Because of brain problems, I can’t stop reading Seneca. I’m still interested in the same old problem, how Seneca thinks angry people are different than animals. Yesterday I was looking at the broad sweep of Seneca’s argument, but now I’m going to focus more narrowly on what I take to be a significant detail.
“Feeding” is a term that enters into the human-animal dichotomy of Seneca’s De ira twice. The first time, it serves to give evidence that animals, mad as some of them may seem, do not experience real anger:
“[animals’] attacks and ruckuses are forceful, but these are not fear or anxiety or sadness or anger, only things similar to these; that’s why they fall away quickly and turn into their opposites and, when they have been raging in the most terrifying fashion, the moment they’re fed (pascuntur), calm and slumber suddenly take the placee of these tremblings and mad runnings-about.” (DI 1.3.8)
The second time, however, it exemplifies a “natural” relationship of gratitude and satisfaction that angry people overturn:
“[angry people] differ from brute beasts in this respect only, namely that these grow tame for their feeders, while the anger of men devours (depascitur) the very people by whom it has been nourished.” (DI 2.8.3)
If we were to reframe each of these sentences as value claims about feeding, we’d come to very different results. The first one seems to tell us that being satisfied and tamed by feeding is bad, because it marks the non-reality of the “affect” that you (an animal) have been expressing. The second one basically says, by contrast, that growing tame toward those who feed you is good, because it demonstrates a grateful or at least pragmatic stance (not shared by angry people) toward your source of food. Well, which is it? Is mansuetus synonymous with “dope” or “gentleman?” “Subhuman” or “superman?”
This is not the place to go into detail about the long ancient debate over the rank and status of tame animals. Aristotle says that the tame ones (hemera) are smarter, as do most natural historians and philosophers after him. However, mirabilia collections designed to show “that beasts have reason” vel sim. usually focus on wild rather than domestic animals. The best animals, like elephants, go both ways: they can be tamed, but would, given their druthers, rather not be.
The confusion is only intensified by Seneca’s subsequent discussion of feritas (translating Greek theriodes, “wild-animal-like character”), a vice exemplified by people like Phalaris who kill and maim for pleasure rather than for any practical purpose. There, it seems as though what’s animal is something untamable, something not even accountable in terms of a search for nutrition: the ferus is not going to be satisfied with any food, qua food. Or, perhaps, only with food that’s wildly inappropriate, perverse or transgressive. Aristotle’s examples in the section of book 7 of the EN that seems to have inspired Seneca are mostly cases of cannibalism: Atreus butchering Thyestes’ children, the man who sacrificed his mother, the slave who ate his fellow slave’s liver.
It’s none of my business what people eat. It’s none of my business what people think about anger, either, but it does seem to me that we can resolve Seneca’s standpoint more clearly if we think of mansuetus as a something that can be predicated of humans and animals alike. What looks confused as a human-animal dichotomy looks more structural as a tame/untamed opposition. An untamed animal is ferum, vicious and driven by feritas, whereas a tamed animal that will take food from you is at least an entity with which you can deal. On the human side, things look a little more complex: there, mansuetus looks like a mean term between two poles, one called feritas and another that goes without a name. The last of those is where the sapiens sits, guided by ratio. Tameness is a kind of automatism, better than wildness (especially in people) but utterly lacking in interiority. Humans, like animals, become tame when they enter into relations of dependency with others; in that case their emotions are all for show, a kind of playacting intended to manipulate the other into providing food. Rightly or wrongly, Seneca believes that it’s possible to escape that mesh of dependency relationships and have a truly human experience beyond the realm of the wild and the tame. To that, one might reply as Rameau’s nephew did: “Everyone adopts a pose, except the king.” And there are no kings anymore.