Role of friendship in the enhancement of human wellbeing – a descriptive research with special reference to ‘letters from a stoic’ by Seneca

Abstract

One of the research area in the ancient philosophy is wellbeing of human beings. Thoughts of Seneca, who was an influential Stoic philosopher during the Hellenistic period in the history of western philosophy, are remarkable in the research area. He provided enormous novel ideas about the human wellbeing in relation with human relationship giving increased to friendship. There were other philosophers also discussed about friendship like Pythagoras in Pre-Greek period, Plato and Aristotle in Greek period, Thiruvalluvan in Indian philosophy but Seneca is much specific in the matter and strongly instructs the reader on the issues through his moral letters. The instruction includes the followings; importance of good friendship, two extreme conditions of belief, methods to construct good quality of friendship, rules to follow in keeping healthy friendship and rebuilding new friendship after the loss of old friendship, symptoms to leave from a friendship, etc. This research article is written in a descriptive method analyzing the concepts of friendship in the above category embedded in the one hundred and twenty for letters in the book of ‘Letters from A Stoic’ written by Seneca. The objective of the research is to critically analyze the concepts in the book and present the possibilities of following them to establish a healthy and long term friendship. For this purpose, the research is conducted in qualitative method as a descriptive study with secondary resources. The guiding research questions are, what kind of pre-conditions are required for a healthy friendship? What kind of benefits may be achieved from friendship to individuals as well as to society? What are the prime role of friendship in the enhancement of human wellbeing?