Being ready to welcome a friend

Friendship is one of the most important blessings given to human beings in their adventure on earth, but like all blessings, it is a blessing that requires a person to know its value and to know how to treat it, and with which he is continually tested through this requirement. People who do not have good or true friends are, in the first place, those who cannot be good friends.

Those who complain of being unable to find a true friend, because they do not know how to be a friend, because they do not know the friends who come their way, cannot recognize them, and so, not knowing them, cannot know how to treat them, live the life of the pauper who suffers want in the midst of plenty. On the other hand, the attributes that most of the philosophies or literature written on friendship ascribe to friendship serve no purpose other than to blind us further to the friends around us.

We said that with such attributions, by loading the friend with our own qualities and expectations, we kill the friend or the possibility of a friend.

Expecting a Khidr-like performance from every friend we set out with comes to the same end. Since we ourselves are not, and cannot be, Khidr, how is our expecting Khidr-ness from another not an equating of him with ourselves?

The sameness here is not the qualities we ascribe to ourselves, but has to do with what we expect from a person we do not know and have not come to know, and with imprisoning him in our own expectations and dreams.

When friendship is brought up, one cannot pass without mentioning the famous statement attributed to Aristotle: the philosopher is reported to have said, "My friends! There is no friend." I say "reported," because some studies say that the original of this saying is "he who has many friends has no friend" and that it somehow turned into this in transmission (Agamben, Cogito). Both forms of the statement have in fact been, and could be, an occasion for the literature of friendship to develop and take color along separate lines. The transmission in the form "there is no friend" is a report often referred to in order to express vague definitions or contradictory situations concerning friendship.

The famous French post-structuralist philosopher Jacques Derrida also relays this form and makes it the axis of his famous book "The Politics of Friendship." Yet although Derrida knows that the original of the saying is not like this (at least through Agamben's warning), he prefers this distorted form, because it will serve his own construction better.

Derrida invites those he addresses as "my friends" to question what and how much they are ready to listen to from him or from those they regard as friends. Thus he does not hold back from saying "my friends" to those who have displayed the friendship necessary for listening to him or reading what he wrote. For good reading and writing require a minimum of friendship, a certain affability and mutual understanding, a wish to understand and be understood, and this is present.

Yet still, there is no Friend. There is no friend who has not been crushed and destroyed under the weight of general perceptions and expectations about friendship. Even those who wait for the Mahdi as a friend know and have memorized in every detail what he will do when he comes. When those who wait for the Mahdi search for a person suited to this expectation, when they listen to a sermon from that person, how much of it corresponds to signs they never hoped for, never expected? What kind of Mahdi had those who clung to the impostors they found as the Mahdi conceived in their minds?

Derrida in fact makes this philosophy of his about friendship in a way that also evokes associations with the Jewish messianic belief. In this connection, how the Children of Israel themselves approached the Messiahs, the prophets, whom they awaited throughout their history, to whom they would cling precisely as a friend, whose voice they would heed, whom they would follow, is also a typical case from the standpoint of the experience of friendship. That the Prophet they were waiting for emerged from an unlettered community that was not from their own tribe was enough for them to immediately close their ears to him. Yet it was He they had been waiting for, and moreover what he said was no different from much of what they themselves said.

And how ready are we to welcome the friend who will change us, who will revive us? We can begin by confronting this question. Do we have the resolve and will not to slip into the facile course of immediately making that friend an enemy and driving him away when he does not turn out as we wish? In this way we have heard once more, in Derrida's tongue, the questions we asked earlier about friendship.

However, if we return to the original of Aristotle's saying as pointed out by Agamben, that is, if we take up the expression "he who has many friends has no friend," we are compelled to view friendship as a value shared with very few people and diminishing as the sharing grows. Yet we find it hard to understand how the same Aristotle, who distinguished three kinds of friendship, ties it to a numerical condition. The kind based on utility and interest no one who lives friendship counts as friendship, but it produces manifestations of friendship in a significant part of current social relations. Friendships based on pleasure manifest as love, which, since its sharing is based on pleasure, must be limited. But the limit placed on the friendship he distinguishes as based on virtue, as friendship among the good, has something to do with the horizon of virtue.

What about you: is your horizon of friendship, or your heart, reserved only for one or a very limited number of people?

Is friendship really a very intimate form of relationship taking place among very few people? What keeps us from thinking of friendship, when it is based on virtue, as a mode of existence that would allow it to be shared with more people, even with all people? Of course it is not possible to be friends with everyone. Being friends with the wicked excludes friendship with the good and turns into betrayal of them. Moreover, all the prophets were made to have enemies from their own peoples. One who is friends with everyone in fact has no virtue, and what he shares in his friendship cannot be virtue. Loving everyone without distinguishing between good and bad, through a mystical philosophy of love, seriously damages friendships founded on goodness.

In fact, thinking about friendship is something far beyond simply talking about a special experience shared among limited people. It is a window opening onto thinking about our total human existence.

We will continue to think and write about friendship. At this stage I consider it a duty to mention here two very fine studies on the subject: the first is issue 68-69 of Cogito on the theme of Friendship, edited by Şeyda Öztürk, which contains the writings of Agamben and Derrida and discussions of their views.

The second is the work titled "Philosophy of Friendship" by our esteemed friend Kenan Göçer, recently published by PAN Publications, which with its powerful literary style invites us to think in the company of many concepts such as philosophy, politics, debt, economy, isonomy, Malamatism, violence, love.