Philosophy—such a loaded word, isn’t it?
The phrase “philosophy of life” is even more loaded. As loaded as your stomach after demolishing a special veg paratha and paneer paratha back-to-back.
What’s not widely appreciated is the original meaning of the word philosophy:
The word “philosophy” comes from ancient Greek, combining two elements:
φίλος (philos) - meaning “loving” or “friend of”
σοφία (sophia) - meaning “wisdom”So “philosophy” literally means “love of wisdom” or “friend of wisdom.”
The term is traditionally attributed to the ancient Greek thinker Pythagoras (6th century BCE), who allegedly coined it to distinguish himself from the “sophists” - those who claimed to possess wisdom. Instead of claiming to be wise, Pythagoras described himself as a “philosophos” - someone who loves or seeks wisdom. — Claude
Love of wisdom.
Once you know the etymology of the word “philosophy,” it acquires a different feeling altogether. It does for me, at least.
In colloquial use, however, when people use the term “philosophy,” they mean different things. The word is a stand-in for principles, beliefs, a framework, an abstract meta idea, or a general worldview or a broad fuzzy idea, belief, or feeling that’s hard to describe.
One peculiarity that fascinates me is the reaction people often have to the use of the word “philosophy.” A lot of times, the people who use it sound like douches to me, and I probably sound the same to other people when I use it. I don’t know why. Maybe because the term is often overused to the point of being banal and meaningless. Hearing it often induces my eyes to execute an involuntary somersault.
Why all this rambling about the term “philosophy,” you wonder?
The reason why I’m talking about the term “philosophy” is to explore the idea of philosophy of life.
This is how the philosopher and writer A. C. Grayling starts his book Philosophy and Life: Exploring the Great Questions of How to Live, a book that has resisted my attempts to read it thrice:
‘There is a question everyone has to ask and answer – in fact, has to keep on asking and keep on answering. It is ‘How should I live my life?’, meaning ‘What values shall I live by? What sort of person should I be? What shall I aim for?’ The great majority of people do not ask this question, they merely answer it unthinkingly, by adopting conventional views of life and what matters in it, and moving along with the crowds of unasking, unthinking answerers in the direction that the crowds take them.
I call this question the ‘Socratic Question’ because it was Socrates who, at least in philosophy’s recorded history, was the first thinker we know who systematically asked it to prompt a search for reasoned answers – that is, answers formulated independently of some antecedent traditional or religious viewpoint.
To say that in our time, as in Socrates’ time – indeed in all times – the great majority of people do not ask themselves his question but answer it unthinkingly, is to say that whereas everyone has a philosophy of life, the great majority of people are not aware of having one. The philosophy of life they have is adopted from the society around them, and shared with most other people. They acquired it from parents, school, friends, television, social media, church or mosque, society at large, absorbing it unconsciously. Indeed they work hard – also in largely unconscious ways – to be as like other people as possible, and to behave in ways acceptable to them. Almost everyone copies everyone else in their social circles, and cleaves to the values and aims held in common there, reinforcing the shared philosophy of life they thus adopt. As Oscar Wilde observed, ‘Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.’
And yet there are times in most lives when something – a feeling of confusion, a sense of unformulated questions pushing at the back of one’s mind, perhaps moments of depression, illness, grief, failure – suddenly forces a halt, a pause, and prompts one to think, giving one a desire to make sense of things. And at those times the unconsciously acquired philosophy one lives by does not seem enough.’
Brilliant, isn’t it?
I wholeheartedly agree.
We all have a lot of philosophies about life—some considered, but the vast majority of them unconsidered. If you aren’t going through the motions of life like a zombie, then a large part of living is discovering one’s unconsidered philosophies and ruthlessly murdering them.
To live is to be born in ignorance and walk toward fuzzy clarity. As for all that talk about enlightenment, I’ll leave that to people wearing loincloths preferring the company of banyan trees to an OnlyFans subscription.
Loincloths are also itchy, man.
Regardless of what we mean when we use the term “philosophy,” we all have philosophies for different areas and aspects of life. Life becomes more fun and fulfilling when we try to have considered philosophies, and that involves engaging with the words of people who’ve lived and wrestled with these questions. More often than not, we call these people philosophers.
I don’t know about you, but these philosophers are impossible to understand. I mean, why can’t they speak like normal people? They all sound and write like they’re tripping on a bad batch of acid and mushrooms after binge-watching Keeping Up With the Kardashians while being hungry.
It takes some work to understand a lot of what passes for philosophy. It’s still worth engaging with these maddening philosophers and their intractable texts because it’s abundantly clear, even to someone who’s as feeble-minded as me, that there’s value to derive from them. The other reason is that when we have existential crises, we all look in different places and to different people to find our bearings. It could be religion, spirituality, money, fitness, men, women, substances, and a hundred other things. What seems clear to me is that philosophy has many answers to offer.
