The Ethics of Friendship
I had to write a paper on the ethics of friendship for my ethical theory class and I wanted to put it on here to see if anyone feels the same way about friendship as I do, and wants to be this kind of friend to me.
If so please respond:
Recently, I was told in regards to my dependence of friendship that, “The bottom line is in this life all you have is yourself.” This prospect was very depressing to me so I took to investigating it for my essay on the ethics of friendship. From a Christian perspective, all we have is love, whether it is love for God, love for ourselves, or love for each other. I am against Christian morality for the most part because, from a Nietzschian perspective, I consider it nihilistic. But it seems to me that denying love of friends with the aim of completely satisfying oneself is also nihilistic and utopian (to abstain from one portion of life in order to attempt to obtain an almost metaphysical ideally complete self). Perhaps, we need to find a golden mean between solely looking out for oneself and having altruistic friendships. I think Kant offers us the perfect golden mean regarding friendship when he says, “Perhaps someone can look after the happiness of their friend without worrying about their own happiness, because their friend will be doing exactly the same for them.”
In friendship, a problem often occurs when friends sacrifice too much and lose themselves to the friendship. They no longer retain their own identity but become whatever is necessary for the friendship to work. Many philosophers of friendship thought that finding your “other self” was the highest type of friendship. Montaigne certainly thought this was the ideal kind of friendship, a friendship in which two individuals ceased to be two and became one, he described it as “one soul in two bodies.” Nietzsche on the other hand, shares a view a lot like mine; he says that friends should still be “other” to each other. I believe that an ideal friendship involves two people, doing life together. Living their own lives and coming to each other for comfort, conversation, company, sympathy, and support. One of my favorite bands, Dashboard Confessional, summarizes the necessity of this type of friendship well, they say, “So many high points on this last leg, and I can't wait to recount them. It seems like nothing's happened until I've shared them with you.” As an example, philosophy is one of my passions, reading philosophical texts and studying philosophy brings me great pleasure. But I can’t help but agree with the Socratic tradition; I believe that most valuable knowledge is dialectical. Philosophy, while personally gratifying, becomes useless if you don’t have anyone to discuss it with, and at the same time friendship is useless if you have nothing to discuss. It seems to me that self-interest can, in some cases lead to ephemeral happiness, but never to eudemonia. Only when you find someone that’s happiness is as valuable to you as your own (and the feeling is reciprocated) that you can achieve eudemonia. Nietzsche says, “It is precisely we solitary ones that require love and companions in whose presence we may be open and simple, and the eternal struggle of silence and dissimulation can cease.” Often times, those who only depend upon themselves are overwhelmed and thrown into depression by the fear of their own failure or unhappiness, when you have a friend that cares deeply about your happiness these fears need not arise, because if you fail, your friend will be there to help.
For a friendship to work, you must be happy with yourself, but being happy with yourself is useless if you have no one to share your happiness with, and being selfish in a friendship will, in the long run, render you friendless. A problem occurs when one friend looks out for himself or herself above all else, including their friends, the end result is usually hurt on both sides and a bit of ephemeral joy for the selfish friend, but this joy is soon fleeting when the individual realizes that he has no one to share it with. Thomas Aquinas points out that the need for self-love does not, by its very definition, entail love of only thyself, or love of the self above others when he says, “because people love those to whom they are close, it is only natural for them to love themselves to whom they are closest. But that does not mean they love others less.” Aquinas also points out that being altruistic in a friendship is not always a sacrifice, he says, “[friends] are as glad to give, as they are to receive.” When one friend gives in hopes of adding to the other friend’s happiness, “the individuals draw closer and friendship will flourish.” The friend that gave is happy because his friend is happy, and he is also happy because the friendship is deepened by his act of love (to steal a phrase from Kierkegaard).
The argument that, in this life, “you can only depend on yourself,” sounds an awful lot like something a moral egoist would say. From a moral egoist’s standpoint, a friendship would only be necessary if we have some desires that we cannot fulfill on our own, and so we turn to friends to fulfill our own selfish desires. But this certainly goes against Kantian morality. It is treating a friend as the means to a selfish end rather than as an end in himself/herself. Friendships are about finding people that you unconditionally love, and treating their happiness as if it is as important as your own, a good friend will return this sentiment and you will both simultaneously make yourselves happy while doing as much as possible to make each other happy. The end result is two people that look out for each other do their best to ensure each other’s happiness, and finally celebrate their individual happiness together. So it seems that if friends behave in this manner, there are people in this life that we can depend on other than ourselves, and we would be fools to go the route of the moral egoist and reject eudemonia for ephemeral happiness. In my opinion, the risks we take to in friendship, and the pains we endure on the road (from making friends with people more associated with the tradition of the moral egoist), are well worth the reward of making a good friend.
