ESTOICISMO - SÊNECA: SOBRE A AMIZADE - Sobre o livro AS RELAÇÕES HUMANAS - Lúcia Helena Galvão

New Acropolis presents: Sêneca: Friendship. Lúcia Helena Galvão, 2020. Hello.

Welcome once again to our pleasant philosophical conversations. Today we are going to start a new adventure. Let's talk about a book called "The Human Relations", by a philosopher named Seneca.

It's true that this book, Human Relations is a compilation of a series of treaties of Seneca's letters to Lucilius, his best friend. So, the first part that we are going to deal with is exactly about friendship. It's how Seneca refers to friendship in these letters addressed exactly to the greatest of his friends.

But before we get into that, I wanted to to do with you just a very quick little introduction. Talking a bit about the phenomenon of Stoicism as a whole. Stoicism actually originates in Greece, with Zenon.

And Zenon, who founds it, deals with a moral philosophy in which people's lives was a clear demonstration of what they think. That is, practical morality and teaching by example. A philosophy grounded in something that man can live and not just theorize about.

Tremendously focused on the aspect of correcting man's moral imperfections. And not very focused on very metaphysical matters. This was very necessary at that time.

Because we were living in Greece a crisis of philosophy. A devaluation of thought, a loss of moral reference within society due to a series of political crises. Including Hellenism itself and a series of things that were causing the Greek to lose its identity.

The fact is that Zenon founded this school that deals with an extreme simplicity of life but moral rigor above all else, for centuries in history. When a person was very rigorous with his way of life, they said he was a stoic. Only from, let's say, the 17th, 18th century when the luminism came, the great classical rationalism is that this ancient nomenclature was lost.

Many centuries later it was still said that a very serious man, very upright, was a stoic. He wants very little for himself, is very hard on his moral principles, that is a stoic. Sometimes it was even exaggerated.

So Stoicism left this mark of a moral integrity beyond all doubt. But at the same time of a serenity and peace of mind that no crisis, no external disturbance would be able to break it. He was a man who was autonomous.

That man whose happiness depends only on him. This was a model for stoicism. Anyway, after Zenon came two others who were Cleantes of Assos and Crisipo of Solos.

And after that the so-called intermediate stoicism that will bring stoicism from Greece to Rome that is with Panetius of Rhodes and Posidonius of Apamea. We will see, here it's even talked about Hecaton, who is another philosopher who was a disciple of Panetius of Rhodes and who also accompanies his master to Rome. The implantation then of Stoicism in Rome happened through these two or three philosophers.

It is interesting because as Rome already had a more practical mentality, more war-oriented mentality, a political mentality, a social construction mentality. Stoicism became almost the religion of the empire. This school was adopted and highly valued within the Roman empire.

And within that circumstance, in a clear historical sequence the first of the great Roman Stoics is Seneca. Lucius Annaeus Seneca, the one we're going to talk about today. Then comes the slave Epictetus, genius, wonderful.

Epictetus, the slave of Nero's secretary. The one who suffers atrocities at the hand of his lord. And he does not stop being a serene man, a man who owns himself and true to his principles.

And last but not least, the emperor Marcus Aurelius. That created something very interesting because Marcus Aurelius is no longer a contemporary of Epictetus, doesn't know him, but has Epictetus as his great inspirer and his great master. In other words, a Roman emperor who has a Roman slave as his master.

This is quite curious, a philosophy that serves kings and slaves. So these three are considered the golden trinity of Stoicism. And it is interesting that we observe a crucial point.

Stoicism then was born at a moment of crisis in Greek thought. When it comes to Rome, it also faces several crises. Therefore it's a philosophy to recover the man's morality status at the moment when he is losing himself in the midst of a series of historical, social, political disturbances.

It is a philosophy of recovering human integrity. Of human character when civilization seems to be in collapse. So it is the ideal philosophy for moments of crisis.

If you think that at this moment we live a crisis of moral character pay attention to stoicism. Which must be one of the most adequate, one of the most appropriate philosophical schools for such a moment. Because it is practical, simple, experiential, and all focused, all its artillery for a strong moral recovery of humanity.

And we have then as the first of this golden trinity of Roman stoics, Seneca, this citizen we are going to talk about now. He is the first, older, he is contemporary with the birth of Christianity. He's born in Cordoba in the year 4 before Christ.

