Building on my post from yesterday (Letters from a Stoic - Letter 2) I decided to continue with letter 3 today.
The mystery of where Letter 1 is must wait for a later time. Perhaps a day where I need at break from reading or if I get to a letter that I find not that interesting.
Letter 3 is basically about friendship. It did not hit me as hard as the letter from yesterday. I even considered just skipping it and going to the next one, which in my book is Letter 5 (another mystery - where is Letter 4!?) but I read it in the morning and throughout the day I thought about it. Re-read it and I did take some lessons from it.
In Letter 3 Seneca reprimands Lucilius for calling someone in Lucilius’ letter to Seneca a “friend” but then asking Seneca not to disclose personal information about Lucilius to that “friend” as Lucilius does not do that himself with that “friend”.
This sends of Seneca on somewhat of a semantic rant about what a “friend” really is. He does give Lucilius a “get-out-of-jail-for-free” card in the beginning where he mentions that you can use the term “friend” more loosely and his description is of a real friend.
But in Senecas opinion once you call someone a friend you should disclose everything with them. You should judge and vouch people hard before you call them friends, but once they have that label then you should never keep anything from them.
But if you are looking on anyone as a friend when you do not trust him as you trust yourself, you are making a grave mistake, and have failed to grasp sufficiently the full force of true friendship.
I do somewhat agree with him and try to live as such. But I do not think that I can see myself free from sharing more with some friends than with others. Perhaps that is a mistake. Perhaps that takes up too much mental space and requires too much mental gymnastics to keep track of. It is not as if I do not trust all the people I call friends there are just people where certain conversations comes up more easily than others.
This can be a combination of settings where you meet, topics you discuss or whatever else. But perhaps I can be more straight with some friends. Or share more than what I have historically done.
I am not sure what I want to do with the intent from this Letter 3, yet. Whether something important for me is to be gained from this. Or perhaps I just feel like I am nearing a personal border from what I want to disclose in the small internet.
What I do know is that I do not agree with one of his last points in this letter.
Similarly, people who never relax and people who are invariably in a relaxed state merit your disapproval - the former as much as the latter.
As I read his point here he is telling Lucilius to look for a certain type of friend. To only enter into friendship with the people who has the “right” attitude to life according to Seneca.
I strongly disagree with this. I think there is tremendous benefits in having friendships with people who look at life differently than yourself. Following his advice makes it seems like you are looking for someone to start a company with. Curating who you call friends after those parameters feels wrong in my opinion.
I have friends that are extremely ambitious. I have friends that are not. I have friends who are almost the same as me. I have friends that are the polar opposite.
But what they all have in common is that I like them and that I trust them. I could not care less whether they would be considered to “never relax” or “always relax” in their state of mind.
So all in all I find the initial part of Letter 3 a semantic and unimportant discussion on the word “friend”. I find the middle part about treating friends as equals and not keeping anything from them as meaningful and perhaps something I need to thing even more about. And then I find the last part of Letter 3 to be something I do not agree with at all.