out.

Now, I know so far this seems like we’ve been here before. I can hear the little Cicero voice inside you: “Why, we’re right back to giving up responsibility for the Suffering Child again, we’re at a place of cowardice, of moral failure. Get up,” you might be saying. “Do something, anything,” else we’re just like Bataille’s weird “unproductive expenditure,” we’re worthless.

Well, in a word, yes. Worth-less. Because “worth” is about transaction is about expenditure is about extraction is about utility. Right? Maybe you’re still channeling William James and his “strenuous mood,” saying that you don’t care about utility and all of that; you just want to go let the kid out of the closet. 

But here we are, caught between two seemingly unacceptable extremes. On the one hand, we have Cicero’s exhausting and utilitarian Unconditional Plow, an Iron Cage reasoning that we must always be tools of the State. It’s interesting to me because here we have the noble story of Cincinnatus returning to his Roman Plow voluntarily, but then we have Cicero demanding that we stay tethered to it, no matter what. But then we have Zhuangzi’s terrifying concept of the freedom of not being useful . . . at all. 

How do we fix this? 

First, remember what I said earlier: oppositions are not opposites; they are relationships. And that even there, we won’t find clear distinctions between them.  Let’s start by looking a little deeper at Zhuangzi’s idea.

Obviously Seneca wasn’t blind to corruption; his Stoicism just didn’t choose to engage it so directly when he met it. Likewise, Zhuangzi also has a whole bunch of parables to work with, and they don’t always create a single absolute. 

Let’s take the concept of wuwei, perhaps, and rethink it. Remember the trouble we have with translation means that some cultural concepts don’t clearly align with the English I’m using. Another way to imagine wuwei is “fluid response.”  In other words, what we do when meeting the world is not duty-driven but spontaneous, unplanned, going with the flow. This means that if we meet injustice in the world, we may well choose to engage it, as, you know, the situation and our own harmony allow or suggest. We must be adaptable, attuned to nature, flexible, meeting change and conflict like anything else, without emotional turmoil or resistance. 

Jeez, this guy would hate me, then, going on as we have for months over this suffering kid question. For Zhuangzi, the energy or flow, the Dao, is always shifting. Go with that. 

We . . . do what is necessary. Some actions and obstacles, as we encounter them, are unavoidable and require our action, what Zhuangzi describes as budeyi (boo-day-yee). And even this, this budeyi, is natural, effortless, responsive. As I understand this, it’s not Bataille’s “unproductive loss” of abandonment which leads soon enough to abandonment of self; but it’s a survival strategy, not an abandonment of self, against the world’s machinations. And it’s not exactly Cavarero’s “duty of care” to actively protect the vulnerable. Instead, Zhuangzi calls for us to act without regard to the worth and without any calculation of political effect. Act because it seems natural to: in this way it is effortless, without ego or expectation. 

Let’s try this one more way. Both Seneca and Zhuangzi have a similar goal: they want us to stop working so hard against the universe. The world is the world, and what we can control is our response to it. Both philosophies want us to align ourselves with the structure of the universe, with nature. Good. For Seneca, this often enough means finding purpose in serving the larger community of other people; for Zhuangzi, it’s a bit more spontaneous. I think I called it “fluid” a few moments ago. We’re not always avoiding engagement with injustice, though. Seneca won’t serve that part of the society which is unprincipled, corrupt. And Zhuangzi won’t avoid that injustice which is inevitably cast before us. We can be useless and free, but we’re free inside the universe which surrounds us, contains us. 

 

The Emperor’s Chisel

There is an enormous foundation of assumptions and context which operate behind the kind of Daoism that Zhuangzi promotes, years of study. And even what I know would take several hours to lay out, so I’d prefer to keep talking about it in terms of parables, koan, stories or situations which themselves offer paradoxes or mysteries to consider. This is, for the most part, how the ancients taught the philosophy in any event: by experience and by story and by exercise, not by lecture.