If so please respond:
Recently, I was told in regards to my dependence of friendship that, “The bottom line is in this life all you have is yourself.” This prospect was very depressing to me so I took to investigating it for my essay on the ethics of friendship. From a Christian perspective, all we have is love, whether it is love for God, love for ourselves, or love for each other. I am against Christian morality for the most part because, from a Nietzschian perspective, I consider it nihilistic. But it seems to me that denying love of friends with the aim of completely satisfying oneself is also nihilistic and utopian (to abstain from one portion of life in order to attempt to obtain an almost metaphysical ideally complete self). Perhaps, we need to find a golden mean between solely looking out for oneself and having altruistic friendships. I think Kant offers us the perfect golden mean regarding friendship when he says, “Perhaps someone can look after the happiness of their friend without worrying about their own happiness, because their friend will be doing exactly the same for them.”
In friendship, a problem often occurs when friends sacrifice too much and lose themselves to the friendship. They no longer retain their own identity but become whatever is necessary for the friendship to work. Many philosophers of friendship thought that finding your “other self” was the highest type of friendship. Montaigne certainly thought this was the ideal kind of friendship, a friendship in which two individuals ceased to be two and became one, he described it as “one soul in two bodies.” Nietzsche on the other hand, shares a view a lot like mine; he says that friends should still be “other” to each other. I believe that an ideal friendship involves two people, doing life together. Living their own lives and coming to each other for comfort, conversation, company, sympathy, and support. One of my favorite bands, Dashboard Confessional, summarizes the necessity of this type of friendship well, they say, “So many high points on this last leg, and I can't wait to recount them. It seems like nothing's happened until I've shared them with you.” As an example, philosophy is one of my passions, reading philosophical texts and studying philosophy brings me great pleasure. But I can’t help but agree with the Socratic tradition; I believe that most valuable knowledge is dialectical. Philosophy, while personally gratifying, becomes useless if you don’t have anyone to discuss it with, and at the same time friendship is useless if you have nothing to discuss. It seems to me that self-interest can, in some cases lead to ephemeral happiness, but never to eudemonia. Only when you find someone that’s happiness is as valuable to you as your own (and the feeling is reciprocated) that you can achieve eudemonia. Nietzsche says, “It is precisely we solitary ones that require love and companions in whose presence we may be open and simple, and the eternal struggle of silence and dissimulation can cease.” Often times, those who only depend upon themselves are overwhelmed and thrown into depression by the fear of their own failure or unhappiness, when you have a friend that cares deeply about your happiness these fears need not arise, because if you fail, your friend will be there to help.
For a friendship to work, you must be happy with yourself, but being happy with yourself is useless if you have no one to share your happiness with, and being selfish in a friendship will, in the long run, render you friendless. A problem occurs when one friend looks out for himself or herself above all else, including their friends, the end result is usually hurt on both sides and a bit of ephemeral joy for the selfish friend, but this joy is soon fleeting when the individual realizes that he has no one to share it with. Thomas Aquinas points out that the need for self-love does not, by its very definition, entail love of only thyself, or love of the self above others when he says, “because people love those to whom they are close, it is only natural for them to love themselves to whom they are closest. But that does not mean they love others less.” Aquinas also points out that being altruistic in a friendship is not always a sacrifice, he says, “[friends] are as glad to give, as they are to receive.” When one friend gives in hopes of adding to the other friend’s happiness, “the individuals draw closer and friendship will flourish.” The friend that gave is happy because his friend is happy, and he is also happy because the friendship is deepened by his act of love (to steal a phrase from Kierkegaard).
The argument that, in this life, “you can only depend on yourself,” sounds an awful lot like something a moral egoist would say. From a moral egoist’s standpoint, a friendship would only be necessary if we have some desires that we cannot fulfill on our own, and so we turn to friends to fulfill our own selfish desires. But this certainly goes against Kantian morality. It is treating a friend as the means to a selfish end rather than as an end in himself/herself. Friendships are about finding people that you unconditionally love, and treating their happiness as if it is as important as your own, a good friend will return this sentiment and you will both simultaneously make yourselves happy while doing as much as possible to make each other happy. The end result is two people that look out for each other do their best to ensure each other’s happiness, and finally celebrate their individual happiness together. So it seems that if friends behave in this manner, there are people in this life that we can depend on other than ourselves, and we would be fools to go the route of the moral egoist and reject eudemonia for ephemeral happiness. In my opinion, the risks we take to in friendship, and the pains we endure on the road (from making friends with people more associated with the tradition of the moral egoist), are well worth the reward of making a good friend.