Oregon Humanities

I'll Be There for You

Friendship, Facebook, and the quest for virtue

Courtney S. Campbell

667? 667! That’s the average number of “friends” my students this term have on Facebook. And that average may be on the low side: Facebook doesn’t require culling your friends until you reach the five thousand-friend threshold. My students assure me that they know all these people through some medium or another, even if it’s a friend of a friend. They do not, they insist, send out friend requests to strangers.

How strange this modern language of friendship would appear to the philosophical sages of the classical world. For Aristotle and Cicero, friendship was both indispensable to human excellence and exceptionally rare. It wasn’t really the unexamined life that wasn’t worth living, as the Socratic adage had it; it was a life without friendship. Remove the sun from the sky, Cicero commented, and you would experience something analogous to a life without friendship: cold and barren, and with no occasion for growth.

Even though these ancient philosophers viewed friendship as necessary to human flourishing, only the singular person genuinely experienced such a relationship, which required a person of profound moral character and an unwavering commitment to seek the human good. The foundation for a friendship’s emotional intimacy involved a shared quest to discover what kind of person one should be. Pleasure and rendering assistance were part of friendships, of course, but ultimately, the core of the relationship involved the pursuit of virtue.

My students will be the first to concede that conferring the title of “friend” to a person through a social networking site does not constitute friendship. The picture of a friend cannot replace the personalized warmth and nuance of face-to-face communication. Posting a quick sentence, in words without vowels and punctuated by emoticons, to describe one’s daily activities for everyone to read is no substitute for the intimate self-disclosure that occurs in conversations between two people who confide only in each other. My students observe that a world in which friends are liberated from any responsibility to one another is morally superficial in contrast to the mutual expectations of benevolence embedded in a relationship of genuine friends and the shared quest for the virtuous life. So, even given the parody that occurs by its cooptation of the language of “friends,” Facebook can remind us of the irreplaceable quality of true friendship and why we value such relationships when we experience them.

The various appropriations of the language of friends and friendship in popular culture, as exemplified on Facebook or on the immensely popular sitcom Friends that ran earlier in this decade, tell us some things of social and moral significance. The classical sages were right—we value friendship, even in, and perhaps because of, our increasingly individualistic culture. Individualism offers both liberation but also isolation, for which friendship provides the balancing reassurance of responsibility and the conviction that we matter. Friendship may no longer be perceived as a school for virtue, which is a social loss, but insofar as any friendship offers us a refuge of community in a world of atomized individualism, it is no less essential to our lives and the quality of our lives than in ancient empires.