By Eugene Schlossberger
Friendship, said Epicurus, is the most important road to happiness: it “goes dancing round the world,” he says, calling us “to wake up to happiness.” But sometimes friendship hurts. In childhood, friendship is easy. Every kid in a park can be a friend, and, looking back, few memories are as poignant as lying on your backs licking a clover under an endless sky, or the thwack of a ball in a well-oiled glove, or pouring imaginary tea. As we get older, it becomes harder to make friends, and friendship gets complicated. Friendships must be woven in the complex tapestry of a thousand life demands, from spouses, children, ambitions, expectations, illness, and the unrelenting drone of tasks that constitute living out an adult life. Questions come up. Do I support my friend when she’s wrong? What are the boundaries of friendship? Do I tell them a hard truth that will hurt them?
Here are two examples:
- Your good friend Sheila wants to marry Bozo. Sheila is meticulous, loves to go to plays and concerts, hates dishonesty, wants children and plans to be a strict but loving parent. Bozo is a slob and a liar, spends his days and nights watching TV and playing videogames, and says kids are a nuisance. Sheila tells you “All our friends tell me not to marry Bozo, but I know you understand.” She’s not asking for your honest opinion. She’s asking for validation. Does friendship mean giving her what she’s asking for or giving her the truth?
- Jonas has been a close friend of yours since childhood. You’re somewhat friendly with his wife, Margaret. They have an exclusive relationship. Jonas tells you, in confidence, that he has been having occasional sex with someone from work. Margaret corners you and asks “is Jonas having an affair? I know he tells you everything.” You know that she will take any answer other than a straightforward “no, he’s not” as a clear confirmation that Jonas is cheating. Do you lie for your friend? More generally, does friendship trump ethics? E. M. Forster said “If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.” Kant claimed it is always wrong to lie. What do you do?
One way to decide is to pick a model of friendship—what is true friendship?
Types of Friendship
We use the word “friend” pretty loosely sometimes. I’ll be talking about what Aristotle calls the “highest” form of friendship, the really personal, important kind. It isn’t what we sometimes say it is. If you thank me for spending the day helping you move, I might say “what are friends for?” But I don’t really mean that friendship is all about mutual aid. We could be business partners and help each other enormously, but not really be friends at all. Sure, good friends are willing to help each other, but we could be really close friends and not need much help from each other. (So, as a philosopher would put it, mutual aid is neither necessary nor sufficient for true friendship.)
Many kinds of friendship are meaningful and important. Meaningful friendships can be based on involvement in a joint project, like shared history (“we grew up together”) or feminist sisterhood. Marilyn Friedman sees close female friendships as helping women recognize and challenge oppressive norms. Amelia Meman talks eloquently about her feminist friendships: https://womenscenter.umbc.edu/post/74810/. Collegial or intellectual friends (Mark Twain and Nikola Tessla), work or team circles, and comrades in a cause all form close bonds. Without in any way slighting these kinds of friendships, which might be called “fellowships,” I want to talk about personal friendships of the most important kind, which I’ll call “true friendship,” even though fellowships can be just as true and important. And of course a fellowship can also be a true friendship.
So what is true friendship all about?
True friendship has two key elements—how you feel about your friend and the place they have in your life.
Affection is obviously a key part of friendship—you aren’t good friends if you don’t like each other. You can feel all sorts of affection for all sorts of reasons: the soft pull of pity (poor lost dog), the fond hand of memory (you remind me of my grandma), the warm glow of hope. But in true friendship, as in true romance, there is also something else. As Aristotle says, true friends see each other as worthy. I like to put it this way: you see in your friend good qualities that call for affection. Good and worthy things stir our emotions. Your heart warms when you witness a kind deed and stirs when you see an act of valor. Acts of loving kindness merit that “aww” feeling—they deserve it. If your child does something really good, you are proud of them—pride is the appropriate reaction to what they did. In true friendship, we see in our friend something that calls for affection, deserves our affection, is worth caring for. You see your friend clearly, faults and all, but if you don’t basically respect them, if you don’t see in them things worthy of fondness, you are not true friends.* Cicero says that virtue is the main source of affection, and so one should never do anything for a friend that conflicts with virtue (like lying to Margaret for Jonas). Cicero acknowledges there are other forms of affection. The bonds formed by shared history can be powerful and beautiful. So “never do anything” is too strong a conclusion. Loyalty to a friend is an important moral factor that must be weighed against others. Still, true friendship must have some element of affection based on something we see in our friend that is worth valuing.