And he will die in Rome in 65 after Christ. All of us, I think most of us, at some point, have heard about this sad circumstance that killed Seneca. He was called by Agrippina to educate her son Nero.

As long as Nero was under his guidance, he was a great emperor. But when he decides to do his own experience and frees himself from the master's advice, he becomes a madman, an atrocious, a tyrant. Who ends up victimizing his own master.

That is, Seneca, his preceptor and his master was condemned to death by his disciple Nero. He was condemned to cut his own veins until he bled to death in a bathtub. He dies in an atrocious way and precisely by the hand of the one he had most committed himself to putting something of education, something of values.

But it seems that Nero's nature imposed itself on all this. Well, I'll start this lecture of ours, reminding you how great he was as a lawyer, as a writer, as an intelletual considered as a touchstone within Roman thought. And I start with a phrase that I like quite a lot, which is part of these letters that we are reading.

At one point in the letters to Lucilius, he says, back in the part concerning philosophy, The philosopher must be the pedagogue of mankind. See how beautiful this is, I repeat, "The philosopher must be the pedagogue of mankind. " That is, it corresponds to philosophy to teach man the most difficult of all arts, which is the art of living as a human being.

To be formed as a human being. This is up to the philosopher. Then man will have math teachers to teach math, will have gym teachers to teach gymnastics and will have philosophy teachers to teach him how to live as a human being.

He would be that pedagogue versed in the art of living, which is the most important of all the arts. For this historical period, should be taught before anything else. As Plato would say, long before that.

What Plato intended is that man should be formed as to incline his character toward a human goal, his character was well formed and only then more information would be given to him. Because if we see the great tyrants of the history it was exactly those men who did the most damage, who were endowed with some intellectual knowledge, who had a charisma for oratory, who had a charisma for writing. If we take, for example, Adolf Hitler, it was better that he was absolutely ignorant.

In other words, resuming Plato's phrase, it's better absolute ignorance than knowledge in inadequate hands. Knowledge arms whatever moral basis man has. So the first thing to do is through philosophy, to build a solid moral basis in man.

Philosophy, for this period, was fundamentally about establishing a sense of human life and form the human being in values. So this idea was widely adopted by the Stoics. Philosophy as the art of living and that should precede and follow all other formations.

Continuing, we will see that Seneca's works, he has these letters that we will treat, which are the moral letters to Lucilius. Which are actually called human relations in this book, in this compilation that we are working on, but that is the original name, the moral letters to Lucilius. These letters that are the best known work of Seneca, is written late in his life.

He had already fled from Rome, on the verge of being condemned by Nero. And in these last years of his life, he writes to Lucilius, that we don't know exactly who he is. Historically we don't know who this character is, except through himself.

Who speaks at times that Lucilius knows such and such a thing, was born in such a place, we know very little about this character. But someone he loved deeply, to whom he devotes the last years of his life, to educate him, to transmit the whole synthesis of his knowledge. So it's beautiful, it's considered the masterpiece of Seneca, and certainly the best known.

It also has 12 dialogues, and a thirteenth that was lost. "About superstition", it was quoted by St. Augustine in the city of God, but is no longer known.

But much of his work has been preserved until our days. In addition, several tragedies. He has nine tragedies in all, based on heroes from Greek mythology above all.

So he was considered an extremely cultured being but also not only cultured in the sense of being extensive. Extremely deep in moral advice he was able to administer. Extremely deep in his treatment of life's questions.

He will talk about how to age, about the brevity of life, constancy of the wise man. Many of the most important themes, fundamental to human nature. He leaves it very well handled in his work.

And fortunately, a work that has largely come down to us. Today then, within this compilation that is "The human relations", I apologize to you because I know this book is not very easy to find. I found mine in a used bookstore.

Within Human Relations four chapters, four books, are compiled. The first of all about friendship, the second about books, the eloquence, the third about the wise man and his attitude in the face of death, and the fourth about philosophy. All of them precious.

He will talk about the importance of friendship in a ceremonial way. The value he placed on it is out of the ordinary. I believe that Seneca, he is not the only one which deals well with the theme of friendship, but perhaps the deepest.

When he talks about eloquence, the importance of books, the importance of productive reading, reading that converts into life, which is integrated with the answer to life. When he speaks of man in the face of death, how the wise faces death, and when he talks about philosophy. We can really say that this work is the best of Seneca.

