​

         Over the last few weeks, I’ve poured myself in conversation with a childhood friend on the subject of friendships. Growing up in a broken home, my friendships offered me refuge and the redemption of a love I’ve learned to fear and deny myself. In the enterprising eyes of my friend, these relations of dependency were an unprofitable distraction from an otherwise empowering solitude. In this paper, I will examine the roles of individualist and relational conceptions of the self in regard to self-love and its limits. I will determine that both conceptions are necessary considerations when developing healthy and lasting companion friendships. Concerns for the independence of an individual’s heart and mind underlie healthy relations with friends. In turn, a wholly individualistic self-interest precludes one from being a good friend to others and one’s self. 

​

Some philosophers like Aristotle would lend support to my position that friendships are “very necessary for living” a happy life (1155a5). For Aristotle happiness isn't a still concept one can commodify and sell for a quick buck, instead, it is a dynamic and experiential “kind of activity” (1169b29). Not only does isolation from living “in relation to others” make it difficult to be “continuously active” and living (1170a7), but it also churns up inside us an active resistance against our natures as social beings (1169b19). I will refer to this view that human beings are social by nature and dependent on others for the development of a good life (1169b10-13) as the weak relational view of the self. 

​

While Aristotle considers friendships to be necessary for the good life of even the “blessedly self-sufficient [that] have no need for friends” (1169b6) other thinkers such as Rousseau would begrudgingly challenge the notion that human nature is anything but individualistic. Rousseau considers that the development of reason both illuminated human’s path out of a state of nature, and was accompanied by a suffocating “universal dependence” that left individuals vulnerable to other self-motivated individuals who are not obliged “to give them anything” (52). In what I will refer to as the individualist view of the self in relation to others, Rousseau acknowledges the interdependence of individuals in civic communities but considers it a weakness that robs people of their “robust” ness (53). 

​

While Rousseau fails to isolate his fierce individualism as both the foundation for his conception of human nature and the subject of his woes in an unfeeling and remorseless society (54), other relational thinkers have challenged these foundations. Specifically, Heidegger recognizes the culture of individualism as metastasizing cancer against our authentic nature as fundamentally relational beings. For Heidegger, the self is not only weakly relational and better off living with friends but is indivisibly and dynamically constituted both in identity and in capacity for meaning-making in relation to others (82). While Aristotle’s weak relational view considers that individuals thrive when they are a part of a community and living among companions, Heidegger’s strong relational view considers that individuals cannot be understood apart from the community, and the self to be ontologically indivisible from its being-with-others. In this sense, the community is as Parker Palmer puts it, “a seed in the undivided self” (Hooks 127). In the context of friendship, Michel de Montaigne has adopted a similar strong relational view captured not in relation to an entire community, but more manageably for the individual, in one true and endearing friend (139). 

​

Companion Friendships and Self-Love
When examining the role of individualist and relational considerations in friendships, companion friendships represent a specific class of friends. Many kinds of relations qualify as friendships for Aristotle, but few qualify as friendships of excellence. In the most general sense, for “those who love mankind” every “human being is a kindred thing and an object of friendship” (1155a21-23). However, not every human is a lasting companion friend whom we can trust. Neither is every friendship of utility involving an intellectual disposition to pursue what is “beneficial” in another. They last so long as the friendship remains instrumentally useful (1156a21-26). Similar in qualifications, friendships of pleasure are an affective disposition most present in young people, they’re quick to form and quick to end if they stop being pleasant (1156a32-36). The third kind of friendship is companion friendships of the good, the most complete and lasting kind of friendship; they grow between people “resembling each other in excellence” (1156b8). They involve the mutual well-wishing of the good for the friend’s sake, in so far as they share an understanding of what is good for one another (1156b9-11). They involve both an affective and intelligible connection with another given that they are simultaneously both useful and pleasant (1158a33). In terms of intelligibility, these companion friendships require time to develop a familiar understanding of one another’s characters (1156a28) to reasonably entrust the other with our love. In terms of affectivity, these friendships ought to be predominantly pleasant and are only considered “friendship in its superior form [when it] resembles one’s love for oneself” (1166b1). If the friend struggles to love themselves, they may instrumentalize the friendship for its utility or pleasure and are bound to wither due to discord on the type of friendship it is. If one friend is exclusively a lover of the other but never the beloved, and the other the beloved but rarely the lover, then there is discord in their interests in the friendship. The lover seeks the good of loving their friend for the sake of their character, while the beloved seeks the pleasure they receive from being doted on by the lover. One of them seeks a friendship of the good, friendship for its own sake, while the beloved seeks the nourishing pleasure of being loved (1157a7-15). Aristotle’s weak relational view necessitates concern and love for the individual in order to enter into healthy and lasting relations. While this self-love is restrained by reason for Aristotle, Rousseau considers that reason engenders individualistic self-interest and ought to be restrained by human’s affective disposition for pity, which I will discuss in coming detail.

