Delphic Maxim 20: Love friendship

I’ve set myself the challenge of responding to each Delphic Maxim for 15 minutes a day.

20. Love friendship

I’ve written previously about friendship, and the fact that a second maxim has come up so soon after the last is a testament to how highly the ancients valued friendship. So today I might develop the argument I took in that last maxim (15. Help your friends) by exploring further why friendship is something worth ‘loving’.

For some time now I’ve been making my way through Alasdair McIntyre’s After Virtue, a work of moral philosophy in which McIntyre aims to revitalise Aristotelian Virtue Ethics. To put it really simply, virtue ethics is a way of conduct where you seek to be as virtuous (or good, I suppose) as you can be. You achieve this across a number of domains, many of which are touched on in these maxims: courage, temperance, magnificence, magnanimity, phronesis, and so on. Unlike utilitarian ethics, which seeks the best outcome for the largest number of people, or deontological ethics, which defers to rules (often given by god), virtue ethics is firmly rooted in the ideals of ‘heroic’ society — in particular that a person should strive to improve themselves.

But these virtues aren’t purely selfish: they’re grounded in the society a person lives in. McIntyre thinks this is the really key feature of virtues, that your role in society and your relationship to others defines how virtues are expressed as you strive to be better. And central to this is a shared concept of ‘the good life’ as Cicero might call it — the way your life is embedded in the communities in which you live. This is a bit of a shift for someone living in the consumerist modern world. McIntyre says:

“This notion of the political community as a common project is alien to the modern liberal individualist world….we have no conception of such a form of community concerned, as Aristotle says the polis is concerned, with the whole of life, not with this or that good, but with man’s good as such. It is no wonder that friendship has been relegated to private life and thereby weakened in comparison to what it once was.”

Friendship in the ancient world was one of the most exciting, rewarding, affirming and important elements of life. For many of these philosophers, it was not only necessary to live and enjoy life, but also to develop more fully as a person. In a sense, friendship was primary — whereas today many people are conditioned by our social tendency towards individualism to think of the self as supreme. Earning money, getting ahead, buying more stuff, being comfortable — these are the forces that drive us today.

But think about it: the most rewarding and fulfilling thing you experience in life is that time you spend with friends. Not because you get something out of it, but because it contributes to your whole being in a way that no material or individual pursuit can mimic. How this was lost as we moved through the last 2000 years is a big conversation (though I think industrialising our work habits might have something to do with it).

So my 15 minutes is well and truly up. You were expecting something emotional, and got virtue ethics instead. Good! We’re overdue for a rational defence of the love of friendship.