On Friendship
by William Turner, Faculty Contributor
Welcome, freshmen, to Wabash College. You are embarking on a great adventure. During the next four years you will do many things. You will take classes in the languages, literature, fine arts, religion, philosophy, history, rhetoric, mathematics, and the natural and social sciences. You will read many good books—and some not so good. You will begin to see the universe and all of its contents in ways you never could have imagined before. You will participate in the grand conversation that is part and parcel of being liberally educated. You will learn how to learn and how to live as free men.
Perhaps one of the most important things you will do is to make many new friends. You will have different types of friends, and different levels of friendship. You will make friends with your classmates, your fraternity brothers or fellow independents, your coworkers, your mentors, and even members of the faculty and staff.
You will make some friendships that will last a lifetime, and you will stay in contact with some friends far into riper years. You will make friends with whom you will laugh and cry. You make friends with whom you will share all aspects of your life. You will share in the share in the greatest of moments, as well as some of the lowest times of your life.
Other friendships will be more fleeting. Some of your friends you will hold dear while you remain within these sacred portals, but you will lose touch with them after you leave the classic halls. Some you will reconnect with many years later. Others will remain only a cherished memory whom you may praise in song and story.
Wabash is a small place, and perhaps the smallness helps facilitate these friendships. As many describe it, Wabash is a family—the students, the staff, and the faculty, all living and working together. You get to know everyone here. You will not have friendships with all of them, of course, but perhaps the friendships you do develop will be all the stronger for it.
However, more than just the smallness of Wabash lends itself to developing friendships. There is something in the ethos of the place that seems to help Wabash men develop strong bonds with their classmates, their fellow alumni, and the college in general. Some even use Shakespeare’s famous quotation from Henry V to describe Wabash: “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.”
In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle distinguishes three types of friendship corresponding to the three types of things that are lovable: that which is good or pleasant or useful. The first type, which we may call a noble friendship, is based on the two people sharing a similar noble character, while the latter two types are more fleeting and are only incidental friendships. These are based instead on what a person receives from the friendship—either pleasure or utility—rather than the way the other friend is. When the pleasure or utility is gone, so too is the friendship.
Unfortunately, not every relationship that appears to be a noble friendship actually is, and not everyone who appears to be a friend actually is a friend. Too often, someone may build a relationship on utility, while the other person thinks the relationship is true or noble friendship. However, the friendship is not a true friendship, since as Aristotle says a friendship—even one of utility or pleasure—is a reciprocal loving of which both parties are aware. Instead, this unreciprocated relationship is something else: a political alliance disguised as a friendship. The person who builds the relationship on utility, the “utility friend”, is deceiving the other person, the “noble friend”. Just as in a friendship of utility, the relationship will evaporate once the utility of the alliance is gone. However, in this case, the noble friend will be caught by surprise.
This type of political alliance posing as a friendship happens everywhere, even at Wabash. Perhaps the band of brothers attitude that many students have, and the family atmosphere in which all of us—students, staff, and faculty—participate, may make it less common here than at other institutions, but it is still far from absent.
Not every apparent friendship that ends was a political alliance in disguise—there are legitimate friendships that drift apart, particularly those based on pleasure and utility. These types of friendships are not bad per se. They can be quite useful to both parties, and sometimes they are even necessary. These bases for friendships are only a problem when they are not reciprocated, and one person does not realize the friendship is not a true friendship.
It is not always easy to distinguish a real friendship from a fake one, but there are some signs that might indicate a political alliance rather than a true friendship. One sign to look for is a power differential. Sometimes a new member of a community may try to ally himself with a more senior member of the community, or an entrenched member of the community, who finds himself without many allies, will befriend a newcomer in an attempt to bolster the number of his allies in the community. Of course, senior and junior members of a community can form noble friendships. A power differential of this type does not necessarily preclude them, but it might be a warning sign of a possible political alliance in disguise.
Another sign to look for is how other people are treated. In a pseudo-friendship, the utility friend may have little use for some of the other friends of the noble friend. In this case, the utility friend will probably ignore them, treating them as if they do not exist. If however the friendship was a genuine noble friendship, as the noble friend believes, both friends will most likely recognize the same noble characteristics in the third person, and they will all develop mutual friendships. In mathematical terms, the similarity of excellence, as Aristotle calls it, that causes both noble friendships is transitive.
While this type of intransitive development of friendships is perhaps more telling of a pseudo-friendship than a power differential, it is perhaps harder for the noble friend to recognize. This is especially true when the utility friend pretends to tolerate the other friends of the noble friend in order to be ingratiated to the noble friend.
Unfortunately, the easiest and surest way for the noble friend to discover a fake friendship occurs only when he or she is no longer useful to the utility friend, and the relationship evaporates. The utility friend may switch political alliances suddenly, or one or both friends may move away. For whatever reason, the relationship ends. It may not be obvious initially, but over time the noble friend will realize the utility friend does not communicate, nor respond to attempts to communicate. Only when hearing some news—perhaps a wedding to which he was not invited, or a sudden life-changing event for the noble friend—does the utility friend react, but even then only awkwardly, giving little notice to normal pleasantries or inquiring into the well-being of others, and perhaps even not communicating with the noble friend at all, but rather only spreading gossip.
Distance in particular has always been detrimental to friendships, but all the various forms of easy communication we have today make it much easier to maintain noble friendships. Technology also makes it much easier to recognize when a friendship was in fact a political alliance in disguise. It takes more effort to send a letter than it does to send an email. It takes even less to respond to an email you receive. A false friend will not even do that.
If you discover yourself in such a pseudo-friendship, you can accept it as a friendship of utility, or if it is not useful to you, end the relationship. Accept it for what it is, and move on. Do not spend time agonizing over not recognizing the relationship for what it was. Do not let feelings of resentment arise over being fooled. It was what it was: a political alliance disguised as a friendship. There is not changing the past, but you can use it as a lesson to try to recognize the similar situations in the future.
You will make many friendships while at Wabash, and beyond. Many of them will be based on pleasure or utility. Some will turn out to be false friendships. A few will be noble. Treasure them as long as life shall last.
Related posts:
