Body and Soul in Ancient Philosophy

442
Martha C. Nussbaum
to him of incontinence and smelliness. All human beings shit, but it is he
who, because of his incompetence and cruelty, can be said to have shat
all over everything. What I now want to suggest is that the text shows at
least the beginning of a further, reciprocal movement: the fact that the
goods of politics have shit all over them leads in the direction, at least, of
a devaluing of those goods, a fastidium toward them of the deliberativeranking
sort. A movement, in fact, in the direction of Stoic values.
What the speaker wants at this moment is to get away from shit, and
he sees the world of politics as covered with shit. So, in that moment
at least, he is expressing a wish to get away from the sullied world of
politics. This conclusion is not stable in the text: for now a counter-fantasy
of purity is projected onto the body of Nero, and Nero becomes
rather like my imagined Finland, a locus of impossible hope for an unsullied
political existence. But disgust at politics, however briefly maintained,
is a first step out of the life in which external goods are overvalued.
When a Roman says, “What shit all this politics is”, he is taking the
first step toward downranking those goods. A true Stoic lives without
disgust, as without anger and fear. Disgust, however, unlike anger, is
a transitional emotion that can help one move in the direction of that
detachment. The world of the Apoc. is, on balance, a non-Stoic
world, a world of anger, hope, and intense concern with political matters.
But at the same time, in the disgust with which the text views
Claudius we find the seeds of a Stoicism.
What do the contrasting cases of Cicero and Seneca show us? Cicero,
passionate to the end, nonetheless finds steadiness and a norm of
public dignity in the Stoic texts he loves; Seneca, Stoic up to a point,
but passionate in politics, clearly turns toward a disgusted down-ranking
of political goods. What should we make of these contrasting examples?
It’s easy for intellectuals to achieve Stoic detachment from politics
and its emotions if they do not care about political things in the first
place. Many intellectuals today manage in some such way to get through
the difficult times in which we live, without blazing anger, without
crushing fear, and probably without very much in the way of political
hope either. However, neither of these courageous and immersed
Roman political actors lived in accordance with Stoicism – because
both of them had a deep concern with justice, the rule of law, and
the future of Rome that finds its natural expression in anger and hope.
Seneca is the more consistent Stoic, finding, in disgust, an exit from
the smelly world of politics toward a purer world. And yet I would
argue that it is Cicero’s example we should prefer, since it is ultimately