A lens on telos from the angle of friendship

I don’t spend much time thinking about the question of why are we here. This is partially because it seems sort of impossible to answer that question in a way that’s sensitive to the vast diversity of human experience. On the other hand, the nihilist response that there is no reason why we’re here feels like a cop-out; I think it’s probably wrong and definitely unhealthy. Also, I feel like I have a reasonable handle on why I’m here (or at least: on high-level guiding principles that are useful for guiding and aligning my actions), which makes the question of why everyone else is here a lot less important to me.

But it occurred to me that this question and another one might be useful lenses on one another. The other question is, “what is a friend?” Sociologists might answer this question by imposing a taxonomy of friendships - I see a lot of different splits suggested, but a lot of them like to distinguish between ‘activity friends’ and ’lifelong friends,’ which seems fairly legitimate, though it appears to model friendship as a binary variable rather than a continuous one (how much can friendship intensity decrease after loss of a shared activity before that relationship is downgraded to the status of ‘activity friendship’?). It also seems to me that there’s at least a partial ordering of relationship quality that this taxonomic model suggests and then declines to analyze.

As someone who uncritically bought into some version of this taxonomic model and the value system that ships with it for a couple of years, I feel fairly comfortable categorizing it as a memetic hazard. I don’t think it’s necessarily wrong, it’s just not as nuanced or philisophically well-grounded in its usual packaging as it needs to be to make it safe.

I’d like to introduce another lens which is, in my view, safer and healthier: a friend is someone with whom you are in a partnership that brings both of you closer to the reason you’re here. This idea isn’t original to me - in fact, it dates at least back to the ancient Greeks. The Greeks were nuts about taxonomies, they never met a concept they couldn’t break into at least two categories. In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle makes modern-day sociologists proud by giving what I might call a basis set for friendship. In his view, all friendships were based on some combination of three aspects:

  1. The intrinsic goodness/quality/excellence (arete) the friends perceive in one another

  2. The pleasure the friends derive from one another

  3. The usefulness of the friendship to the friends

Arete is sort of important, so I’ll briefly define it: arete is usually translated as ’excellence’, and refers to the effectiveness of a person or thing in fulfilling their purpose (telos). Arete implies a fulfillment of potential in service of an ultimate purpose. A person of arete is aligned towards that which is noble - morally, emotionally, and in their actions. For people, another translation might be “flourishing.”

Now, just based on this information, Aristotle’s taxonomy is already better than just splitting friendships into categories, because he’s suggesting that all friendships contain all three of these aspects to different extents, which allows for a lot more nuance than choosing one of a preset number of boxes. But it gets better from here, because Aristotle imposes a value system just like the sociologists do - except he analyzes it transparently. In Aristotle’s view, only arete makes for durable/high-quality friendships. Aristotle’s idea of ideal friendships progresses like this:

  1. Two people meet and recognize arete in one another. Being aligned towards that which is noble, they feel goodwill towards one another.

  2. Each person reconizes the goodwill that the other has towards them, and becomes personally invested in the arete of that person, associating it with their own arete. The friends love each other in the same way (though perhaps not to the same extent) as they love themselves.

OK, we’ve covered arete, so it’s time to talk about anime now. I’m going to start with a disclaimer: I haven’t watched a huge amount of anime, and I know there’s a lot of variety. As I talk about anime in this essay, I’m referring to cherry-picked shows that were recommended to me by friends because those friends thought I would like them, which is a huge sampling bias.

That said: most action-genre anime I’ve seen has a trope where the main character makes a friend who constantly trains with them and pushes them to improve. The friends are constantly competing to “surpass” one another (it’s really interesting to me how certain words are way more common in anime than in other genres), and over the course of the show both become stronger and more moral as a result of their competition. Sometimes the entire main cast is working to keep up with each other.

The alignment of this relationship with the Aristotelian ideal is almost exact - the friends are completely committed to their own and one another’s arete, which they spend the show refining and clarifying. But, strangely, I can’t think of a single analogous relationship in US TV or movies - even though western intellectual tradition is ostensibly Greek in its lineage and Japanese intellectual tradition is not.

Instead, it appears to me that the relationships in US TV are based on acceptance and osmosis. Friends accept each other, including each other’s flaws, and over some period of time they learn certain qualities from one another, usually by coincidence, which usually correspond to improvement of some sort. One example might be the shy character who is ‘adopted’ by a more sociable friend and eventually learns the confidence to stand up for themselves. The friends accept each other exactly as they are, but end up improving anyway. My analysis of this is that it has a lot to do with West’s Disease - we want improvement to happen to us the way it happens to the characters in the movie; thus, the movie becomes a way for us to see our fantasies played out on the screen (cf: Sadly, Porn).

Anyway, back to our original question of why we are here. If we assume that Aristotle is right and ideal friendships develop our arete (which is excellence in service of our telos), we can infer the answers that different cultures offer us from the nature of their idealized friendships. Aristotle’s answer is sort of circular: he thinks we’re here to develop and exercise our excellence - as individuals, in the many roles we play, and as humans generally. Like I said before, I don’t have strong opinions on the telos of humanity, but Aristotle’s view seems pretty well aligned with my own vague instinct. Similarly, anime frequently has a theme of applying deep perserverance to transcend limits.

But in popular US media, things get even more weirdly circular. The most common trajectory of even idealized friendships in US media, as far as I can tell, is one of becoming a better friend. The friends might improve in other ways, but they don’t set out to help each other in this - in fact, we often see the exact opposite, where one friend tries to help another improve and ends up learning to respect boundaries or accept his friend as he/she is. With some caveats, I don’t really care for this. Friendship for the purpose of being a better friend strikes me as form without function, barely a hair’s breadth away from the nihilist’s rejection of telos altogether.

The argument for this approach, I think, would be something like: “it’s not good to go into relationships with an agenda, you should accept people as they are.” I agree that you should try to accept people without forcing your values onto them - but people are constantly changing. Making a friend with the intention of fixing them is unhealthy, but making a friend with the intention of growing with them isn’t just healthy, it’s the only realistic thing you can do.

And: there’s a lot to be said for agendalessness, but it shouldn’t be confused with purposelessness. Sometimes, imposing our own agenda or preconceptions on a situation or interaction leads us to misunderstand, or even to do harm. But releasing your agenda should be done in service of some purpose; otherwise you’re just throwing up your hands and taking the easy way out. I’d like to see more purposeful relationships in the US and in US media - friendships based not just on mutual enjoyment and entertainment, but also on mutual recognition, nourishment, clarification, and even challenge.