Forme della ragione nelle Naturales Quaestiones di Seneca

This chapter analyzes the rational approach that Seneca adopted in his attempt to understand the world-environment in its entirety – from the most spectacular and extraordinary phenomena that occasionally disrupt the course of human affairs to the constant regularities of natural cycles that unfold unceasingly on earth and in the heavens. The Naturales quaestiones suggest an idea of nature as an excess that human beings cannot fully comprehend, while at the same time, humans, limited as they are, remain a part of that very excess. The study of natural realities, therefore, cannot be separated from the study of human reality, which is integral to them. Both nature and the human soul share the characteristic of having a “hidden depths”: mysterious and immense recesses, invisible to the eye and yet intuitively graspable beyond the surface of phenomena, which both reveal and conceal a dimension that is sometimes inaccessible. Scientific in- quiry, and the endless stream of “why?” questions it provokes, thus becomes above all a path toward awareness – of the limits of understanding, but also of self-determination – that the human participant observers encounter both within and outside themselves. Indeed, it is man who often proves to be the greatest obstacle to the knowledge of the cosmos that is so ardently sought, given the ease with which he squanders his intellectual resources while succumbing to moral vices, to the point of forgetting life’s fleeting transience in the face of the body’s inevitable death. Yet a space for understanding opens up toward the end of Seneca’s Naturales quaestiones, where it is recognized that human wisdom “must fulfill its own task” (VII, 32). As if it were an organ with its own vital function, the sapientia of the Stoic sage, in its exercise, expresses the need to explore those depths – of nature and of the self – by repositioning the natural phenomenon “man” within the condition of limit-within-the-unlimited that essentially defines him. The future, if we are willing to follow this cognitive impulse, may yet prove to be our greatest ally in the journey through the immense unknown in which we are immersed.