Doing a favour

Statue of Seneca in Cordoba, Spain

Everyone knows the problem: When to do someone a favour? When to help someone or when to give a present? And when you give someone a present or does someone a favour, should you expect that he or she does the same to you at a later moment? Moreover, what to give? If you are the receiver of a present or a favour, should you do then something in return, now or later? Even more, should you accept it?
These are questions that people often encounter in daily life and in every culture. Where people meet, people give and receive and ask themselves these questions. However, different cultures have found different answers. Basically, there are two kinds of answers. One is the “do ut des”-answer of the Romans: I give in order that you give. So, I give so that I’ll receive something in return, maybe not now, but anyway in the future. Giving creates an obligation, which is confirmed by accepting the gift or favour. Or rather, accepting a gift or favour is accepting the obligation, and it contains the implicit promise to return it later at the right moment. Maybe it is because this view on giving was reigning in Rome then, that the Roman politician and philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4 BC - 65 AD) wrote a treatise defending the opposite view that giving is an end in itself. You don’t give in order to receive something back, now or later. That’s making a deal. No, you give because of the pleasure of giving as such.
Seneca wrote an extensive “theory” of giving in his De Beneficiis, actually one of his lesser-known works, maybe because of its length, for it consists of seven books and it is about 250 pages long. For a modern western reader, what Seneca writes here is often obvious, sometimes a bit superficial, and sometimes too detailed, so that actually you can better read a kind of compilation – as I did *) – that omits the details that are not interesting for the present reader. But in Rome in the first century of our era, obviously writing such a book made sense, just because of the “do ut des”-view on giving reigning there.
The title of book, De Beneficiis, can be translated as “On Favours”, but I think that you can read it better as a book on giving in general, be it doing favours, or giving presents, or providing a service to someone, or what else. It defends the idea that doing favours, etc. – but here I’ll follow Seneca, who talks about favours – is not something you do for getting something in return. No, you perform this act simply for the pleasure of the act itself: “It is the art of doing a kindness which both bestows pleasure and gains it by bestowing it, and which does its office by natural and spontaneous impulse. It is not, therefore, the thing which is done or given, but the spirit in which it is done or given, that must be considered, because a favour**) exists, not in that which is done or given, but in the mind of the doer or giver.” (De Beneficiis, Book I-6)
In other words: A favour is an abstract idea. The essence of giving, like doing a favour or giving a present is not in the object, so the deed in the favour or the thing you give. No, the essence is in the “spirit”, or I would say, the intention with which you give. The concrete form of the favour is of secondary importance. This makes that you don’t give in order to get something back, now or later. You give simply for the pleasure of giving. You don’t make only the receiver of the gift happy but also yourself by the act of giving.
With this in mind, the rest of De Beneficiis is not more than an elaboration of this idea. It contains Seneca’s answers to the questions I started this blog with; and to many other questions. Take, for instance, the question “What to give”? When you choose your gift keep this in mind: give first what is essential for the receiver, then what is useful. So, in this order, give 1) what is indispensable; 2) what we basically can miss but makes life more pleasant in view of the death, like liberty, a good consciousness, good relations and the like; 3) what is useful 4) the rest, which is mainly redundant and unnecessary but makes life more pleasant. This list seems obvious, but how often doesn’t it happen that someone gives what this person needs or likes him or herself but that is not something the receiver would need or like?
Although in his book Seneca pays mainly attention to the giver, he says also something about the receiver of the favour. Especially the main sins a receiver can commit are worth to mention: ingratitude, forgetting what s/he has received and denying that s/he has received something, or ignoring it. Actually, these sins are an insult to the receiver. Should the receiver then do something about it? No, so Seneca, for these insults don’t harm the intention of the favour. Simply ignore them. So long as the intention of the favour has been good, it is okay. An ungrateful receiver injures him or herself, not you. “What I have lost with him, I shall receive back from others. … It is no proof of a great mind to give and to throw away one’s bounty; the true test of a great mind is to throw away one’s bounty and still to give.” (Book VII-32)

Note
*) The edition I used.
**) I prefer to talk of “favour” instead of “benefit”, as the translator does. Therefore I have replaced the word “benefit” by “favour” in the quotation.