In a worthy July 4th NYT blog entry, “Friendship in an Age of Economics“, Todd May , a professor of Philosophy at Clemson University, gives himself over to some rather random thoughts on the nature of friendship. He draws upon Aristotle’s classification of relationships — those of pleasure, those of utility, and those that are true — and concludes of the true that:
We might say of friendships that they are a matter not of diversion or of return but of meaning.
May’s “true friends”, are those who sit by his bedside without clear ulterior motive. These friends have a purity of motive that makes their friendship more complete. He quotes John Berger:
“We were not somewhere between success and failure; we were elsewhere.” To be able to sit by the bed of another, watching him sleep, waiting for nothing else, is to understand where else we might be.”
Friendship is the wellspring of meaning. Our friends are the ones who are there with us over time. They are the ones who provide us with the looking-glass by which we come to possess a sense of who we are as we do the same for them. Friends are those who continue to feel “you” and make you, for better and for worse, amidst the ebb and flow of ever-changing events. Friends are there with you, renewing you constantly, and you are likewise, there with them,
I have decided that it is not motive that determines the nature of friendship, it is time. Friendship is a sustained jam session of call-and-response. Friends are the partners who make up your friendscape. They are there with you time and time again, creating you as you create them.
Without friends, our sense of participation —- our sense that we mean something — fades away. This fading is called loneliness, and in my experience there is too much of that in our culture of self-justification, self-aggrandizement, self-esteem, and solo performances.
In an age of rationally motivated economic self-interest, friendship is under continual assault, in part because we are indoctrinated with the idea of motivation and in part because we have built a society of predation rather than collaboration.
To experience friendship requires that we accept others for who they are — we let it be. The obstacles to friendship are in our minds as well as in the nature of our “caveat emptor” economic relations. We have engineered a society of lonely self-interest.
