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PART I
Family and Friendship
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1
LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP
Diane Jeske
When we think about those people whom we count as our friends, we will think about people whom we have known for many years but also about people whom we have known for only a few months. We will think about people with whom we share nothing more than an interest in, say, horror movies, and also about people with whom we share our hopes, dreams, fears, and anxieties. We will think about people whom we love deeply and about people whom we think of ourselves as being fond of or as liking. Why do we describe such a disparate range of people as friends? Do all of these relationships have something in common which picks them out as friendships? Or are only some of these relationships genuine friendships while the others are āfriendshipsā only in some derivative way?
For all of their disagreements, philosophers of friendship seem to agree that our friends are people to whom we are attached by love or some relevantly similar attitude and whom we know better than we know those who are strangers or mere acquaintances. These are claims about friendship that non-philosophers will generally also take for granted. But trying to determine what knowledge of another is required for friendship is not an easy matter. We might agree, for example, that I donāt need to know whether Max brushes his teeth before or after his morning cup of tea in order for Max to be my friend. We might think that that is because I can love Max without knowing such trivial matters about him. But, then, there may be āimportantā facts about a person that are particularly relevant to our loving himāso maybe we do need to know certain central facts about someoneās character and/or values in order to have that person as a friend. For example, if it turns out that Max has deep moral flaws of which I was unaware, then maybe I never loved Max and we never were friends even though we mistakenly believed that we were.
I am going to argue, however, that no particular knowledge is essential for love or for friendship. Two people can love and be friends with each other even if they have false beliefs about each other, and not just false beliefs about small, trivial things: love and, thus, friendship can exist even in the light of false beliefs about core values or key character traits. Importantly, I have used ācanā in the statement of my thesis, because I am going to argue that love, and therefore friendship, do not require, as a conceptual matter, knowledge of character or values. As a matter of empirical psychological fact, they might, and such matters can vary from individual to individual, so that what knowledge of oneās friend is required is determined to a large extent by the nature of the person and the nature of her friendship.
In Section I, I will discuss three elements that have been placed at the core of friendship by most, if not all, philosophers of friendship: love or some relevantly similar emotional attitude, interaction exemplifying concern, and special knowledge. In Section II, I will consider how our beliefs about another person play a role in our initiation of a friendship, while it is also the case that friendships must be formed in the absence of some knowledge and may be formed with false beliefs about the other person. In Section III, I will argue for my thesis that friendship can exist even in the presence of radically false beliefs about someoneās character and/or values.
I The Best of Friends
Because of the way that āfriendā is used in ordinary discourse, it is very difficult to engage in conceptual analysis of the concept āfriend.ā1 However, we do often say of someone that he is a friend, but not a good friend, meaning that he is not a close friend. So even if it is in some sense appropriate to describe a wide range of people as friends, we can position such people along a spectrum, where our close or āreally goodā friends are at one of the extremes. My focus is on what makes two people close friends.
Attitudes and Feelings: One feature that certainly seems relevant to whether we place someone in the category of close or really good friend is the nature and strength of our feelings for that person. Since Aristotle many philosophers of friendship have claimed that it is a necessary condition of genuine friendship that each party to the relationship cares about the other for that otherās own sake, i.e., not merely as a means to some other end.2 Thus, if Hillary cares about Bill only as a means to furtherance of her own political career, then it seems that Bill and Hillary are not genuine friends, even if Bill cares about Hillary for her own sakeāthe appropriate sort of concern must be mutual.
Having concern for someone, however, is a complex matter, involving both affective states and dispositions to behave in certain ways. The sorts of emotional states or attitudes commonly attributed to friends range from affection and fondness to love. Whatever analysis one offers of love, it seems that one must accommodate the idea that love is or involves deep and strong emotional attachment. Fondness and affection, however, when they occur in the absence of love, can, it seems, vary in their depth and strength. Because I am focusing on close friendship, I am going to understand friendship as involving love: close or good friends have deep and strong emotional attitudes and attachments to each other. Thus, close friendships involve what I will call āloving concern,ā i.e., a concern for another partly constituted by the emotional attitude of love.
It is important to see here that not any positive attitude toward another person will be relevant to establishing the presence of the friendship relation even in the case of a friendship that is not close and so may not involve love. Admiration and respect are positive attitudes that we can have toward other people, but we can certainly admire or respect someone without loving or even liking her. It is also possible to love or be fond of someone whom one does not admire or respectāI would think that this is true of parents with respect to new-born infants. Aristotle would deny this claim, because, for Aristotle, genuine friendship requires that both parties be virtuous and that each recognize the otherās virtue. Virtuous people obviously understand virtue as inherently admirable, and so will admire their genuine friends, as opposed to friends for pleasure or utility. The core of truth in Aristotleās claim is that it may often be difficult to sustain love or even fondness in light of a total absence of respect, but it seems to be the case that it is the love or fondness that is central to friendship, not any attitudes that may be prerequisites or results of that love or fondness.
Interaction: Regardless of the importance of love for friendship, it is quite clear that mutual attitudes of love can exist between two people without its being the case that they are friends. Friends have a relationship in which they interact with each other. While philosophers have generally agreed that friends must care about each other for the otherās own sake, they have differed quite widely about the nature of the interaction that is requisite to the friendship relation.