In the preface of the same book, Grayling writes that academic philosophy is solely concerned with the study of aspects such as reality, knowledge, truth, and reason. While these are important aspects whose study has led to great human progress, the other half of philosophy, which is how to live a good life in a complicated world, has vanished from study.
He then goes on to write:
‘But the important point I seek to make is that in this ‘other half of philosophy’ – the philosophy of life – the philosophers, the philosophes, are not just philosophers or philosophes as such, they are also the novelists, historians, dramatists, essayists, poets and scientists whose explorations and thoughts are likewise about life and how we do, and should, live it. This is because reflection on life, exploring its complexities and possibilities, seeking routes to survival at least and flourishing at best – finding the good that is in things bad and wrestling with the bad that is in things good, and deciding what really matters in the end – is everywhere the business of intelligent minds when they apply themselves, whether directly or indirectly, to answering for themselves the Socratic Question.
The period in the history of Western philosophy when the question of how to live was most actively pursued – and the results applied in life itself – was the Hellenistic and Roman period in which Stoicism, Epicureanism and other approaches took their classic form: between the fourth century BCE and the fourth century CE.’
Again, I agree.
The reason why I am writing this post is because I’ve been playing around with AI coding tools, and I’m having a ton of fun. These tools are so good that I can now build all the side projects I ever wanted to build on my own without knowing a lick of coding. All it takes to be a coder now is the ability to double-click an icon and then type English sentences. Wild times.
Anyway, one thing I always wanted to build is a site similar to Project Gutenberg but for India. Even with AI coding tools, this is complex. So I figured I’d start small. One other thing I wanted to do was collect and publish letters, speeches, essays, and lectures from the public domain, inspired by Shaun Usher of Letters of Note fame.
Claude Code is so good that it helped me build a site for it in no time, and that’s how Paper Lanterns was born. Once the site was ready, I started scouring the web for good letters to share, and that’s when I came across this collection of letters by the famous Stoic Seneca to his friend Lucilius.
I read the first couple of letters and didn’t think much of them. Maybe because I was sleep-deprived, I thought, “Eh, another white Roman guy with abs from having a stick up his ass, trying hard to say prophetic stuff to pander to his ancient Roman Instagram audience.” I posted a few random letters on Paper Lanterns and quickly forgot about them.
After a few weeks, I came across the letters again for reasons I can’t remember and started reading them again. This time I was paying full attention. I was floored by the second letter at how good these letters were. The practical wisdom, the timelessness of the advice, and the clarity with which old man Seneca writes about issues of practical significance in everyday life are, well, I can’t think of any other word than beautiful. At their heart, the letters are about what it means to live a good life, what it takes, and how.
By the end of the second letter, I had this strong urge to get as many people as I could to read them. Then, as Eminem once said, I snapped back to reality and realized that all those people are swiping reels. But I still figured there might be other people who would love the letters if they were easily accessible and readable, like I did.
These letters are in the public domain and are easy to read and download on WikiSource, but they still felt a bit unreadable to me there. So I downloaded all the letters and built this simple site to make it easy to discover and read the letters. Please do check it out. I hope you like reading the letters as much as I do right now.
Along with that, I started reading the letters and bought this translation of the letters by Margaret Graver and A. A. Long, and I highly recommend it. The introduction is brilliant and helped me get a sense of who Seneca was and why his letters are so popular.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca, more commonly known as Seneca the Younger, was a prominent figure in ancient Rome. He was quite the polymath—a Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist, and satirist. He is perhaps most famous for being the tutor and advisor to the tyrannical emperor Nero, who later was responsible for Seneca committing suicide.
Seneca, alongside Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, is one of the most popular Stoic philosophers. Stoicism is undergoing somewhat of a revival and has become the go-to philosophy of everyone from Silicon Valley bros to influencers and “content creators” who produce bite-sized Stoic philosophical content with the ease and nuance of a diarrheal discharge.
My own journey with philosophy started just a few years ago with the reading of this book, and that’s how I discovered Stoicism. It immediately had a certain appeal to me. Attracted to the Stoic style of thought, I wanted to learn more and bought a few books about Stoicism by Massimo Pigliucci—which, naturally, I haven’t read yet.
Like the content creators of the diarrheal discharge variety, I have a superficial understanding of Stoicism, which is some version of “stop bitching, shut up, and accept things.” There’s a universe of nuance there, and that’s what I intend to discover over the coming years.
Another reason why I’m starting to like philosophy is because of the nature of the Stoic characters. Marcus Aurelius was an emperor who knew power like no other but preached about the unimportance of external things. Seneca wrote extensively about the virtues of simple living while being one of the richest men in Rome, with wealth estimated at 300 million sesterces. Then there’s Epictetus, my favorite Stoic. He was born into slavery, earned his freedom, and taught people to focus on what is in one’s control and to ignore the rest.
