Session 8: Friendship
Chair: Gavin Rae


On Friendship
Oana Suciu
Universite Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium

What is a friend? What defines friendship?
None of the answers are clarified until this day and research on this topic arises a great deal of difficulties in grasping the subject. Still, people do claim to have friends and to know what friendship is.
The case studied within my paper concerns a group of students belonging to different ethnic backgrounds and living in an international student corridor during the autumn of 2005 in the city of Lund, Sweden.
My findings subscribe to the sociologist Ray Pahl opinion that friendship is a significant form of social glue. But how to scientifically comprehend it?
This is the aim of my paper. I start from raw data, analyzing it and then using Luhmann’s systemic perspective and Giddens’ reflexive theory to make sense of it.
It is about drawing identity by difference; a continuous drawing of the borders that define ones close and intimate world - a world representative for one’s individuality – against a distant, impersonal, cold and alienating world; the rest of the world.
Within the close world, for the intensive personal relationships where the person’s attributes are highly significant Luhmann uses the concept of “intimate relationship”. Friends are nevertheless part of this close intimate world, bestowing meaning upon it.
Looking at how intimate interpersonal systems work in general, and studying my case in particular, I attempt to identify the general characteristics of all systems based on friendship (as distinct than the intimate interpersonal systems of love – which Luhmann so meticulously depicted).
What I try to offer is different perspective on friendship that meets with Pahl’s demand and points towards reconsidering this subject within the sociology’s field of study, for friendship has a great potential towards explaining the social.

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Who is a Friend?
Paul James
Department of Health and Ageing, Australia

In my presentation I explore a question which affects the meaning value, role and importance of friendship in human life. This is the question, who is a friend? 
My approach to this question is informed by Axel Honneth who has written extensively on the subject of personal recognition. Two points made by Honneth impress on me:

• the value on considering, reflecting and evaluating something from within an actual issue or issue; and
• the importance of accounting for the peoples’ need to define and shape themselves in context of other people and their environment.

I therefore explore the question who is a friend in terms contemporary social life. Human life appears to be pluralistic with a variety of ideas, approaches, and complex economic, technological, scientific, political factors in play.  Our understanding of what friendship is can also be seen in terms of our need to define and shape ourselves and the important role that some other people can play in our lives.
In terms of responding to Honneth’s challenge of contextualisation and self shaping I explore how the word ‘friend’ has become, at least to a degree, a ‘concept catch all’. I take this as important for as Nietzsche highlights, when language becomes like a ‘concept catch all’ it loose its power it becomes more like sludge. Such language may cover things but it doesn’t give them life. It does not effectively illuminate them.
In trying to be clearer about who is a friend I explore some ways which we can consider, reflect, and feel the form of friends that are flourishing with human life.  This is in great contrast to calling someone a friend as a vacuously polite gesture. I also show that by being clearer on who actually is a friend we may also encourage and restore friendships.  

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Friendship and Self-Love: Can the Stoic Wise be a Genuine Friend?
Ayten Sururi
Eastern Mediterranean University, Turkey

In this paper, I shall discuss the Stoic notion of friendship in Seneca’s moral letters.  The theoretical account of self, literally translated as love of self, introduces friendship as a natural need, rather than a means of socialization; in order to realize one’s self, exchange of mutual love is necessary among the fellows. However, being and having a genuine friend is a rare case. For Seneca, none but the wise can be a real friend and that the friendship of the wise exemplifies the state of pure love.
Several forms of friendship are discussed as distorted forms of self-love, which the Stoics call the state of passion. Such cases of friendship prove to be self-deception, showing us that they are either driven by the passion of fear or the other forms of the excessive love of self, holding self-interest as the primary urge. 
I argue that the friendship of the wise as pure state of love  in Seneca’s moral letters is problematic in several respects, creating a tension between self-love and the love of others.  From the theoretical perspective, friendship as one state of love of self comes to the point of acting against the natural need, forcing the boundaries of selfishness. For Seneca, although the wise has a friendly attitude to the others only a wise can be a friend of wise in real sense. The friendship of the wise sometimes makes deceiving the others necessary out of self-interest.  

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