But friendship is not just admiration from a distance. A true friend has an important place in your life. You care about them. Their story is part of your story. A tragedy to them hurts you. One of your goals in life is their flourishing. In some sense, you go through life together, even if you’re very far apart. And you see the world through their eyes. We take many different perspectives on the world we live in. We see things as a nurse or cab driver or professor. We see things as a father or a sister. We also see things through the eyes of a true friend. We grow by doing so, because a true friend is a different way of being you. I don’t like dancing. My friend loves to dance. We’re different. For her, dancing is a way of throwing away self-consciousness and people’s expectations and just reveling in being herself. I feel this way when I’m playing music. I still don’t like dancing, but I see dancing differently because of my friend, and I understand better my own love of playing music. True friends are different. You can’t be best friends with a mirror. But in some important way you see yourself in them. George Herbert said “the best mirror is an old friend.” Joseph Addison, in 1711, said “Talking to a friend is nothing else but thinking aloud.” It’s not always this cerebral. But just as travel broadens you because you experience different ways of being human, so, with a true friend, you travel in their world when you are with them, as they travel in yours. If they are good friends, it is a good journey. Anais Nin said “Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.” Friendship turns even the invalid into an astronaut, flying us to an unknown planet that turns out, in some way, to be the very world we never left. Our friendships are thus mirrors of who we are as persons. They reflect and proclaim our values. That doesn’t mean I approve of everything my friend does. But you can’t be true friends with someone you find despicable. And the way you conduct your friendship should match your values. (I talk about this more in “Engineering Codes of Ethics and the Duty to Set a Moral Precedent.”)**
What to tell Sheila
What does this tell us about Sheila? Well, as a friend, you want to be gentle, you want her to know you respect her needs and that you’re there for her. After all, you’re committed to her welfare. But—and it is an even bigger but than Jennifer Lopez’—if you are true friends she has to see the world through your eyes. Marriage is a central part of Sheila’s life. If you don’t let Sheila see Bozo through your eyes, you’re not really being true friends. Choose your occasion: not when she’s celebrating a promotion, but don’t wait for the wedding. Be tactful, be kind, but be honest. “I have to tell you we are perplexed because you two seem so different. I can talk about that more, if you want. But the main thing is we are here for you, we’re listening, and we truly want to understand. What do you see in Bozo? How do you see things working with Bozo?” And then you listen, with an open mind. And speak up, gently, if Sheila is deluding herself. As Frances Ward Weller said, “A friend can tell you things you don’t want to tell yourself.” The sad reality is that if Sheila is like most people, if she is confident Bozo is the right man, she’ll understand that you’re just trying to be a good friend. If, deep down, she knows you’re right about Bozo, she’s likely to get angry and defensive. But that’s a risk a true friend would take.
More generally, we have to share the worlds inside our head.
In some sense, we are locked inside our heads. When you look at a tree, what you’re seeing is not the tree. Plato knew this over two thousand years ago. The tree doesn’t get bigger as I walk toward it or smaller as I walk away. I can’t make it grow that easily. What gets bigger is an image of the tree, not the tree itself. If I sip from a glass of orange juice, it’s sweet. If I take another sip after I brush my teeth, it’s sour. The juice in the glass didn’t change. And so for all the other senses. What we experience is an image, not the world itself. Because we lack direct access to the world, we can’t be sure the world is anything like what we experience. That “tree” could really be a smiling demon. Even if I take a photo of the tree, I still have to look at the photo—I’m comparing one image against another. I could be looking at a photo of a smiling demon and seeing a photo of a tree. And no one else can see what you see or feel what you see.
