Moral Letters to Lucilius

​But I should like to ask this: since all things are either evil or good or indifferent, in which class is to be wise? They deny that it is a good, and it is certainly not an evil; it follows that it is indifferent. Now, we call that indifferent which can happen to a bad man as well as to a good man, like money, beauty, noble birth. But this, to be wise, cannot happen to anyone except a good man; therefore it is not indifferent. And yet it is not an evil either, which cannot happen to a bad man; therefore it is a good. What nobody but a good man has is a good; only a good man has to be wise; therefore it is a good.

”It is an accident,” someone says, “to wisdom.” Therefore, this which you call to be wise, does it act upon wisdom or suffer from it? In either way, it is a body. For both that which is made and that which makes are a body; if it is a body, it is a good. For only one thing was lacking to it to prevent it from being a good, namely, that it was incorporeal.

​It is agreed among the Peripatetics that there is no difference between wisdom and to be wise, since in either of them the other is also present. For do you think anyone is wise except the one who has wisdom? Do you think anyone who is wise does not have wisdom?

​The ancient dialecticians distinguish these; from them the division came down to the Stoics. I shall tell you what kind of division this is. A field is one thing, to have a field is another, is it not? Since to have a field belongs to the owner, not to the field. So wisdom is one thing, to be wise is another. I think you will grant that these two are different: that which is possessed, and the one who possesses; wisdom is possessed, the one who is wise possesses it. Wisdom is a mind perfected or brought to the highest and best condition. For it is the art of life. What is to be wise? I cannot say “a perfected mind,” but that which happens to the one who has a perfected mind; thus, the one is a good mind, the other is, as it were, to have a good mind.

”There are,” he says, “natures of bodies, like this man, this horse. These are followed by the enunciative movements of minds concerning bodies. These have something of their own and separated from bodies, like ‘I see Cato walking.’ Sense-perception showed this, the mind believed it. What I see, to which I directed both my eyes and my mind, is a body. Then I say: ‘Cato walks.’ What I now speak,” he says, “is not a body, but an enunciative proposition about a body, which some call a statement (effatum), others a proposition (enuntiatum), others an utterance (dictum). Thus, when we say ‘wisdom’, we understand a corporeal thing; when we say ‘he is wise’, we speak about a body. But there is a very great difference whether you speak of him or about him.”

​Let us assume for the present that these two are different,—for I do not yet declare my own opinion,—what prevents them from being indeed different, but nevertheless a good? I said a little earlier that a field is one thing, to have a field is another. Why not? For the possessor is of one nature, and the possessed is of another. The latter is land, the former is a human being. But in this matter under discussion, both are of the same nature, both the one who has wisdom and wisdom itself.

​Furthermore, in that case, what is possessed is one thing, and the possessor is another; in this case, both what is possessed and the possessor are in the same subject. A field is possessed by law, wisdom by nature. The former can be alienated and transferred to another, the latter does not leave its master. Therefore, there is no reason for you to compare unlike things. I had begun to say that these two can be different and yet both can be good, just as wisdom and a wise man are two things and you grant that both are a good. Just as nothing prevents both wisdom and the one who has wisdom from being a good, so nothing prevents both wisdom and to have wisdom—that is, to be wise—from being a good.