V. Happiness Requires Reason

Without reason, no happiness is possible. Seneca explains why.

You might say: to be happy means to have no fear and no hope. That is close to true. A stone also has no fear and no hope. That does not make it happy.

Cattle feel no fear of death in the way a human does. That does not make a cow happy. Happiness is not simply the absence of disturbance. It requires the capacity to understand what happiness is, and then to achieve it.

The man whose reason is corrupted, who is clever in the service of his own destruction, who thinks crookedly about what is good for him, is not happy. He is like cattle but worse, because cattle have no reason at all while this man has reason that has been bent into a tool for his own ruin.

The mind that is genuinely free is one that can escape not just serious damage but even small damage, not just deep wounds but scratches. It has fortified itself thoroughly enough that Fortune finds no gaps.