A tremendous burden is being placed on friendship: more and more is being asked of this voluntary, informal, personal relationship. For example, it is commonplace for sociologists to note that institutions like marriage, kinship, class, unions and corporations are loosing their stickiness. As their power to hold society together moderates, so, they say, people are turning to friendship to support them and secure their sense of place in the world.
Alternatively, people today are en masse much more mobile. Whereas perhaps only 50 years ago there was basically one network upon which most people mapped their relationships, the network of their local neighbourhood, now free ranging individuals have networks of interests, jobs, families, colleges, lovers, and the network itself in the shape of the internet. If their sense of belonging is loosed from the local, then in the anonymity of these networks they seek friends.
The mood is generally optimistic about what friendship can deliver in this environment of shifting affections ??" that it can do much more than just help people ‘get by’ and can fulfil or complete complex needs and expectations. All in all, the tone is one of belief, or perhaps hope, that friendship will come into its own: it is elastic enough to connect us across the web of complex lives and strong enough not to snap.
But is it? For it seems to me that whilst many people, at both a personal and social level, are turning to friendship, few are asking just what it is they are turning to. We need to ask a question and we need philosophy to pursue it: what is friendship?
It may seem an odd one to ask. Do we not know what friendship is, who our friends are? Well, yes, at a perfunctory level. But when friendship is being loaded with personal expectations and heaped with social burdens, the perfunctory is not enough.
Not since the Greeks, Nietzsche reflected, has friendship been thought a problem worthy of a solution. Nietzsche, you note, does not say that the Greeks solved the problems associated with friendship. The arguably leading ancient ‘philia-philosopher’, Aristotle, for example, seems caught on a conundrum. His discussion in the Nicomachean Ethics, though full of illuminating thoughts on the nature and value of friendship, also reads as if friendship was something of a mystery to him: if a happy life requires self-sufficiency, so that you are not reliant on others for your happiness, then how can a happy life also include friends, as it seems uncontroversial to say it must?
Plato’s main dialogue on friendship, Lysis, explicitly ends inconclusively. We will look ridiculous, Socrates says to his interlocutors Lysis and Menexenus, since although we think we are friends, we have not been able to say what friendship is.
Try listing some of the friends you have. Your partner. Oldest friend. Mates or girlfriends. One or two family members. Work colleagues. Neighbours. Family friends. A boss perhaps. Therapist, music teacher, personal trainer?
It soon becomes obvious that friendship is nothing if not an amorphous thing. Your friends share something in common, perhaps your goodwill for them. But qualities of friendship, like the degree to which you trust them or rely on them, are pretty diverse. They are far less coherent, and for the most part far less strong, than, say, the qualities that tie you to your family.
Another door onto the elusive nature of friendship is opened by carrying out a thought experiment suggested by Nietzsche: Just think to yourself some time how different are the feelings, how divided the opinions, even among the closest acquaintances; how even the same opinions have quite a different place or intensity in the heads of your friends than in your own; how many hundreds of times there is occasion for misunderstanding or hostile flight. After all that, you will say to yourself: ‘How unsure is the ground on which all our bonds and friendships rest; how near we are to cold downpours or ill weather; how lonely is every man!’
Nietzsche believed his thought experiment would make the grounds of friendships more, not less, firm since undertaken as a kind of therapy it makes us more, not less, forbearing to one another. However, the implication is that friendship is not only amorphous, but without care, really quite fragile.
The picture becomes more complex again if a comparison is made between some of the things people say about friendship today with what the Greeks thought of friendship in the past. For example, today, many hold the belief that best friends are those who you do not see often, but when you do, you immediately pick up where you left off. A variation on this is the belief that best friends are those you can call when you have a problem. Or that they are those who might come and go, but without damage to the relationship.
Such intermittent friendships were compromised according to Aristotle. He thought that friendship depends on shared living which means spending substantial, regular, quality time together. ‘Cut off the talk, and many a time you cut off the friendship,’ he said. He might have added that intermittent friendship is an idealisation perpetuated only in a society desiring connectedness but suspicious of bonds as limitations on freedom.
