What Does It Take To Be A Good Friend?

On the next to the point, Europeans are asking if the Brexit is the first of many accidents. Is the referendum the mistake or the voice of the people?  It is the last decision day for the U. S. Supreme Court. All eyes are on justices and how they will vote on abortion restrictions.  And our society it is good to be known as a person who has a lot of friends. It seems to imply that you are attractive and interesting. The idea friendship itself is held in high esteem. Everyone knows that friends can also lead you astray in make unreasonable demands on your time and your life. Which is it? Is friendship a relationship to be prize or something to be tolerated? I'm joined by Alexander -- Alexander Nehamas a philosophy professor and author of the new book on friendship. Welcome to the program.  Hello. I'm delighted to be here.  One of the central questions you tackle in your book is whether friendship is a moral good. You disagree and it has to do with the favoritism that is inherent in friendship. Tells about that.  In a way we can a person by taking up the question that you asked a minute ago. Is friendship something to be praised or something to be very wary of?  The answer is both. Friendship is one of the most wonderful and absolutely necessary relationships we should have in life. It is also extremely dangerous. That is the reason why I think that despite the philosophical traditions insisting that it is a moral good, it isn't. A very good friend with all the good intentions can get you into absolutely huge trouble. There is a saying to the fact that a friend helps you move house. A good friend helps you move a body. That really tells you the story.  And your studies, would you say the different cultures and different periods of history approach friendship differently than we do?  It is something that is difficult to actually believe. What goes under the name of friendship changes quite seriously during different periods. For example, an agent Drese, the word that we now translate as a friendship covered just about every relationship that people had with one another as long as it was important for real life.  In the Renaissance and in early-morning England, a friend was simply somebody who supported you in politics and business. He was an ally or a patron and you are an ally yourself. The alliances could change whenever interest change or whether the political situation changed. A friend did not necessarily have to like each other at the time. Friends simply worked together. That a relationship that was clearly delineated. I think that is the fundamental difference between their kind and what they call friendship and what we call friendship today. The important difference is that in a friendship and in the Elizabeth the in court, when you were somebody sprinting exactly what you would expect from them. You'd expect advancement in court and you would expect money and patronage. You would expect social tendency. You knew in advance what you wanted. Today when I make a friend I have no idea what I expect from them. I just want to spend time with them. There is a sense when we make a friendship that if this other person and we join our lives together, both of our lives will be in some way better. We expect and hope that this will happen through a relationship with a friend.  Used a friendship is one of the ways we can express freedom and I mean friendship in the way that we understand it in the modern era with sharing intimate details about our lives and spending lots of time together. Woody mean expressing freedom through friendship?  We express freedom to choose to begin with, who our friends will be. Friends are not appointed for us. They are not natural relationships. Those are relationships that we are born into and we cannot escape from. Friendship is something that we choose. I think it makes a traffic difference. The other aspect is the fact that friendship is a mechanism of individuality. If you and I become friends, if we are friends, we are not friends of others. Friendship is preferential. We do favors for our friends, which we don't do for other people. When we become friends, we immediately differentiate ourselves from other groups and other individuals.  Your book as anyone listening to this can tell does dive deeply into the concept of this fundamental human relationship. I'm afraid even to ask you about tips. As you been thinking about this and as you have been writing about this, are their keys to sustaining a friendship over decades?  I don't think there are any general rules. Maybe someday psychologist will find something about it. Right now why people become friends, why some friendships persist in others don't? Those are questions we don't really have answers to. There is a general sort of thing that I could say is all of this change as we go through life. Sometimes the changes we undergo take us away from a particular friendship or other. If a friendship of mine was contained -- containing a serious political agreement and gradually moved away from that political agreement and adopted different political views, those may undermine the friendship. What does undermined is not necessarily the political nature of the views but the fact that they changed in ways that their friend doesn't find it acceptable.  I have been speaking with Alexander Nehamas , philosophy professor at Princeton University and the author of the new book, on friendship. Thank you for your time.  It was a pleasure. Thank you very much.