But we do have ways of sharing the world inside the prison of our head. Sometimes we do this by talking. You can tell Sheila how you see Bozo. But we have other ways of sharing our experiences. Walking together in the pine scented woods, we share the feel of the pine needles beneath our feet, the warmth of sunshine peeking through the trees, the satisfaction of activity, the joy of companionship. True friends have a thousand ways of sharing. The deepest and most subtle are possible because of our history, because of what we know about each other and what we’ve lived through together, which makes your smile as we walk more than just a movement of your lips but a doorway into your world.
What to do about Jonas and Margaret
What does all this tell us about Jonas? Jonas is getting something from Margaret he wouldn’t get if he didn’t lie. They are married, which is a relationship based on trust—Margaret is entitled to expect the truth from Jonas. You are a trustworthy person. (Why else would Margaret bother to ask you?) If you participate in wrongdoing by lying to Margaret, your friendship is not reflecting who you are as a person, but betraying who you are as a person. You don’t have to volunteer the truth, but you at least shouldn’t be an accomplice by lying. You can say, for example, “that’s between you and Jonas,” letting the chips fall where they may. Let Margaret assume what she wants. You haven’t lied and you haven’t come out and exposed him. This is not a comfortable resolution of the dilemma. You’re in an uncomfortable situation with no satisfying option. But at least you’ve avoided the worst resolutions. The best solution is something you do ahead of time: tell Jonas, when he confides in you, that he has to level with his wife and that you won’t lie for him.
The Beauty of Friendship
True friendship grows arctic slow, roots settling in the cold hard ground like wise fingers, hidden, determined, steadfast. Yes, friendship can start in a fiery bloom, a moment of intense bonding. But it is the seed from that bloom from which true friendship grows, patiently through ice and stone. This is because, though affection is the green heart of friendship, friendship is not a feeling. Friendship, like true romance, is baring, sharing, and caring. (After all, real romance is 85% friendship.) Friends know each other, see through to the open bone. They share the burdens of the body and the sighs of the soul. And they care about each other’s flourishing. What happens to my friend, happens to me: it is part of the story of my life. The true power of a doorway is the friend who comes through it. For no spell has greater magic than the voice of an old friend. The hand of a friend is a marvel, for it is steady even when it shakes. The scent of friendship is linen and moss and moonflowers long forgotten. No cane is so secure and no parachute so uplifting as the sure hand of a true friend.
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* Kieran Setiya, a generally insightful writer, insists in Life Hurts that friendship is not based on what is good about you as an individual, but on respect for the value of humanity that all people have, “the irreplaceable worth of a human being”– your friend matters “just like everyone else.” But look. If friendship is based on recognizing the “human dignity” that everyone has, then friends are really interchangeable (fungible). What makes you different from your neighbor? The very “qualities that make you you,” precisely what Setiya denies friendship is based on, not some mystical metaphysical fluid of you-ness. (Philosophers call that a “bare particular,” because it is supposed to be something stripped of all its qualities, a colorless, shapeless, “it”; your hopes, likes, or tendencies to burp are like pins stuck into the bare pincushion of your soul.) Neo-Kantians and Christians who think true friendship is based on our common humanity (as children of God or as rational agents) make friendship impersonal. But friendship is, by nature, intensely personal. It is a response to what Setiya calls a person’s “individuality, their distinctive way of being in the world.” (I call this a person’s “worldview.”) Confucious reminds us that each person has their own individual way of being honest or generous or responsible. It follows that true friendship is never unconditional—as the person changes, the friendship changes. Otherwise, your friend isn’t really friends with you.
** In my classes, I summarized all that in a single short paragraph:
The highest form of friendship consists of two people who each see the other’s merits as demanding affection, both making a central place for the other in their lives. Making a central place for another in your life includes being strongly committed to the other person’s flourishing as one of your own life goals and having your world-view expanded by seeing the world through the other’s eyes, because you see the other person as a different way of being you, where the friendship itself reflects who you are as a person.
Nothing that appears on this blog is meant to replace legal advice, therapy, or medical treatment. I am not providing legal, medical, or mental health advice. Always seek the advice of your own attorney or medical or mental health provider about specific questions concerning your specific health or legal issues.