In that sense, let me make an observation about Western philosophies, then explain how Zhuangzi works differently. The observation is that most all Western philosophies–no matter which you know of—operate on an assumption of sameness or commonality. That is, they presume the world and nature and all of humanity to be basically the same, or that where we’re different, it is because we have not yet discovered the Truth, who we are, what we must do. Existentialists say we must renounce dependence upon outside influence; Jamesians argue for a strenuous mood of moral outrage as the only thing which will disturb our pragmatism; Parmenidean Monists believed that no matter what we did, the universe remains a single unchanging entity;  Sylvester Stallone-ists argue that sometimes the world just needs a few more rifles to clean house. 

So we can remember the useless tree of Zhuangzi. Now here’s another one:

It is a story of three emperors, Hu and Shu, from the North and South kingdoms, and Hundun from the Central kingdom. It happens that Hundun hosted the other two visiting emperors and never had they witnessed such grace and kindness. Hundun’s hospitality knew no bounds. However, it so happened that Emperor Hundun was unusual in that he was without a face. He had no eyes, ears, nose, or mouth. And so, to repay him for his kindness the Emperors from the North and South decide to help him and make his face more normal. Each day, for seven days, they drilled a new hole into his head so that he would eventually have a complete human face. And, little surprise, on the seventh day, Hundun died.

Yeah. So what are we to make of this? In contrast to an ethics of commonality, of sameness, as Western philosophy so often practices, this is philosophy sensitive to difference. Who are we to impose our own standards and conceptions upon another? 

Here’s another, the story of Marquis of Lu and the Seabird, also from the Zhuangzi. It so happens that the Marquis came to love a seabird that landed in his capital city. He honored the bird by treating it with wine, fine beef, and lamb, beautiful music. He knows that if someone hosted him, this is how he would like to be treated. The bird, terrified and overwhelmed, refused to eat or drink at all. In three days it was dead.

I’ll risk bringing in a favorite philosopher of mine, ethicist Emmanuel Levinas. He argues that our concept of the “face” (of visage) refers to the radical vulnerability and exposure of the Other, and that this demands ethical responsibility, prohibiting violence (“Do not kill me”). It is not merely physical, but an ethical “epiphany” that prevents our inaction, imposing an obligation to care for the vulnerable, much as Cavarero says.

What’s really important, though, in our stories, is that neither the death of Hundun or of the Seabird were done out of cruelty. What the Emperors and Marquis do is specifically out of good will, hospitality, reciprocity. Their crime, as Levinas sees it (and probably Zhuangzi) is that they are absolutely incapable of seeing the Other as different from themselves. They do not ask Hundun if he is human or even if he wishes to be. The Marquis assumes the bird is like him, much like so many pet owners believe their cats and dogs want to be treated like humans.

We simply cannot do this, the Zhuangzi warns us. We must accept the Other for what it is, different from us. Our desperate “mercy” or “care” for the Suffering Child in the basement might actually become its own form of violence, an imposition of our standards on the already marginalized. Or, to put it another way, Zhuangzi argues that our “duty” to some ethical standard is itself a potential weapon. Our desire to “civilize” or “care” for the marginalized is just us chiseling our own moral framework into their faces until they bleed to death.

 

I’ll Exploit Myself, Thank You

 

Stoics and Daoists may or may not intervene, then, when they meet the Suffering Child. I suspect they would ask, first. But now we have Cavarero and others calling on us for a duty of care, a plea to protect the l’inerme, the vulnerable and defenseless of the world. And we have a Zhuangzi who warns that our action may have its own sharp chisel, and so a radical uselessness is preferred. Seneca, though, is concerned about our wasting time in useless otium, and Cicero goes further to suggest that our leisure time robs the state of civic duty.

