Epicurean friendship: Vatican Saying 23, "Every friendship is desirable in itself; however it begins with usefulness." Vatican Saying 39, "The friend is neither the one who always seeks what is useful nor the one who never joins usefulness to friendship: for the first makes a trade of the benefit and what is given in return, while the other removes hope for the future.""Of all the things that wisdom prepares for ensuring lifelong happiness, by far the greatest is the possession of friends." Vatican Saying 34, "We do not welcome the hepl of our friends, the help that comes to us from them, so much as our trust in the subject of this help."
Friendship is desirable because it is part of happiness. Happiness consists in knowing that we are as well protected as possible against the evils that may come from the world and that we are completely independent of them.
Our awareness of friendship that we are surrounded by friends who will reciprocate our attitude of friendship towards them, which constitutes one of the guarantees of our happiness. Its objective is to establish the soul in a state resting on ataraxy, that is to say the absence of inner turmoil, wisdom surrounds itself with friends because we find in these friends, and our trust in them, one of the guarantees of ataraxy and the absence of inner turmoil.
Epicurean friendship remains within the care of the self and includes the necessary reciprocity of friends as guarantee of ataraxy and happiness.
So it is the balance between utility and something other than utility. Friendship must be chosen for itself, on account of itself. Usefulness designates an external relationship between what one does and why one does it.
For Stoics, the conception comes from that man as a communal being. Epictetus says, the order of the world is so organized that all living beings, whatever they are seek their own good. The God has determined that whenever one is seeking its own good, and without wishing to or seeking to, it acts for the good of others. Discourse 19 of book I: Zeus has arranged the nature of the rational animal in such a way that he can attain no particular good without bringing about the common utility. Thus it is not antisocial to do everything for oneself.
One cannot have access to the truth if one does not change one's mode of being. Zeus has entrusted men to themselves. He has determined that unlike animals, and this is one of the fundamental differences between the rational animal and nonrational animals, men are entrusted to themselves an have to take care of themselves.
He has to ask himself what depends on him and what does not depend on him, and what is appropriate for him to do or not do. In discourse 14 of book II: those who succeed in taking care of themselves "have a life free from pain, fear, and distress, and they observe the order of natural and acquired relationships."
The "princely" duty from Marcus Aurelius: You have to forget that you are Caesar, and you will only perform your work, your task, and fulfill your obligations as Caesar if you conduct yourself like any man. (p.200 & p.201-important.)
The examination of conscience in Stoic and Pythagorean practice: the morning and night examinations.
Descartes: to be capable of truth you only have open your eyes and to reason soundly and honestly, always holding to the line of self-evidence and never letting it go. A man has to ask himself what he is, what he is not. He has
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