Note 67 — Chapter XII · APPLIED MORAL SCIENCE.

On this point, difficulties reappear. How can this need of society be reconciled with the wise man’s freedom from wants? If the wise man is self-sufficient, how can another help him? How can he stand in need of such help? The answers given by Seneca are not satisfactory. To the first question, he replies, that none but a wise man can give the right inducement to a wise man to call his powers into exercise.67 He meets the second by saying, that a wise man suffices himself for happiness, but not for life.68 Everywhere the wise man finds inducements to virtuous action; if friendship is not a condition of happiness, it is not a good at all. Nor are his further observations more satisfactory. The wise man, he says,69 does not wish to be without friends, but still he can be without friends. But the question is not whether he can be, but whether he can be without loss of happiness. If the question so put is answered in the negative, it follows that the wise man is not altogether self-sufficing; if in the affirmative—and a wise man, as Seneca affirms, will bear the loss of a friend with calmness, because he comforts himself with the thought that he can have another at any moment—then friendship is not worth much. Moreover, if a wise man can help another by communicating to him information and method, since no wise man is omniscient,70 is not a wise man, if not in possession of all knowledge, at least in possession of all knowledge contributing to virtue and happiness? If it be added, that what one learns from another he learns by his own powers, and in consequence of himself helping himself, does not this addition still overlook the fact that the teacher’s activity is the condition of the learner’s? True and beautiful as is the language of Seneca: Friendship has its value in itself alone; every wise man must wish to find those like himself; the good have a natural love for the good; the wise man needs a friend, not to have a nurse in sickness and an assistant in trouble, but to have some one whom he can tend and assist, and for whom he can live and die71—nevertheless, this language does not meet the critical objection, that one who requires the help of another, be it only to have an object for his moral activity, cannot be wholly dependent on himself. If friendship, according to a previously quoted distinction,72 belongs to external goods, it makes man, in a certain sense, dependent on externals. If its essence is placed in an inward disposition of friendliness, such a disposition depends on the existence of those for whom it can be felt. Besides, it involves the necessity of being reciprocated, and of finding expression in outward conduct, to such an extent that it is quite subversive of the absolute independence of the individual.