04 - “Their rest could benefit humankind:” Seneca and W. E. B. Du Bois on Leisure as a Political Project

Seneca's De Otio, a first-century CE philosophical treatise, and Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk, an essay collection published in 1903, both attend to the relationships between leisure, learning, and political participation. Writing in exile, Seneca, once an imperial advisor, argues that learning offers a way to serve our fellow human beings. Du Bois, an African American scholar, writer, and activist, insists that freedpersons and their descendants in the United States require leisure to benefit themselves and the nation as a whole. Following work on "fuzzy" or "fragile" connections in reception studies (Hardwick 2011, Greenwood 2013, Fertik and Hanses 2019), I compare how Seneca and Du Bois understand leisure as a condition for contributing to a broader community. Seneca and Du Bois both embrace the liberatory possibilities of learning, but reading them together reveals the need for social and institutional recognition of what people excluded from public life have to teach.

I begin with Seneca's and Du Bois's views of the value of leisure and learning. Seneca observes that, in his leisure, he can surround himself with the best thinkers to learn from (1.1). Du Bois imagines sitting and strolling together with thinkers of the past who "come all graciously with no scorn or condescension" (157). He explains that, following the failures under Reconstruction to secure their political rights, freedmen turned to "book-learning," because "the journey…gave leisure for reflection and self-examination" (104-105). Du Bois presents the freedmen as heirs to Socrates and his dedication to the examined life, but their learning is not an end in itself: it is a stage in their pursuit of freedom and citizenship. Similarly, Seneca explains that while all philosophers value contemplation, Stoics treat it as a station along the way (statio), rather than as the object they seek (7.4).

Next, I compare Seneca's view of the philosopher's contributions to politics with Du Bois's ideal of the work achieved by the university. Seneca insists that leisure can serve the true commonwealth in which all human beings are included (4.1). The Stoic sages realized that "their rest could benefit humankind" (6.5), because what they discovered in leisure was more valuable than traditional forms of public service. Du Bois points out that there is no "leisure class" among African Americans in the South, and thus no opportunity for "[sitting] beside the fire and [handing] down traditions of the past" or for the "dreaming" of youth (175). Universities, in Du Bois's account, provide time and space for people to live and learn together. Yet the freedmen do not simply need leisure for learning: they also need to be recognized as people who have something to teach. When Seneca praises the sages' achievements in leisure, he grants recognition to the broader significance of what they learn. Widespread commitment to the university, as Du Bois envisions it, would be a form of widespread recognition that the students there, like Seneca's sages, can offer essential learning for the polity and the world.

---

Presenters

Harriet Fertik, The Ohio State University

  SCS-5