And Seneca is the best within Stoicism and philosophy as a whole. So come on, today we're going to deal with the first part, which is about friendship. We will have four meetings about this book.

Today we will start with friendship. Part of Lucilius' letters have been lost. They say there were 22 books at first.

It's quote that there would be 22 books. Today, 20 are left. A pity, because it really is a sensational work.

As I have already told you, it is Seneca's most widely read work. And there is a passage that I thought wonderful from one of these letters. And I bring it to you as a portico to inspire us.

At a certain point he turns to his friend from his heart. The one whom he took as friend and disciple. And gives a wonderful moral exhortation.

He says: "Yes, my dear Lucilius: claim ownership of your being. " In other words, don't forget, don't let anyone rob you of yourself. Claims at all times, in every episode of your life, the property of your being.

And then we begin our dialogue about friendship. The letters in which Seneca teaches Lucilius about friendship. And they are very beautiful passages.

And just to give you an idea in some moments I mixed quotes from other philosophers who have also made beautiful contributions on this theme. So at some point I'll mix it up some philosophers like Cicero, like Plutarch, like Xenophon. Just to have a comparison, even Nietzsche.

We are going to talk a little bit about some thoughts as a comparison to see how the thought of all these great thinkers express very closely things. They almost confirm and reinforce the knowledge that was left by Seneca. Then he starts by saying the following: "Reflect for a long time to know if you should choose someone as a friend.

But once the decision is made, love him from the bottom of my heart. Talk to him as freely as you do to yourself. " This idea that in choosing a friend you have to be very careful.

You don't understand what all this caution is about. A friend to him is someone for whom you will share your life. Someone for whom survival and well-being will be just as important as yours.

Someone you don't want to depend on but someone you want to give your best to. The characteristic of true friendship is that, to make sure that he can grow together with you more than he would on his own. That is, this person has to be beneficial to the laws of nature, has to be beneficial to humanity, have to be a person of courage, of value, of character.

Therefore, you have to be very careful in your choice. But once you have devoted your friendship to someone, there is no reason to be suspicious or have any middle ground. A half friendship is simply a convenience, not a true friendship.

He begins by exhorting Lucilius exactly because Lucilius had sent him a messenger and says look, this messenger is my friend but don't say certain things about me in his presence. He says, what's that Lucilius? What do you call a friend?

You are profaning friendship. If he is your friend, what about you cannot be said in his presence? And he will give a long exhortation from this failure of Lucilius.

It is a mistake to trust no one, as well as to trust everyone. I would say that in one case, of not trusting anyone, we act in the safest way. In the other case, to trust everyone, in the most honest way.

In other words, you give yourself with all honesty, but with imprudence. Because you may be giving yourself to someone who simply wants to use you and manipulate what you so willingly hand over. But also if you don't give yourself to anyone, don't realize one of the most beautiful human virtues.

Which is to create a deep bond with the soul of the other. As another philosopher I admire a lot, to recover unity in multiplicity. That time when someone intimately unites his soul to someone else's soul, you recover some of the unity in multiplicity.

So the ideal would be to conciliate these two things. Where you are prudent in your choice, use all your discernment. But once you have dedicated your trust it helps the other to be more solid.

Because you believe in him more than he believes in himself. Your confidence announces a future for this friend that is greater than the present. A future that you have glimpsed before him, and that you reach out your hand to help him.

To walk with him and help him to achieve. And that is the result of true friendship, it always adds up. "The true friendship, nor hope, neither fear, nor concern for self-interest can break through.

" In other words, the true friendship, hope, fear, worry, nothing is powerful enough to annihilate it. It's the one we carry when we die and for which we can die. That is, if we have come here to recover some of that unity in multiplicity, to establish links, bonds, that cause our soul to establish a contact with another soul, that is, a bit of the universe pulled himself together when two pieces of the big puzzle fell into place.

We start our future from this level. The level of having seen the world through two angles and not just one. We start a new experience from the level of having won, to a great extent, selfishness, which is always our greatest enemy.

Once I have joined with another in such a way that his interest and mine are one, and I have no preference, my personality above another's, that this is true friendship, I have already started to turn the game against the great enemy, the heresy of separateness, because I unite. The selfishness, because now a part of the universe has come together through this union. If you go back to the etymology, the universe is about exactly that.