I’m particularly drawn to Epictetus because of bangers like this:
I have to die. If it is now, well then I die now; if later, then now I will take my lunch, since the hour for lunch has arrived - and dying I will tend to later.
In his letters, Seneca writes about important aspects such as moral progress, wise use of time, fear of death, managing emotions, friendship, integrity, and mutual aid. You would expect that a man who preaches the importance of living a virtuous life would be beyond reproach, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Like all of us, Seneca was deeply human and full of contradictions. From the introduction of this book:
Many historians, ancient and modern, feel that this early part of Nero’s reign, moderated by Seneca and Burrus, represented a period of comparative good rule and harmony (the “quinquennium Neronis”). The decline started in 59 CE with Nero’s murder of Agrippina, after which Seneca wrote the emperor’s speech of self-exculpation—perhaps the most famous example of how the philosopher found himself increasingly compromised in his position as Nero’s chief counsel. Certainly as a Stoic, Seneca cuts an ambiguous figure next to the others who made their opposition to Nero clear, such as Thrasea Paetus and Helvidius Priscus. His participation in court politics probably led him to believe that he could do more good from where he stood than by abandoning Nero to his own devices—if he even had this choice.
Because of his ethical writings, Seneca fared well with the early Christians—hence the later forging of a fake correspondence with St. Paul—but already in antiquity he had his fair share of critics, the main charge arising from the apparent contradiction between his Stoic teachings on the unimportance of “externals” and his own amassing of huge wealth. Perhaps for this reason he never gained the respect accorded the “Roman Socrates,” the Stoic C. Musonius Rufus, banished by Nero in 65, even though Seneca’s writings have had far more influence over the centuries.
In Seneca’s own lifetime one P. Suillius attacked him on the grounds that, since Nero’s rise to power, he had piled up some 300 million sesterces by charging high interest on loans in Italy and the provinces—though Suillius himself was no angel and was banished to the Balearic Islands for being an embezzler and informant. In Seneca’s defense, he seems to have engaged in ascetic habits throughout his life and despite his wealth. In fact, his essay On the Happy Life (De vita beata) takes the position that a philosopher may be rich as long as his wealth is properly gained and spent and his attitude to it is appropriately detached. Where Seneca finally ranks in our estimation may rest on our ability to tolerate the various contradictions posed by the life of this philosopher in politics.
Seneca is also aware of the difficulty in attaining the lofty ideals preached by Stoicism:
Like earlier Stoics, Seneca does not doubt that such advantages as health, financial security, and physical comfort are in accordance with our nature and worth pursuing, but he does insist that such things are not intrinsically desirable. Knowledge is an absolute: it is a limit, like the straightness of a straight line, and the virtues are in essence forms of ethical knowledge (66, 71). From this it would seem to follow that the human good is virtually unattainable, and Seneca concedes that actually to attain the ideal is at least extremely rare (42). But even ordinary, very imperfect people can make progress toward that goal (52, 75).
—Lucius Annaeus Seneca; translated by Margaret Graver and A. A. Long, “Seneca: Letters on Ethics To Lucilius”
The reason why I am reading the Stoics is because I don’t think I’m built to accept one philosophy of life like Stoicism and call myself a Stoic or whatever. I like the DIY approach to building a philosophy of life, and for this reason, I prefer the honeybee approach, which Seneca himself advocates in one of his letters:
But I must not be led astray into another subject than that which we are discussing. We also, I say, ought to copy these bees, and sift whatever we have gathered from a varied course of reading, for such things are better preserved if they are kept separate; then, by applying the supervising care with which our nature has endowed us,—in other words, our natural gifts,—we should so blend those several flavours into one delicious compound that, even though it betrays its origin, yet it nevertheless is clearly a different thing from that whence it came. This is what we see nature doing in our own bodies without any labour on our part;
the food we have eaten, as long as it retains its original quality and floats in our stomachs as an undiluted mass, is a burden; but it passes into tissue and blood only when it has been changed from its original form. So it is with the food which nourishes our higher nature,—we should see to it that whatever we have absorbed should not be allowed to remain unchanged, or it will be no part of us.
We must digest it; otherwise it will merely enter the memory and not the reasoning power. Let us loyally welcome such foods and make them our own, so that something that is one may be formed out of many elements, just as one number is formed of several elements whenever, by our reckoning, lesser sums, each different from the others, are brought together. This is what our mind should do: it should hide away all the materials by which it has been aided, and bring to light only what it has made of them.
With that said, by the second letter it became abundantly clear to me that these letters have a wealth of wisdom to impart. What you get out of them depends on when you read them, the stage of life you’re reading them in, your mental state, and overall life context.
Check out Seneca’s Letters and Paper Lanterns for more philosophical and literary treasures from the public domain.