Of course, it is possible to write a real letter to someone by email. And, thankfully, that sometimes happens. But since most emails are just quick notes, the medium itself encourages us to communicate less thoughtfully than before, back in the day when people wrote physical letters. Put another way, with email we communicate much faster and more frequently, but also less deeply.
In his letters to Lucilius, Seneca offers us a model of what a deep kind of friendship might resemble. But in our fast-paced, utilitarian culture, with its focus on achieving quick results and immediate gratification, we often seem to forget what deep and satisfying friendships require.
THREE LEVELS OF FRIENDSHIP
Aristotle (384–322 BC) emphasized the importance of friendship over two thousand years ago, when he wrote that there were three different kinds of friendship—and how living a happy life was not possible without meaningful friendships. While you are unlikely to study friendship in a college philosophy course today, it was so crucial to Aristotle that he devoted one-fifth of his main work on ethics, the Nicomachean Ethics, to exploring the nature and significance of friendship.
The most basic level of friendship, Aristotle explains, relies on mutual advantage. We can see these kinds of advantage-friendships resembling connections you might make at a networking event for work. These are the most shallow and short-lived types of friendship. Because they are often self-centered, when the advantage someone offers disappears, the friendship dissolves also. Personally, I wouldn’t call these people friends but acquaintances. In the words of Seneca, “Real friendship is stripped of its dignity when someone makes a friend just to increase his personal gain.”5
The next form of friendship relies on mutual pleasure. These pleasure-friendships consist of people who enjoy one another’s company. This could include a drinking buddy, someone you like going to movies with, or anyone you enjoy spending time with.
The deepest level of friendship for Aristotle, however, is based on mutual admiration, in which each person sees something he or she admires in the other person’s character. These character-friendships are based on something good or virtuous you notice in another person. Character-friendships require trust and an investment of time, and are the types of bonds that can easily last a lifetime. Aristotle called this kind of friendship “perfect,” and it involves sharing your inner life with another person. Like all friendships, it involves genuinely wishing well for the other person. And because it requires time, the number of real friends you can have is limited.
For both Aristotle and Seneca, no human life can be fully satisfying in isolation, without real friendships based on the love and knowledge of others.6 Equally important, by spending time with others and engaging in dialogue, we can also develop our inner qualities. Friends are like mirrors to one another, because when you see good qualities in another person that aren’t developed in yourself, it inspires you to improve your character, to become a better person.7
This is the lost art of friendship that Seneca and Lucilius practiced, which was not just philosophical but filled with genuine affection. Based on engaging dialogue and the desire for another person’s well-being, this is a kind of friendship I’m convinced many people are hungry for today, but one for which we don’t have many good role models. Certainly, those rare, deeper-quality friendships, which feel inwardly meaningful, make us feel more human and more fully alive. These kinds of friendships not only improve the quality of our lives—they make us into better people.
MAKING PROGRESS TOGETHER
Seneca was in high spirits when he wrote one of his first letters to Lucilius. As he wrote with excitement in the very first line, “I can now see, Lucilius, that I’m not just being improved but transformed!”8
Seneca wasn’t just trying to help Lucilius, as a mentor, to improve his character. As this line shows, he was hoping the same for himself. Although Seneca had been studying Stoicism since he was a teenager, he still felt he had an immense amount of personal progress to make.
After telling Lucilius he was experiencing a transformation, Seneca explains this insight in greater depth. He knows that he has “many traits that should be identified, and decreased or strengthened.”9 He believes this realization is significant. It’s proof of a mind that has transformed itself for the better, because he’s now able to see his own faults.
What Seneca was feeling is the exact kind of transformation he wanted to see in Lucilius, too. Perhaps with his excitement Seneca was trying to emphasize and model these insights for Lucilius. For Seneca, if two friends could help each other improve their characters and make progress together, that would be an ideal type of friendship.
Friendships and meaningful relationships are crucial in Seneca’s philosophy for another reason (see chapter 9, “Vicious Crowds and the Ties That Bind”). That’s because the people we surround ourselves with make a huge impact on our own character. For Seneca, we should choose our friends carefully, because it’s easy to pick up, or unconsciously absorb, bad character traits from other people. Alternately, being around people with good character traits helps us to develop good character, too. Those friendships help us to make progress.
MAPPING OUT A PATH: STOICISM AS PROGRESS
As Seneca realized, only when you become aware of your faults, or what you might lack, is it possible to make real progress.
This idea was first associated with Socrates. He learned it from a wise priestess by the name of Diotima. As Diotima told Socrates, the gods possess perfect wisdom, so they don’t seek it. Most people don’t even know that they lack wisdom, so they don’t seek it either. In the end, it’s only possible to seek wisdom if you realize something is lacking.10
Put another way, if you’re not aware of your faults, if you don’t engage in self-inquiry, or if you don’t seriously examine your values, you really are unconscious of these things, and little to no progress is possible.
For the Roman Stoics like Seneca, everything was focused on making progress toward wisdom and developing a better character, with the ultimate goal of becoming a Stoic sage or wise person.
While that makes perfect sense, one of the strangest and most damaging ideas of the earliest Greek Stoics (in my view) was that virtue itself, or having a good character, was an all-or-nothing matter. This meant that only the Stoic sage was virtuous, while everyone else was described as being foolish, vice-ridden, and even insane. This idea had come from the Cynics, which helps to explain its unusual and questionable nature.
Zeno of Citium, the founder of Stoicism, was strongly influenced by the life and thought of Socrates. But Zeno was also influenced by another Greek philosophical school, the Cynics. Seeking a radical state of freedom, the Cynics lived on the streets of Athens as beggars and were infamous for their extreme sayings and personal behavior that openly defied social conventions. (Plato supposedly described Cynic philosopher Diogenes as “a Socrates gone mad.”11) Nearly all of Zeno’s more radical ideas went back to the Cynics. Similarly, the idea that virtue is an all-or-nothing matter (and the idea of the sage) came from the Cynics.12
Certainly, there is nothing wrong with the basic idea of the Stoic sage. It’s actually a very helpful concept. The problem is with the idea that virtue is an all-or-nothing matter: someone can either be a perfectly virtuous sage or be completely lacking in virtue. Consequently, in my view, Zeno’s notion of an extreme dichotomy between a sage and the rest of humanity was not a helpful idea. While certainly attention-getting, it was harmful to the Stoic school, and it brought quite a bit of ridicule on the Stoics from other ancient philosophers.13