"Versos unam", around the one. The universe is one that walks to recompose unity. And a friendship walks the course of the universe.

"Today, I had the pleasure of reading up on Hecaton. " This Hecaton, who is that philosopher that I told you, that he was a disciple of Panetius of Rhodes. A Greek philosopher who comes to Rome, that unfortunately we lost all his work.

We only know something of him, that he was prolific in writing. We lost a lot of things along the time, by fanaticism, by a series of factors. All that remains are comments that others make about him, saying how great he was.

And here Seneca quotes a phrase of him and says: "Today I had the pleasure of reading in Hecaton: 'Ask me, he writes, what progress have I made? " In other words, what did I grow up on? What progress have I made?

'A great progress. I became my own friend. ' "Great progress!

", says Seneca, "You will never be alone. If you have such a friend, you will have the mankind for a friend. " Look how beautiful this is.

How this corresponds to what I always say to you, the more in, the more out. The man who is a friend of his own essence, the human essence endowed with principles, with values and virtues. The man who is a friend of these laws that govern the universe, and brings everything back to unity.

The man who is friend of his own essence, which is a cell of the world, certainly through this friendship, he will be a summing factor in the lives of all the people around him. And through that friendship, he can establish deep bonds with others. Because he found himself deeply.

He made the first and most essential of all friendships. The friendship of his existence with his essene, of his personalistic mask with his true identity. The more in, the more out.

If I am deep in relation to myself, I can establish deep bonds with others. In other words, I have progressed a lot. Do you know what I did?

I became my friend. If you see further on what he says about friendship, that the friend is the one who exhorts, that corrects the deviations, that reminds you of your true identity, that shows you the true direction that is expected of a human being, and you started to do this to yourself, you are privileged. And from there, you can do the same for all of humanity.

Moving on, he will talk about the friendship of the wise. Which is something very interesting and I ask you to pay attention to that. He will highlight a point.

Friendship is not established by lack, but by abundance. That man who can live a true friendship, a true bond with the other, he is not lacking in anything, he is overflowing. He is self-sufficient, but doesn't want to give up living the privilege of the virtue of friendship.

Therefore, he overflows. He doesn't make friends with anyone to want to receive favors. Quite to the contrary, he ties bonds to give, to overflow, to share.

And he exemplifies this exactly through the friendship of the wise man. "The wise man, even if he is self-sufficient, likes to have a friend. Even if it is to put friendship in practice and not leave such a beautiful virtue unused.

The sovereign Good does not look for its sources abroad. It is inwardly that he cultivates himself. Depends entirely on himself.

" Therefore, a wise has found all the fullness he needs in himself. He is a being that is well, that is at peace, that is serene. Therefore, he does not look to his friend as someone to lean on.

He looks for his friend as someone who is a receiver of all the gifts of life that he was able to collect and that he doesn't want to keep just for himself. Remembering that Gibran's phrase, "We are enrichment posts of life's gifts. " He doesn't want to keep these gifts of life for himself, he wants to give them away.

The friend gives him the honor to receive these gifts of life, to value them and to live them. So this friendship of the wise man reverses and positions well the idea of friendship for Seneca. "It is not about having someone who can look after him in case of illness and help him if he is in prison or in need.

But, on the contrary, it is a question of himself looking out for his friend, in case he is sick, or get him out of the prison into which he has been thrown by the enemy. The selfish person who makes a friendship with such a perspective of obtaining favors is mistaken. Such a friendship will end as it began.

" Founded on interests, it will end by the exhaustion of mutual interests. When the other no longer serves you. Remember that sentence I always repeat from Leon Tolstoy.

"There are those who pass through a forest and only see firewood for their fire. " If the other doesn't add fuel to my fire, I don't even see it. I just look at things realizing what they serve me for.

How they can meet my lacks and my needs. That will never be a true friendship. A true friendship submits the character, the nature of the other to a rigorous sieve.

But once you consider this other a useful being to life as a whole, have this friendship to give this other with the best that you reaped in life. Something else makes a passing collegiality, an exchange of favors relationship, a complicity, but never a true friendship. Friendship as abundance and not as lack.

