Chiara Graf. Seneca’s Affective Cosmos: Subjectivity, Feeling, and Knowledge in the Natural Questions and Beyond. Oxford University Press, 2024.
In Seneca’s Affective Cosmos: Subjectivity, Feeling, and Knowledge in the Natural Questions and Beyond, Chiara Graf, in line with scholars such as Martha Nussbaum and Margaret Graver, argues against the view that Stoicism was an emotionless school of thought (p. 3). In the introduction, Graf contends that Seneca engages his readers’ affects to demonstrate the didactic functions of sensations such as blushing or sweating (p. 19). Seneca finds these biological events instructive even if one’s affects misguide their cognitive judgments about a given stimulus (p. 19). Instead of examining formal categories of emotions, such as propatheiai and metriopatheia, as Nussbaum and Graver do, Graf focuses exclusively on the affective reactions, such as increased heart rate, that Seneca discusses in various works. The book includes an introduction, five chapters, and an epilogue that examines Seneca’s Natural Questions, Epistulae Morales, and Troades.
In Chapter One, Graf outlines Stoic and Senecan understandings of the self’s place in the cosmos. She shows how in Natural Questions Seneca emphasizes the importance of what she calls “integrated wonder” (p. 30). According to Graf, integrated wonder is an individual’s ability to recognize that the cosmos is rationally ordered regardless of its appearance (p. 30). For an irrational person, the cosmos’s order, which renders individuals largely inconsequential, may cause distress (pp. 40–41). But a rational person will marvel at both the cosmos’s grandeur and at their minor role in it (p. 32). This approach allows Graf to show that the purpose of the self in a Senecan understanding is not to achieve “impenetrable interiority” but to acknowledge the self’s small role in the cosmos (p. 28).
On this foundation, the second chapter explores Seneca’s discussion of different responses to natural disasters in Natural Questions (p. 54). According to Seneca, a person’s reaction to catastrophic events should reflect their beliefs about the natural world (p. 54). Irrational individuals will experience fear during disasters because they are overly attached to life (p. 55). Rational people, however, recognize that environmental catastrophes are simply one component of the cosmos’s cyclical patterns (p. 54). In particular, Graf examines Seneca’s discussion of floods in Book 3 and earthquakes in Book 6. For example, in Book 3 Seneca depicts the narrator of the flood as “an epistemically compromised human” (p. 62). The speaker’s fear of an incoming flood aptly demonstrates how fear motivates imperfect human actions and desires (p. 62). This allows Seneca’s readers to experience the fear of a natural disaster without undergoing the event, so they can adjust their affective response to future occurrences.
Although some scholars have concluded that Stoic thinkers regarded wonder (miratio) as an ignorant state needing correction, Graf argues in Chapter Three that Seneca’s use of miratio is more complex (p. 84). She explores Seneca’s dual understanding of miratio in his discussion of comets in the Natural Questions. Seneca’s double miratio involves an individual fixating both on unusual phenomena and the regularity of the cosmos (p. 93). For Seneca, exploring unusual phenomena, such as comets, may spark curiosity in the Stoic subject to uncover the cyclical nature of the universe (p. 100). Through this process, individuals come to understand that all natural phenomena, including meteorological events, are ordered and rational, even when they do not appear so (p. 115).
Graf further examines Seneca’s use of wonder throughout Chapter Four, but here the focus shifts to the Epistulae Morales. In letter 120, Seneca argues that wonder is beneficial even if it distorts the truth because it guides individuals to distinguish true good from false good (p. 117). Seneca affirms the natural human tendency to seek praiseworthy things, as this drive enables individuals to access the good (p. 125). He then demonstrates, through exempla, how one might ascertain which individuals are worthy of praise (p. 126 and p.133). For example, when comparing Quintus Fabricius Luscinus and Publius Horatius Cocles, Seneca describes Fabricius’s actions in the second-person point of view but concludes by relaying Horatius’s works in the narrator’s voice (pp. 131–32). This narrative device depicts false wonder toward Fabricius as subjective, but proper awe toward Horatius as objective (p. 133). By contrasting false and rational wonder through these exempla, Seneca shows his readers that miratio has important didactic uses.
The final part of Graf’s argument examines how Seneca employs fear in tragedy to offer his audience hope for the future. For some scholars, Seneca’s negative exempla contrast with later counterexamples of positive, rational people, but for others, the negative exempla exhibit Seneca’s critique of Stoicism (pp. 140–41). Instead, Graf argues that these exempla enable Seneca to demonstrate the therapeutic potential in misguided affects such as fear (p. 142). In Troades, Seneca employs Andromache’s fear of her son’s death and her subsequent grief at his passing to demonstrate the fruitlessness of death (p. 155). For Seneca, death is the ultimate end, which should provide his audience with hope because they do not have to fear death (pp. 155, 177–78).
In her conclusion, Graf restates the purpose of her project, namely, demonstrating the widespread applicability of an affect-based framework for Seneca’s works (p. 179). She examines three types of texts, specifically scientific, philosophical, and tragic works, to illustrate the potential of her approach (p. 179). In this chapter, she provides a final example of Seneca’s affective pedagogy through his epistle of consolation addressed to a grieving mother named Marcia. Graf argues that Seneca’s affective therapy for Marcia does acknowledge that the death of a child is worthy of grief, but because so many aspects of life necessitate grief, excessive lament is irrational (p. 185). She concludes that affects such as numbness, shock, and fear might become an unexpected source of comfort for the Stoic subject (p. 189). The additional discussion of a new text in the conclusion offers readers potential avenues for future research, particularly the intersection of gender, affect, and social status in Senecan works.
Graf serves as an able guide for readers through the complex ideas of Stoicism, Seneca’s philosophical vision, and affect theory. Readers less familiar with Senecan ideas will likely find this book a helpful introduction. She builds on earlier views of Stoicism, and her book offers new contributions by using affect theory to demonstrate that affective sensations are crucial to Seneca’s arguments about rationality, the self, and the cosmos (p. 189). Rather than advocating for what Graf dubs an “impenetrable inner fortress,” Seneca instead appears to embrace affects as therapeutic and didactic (p. 189). Graf also discusses the rhetorical strategies that Seneca employs to evoke his readers’ affects, although her argument might benefit from more explicit engagement with literary theorists and reader-response critics who examine how an author facilitates readers’ dialogical interaction with a text. This book will be of interest to Senecan studies because it moves beyond apathetic understandings of affect. More broadly, those working on the intersection of affect, rhetoric, and gender in the ancient Mediterranean world will find this book a valuable addition.
Morgan Hundley is a doctoral candidate in Religious Studies at Duke University. Her work explores emotions, affect, and rhetoric in Luke’s Gospel. She considers how Luke employs characters’ emotions to reveal Jesus’s identity.