Thinking About Friendship With Philosophers
Christian, Pop & Classical, They Have Something to Say
Of all the miracles life affords, the most delicate yet durable, the most singular and far reaching, is friendship.
What CS Lewis says might well be true: friendship has no survival value; biology does not need it in order to engineer the self-perpetuation of the species. Yet like philosophy and art, it adds inestimable value to survival. Not necessary for life but indispensable for the life worth living.
By far my favourite Lewisian reflection on the subject is about how friends catalyse and augment one another. In each friend there is something that only some other friend can bring out so that as the circle of friendship expands beyond two, it becomes richer and acquires more texture. That’s because by ourselves we are ‘not enough to call the whole man into activity’. So we benefit when other lights besides our own shine on our friends and bring into focus the different facets of who they are. In this way shared friends see and experience more of each other, and, subject to practical limitations in the realm of time and space and social considerations of preference and affinity, we “possess each friend not less but more as the number of those we share with him increases.”
I watched a clip of Trevor Noah, emerging modern day patron saint of friendship, talking about something akin to what Lewis describes here. His friends are his horcruxes, he says, leaning into a Potteresque metaphor. Each of them keeps a little piece of himself that he wishes to keep. This one keeps his sense of humour, that one his tenacity. A good friend is someone who reminds you of something good inside of you.
Not all our friends will hold all the pieces of us all the time. As circumstances and trust unfold over time some will come to bear more of us and carry the weightier pieces of us, but no one will ever hold every piece of us. The gift is that there are those willing and able to receive and carry the different pieces of us that make up our whole.
I’m fascinated by the rich and eclectic life that Aristotle lived.
Most people don’t realise how much he wrote about friendship. He is best known as a philosopher, of course, but he dabbled in everything: biology, chemistry, history, logic, rhetoric and more. He was carrying out scientific research to classify animals into genus and species on the one hand while building the foundation of formal logic on the other. And in the midst of all of this, Aristotle found time to think and write about friendship.
He was persuaded that good friends are an essential part of a flourishing life and he called friendship one of the most indispensable requirements in life. Which, at first glance, might sound incongruent with Lewis’ view. Except Lewis was describing a life at the edge of survival, Aristotle was describing a flourishing life.
When Aristotle tackled the subject of friendship, he wanted to get the full measure of it. To distill its true nature. Was it, as Euripides described, a mutual fulfilment of a complementary yearning? Or was it more after the fashion of Empedocles “Like seeks after like?” Also: are people drawn to those who are objectively good or those who are good for them, he wondered.
After significant churning, he crystallised his thoughts on the nature and shape of friendship. To be friends, he declared, you have to feel goodwill for each other, you must be aware of each other’s good will and the cause of your goodwill must be one of friendship’s three underpinning motives: pleasure, utility and goodness.
Those three motives flowed into his list of three types of friendship.
First are the friends of pleasure. You do fun things together and you enjoy being around each other but the friendship is sustained wholly by that enjoyment and once it ceases as people evolve and interests change, the friendship peters off. Think teammates, for example. Or young children and their first friendships.
Second are friendships of utility. Friendships premised on mutual, or sometimes one directional, utility. Perhaps a business, or shared vocational interests, or political alignment. Maybe two peers build a friendship at work that helps them survive a hostile work environment. When one or both exit the context, the foundation on which the friendship was built might collapse and the house comes tumbling down. At the end of their utility, these friendships are prone to falter too.
Third are what Aristotle called friendships of virtue. Longhaul friendships. These are friendships with and between people who resonate at a soul level, whose deep values are aligned. Kindred souls. They are friendships grounded in who people are. They can begin with utility and often bring pleasure, but they go further and do more.
Aristotle doesn’t suggest that friendships based on pleasure or utility are bad, mind. Only that they do not last beyond the range and degree of the motive. In other words, have them but don’t count on them.
You have to know your flow friends and hold on to your ebb friends. Some people are sincerely your friends when you’re in your flow but don’t know how to be there in your ebb. We must not demand of our seasonal friends that which we can only get from our perennial friends.
It’s complex and it’s complicated.
Friendships sometimes fizzle. Nobody’s at fault: sometimes people just grow in different directions, intellectually, socially, spiritually, or even geographically. For friendships to continue to thrive where there is no lived intersection, considerable resources of time and exertion need to be committed and expended. In other words, it’s possible, but it takes serious work. Sometimes we make the decision, consciously or unconsciously, to channel those considerable resources elsewhere and elsehow. Something that was real and tangible and meaningful becomes a shadow of its former self. But just because it has changed does not mean it was not true nor that it could never be true again.
Friendships sometimes break. All of us are flawed and human and eventually our brokennesses will rub up against one another and wound. Sometimes grace abounds and friendship survives these wounds. Sometimes it doesn’t.
Friendships sometimes sprout in unexpected places. You’re going about your life, tending to your patch, walking in your lane. Then you serendipitously bump into someone who’s got the soul of a kindred and you immediately know there’s a friend in there that you’re going to be happy making.
What’s true is that friends change us. Friendship leaves an indelible mark on us.
Friendships are living things. Seeded and nurtured by individuals, they grow to exist as third entities outside of them and alongside them. Friendships grow and change and adapt as they are nurtured or neglected, always one or the other, never neither. Some bloom, bearing fruit and offering shade. Others blaze for a season then turn to ash. Some abide in quiet step, present yet unobtrusive.
My boss passed away just over a decade ago. I had not known him long before he died, but it was clear in the short time that I knew him that people were drawn to him and that he had a particular gift for nurturing deep and meaningful friendships.
His friend said something at his funeral that I remember to this day: he said the day my boss died, his entire vision of his future changed. He did not yet know how he would do it but he knew he had to rewrite his entire future because my boss had always had a starring role in his imagination of every moment of his life and now my boss was dead.
Because of course as we are sharing pieces of ourselves with our friends, we’re making room for them in us.
I wish you the incomparable wealth of deep and abiding friendship today. Plant seeds, nurture them, watch them bloom.