The needy use the other like a private security plan, a private pension plan. They don't consider the other to be the best place in the world to deposit their best hopes and their best achievements. I brought here an intercalated placement, as I told you that I would, of Cicero, who also has a work exclusively about friendship.

And who also says wonderful things. In Cicero's friendship he will say, "For he who has the most confidence in himself, he who is so well armed with virtue and wisdom, that has no need of anyone and knows that he carries everything within himself, this one always excels in the art of winning friendships and keeping them. " That is, he overflows in gifts and look for someone worthy of receiving them in a friend.

And he takes his friend's life as a part of his own. He is skilled at making friends and keeping them. This is Cicero reinforcing exactly the same idea.

Continuing, going back to Seneca, he reiterates this point in the following sentence: "If we make a friend so that he can free us from chains, we shall see him flee at the first opportunity. These are friendships 'of circumstance', as they say. The friend chosen out of interest will only please as long as he is useful.

" He doesn't serve me anymore, he doesn't exist. "This is why prosperous men are besieged by a crowd of friends, but, after a reversal of fortune, all around them will be nothing but a desert. The relationship you describe to me is commerce, not friendship.

" Lucilius had probably written something for him, and we do not have these Lucilius' letters to him, only the answers he said. He says, "That is trade, this is exchange of favors. This is not friendship.

" Friendship is not based on lack, but on abundance. It is a very interesting thing, which I made a point of highlighting for you here. Plutarch has a book called "How to distinguish the flatterer from the friend".

The one we just saw, who gathers around the powerful man, is the flatterer. Plutarch says a very curious and even a little funny sentence. "The flatterer is like a tick attached to the ear of the one who loves glory.

" That is, when the man is too vain, his self-esteem is exacerbated, he does what Jung would call ego inflation, he practically leaves the door open for flatterers. They are the ones who pretend to believe in this self-image of the vain one. They love this mask of you, when in fact they just want to exploit you and leave you to your fantasies when the crash comes.

These are the flatterers. And it is very interesting in this book "How distinguish the flatterers from the friend", which is worth a good read, is that it has certain passages where Plutarch will reinforce this idea. He says that the friend knows how to be tough at the moment when it's necessary to give your friend a shake.

He knows how to say the right word, even if he puts his friendship at stake to save his friend from an abyss. The friend is necessarily the one who always points upwards. He is not complicit when your friend falls into vulgarity, into trivialization.

He is always a point of support when this friend wishes to resume his path toward the full human condition. And he makes a very big difference so that man is not mistaken and never confuses the flatterer with a friend. I also brought as a counterpoint for you an excerpt from nobody less than Khalil Gibran, in "The prophet".

In the chapter on friendship, Gibran also defines in a beautiful way, just to compare with Seneca. An excerpt from Gibran says the following: "May the purpose of friendship be nothing more than to deepen the spirit. " Friends grow together, they are sum factors in each other's lives.

"For the love that seeks more than the discovery of its own mystery, is not love, but a net: and only the useless is caught. " One the most beautiful symptoms of true friendship is when you see a very beautiful from someone, an act of justice, an act of beauty, of kindness, when you see a landscape that is disconcertingly beautiful, when you see a wonder of nature, you immediately get that mental image. How good it would be for so-and-so to be with me.

That is, so-and-so in your memory, in your life is associated with the best, because this is a true friend, he exists to share with you the best. There are people with corrupted souls who have friends, don't have, they have accomplices. The friend is always the one who comes to your mind when you see the most beautiful, kindest, and just things that exist in nature.

And you remember and say, "So-and-so would love to see this, so-and-so would love to be here. " That is a good symptom of a good friendship. And he goes on to say that love has a mystery, that friendship is nothing more than a part of love.

And this mystery of human existence is the fundamental object of true friendship. Gibran, also wonderful to describe such a noble feeling. Continuing with Seneca, he will say: "What is my goal when I make a friendship?

To have a being for whom to give my life, a being that I will follow into exile, that I will defend with all my strength against death. " In other words, I have a friend out of a desire to serve him, not so that he serves me. "We take away the greatness of friendship when we see in it a means to gain something.

" I reiterate what I often talk, about Immanuel Kant, when he says that it's immoral to have a rational being, a human being as a means and not as an end in himself. And especially when this human being is a friend of yours. He is well connected, he has status, he has fortune.

