Glossary
Living according to nature
ὁμολογουμένως τῇ φύσει ζῆν (homologoumenōs tēi physei zēn) / secundum naturam vivere (latin)
Living according to nature is the Stoic formula for the end of life, the goal by which every action is measured. Diogenes Laertius credits Zeno with first stating it, and Seneca calls it the school’s watchword: “Our motto, as you know, is ‘Live according to Nature’”, in Richard Gummere’s translation of Letter 5, §4. Nature here has two senses held together. It is the nature of the whole, an ordered and rational world, and the nature of the human being, whose distinctive part is reason. To live according to the one is to live according to the other.
The formula is not a call to roughness for its own sake. Seneca uses it in the same letter against philosophers who make a display of shabby dress, unkempt hair and repellent food: it is “quite contrary to nature to torture the body”. In Letter 16 he borrows a maxim from Epicurus, “If you live according to nature, you will never be poor”, and turns it into a test of desire. Natural desires are limited; those which spring from false opinion have no stopping-point. A wish that always finds a more distant goal is, in his words, contrary to nature.
Marcus Aurelius counts the formula among his debts. In Meditations I, 17, in George Long’s 1862 translation, he thanks the gods that he “received clear and frequent impressions about living according to nature”, and admits that he still falls short of it through his own fault. Later books make it a rule for the time that remains (Meditations, VII, 56). The same reasoning ties the formula to sympatheia, the kinship of the parts of one whole, and to the view from above, which looks at human affairs from the order of that whole.
In the texts
Seneca · Letter 5, §4
Our motto, as you know, is “Live according to Nature”; but it is quite contrary to nature to torture the body, to hate unlaboured elegance, to be dirty on purpose, to eat food that is not only plain, but disgusting and forbidding.
Seneca · Letter 16, §7
Whatever is well said by anyone is mine.—This also is a saying of Epicurus: “If you live according to nature, you will never be poor; if you live according to opinion, you will never be rich.”
Marcus Aurelius · Meditations, I, 17
that I received clear and frequent impressions about living according to nature, and what kind of a life that is
What the term does not mean
- Nature does not mean the countryside or untouched wilderness. For the Stoics it is the rational order of the whole and the rational nature of the human being; Letter 5 opposes it to a studied roughness, not to the city.
- Not every use of the phrase is Stoic. The maxim in Letter 16, §7, “If you live according to nature, you will never be poor”, is introduced by Seneca as a saying of Epicurus.
- It is not a licence to follow impulse. Seneca’s test in Letter 16 is limit: a desire that can stop at a definite point is natural; one that always finds a further goal is contrary to nature.
Related terms
- Sympatheia — συμπάθεια (sympatheia)
- View from above — ἄνωθεν ἐπιθεωρεῖν (anōthen epitheōrein)
- Amor fati — amor fati (latin)
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