To love someone else is easy, but to love what you are, the thing that is yourself, is just as if you were embracing a glowing red-hot iron: it burns into you and that is very painful. Therefore, to love somebody else in the first place is always an escape which we all hope for, and we all enjoy it when we are capable of it. But in the long run, it comes back on us. You cannot stay away from yourself forever, you have to return, have to come to that experiment—whether you can love yourself, and that will be the test. —Carl Jung, lecturing on Nietzsche
L’amitie, Pablo Picasso, 1908. Permission of the State Hermitage Museum, US.
1. Friendship Born of Self
It is commonly, and truly, said that you can only love someone as well as you love yourself. For many of us, myself included, this is a hard teaching. As Jung says in the epigraph, we hope that we can love others without figuring out how to love ourselves, but eventually “it comes back on us.” The love I’m talking about is friendship. (It should come as no surprise that philosophers and psychologists haven’t looked to familial or romantic relationships as exemplars of enlightened love!) I want to explore how this curious relation between befriending ourselves and befriending others works. Along the way I show how we can use our discoveries to become better at both.
The notion that loving others depends on loving ourselves is not new. Aristotle discusses how the kind of friend we are to ourselves will be reflected in the kind of friendships we have with others. Where there is “internal conflict,” where, as he puts it, “souls are divided against themselves,” they will not be able to love themselves, or others. I think of people I’ve known who end up in therapy because a friend or partner made it clear that the relationship would be over if they didn’t address their depression or anxiety or addiction—examples of how internal discord causes troubles for others.
2. It’s Mutual, Actually
But friendships don’t just reflect who we are. Who we are, and how we show up in relationships, depends also on how we have been treated by others. If you grew up with a hypercritical rejecting mother, your attachment pattern and personality will reflect this. In other words, our way of being with others is informed by the way others have been with us; in particular, by how attentive and attuned (friendly) early caregivers were. Read more »
The happiest, most fulfilled moments of my life have been when I was completely aware of being alive, with all the hope, pain, and sorrow that entails for any mortal being. —Jenny Odell
Applied Philosophy Back when I was a professor, I loved teaching intro to philosophy courses. Philosophy’s essence comes alive when working with people whose view of themselves and the world is still open and underway. One of the texts I used was Aristotle’s timeless exploration of friendship in the Nicomachean Ethics. I hoped it would win the students over, showing them how interesting and practically minded philosophy could be. We spent a month exploring what’s known about friendship, how it is known, and why it matters.
We don’t have a month together, but think of this essay as an invitation to go deeper into this most familiar of subjects. I offer three big things worth knowing about friendship. First, it’s worth knowing why friendship matters, why we agree with Aristotle when he says that ‘even if we had all the other goods in life, still no one would want to live without friends.’ That friendship matters is obvious, which is why the current crisis in friendship (especially among men) is getting so much attention. Second, it’s worth knowing that there are three kinds of friendship; recognizing these can shed light on how our own friendships work. Finally, it’s worth knowing that friendship and justice go hand in hand. This may seem obvious; after all, when is it ever friendly to be unjust? Nevertheless, the implications of this provoked students, and no doubt will provoke some readers.
1. Why Friendship Matters: It Empowers and Enlivens Aristotle opens his discussion of friendship by remarking that friendship—‘when two go together’—makes us more able to think and act. He’s alluding to a famous passage from the Iliad, where war-like Diomedes volunteers for a dangerous spying mission behind enemy lines, saying
But if some other man would go with me, my confidence and mood would much improve. When two go together, one may see the way to profit from a situation before the other does. One man alone may think of something, but his mind moves slower. His powers of invention are too thin.
Diomedes chooses resourceful Odysseus as his companion: “If I go with him, we could emerge from blazing fire and come home safe, thanks to his cleverness.”
This is our song as social animals, that by going together we are safer and our prospects for a good outcome improved. In evolutionary terms, friendship is empowering because cooperation is a non-zero-sum game that confers a greater-than-the-sum-of-the-parts power to the friends. Having friends is a means of better adapting to the world.
But friends aren’t just an empowering means to an end, they can also be an enlivening end in their own right. Read more »
Even if they had all the other good things, still no one would want to live without friends. —Aristotle
Is love an art? Then it requires knowledge and effort. —Erich Fromm
This is Leo. She was surprised by how hot he is.
Many of us are, or soon will be, tempted to connect with an AI companion. Maybe you want a partner for your work or personal life. A friend of mine consults with a personal AI on his creative branding work for clients. A therapist or doctor can use a personal AI to help them track and reflect on specific patients. A recent article in the NYT describes a woman’s steamy (and expensive) romance with her AI boyfriend, Leo.
All of these and other possibilities are coming to pass. I take it for granted here that AIs are useful and pleasurable digital assistants or companions. With corporate powers making that case, the more pressing concern is to recognize the limits and dangers AI companions pose. This is urgent because AI companions exploit a human vulnerability: our resistance to the effort required for personal and interpersonal development.
I will focus on a fundamental limit overlooked by enthusiasts and critics of AI alike. A limit no tweaking of algorithms will overcome. A limit that makes AIs ontologically incapable of friendship. A limit that shows why we need to resist the considerable temptation to imagine AIs can be friends. To anticipate, consider two necessary conditions of friendship: that they are freely chosen, and mutual. We’ll see why AI companions cannot meet these conditions. But first let’s look at their basic limitation. Read more »
