In another letter, Seneca cautions against mistaking flattery for friendship - an admonition all the more urgent today, in the Age of Likes, when the forms of flattery and the channels of positive reinforcement have proliferated to a disorienting degree: My visual taxonomy of the four levels of platonic relationships One who seeks friendship for favourable occasions, strips it of all its nobility. With an eye to such arrangements of convenience and favor, which he condemns as “a bargain and not a friendship,” Seneca adds: A man will be attracted by some reward offered in exchange for his friendship, if he be attracted by aught in friendship other than friendship itself. He who begins to be your friend because it pays will also cease because it pays. The beginning and the end cannot but harmonize. Hence, also, we notice those many shameful cases of persons who, through fear, desert or betray. Hence prosperous men are blockaded by troops of friends but those who have failed stand amid vast loneliness their friends fleeing from the very crisis which is to test their worth. These are the so-called “fair-weather” friendships one who is chosen for the sake of utility will be satisfactory only so long as he is useful. The end will be like the beginning: he has made friends with one who might assist him out of bondage at the first rattle of the chain such a friend will desert him. He who regards himself only, and enters upon friendships for this reason, reckons wrongly. Observing that some people form so-called friendships by estimating how much a potential friend can help them in a moment of need, he writes: In another letter, titled “On Philosophy and Friendship,” Seneca examines the common bases upon which friendships are formed and admonishes against the tendency, particularly common today, toward seeing others as utilitarian tools that help advance one’s personal goals.
Speak as boldly with him as with yourself… Regard him as loyal and you will make him loyal. Ponder for a long time whether you shall admit a given person to your friendship but when you have decided to admit him, welcome him with all your heart and soul. Those persons indeed put last first and confound their duties, who … judge a man after they have made him their friend, instead of making him their friend after they have judged him. If you consider any man a friend whom you do not trust as you trust yourself, you are mightily mistaken and you do not sufficiently understand what true friendship means… When friendship is settled, you must trust before friendship is formed, you must pass judgment.
Roman urdu poem friendship series#
That’s what the great first-century Roman philosopher Seneca examines in a series of correspondence with his friend Lucilius Junior, later published as Letters from a Stoic ( public library) - the indispensable trove of wisdom that gave us Seneca’s famous letter on overcoming fear and inoculating yourself against misfortune.Įighteen centuries before Emerson wrote in his meditation on the two pillars of friendship that “a friend is a person with whom may be sincere,” Seneca considers the uses and misuses of the term in a magnificent letter titled “On True and False Friendship”: And yet today, as we face the commodification of the word “friend,” what do we even mean - what should we mean - by this once-sacred term, now vacated of meaning by chronic misuse? Lewis wrote, “like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself… it has no survival value rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.” Darwinian caveats aside, the truth of this beautiful sentiment resonates deeply for anyone whose life has been enriched or even saved by the existence of a genuine friend.
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