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.

some articles on Wittgenstein, eastern philosophy

Here's an eastern-philosophical take on the philosophy of transcending boundaries that my brother sent me:

http://www.centerpointe.com/blog/2009/04/02/news-flash-theres-no-escape/#more-46


Here is a New Yorker Book Review of a new biography of the Wittgenstein family:

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2009/04/06/090406crbo_books_gottlieb

3 of the Witgenstein brothers commit suicide, and 2 were geniuses. One of those two is the most celebrated philosopher of the 20th century.



There's some real trouble with all of this. I really like the problem of Determinism versus Free Will. As my professor said, however, there are more problems, better problems, to philosophy than just this one.

New Article

Here's the news ahead of time! This opinion article is set for publishing tonight, which means it will be on the stands tomorrow, in the NCSU Paper, the Technician. I'm very excited.



Tentative title: Lessons for Stressin!


With upcoming finals, I thought it would be a good idea to tell you all how to de-stress. Writing this article proved to be completely stressful in and of itself. I was massacred with terrible deadlines and horrible weights on my chest. I felt like a Duke student who had recently scored too low on a test and had to do some sort of ritualized shame practice in front of a board of post-doctorate assistant-teacher's assistants. Or worse -- a UNC student who stresses about all the work he has to do when he really is just doing liberal arts (aka: YouTube). When YouTube got boring, however, I hit up WebMD and got some classic tips, just for you. Here's what the doctor site said: Write. Let your feelings out. Do something you enjoy. Focus on the present. Meditate. Use guided imagery. Ways to relax your body: Exercise. Try techniques to relax. Breathing exercises. Progressive muscle relaxation.
The problem with these, however, is that they all seem like distractions-from-stress instead of stress-fighters.
So, for a new spin I went to the Philosophy Department's Dr. Puryear, who then lent me some literature. He gave me a book on the philosopher Baruch Spinoza. Spinoza got rid of stress from knocking out the passions. As Spinoza scholar Dan Garrett said, “The constraint or removal of affects- including harmful ones – depends on the occurrence of opposite and stronger affects. An affect is more powerful if we imagine its cause to be present rather than past or future; more powerful if we imagine its object as being in the near, rather than the distant, future, or past; more powerful if we imagine its object as free rather than necessary; more powerful if we imagine its cause as necessary rather than possible; and more powerful if we imagine its object as possible rather than merely contingent” (Garrett, from the Cambridge Companion to Spinoza).
Everybody is going “huh?” So let me put this a different way. Spinoza said we have to fight fire with fire, but not just any fire. He was talking about getting rid of a basic passion with a stronger passion. Spinoza would first have us realize that we are stressed. Then, he would make us think about our goals and our grades. Then he might have us think of our passion to be de-stressed. If it's not harmful and crazy stress, then it might be good. But if it is bad, we can knock it out with our bigger passion to de-stress, or our bigger passion of studying. Some of us might already do this or have done this in the past.
Besides the normal stress-awareness tips, I'm using Spinoza to say this: when you realize that you are stressing, try to knock it out with a greater passion. How do you get your greater passion? Well, Spinoza's got the basic set up written above: it's got to be opposite and stronger. The passion for studying can knock out a lot of stress.
When people study, it's impossible to worry about tests and think about what I'm studying at the same time. This is what Spinoza means by having something “present rather than past or future.” We should take “its object as being in the near” to think of how our tests are in the future, but the stress itself is now. The larger passion that we have to use to cancel this one out is concentrating on studying. By focusing on the act of studying rather than the conflict between studying and not studying I think you can eliminate stress. But by studying alone, instead of thinking about the act of studying, you might get rid of even more stress.
Ironically, when you do de-stress, you position yourself to get better grades, which is the only point of stressing in the first place.

minor hitch

So is it that we have trouble that we have the good? One friend of mine has a philosophy, "You can't have sweet without the bitter" and I think that's not true. He's talking metaphysically, and while my friend Shoemaker (name changed for courtesy) says that there are one or two mathematically logical proofs for opposites, I think we can rule this one out off of the bat.

For example, he's immediately talking about tastebuds, I think. Anyone who thinks twice about this can figure out how you can have something bitter without having something sweet. There's a cool idea that before the middle ages, Europeans didn't even know what sugar was, and had to do the Crusades. Alas, this is wrong too, because sugar is found all over the place. For instance, saliva can break down bread into simple sugars right in the mouth.

Do we need trouble? Do we need problems in order to solve them? Well yes and no, but I think it's dangerous to get into things so much that you think there is a need for the pain, challenge, and suffering. There's some great science fiction out there about doctors who are so close to being a patient that they drug themselves to death or something; or the cops-being-criminals drama is a genre unto itself.


A lot of people complain and complain, but if you take away their "source," they'll freak out about it. Humans are routine animals, and we get this thing where we can't let go. I should know, I'm one of them.