Greek dramatist Sophocles once sanguinely wrote, “To throw away an honest friend is, as it were, to throw away your life.”
I wonder what is so significant in an honest friend whose throwing away is equal to throwing away one’s life. Lately I have been to Gwadar to attend a book fair. An honest friend of mine, who is an advocate, said: ” I feel spiritual comfort when I am in your company.” This came to me as a bit of a shock.
I felt an emotional fillip to think about it. Does friendship bring happiness to one’s life? What sort of happiness, happiness of a child flying kites or happiness of a depressed person looking at sea? What is friendship per se and what are those elements that create and then preserve a friendship? These questions nag me continuously when I meet an honest friend. There is also a girl from my class who I’ve noticed a long time ago but I am sharing ideas with her now, after years. I really can’t figure out what is my relationship with both of them. Both of them are lovely, beautiful and high-brow humans and I am greatly impressed by them. That girl is awesomely mature, thoughtful and a connoisseur of art. But, sometimes I feel, perhaps there is a gap in her, a huge gap that makes her reckon with this idea: ” I know that I have lost something but I am not sure what that is?”
The famed Greek philosopher Aristotle has virtually written something on everything, so friendship is not excluded. In his seminal book Nichomachean Ethics Aristotle divides friendships into three categories: friendship of utility, friendship of pleasure and friendship of good or virtue. The first two kinds are emotional and accidental. But the last one which Aristotle considers to be the most enduring and ravishing dwarfs others. Friends of utility and pleasure are tawdry and shoddy in nature, they are transactional, like give and in return take something type things. Therefore, one cannot express one’s true self in this friendship and can’t depend on it much. And surprisingly, most of the friendships that abound in our society revolve around these two accidental friendships. A small fraction, amongst them my above mentioned two friends fall, develops and then preserves the friendship of good which, more or less, upheaves and lifts one’s soul up. Their friendship gives hope to wait for good days, they are always there to encourage and make you feel worthy and important.
Friendship of utility is hard, withering and short. You befriend someone so that he brings you benefit and in exchange must expect something in return. There is no honest affection and devotion in this type of friendship
Friendship of utility is hard, withering and short. You befriend someone so that he brings you benefit and in exchange must expect something in return. There is no honest affection and devotion in this type of friendship.
This type of friendship is very short and impermanent in nature. Whenever the benefits end, the friendship shuffles off the mortal coil. One is always emotionally dissatisfied in this friendship.
This never penetrates your heart. The other one which follows this is friendship of pleasure. This one is more common in sophomores and university students. They fall in love to get carnal pleasure. Entire liking and love revolves around pleasure.
It is very emotional and in Freudian terms libidinal. The sexual urge and the force to satisfy it blinds the mind, this turns this friendship into a sleazy one. Pleasure, joy and enjoyment with whom you love is not bad but these all are short-lived. When pleasure, joy and enjoyment finish, so does friendship. Friendship is beyond these things.
Most friendships, however, that many of us have, fall into these two categories. Aristotle does not deride these friendships but according to him these are short, not human and more disastrous.
The third type of friendship which is driven by good and virtue is amazingly longish and enduring. This type of friendship is premised upon mutual appreciation. Both parties deeply respect one another, the values, the religion and the interests. There is no greed for galore benefit, or madness for making love or something. Everything seems simple, human and uniquely yours in this friendship. Hua Husu wrote in The New Yorker , ” Some friends complete us; others complicate us.” I wager this line fully defines the friendship of good, what we call in Urdu and Persian: Dosthi. The most interesting and confident aspect of this friendship is that it completes you and when you are around a friend as though there is something utterly good around you and you are indubitably in the presence of ” greatness”.
A boat on a sea never feels that it is in a strange place, a bird flying in the sky never hesitates that someone will hunt it, similarly in the presence of a good friend, one never feels alone and insecure.
Moreover, beyond goodness, if well preserved, this type of friendship gives you pleasure and benefit as well.
The biggest facet of this friendship is respect. The friend must care about the subjectivity, the inner person of the friend and never hurt him/her.
If a friend fails in identifying your true self and then giving you a hand to make that self better, this suggests the friend must be interested in the utilitarian part of friendship. Aristotle adds that perfect friendship is made up of men who are good and alike in virtue; for each alike wishes well to each other- they are good in themselves.
Aristotle emphasizes reciprocation of goodwill. A good and great friendship is based on mutual appreciation of inner craze, madness and soul. And Aristotle says this type of friendship is only possible between good people similar in virtue.
So when you suddenly realize that a person whom you have met shares a part of your inner soul, he/she must be someone whom you had better befriend with heart. This friendship usually brings two people so close that they subsequently marry each other. Nonetheless, Aristotle has a very interesting philosophy of marriage as well which I will discuss some other time.
Good friendship is also keeping each other’s sordid and dark secrets. It is volunteering. “For to love friendship,” French philosopher Jacque Derrida writes, “it is not enough to know how to bear the other in mourning; one must love the future.” Derrdia must be saying that we see our friends and beloved in happiness, and think this will prevail. But future holds bleak and depressing things for us. And a friend must always envision his/her friend in future, in many conditions, in sadness, mourning and ill with endemic illnesses.
Love must not begin headlong. Friendship must give way to love to affirm its foundations. A good friendship gives you a space to speak your confused mind with confidence, lay bare your soul in its depth, and display yourself as it is. No drama, no spectacle, everything simple and untainted. A true friendship never badgers or bothers you. With whom you feel nervous and even squirm while sharing something is not a friend of virtue. With a friend of virtue, you can feel as though you are with yourself, not with someone else. I could vaguely remember an idea which says, ” whenever I conversed with her, I felt as though I was conversing with myself.”
I will leave you, my reader, with this thoughtful quote from Milan Kundera’s novel Identity, ”How could she feel nostalgia when he was right in front of her? How can you suffer from the absence of a person who is present? You can suffer nostalgia in the presence of the beloved if you glimpse a future where the beloved is no more.”
When I read this quote, something stops me from going even deeper in friendship, the reason behind that is that when I lose them, the pain will be unbearable. That is why I too feel nostalgic about some friends, who I love, respect and care about, that there will come a time that they will abandon me.
The writer is a student, based in Turbat. He Tweets at @shahabakram6 and can be reached at [email protected]