Philosophy of Friendship

I have been wondering about friendship ever since I was just about in 3rd grade.  I have wondered what the difference between friends, mentors, professors, workers, and teachers are with friendship.  I've wondered about love and friendship and all of these really interesting relationships all around us.

I was talking to a Rabbi a couple of weeks ago, and one of the first things he said to me was that with all of this technology we have thousands and thousands of friends, but no real friends.

I was quick to point out Leibniz's theory of relations:  everything is related to everything.   So for example, if you took a point in space A, this point is already in relation to anything around it (like space), but if we put a point near it, because the potential of the point was there, and because that point B is already built into the concept of A, the relationship is inherent.  One could say this about point A on this screen, for example.  There's just no way that this point A on the screen is unrelated to the screen, and your eyes, for example.  They are in a relation to each other whether you say so or not.  

And don't discount that it was inherent, that it's there with or without you, either.  

So the Rabbi countered that his clothes are made in China, but what's that worth?  What's it worth to say that we have a relationship to China?

Those of you who know me too well already know that I feel this way, but I sort of felt then, and at this time, too, that we do have a relation to China.  In fact, the Rabbi, as a Hasidic Jew rooted in the Kabbalah, should know that there is a spiritual element to everything.  When I say everything I really mean it.  

That is, there should be a greater emphasis on who you buy your clothes from and the spiritual element of the people who make your clothes.  

But to strike at mere casual conversation is so rude!  He was only telling me to consider my friendships and who my friends are.

Well I know this:  Aristotle in his Nicomachean ethics, says that there are roughly three types of friendships:

1)  When people are meeting for a cause or an appointment, like an event or multiple events.

2)  When people want pleasure from one person for themselves.  So if I am friends from a person because they bring me pleasure, but I am not necessarily interested in their pleasure.

3)  When both partners is interested in virtue for the other.  

This is fundamental!! Western philosophy, and popular culture, has been derived from Aristotle.  

I'll bet you already sort of felt this way about your friends.....

One counterexample that I can put up against this is the fact that sometimes the best friendship, the 3rd kind where both partners want virtue, is when one wants virtue in the other, but the most virtuous thing would be to not be friends.  This can get tricky.  

Recently, I read a February 2009 Article of the Economist which says that scientifically, people are only able to have 7-10 close friends in their lives, and are only able to understand or have the capacity for about 150-200 (The Dunbar Number, folks).  The article was using Facebook, Primatology, and Harvard Social Scientists in order to come up with these numbers.  

In my own life, I feel that this is true at any given time.  But it is so important that there is a type of life cycle to friendships, and that the process is organic.  More on this point in  a later post.  

The article concludes that facebook means we are passively tracking and presenting ourselves to the world instead of "friending" people like we would in real life.  

There's some pretty big ideas here but I'm all out of gas so I'm going to post more on these thoughts later.

Book Report: The Centaur

Just read Updike's 1963 The Centaur, about a boy and his dad. Here's the link to Wikipedia, which gives a decent rundown:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Centaur

Can't help but thinking of this one Death Cab for Cutie song:

http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=face+that+launched+1000+shits&hl=en&client=firefox-a&emb=0&aq=-1&oq=face+that+launched+1000+shit#


The idea between the song and The Centaur is that both use a comparison of contemporary times to give extra meaning. By making these times symbolic of some mythology these themes hitch their stories to some greater thing.

The book takes on three or four different modes of presentation, which sometimes confuse the reader and other times make for interesting reading. One of these is a changing viewpoint between 3rd person omniscient narrative and 1st person narrative. Another mode was the way Updike interspersed mythology into scenes, sometimes wildly going off of the scene (wait, they're a bunch of talking Gods on Olympus, but they were two students eating lunch). I struggled for a time with whether or not George Caldwell would die or not.

Therefore, one problem is certainly the ambiguity, which Updike uses purposefully enough. Explaining this, I feel like I've already told you how this can get boring. There were a couple of times where I would put down the book just for the sake of putting down the book. It sometimes reads like a short story that Updike just kept on writing. Likewise, all of the classic Updike overly-sentimental metaphoric scenes are here.

The one chapter that affected me the most was the emotional climax of the book. This was directly after there was an obituary talking about Caldwell's death. The book is obscure enough that when I read it, I didn't have to believe it, but when the scenes blur and Updike talks the slightest bit about Caldwell walking the slightest bit ahead of the son, I felt as if the whole world were ending. In short, the gimmicks worked.