Well, that will never be friendship. This is nothing more than a use of the other as a means to the one you consider your only friend, which are the desires and interests of your personality. Because such a man is generally not even a friend to himself.

As we have talked about before. If he was his own friend, he wouldn't do such a thing to someone. Wouldn't use the other for petty and personal interests.

"The friend is the one with whom we seek good. " Look how beautiful. A good partner to seek the good, to search for the mystery of life, as Gibran said.

To seek to grow together. He is the one who always pulls you up. And when he himself stumbles you pull him up.

There is a silent pact within friendship. Let's grow together. And you will be a good reason for me to grow up.

If not grow for me, grow for you. And vice versa. One is a powerful stimulus for the growth of the other.

So that alone they would not be as great as they are when they are together. Continuing on, Seneca will have a paragraph which I consider one of the most beautiful in this part of the friendship. "My interest is intertwined with yours; I am not your friend if what concerns you does not concern me.

Friendship makes us share everything. There is no more individual happiness or unhappiness. Our two lives form only one.

You cannot live happily if you only look at yourself, when all you think about is self-interest. You have to live for others if you want to live for yourself. " Imagine such a thing of beauty.

I think that some sentences like this are sufficient trails for someone to say, a great man passed by. What I think it's fascinating about Seneca is that he himself had this awareness. That he would leave a bright and positive trail for humanity.

That he speaks for posterity that he would be remembered. He has a sense, he has a conscience of the legacy that he leaves for the future. Reiterating just this final bit for you to savor.

How we taste an excellent wine, that which is endowed with exceptional quality. "You cannot live happily if you only look at yourself. When all you think about is self-interest.

You have to live for others if you want to live for yourself. " In other words, the more I think about the whole, the more I benefit from it. Because I hone my best tools to live and work for the whole.

I sharpen intelligence, I sharpen will, I sharpen love, creativity, initiative. I sharpen all the tools of the human being kit that came into the world with me. Why?

Because the needs of the world are many. And some of them I want to answer before it is my time to go backstage. It is the best we can do for ourselves.

Is to commit ourselves, from the heart, strongly to the whole. With humanity as a whole, with nature as a whole. That is beautiful.

That's typical of men who are friends to themselves. They have that notion. I have brought you here one more counterpoint that I think it's very interesting.

Much later, of course, a few centuries later. Michel de Montaigne, who wrote "The Essays", had a very strong and deep friendship with another writer, that was Étienne de La Boétie, the one with the speech on voluntary servitude. And this friend of his dies much younger than he does.

He does a series, write about friendship, a series of wonderful phrases. Talking about this friend of him. With whom he was so complete, as if a part of himself was gone.

And that paragraph is very beautiful. He will describe the friendship. "The Friendship", by Michel de Montaigne.

"In the friendship I speak of, souls mix and mingle with each other. Such a universal mix, that they fade away and no longer find the seam that brought them together. If you pressure me to tell you why I loved him so much, I feel that it can only be expressed by this answer.

Because he was him. Because I was me. " For what I am and for what he is or was.

We were one. You realize the nobility that friendship has already stood before great minds of the past. While today it has often been reduced to a collegism.

A little slippery, a little more given by circumstances than by a true feeling. How much this duty to make the other to grow, to share everything well with the other, how much this has been forgotten. And how much we lose one of the tastiest things in life.

One of the things that give life the most meaning. A few more counterpoints, now we are closing on this part of Seneca's chapter, which is a short chapter. I have brought you Socrates through the voice of Xenophon.

We, in general, know that Socrates didn't wrote nothing, we know Socrates through Plato's work. But Xenophon, in a work called "The Memorable Thoughts of Socrates", also talks by putting Socrates as the main character. So, two sentences from Xenophon's Socrates.

"We must be honest in words and deeds, for the wicked have no virtuous friends. " You see, we must be honest in words and deeds, not only because it's our duty to be so, but also because, if we are not, we will never be worthy of true friendship. The virtuous are friends with the virtuous.

They are a stimulus for each other, so that grow more and more in virtues, values, and wisdom. Continuing with Xenophon's Socrates, he says, "Friendship overcomes all obstacles to unite virtuous hearts. " In other words, almost an attraction, that we don't even know how to explain, as Montaigne said.

An almost magnetic attraction, where the virtuous, without knowing very well how, they end up meeting at some point in the future. Why? They are working for the same thing.

Because they are part of each other. "Friendship is a heart that dwells in two souls", Aristotle. A heart that dwells in two souls.

The only being that dwells in two bodies. That is, the affinity of means, which are values, and ends, which is to add value to the world, to leave here greater than we came in, to add value to humanity, is so great that if means and ends are so similar, it's as if it were a single being seen by two different pairs of eyes. And together they are a power, which unites the particularities of their masks of their personas, for a single purpose.

They are a powerhouse, and grow much more together than they would separately. A true friendship is a find. Continuing with Aristotle, he says: "The perfect friendship can only exist between good people.

" Among those who come together to practice a crime or to share a petty criticism, this is complicity. Complicity that dissolves when it is more interesting to talk about the one in front of you, than from third parties. That which obeys only to interests.

Unfortunately, it seems to me that this is far more common than friendship these days. Nietzsche, Friedrich Nietzsche, "Friendship is when two people unite in search of some higher truth. " That is, just on an upward path, toward the fullness of the human condition, we can make friends.

Therefore, I often say that a good friend tells his friend, "To grow, always count on me, to go down, come down alone. " I think it is a tremendously educational maxim. True friendship is a union around the rise of consciousness, or apex of its possibilities.

It is a joint work, which is a joint effort toward evolution as human beings. There is a passage by Nietzsche, that's very interesting, which adds another detail to this question of friendship. "The ones I had been waiting for, who I thought were transformed, just like me the fact that they had grown old, drove them away.

Only those who transform themselves remain my friends. " It is interesting this passage, that he speaks of aging, not physical aging, aging of dreams, accommodate, give up a saga, living only for the sake of a comfortable survival, those who do not move toward a better version of themselves, those who have not improved, those have unfortunately moved away from me. Only those who fight for self-improvement constantly, are truly my friends.

It does not mean that I abandon the others, it means that the points of affinity contact, are becoming more and more scarce. If they react and want to grow, I am here again. But who does not aim at self-transformation, self-improvement, this friendship for sure will.

. . As if it were a thread that goes on and on until break, because one moves and the other stood still.

Friendship is recognized as a point of meeting between those who are on the road to the best of themselves. And if one is paralyzed, necessarily that thread will eventually break by this. Going back to Seneca, there's a passage towards the end, in which he says something that seemed to me to be very interesting and beautiful.

What I told you, he has conscience of the role he plays before posterity. He writes for posterity, understand, stop everything, stop to think. Posterity is us, I am Seneca posterity, you are, you already describe for us and do it consciously.

Look at these excerpts, how beautiful. "I work for posterity: it is in their interest that I write. I give my works salutary advice, which are like effective remedial formulas: I felt its benefits in my own pains, which are not yet completely cured, but have at least stopped spreading.

" I have tested this knowledge in myself, which I leave to you. "I show others the straight path that I met late, after many exhausting wanderings. " After much wasted time, as we all have, after many mistakes, as we all make, but without losing the spirit of improvement.

He arrives at a balsam, which is able of paralyzing the extent of his wounds, and slowly nursing them back to health. And that is the gift he consciously leaves to posterity. And for gift giving to take place, there have to be two things.

The one willing to give, the gift itself, and the one willing to receive. It is to open that package and take it as your own. And that part is ours.

And we just got a present. Think about it. Then, towards the end, he talks about a quote from Epicurus, which Epicurus speaks to a friend of his, Epicurus who is of another school, Epicureanism.

Epicurus tells a friend of his, who was searching riches: "One day you will be considered special, not for all these riches that you seek, but for having received letters from me. " And then he turns to Lucilius and says the same thing: "What Epicurus could promise his friend, I promise you, Lucilius: I will be favored by posterity. I can take names with me, whose survival I will give them.

" In other words, he gives Lucilius the greatest of gifts. He takes him, along with him, consciously, towards posterity. And he knows that posterity will receive this message.

And he will know how to use it and value it more perhaps than his contemporaries. In other words, he expected this from us. That posterity would recognize the jewel he saved for us.

And now is our part. Do you recognize it? Here we have the purest pearl of the description of friendship, that we can collect in it, in all these ideas that I used as support.

It is a pearl. And it is a gift. I hope you are open to receiving this gift.

Thank you very much, our meeting ends here. And we continue next week. We still have three more meetings about Seneca.

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