And yes, I’ve used both Stoicism and Daoism here in very specific ways, perhaps distorting them some, but I’ve based my discussion here mostly on the Zhuangzi itself and on Seneca’s On the Shortness of Life. If you’ve got another way to see either of these approaches to answer our questions differently, I welcome your emails. The address is in the Show Notes. 

But before we go, let me raise another argument, this one from Byung-Chul Han in his 2010 book The Burnout Society. The title already tells you what he will argue, doesn’t it? But let’s carry it through some. Sure, all these ancients have their takes on their own societies and ethics, but we live in a different time and place. We’re no longer in a world that is so easily divided between the utilitarian ideal of civic duty and the privileged relaxation of otium. Han argues that yes, once the Iron Cage ideologyFrom Todd Gitlin and Antonio Gramsci, a system of beliefs—ra... More of safety and order compelled us to work hard and achieve success. That American Dream thing, the Joneses who just got the new patio set, the promotion to a new office and more work hours. 

More work hours? Well, of course, if we are to achieve, we have to work harder and longer. We’ve convinced ourselves and locked ourselves into a space where we have precious little time to consider the ethics of it: This Achievement Society. But still, and far worse, our otium time, too, is compromised. Or rather, commodified. 

Costly spas, branded sports gear, gardening workshops, paid yoga, paid gyms, the entirety of coffee culture, food bloggers, Christmas, Netflix subscriptions. There doesn’t seem to be much of our relaxation left which isn’t sold to and purchased by us. Exchanges. Extractions. Utility.  

So how do we separate otium and negotium anymore? And how do we address the Omelas child when we are bent 24/7/365 to a morality and lifestyle of exchange? No wonder we feel too exhausted to act. Is Zhuangzi’s radical uselessness even possible? Can any of us afford Seneca’s time away for “otium honestum?”

Bah. When I first introduced Seneca all those episodes ago, I thought he might be on to something. And what I know now? That we’ve spent as many weeks seeking an answer to Le Guin’s Omelas question, and all I know for sure is what we must not do. 

And what we can? Look about you. Find a book and don’t pay retail. Trade one with a neighbor, support a library, and consider any virtue in uselessness. Do that . . . while you read something. 

 

Outro

 

Follow me and find me along with supplements, bonus episodes, resources, newsletters, and still more at Waywords Studio dot com.  That’s Waywords Studio (two s’s in the middle) dot com. Thanks for listening! 

Music for Literary Nomads is by Randon Myles

Chapter headings by Natalie Harrison and Sarah Skaleski

Literary Nomads is a production of Waywords Studio. Find me at Waywords Studio on most social media and at Waywords Studio .com.

 

Bibliography

 

Chen, Hui. “Zhuangzi’s Theory of ‘Budeyi’ and the Worldly Character of His Thought.” Journal of Chinese Humanities, 2015. https://brill.com/view/journals/joch/11/4/article-p357_4.xml

Cicero, Marcus Tullius. De Officiis (On Duties). Walter Miller, trans., 1913.  http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/47001.

Han, Byung-Chul. The Burnout Society. Stanford University Press, 2015.

Huang, Yong. “The Ethics of Difference in the Zhuangzi.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, vol. 78, no. 1, 2010, pp. 65–99. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40666462. 

Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Translated by Alphonso Lingis, Duquesne University Press, 1969.

Machek, David. “Stoics and Daoists on Freedom as Doing Necessary Things.” Philosophy East and West. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26405382. 

Nussbaum, Martha. The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics. Princeton University Press, 1994.

Seneca, Lucius Annaeus. “On the Shortness of Life.” Gareth Williams, trans., 2003. https://archive.org/details/SenecaOnTheShortnessOfLife

Zhang, Ellen Y. “The Face/Facelessness of the Other—A Levinasian Reading of the Ethical of the Zhuangzi.” Frontiers of Philosophy in China. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26571920. 

Zhuangzi. The Zhuangzi. Martin Palmer et. al., trans. 2020. https://archive.org/details/thebookofchuangtzu_202002