Consider another common contemporary assumption about friendship, this time concerning quantity. Many today would say that they rejoice in having a large number of friends, again as fits a networked age of multiple links, loose ties and random connections. Carole Stone, for example, socialite and author of ‘Networking: The Art of Making More Friends’, claims to have a database of over 21,500 individuals, of whom she can put a face to over 10,000, mixes socially with up to 1000, and would call around two dozen close friends.
Again, Aristotle would seriously question the possibility of such prolific friendship-making. ‘The desire for friendship comes quickly,’ he says. ‘Friendship does not’. His belief is that the closest kind of friendship is only possible with one or two individuals, such is the investment of time and self that it requires. If less is more, with the corollary that more is less, then he might say further that the networked age is one that has substituted the networking for the friendships it is supposed to yield. ‘Host not many but host not none’, is the formula he cites for the right balance.
When it comes to the specific question of what friendship is, Aristotle thought that it was important to try to come up with a definition. Without one you risk making mistakes about friendship, such as thinking that there can be friendship amongst thieves or such as trying to befriend a creditor. His attempt: ‘A man becomes a friend whenever being loved he loves in return’.
But Plato disagreed. He seems to resist any definition of friendship (in Lysis, there is not only a final aporia, but all points Lysis and Menexenus make are refuted by Socrates). He believes, I think, that the risk of not tying friendship down is one that has to be taken. This is for the reason that although friendships appear to share similarities, and thus be definable, they are in life as varied as the people who are friends. There is an irreducibility to friendship and anyone who tries to collapse them risks walking roughshod over the infinite variety of experiences that individuals have.
If, for example, you define a book as ‘impressions on paper within a binding’, then there is a danger that your accurate but tight definition might foreclose the sense in which a book can be thought of as a window onto a different universe, or as a powerful political weapon. Plato seems to have thought that confining friendship to a sentence makes as little sense as a parent trying to complete a sentence like, ‘children are….’, or a fan completing with a single phrase, ‘football is…’.
Paradoxically, though, such philosophical hesitancy makes for excellent friendships. Socrates, who turned philosophical hesitancy into a way of life, was living proof. His search for wisdom required him to be open to interactions with all kinds of people. Since the wisdom that interested him was not just empirical facts, but was a wisdom embodied in character and life, the wiser someone seemed, the better he had to get to know them ??" to see how far their wisdom went. So we could also say that Socrates’ life as a philosopher was one characterised by the attempt to make friends. Gifted philosophers are gifted at friendship. (Aristotle, on the other hand, implies the opposite: because the best philosophers are the most self-sufficient, their friendliness would seem to decrease as their philosophical brilliance increases).
More generally, the value of the Platonic conception of friendship is that it is open ended: there is always more to discover and enjoy in the best friendships. Friendship is a way of life, in the sense of a being a constant process of becoming with others. It is distinguished from other kinds of love by a dynamic that results in an increasing self-awareness coupled to knowing the other better. Friends want to know each other and be known. And, the best friendships are not confined to a mutual introspection, but are fed by the common striving of the friends after knowledge, goodness or wisdom which lies beyond them both.
Whether or not, therefore, friendship can overcome the dislocations of the networked age is a moot point. At a social level, Platonic friendship contributed to Socrates’ confrontation with the Athenian authorities. His friendship taught people to think for themselves and were thought subversive, not cohesive. Conversely, at an individual level, the more impetuous youths of his acquaintance, who one can perhaps imagine sharing many of the speedy attitudes towards relationships that seem to dominate today, rejected Socrates’ friendship because of its demands. Alcibiades, for example, a man who revelled in his freedom, said that Socrates’ friendship made him feel like a slave. So, is friendship up to the contemporary demands apparently being made of it? As a panacea to social ills, I rather think not.
