Friendship
Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about friendship and what it means to be a friend. Ancient philosophers, unlike philosophers of modern times like Korsgaard and Singer, did not cleanly demarcate between moral and nonmoral considerations in the way we tend to. What this meant was that character traits like having a good sense of humor or being a good friend mattered morally to the Ancients in ways that we ascribe importance to prohibitions on murder and the like. Another way of thinking about this is that Ancients wanted to reconcile what they considered to be “the good life” with the self-interest of he who pursues that life. Because it is clearly in one’s interest to be a good friend (for very many reasons), it makes sense to ascribe this institution moral value that incentivizes somebody to pursue it not only for its benefits but also for its intrinsic value.
Thus far in my Ancient Ethics seminar, we have discussed two theories of friendship: that of Aristotle, and that of Epicurus. In what follows, I (very crudely) sketch out what I take to be the fundamental tenants of these two theories. For Aristotle, the true friend is one that is virtuous. These kinds of friends help you be the best version of yourself that you can possibly be by facilitating your journey on the virtuous path. According to Aristotle, these kinds of friends are few and far between, as it is very unlikely that you will find many people in life that you will be able to love as much as you love yourself. Moreover, these kinds of friends provide not only the benefit that comes with having a friend that values you for your own sake, but they come with rudimentary benefits as well. These kinds of friends often partake in the same pleasures as us, and are useful in the sense that they have character traits that we benefit from and we likewise have character traits that they can benefit from.
Epicurus, on the other hand, has a conception of friendship that is far less romantic than the Aristotelian. For Epicurus, the highest good in life is pleasure. He understands pleasure, however, not as the agglomeration of hedonic ecstasies but as the elimination of pain, or ataraxia. Ataraxia roughly translates to tranquility or contentment. Because the highest good is to pursue a state of being where you experience neither physical nor mental turmoil, friends are obviously important to have because they take care of you when you fall on hard times. And in order to be assured that you will be taken care of during these times, you likewise must be the kind of friend who would take care of a loved one when they came upon hard times. In the words of my professor: Epicurus believes that “friends are fungible.” While Aristotle acknowledges that it is possible only to have very few true friends in life, Epicurus encourages people to forge as many friendships as possible. This is to ensure that if you lose a friend for whatever reason, there will be plenty of others who will take care of you when you fall on hard times.
In my opinion, both conceptions of friendship are deeply flawed. For Aristotle, friendship is only possible when the individuals partaking in it are already sufficiently virtuous individuals. However, I find it is important to define friendship such that it counts not only these kinds of friendship as true friendship, but also friendships that exist between developing individuals who are helping one another achieve and understand what virtue consists in. If we fail to account for these kinds of friendship, we narrowly define the enterprise in such a way that it seems impossible to partake in friendship. If friendship is central to the good life, it must then be the case that every person is capable of experiencing it, lest we are willing to accept that some people are simply undeserving of the good life.
Epicurus, on the other hand, entirely misses the point of what it means to be a friend. Knowing that somebody will care for you if you fall on hard times is merely a happy consequence of friendship. It ought not be its object. Certainly it is neither healthy nor desirable to regard a friend so highly that you lose your sense of direction in life upon losing them. Epicurus’s conception of friendship has merit in denouncing this kind of “friendship.” I contend, however, that there is a grey area that exists between idolizing a friend and treating friends as fungible. A true friend, I believe, is somebody who cannot be replaced. Though you will find ways to carry on without them, there will always be a them-sized hole in your life because they were special and irreplaceable. If you feel that your friends are replaceable, perhaps they are not the kinds of people you should be pursuing.
What does it mean to be a good friend? I’m not entirely sure. But I do know that friendship is something that is open to everybody, that it is hard to come across in its truest form, and that it is beautiful, priceless, and cannot be replicated.