On the Aristotelian view of friendship according to which genuine friendship is necessarily a relationship between two virtuous people, the interaction between friends is a result of their commitment to virtuous ends, both for themselves and for each other. As David K. OāConnor has put it, Aristotle views āfriendships as partnerships ā¦ in the pursuit of some common ā¦ goalsā (OāConnor 1990: 112). Of course, through such interaction friends will express their mutual concern insofar as they aim to support, mirror, and emulate each other.
To most contemporary philosophers, Aristotleās requirement that friends be virtuous people engaged in joint virtuous activities has not seemed to capture the vast majority of relationships which we confidently consider close or good friendships. Thus, they have turned their attention to that notion of friends being close to each other, and have offered competing accounts of what such closeness amounts to.
One kind of interaction or joint activity that many friends engage in is mutual self-disclosure. In fact, Laurence Thomas has made this kind of mutual āself-disclosureā the central element of good friendships, claiming that ā[t]here is an enormous bond of mutual trust between such friends ā¦ which is cemented by equal self-disclosure, and, for that very reason, is a sign of the very special regard which each has for one anotherā (Thomas 1987: 217). Friends reveal themselves to each other, sometimes in conversation, telling each other about, for example, crushes they have, guilty pleasures, inappropriate behavior of which they are ashamed, or hopes and dreams which they fear would appear ridiculous to anyone other than a friend. But they also reveal themselves in behavior: crying during corny movies, laughing at jokes that might appear inappropriate or stupid to strangers, being silly.
There is undoubtedly an element of truth in Thomasās account: friends reveal themselves to each other in unique ways. But, as Thomas himself says, such self-disclosure āis a sign of the very special regard which each has for one anotherā (Thomas 1987: 217). So is it the revealing of the self that is distinctive of friendship or is it the special regard and its expression in the interaction between the parties to the friendship? While some kind of special knowledge of our friends seems crucial to the relationship, it is not clear that concerned interaction needs to take the form of self-disclosure.
Cocking and Kennett offer an alternative account of the sort of interaction that marks two people out as friends: āas a close friend of another, one is characteristically and distinctively receptive to be directed and interpreted and so in these ways drawn by the otherā (Cocking and Kennett 1998: 503). What Cocking and Kennett mean is that friends are open to each otherās interests in such a way that their own interests become responsive to and developed in light of the otherās interests and concerns as understood by the other. Further, friends possess unique insight into each otherāperhaps via the self-disclosure emphasized by Thomasāand share their understandings of each other, so that, over time, each friendās conception of herself changes in light of how the other perceives her. Thus, friendship is characterized, for Cocking and Kennett, by friends having their interests and self-understandings shaped by each other: each friend is shaped by the friendship in a way that she would otherwise not have been.
As with Thomasās view, there is certainly something right about what Cocking and Kennett are saying about friendship: when we love someone, we regard their interests, passions, and ambitions in a different light than we would if that person were not a beloved friend. This doesnāt mean that my friend will always come to share my interests and passions, even if she is my closest friend. However, it does seem that she will try to see why I like horror movies, and why I donate so much money to the ASPCA. That is not to say that my friend wonāt tease me about my passions or that she will always come to share them, but, in loving me, she will want to try to understand what it is that I care about and why I care about it. In part, this is because in loving me, she will want to understand me and to help me to pursue my ends, as long as she does not view those ends as harmful or immoral (and even then she will exert more effort to understand or to forgive). But, again, this way of regarding and responding to a friendās interests, like self-disclosure, seems to be a way in which friends express their loving concern for each other. So, at bottom, it seems plausible to say that what is crucial to friendship is that friends not only love each other for their own sakes, but that they have and continue to express loving concern in their interactions with one another. After all, even Aristotleās conception of virtuous friends engaging in virtuous projects together is a way of conceiving of people as expressing their love for each other.
Thus far, then, we can conclude that friendship is characterized by mutual attitudes of loving concern that are expressed in a history of interaction between the parties to the friendship. Unlike Aristotle, Thomas, or Cocking and Kennett, I would argue that the ways in which friends express their love for each other in their interactions will vary between friendships, and are determined by the characters and personalities of the friends, the circumstances under which they became friends and in which their friendship develops, and the unique history of their interactions. Thus, it is not always transparent to any one besides the friends themselves that their relationship is in fact a friendship, because it may look very different from the friendships familiar to an observer.
Knowledge: It is natural for us to think of our friends as knowing us better than other people know us, and, of course, such knowing seems reciprocal. For Aristotle, this knowledge will take the form of grasping the friendās virtuous character and the way in which the virtues fit together in her character in particular. For Cocking and Kennett, in order for friends to be ādrawnā by one another, they must have knowledge of each otherās interests and character. And for Thomas, self-disclosure on the part of friends, self-disclosure that goes beyond that which one displays with just anyone and is or is likely to produce the friendsā knowledge and understanding of each other, is definitive of friendship.
It certainly seems right that friendship involves knowledge of the other that goes beyond that had by strangers or casual acquaintances. But some qualifications are in order. First, such āspecialā knowledge is not a matter of quantity. The mere amassing of information about someone is not what characterizes friendship. Rather, friendships gain their unique characters from the kinds of special knowledge that the parties have about each other, and how that knowledge has been and continues to be acquired. People do not share all of the same things about themselves with all of their close friends. For example, Lucy may share her sexual fantasies with Ethel but not with Mary, knowing that such matters make Mary uncomforta...
