Key Arguments

• Seneca likens friendship to love, calling love 'friendship gone mad,' and asks whether anyone falls in love 'with a view to a profit, or advancement, or celebrity,' thereby suggesting that injecting such motives into friendship is equally corrupting.
• He describes 'Actual love in itself, heedless of all other considerations,' as that which 'inflames people’s hearts with a passion for the beautiful object, not without the hope, too, that the affection will be mutual,' portraying love as oriented to beauty and reciprocity, not gain.
• He draws the normative inference: 'How then can the nobler stimulus of friendship be associated with any ignoble desire?' implying that friendship, being nobler, should be even more free from mercenary motives than love.
• He insists that proving friendship is to be 'cultivated for its own sake' is 'exactly what needs proving most,' because only then can the self-contented wise man be justified in pursuing it without contradicting his self-sufficiency.
• He concludes that to 'procure friendship only for better and not for worse is to rob it of all its dignity,' emphasizing that real friendship must endure adversity, not just prosperity.

Source Quotes

The thing you describe is not friendship but a business deal, looking to the likely consequences, with advantage as its goal. There can be no doubt that the desire lovers have for each other is not so very different from friendship – you might say it was friendship gone mad. Well, then, does anyone ever fall in love with a view to a profit, or advancement, or celebrity?

There can be no doubt that the desire lovers have for each other is not so very different from friendship – you might say it was friendship gone mad. Well, then, does anyone ever fall in love with a view to a profit, or advancement, or celebrity? Actual love in itself, heedless of all other considerations, inflames people’s hearts with a passion for the beautiful object, not without the hope, too, that the affection will be mutual.

Well, then, does anyone ever fall in love with a view to a profit, or advancement, or celebrity? Actual love in itself, heedless of all other considerations, inflames people’s hearts with a passion for the beautiful object, not without the hope, too, that the affection will be mutual. How then can the nobler stimulus of friendship be associated with any ignoble desire?

Actual love in itself, heedless of all other considerations, inflames people’s hearts with a passion for the beautiful object, not without the hope, too, that the affection will be mutual. How then can the nobler stimulus of friendship be associated with any ignoble desire? You may say we are not at present concerned with the question whether friendship is something to be cultivated for its own sake.

In the same way as he would any object of great beauty, not drawn by gain, not out of alarm at the vicissitudes of fortune. To procure friendship only for better and not for worse is to rob it of all its dignity. ‘The wise man is content with himself.’

Key Concepts

• There can be no doubt that the desire lovers have for each other is not so very different from friendship – you might say it was friendship gone mad.
• Well, then, does anyone ever fall in love with a view to a profit, or advancement, or celebrity?
• Actual love in itself, heedless of all other considerations, inflames people’s hearts with a passion for the beautiful object, not without the hope, too, that the affection will be mutual.
• How then can the nobler stimulus of friendship be associated with any ignoble desire?
• To procure friendship only for better and not for worse is to rob it of all its dignity.

Context

Still in Letter IX’s discussion of motives for friendship, Seneca deepens his critique of utilitarianism in friendship by comparing it to love and insisting that friendship must be valued as an end in itself.