 

Aristotle takes our relationships with others as being modeled after our relationship with ourselves (1166a2-3) thus requiring some degree of individualistic concern in order to engage in friendships. If a friend loves in the way a mother loves their child, “without seeking to be loved in return” (1159a30), these friendships will be the longest to last (1166a4-7). The person that loves themselves just as unconditionally, lives with internal harmony. Their image of themselves is in accord with their actions, their desires take into account their whole soul, their reason, perception, and appetites. The self-loving person wishes good for one’s self and pursues in action what they deem to be good, for their own sake and by appeal to reason. In addition, self-love is verified in the will to live and remain safe (1166a14-20). When a person loves themselves they take pleasure in solitude, they find comfort in their memories and hope for their future. They have a lively life of the mind furnished with “a good supply for thoughtful reflection.” A self-loving person has a grounded, honest and self-caring heart that allows itself to share grief and pleasure with itself (1166a23-28). Aristotle takes our relationship with others to reflect the quality of our relationship with ourselves. If we’re decent, and caring with ourselves, we will be decent and caring to our friends. Contrastingly, people who lack self-love “are at odds with themselves” and by extension with their friendships. The different parts of their soul are tugging in different directions, their appetites might desire one thing but their reason wishes for another. They lack self-control and pursue momentary and harmful pleasures over the good. Some stand in the way of what is best for them out of “cowardice or laziness”. While others are riddled with guilt and bury themselves in fear of being seen or grazed by the sunlight. When a person lacks self-love, they’ll find only a state of “depravity” when they’re alone. This loneliness prompts them to instrumentalize their friendships as means of escape from themselves. A guilt and fear-ridden life that people might seek to forget in the company of others to draw away their attention from their marauding thoughts. People of this demeanor aren't friendly with themselves. They make neither room for their joy nor their grief. In their self-criticality they find pleasure in their own pain and pain themselves with guilt at feeling pleasure, “as if tearing the soul apart” (1166b3-25). In failing to be a friend to themselves not only will they cut love out of their being and their being out of Love, but they will also fail to love their friends as ends in themselves rather than means for their escapes from their selves. This kind of self-love is conditioned by and morally restrained by the rational part of the soul. Reason allows the self-lover to overcome the affective impulses of their desires for “money, or honors, or bodily pleasures” (1168b25-30). Reason also allows a self-lover to think of what interests “lies beyond [one’s] self” (1168a34). A good, reasonable, and self-loving person (1168b6) sets their interests aside when acting for the sake of a friend even if the friend is unaware of the act (1168a34-1168b4). As opposed to Rousseau who credits pity as the affective restraint on our unbridled self-interest motivated by reason, Aristotle places reason at the forefront of our moral inclinations towards others (1168b35).

​

Rousseau considers friendships to be the products of a constant “pity fixed on a particular object” (54). Pity is a pre-reflective moral faculty shared by all animals and is an aversion to the pain of other living beings. From this affective inclination of the heart “alone flow all the social virtues” (54). With reason came humanity’s faculty for self-perfection which allowed the individual to co-author their livelihood with or against their circumstances as opposed to being inescapably the product of one’s environment (45). Incidentally, the faculty of perfectibility is also “the source of man’s misfortunes”. The development of reason both created the ailments of humanity and their solutions, their “enlightenment and his errors”, their “vices and his virtues.” This freedom from the balance that nature holds in itself, the harmony that leafs and birds alike take part in, has granted humans the ability to be “a tyrant over himself and nature.” (45). This intelligible capacity rests on an ability for self-reflection that allows humans to develop what Rousseau calls an “unlimited faculty” for perfectibility. It sets humans apart from other animals that Rousseau views as “ingenious machines” caught up in the inescapable currents of nature's design. These machines interact mechanically and in reaction to the causal landscape, whereby “nature alone does everything in the operations of an animal”. Humanity’s free will is a break, a subversion, and a resistance against the natural order. As free and rational agents, humans contribute to their “own operations.” While an ingenious machine is moved by instinct alone. Humans deviate from the rules prescribed to them “by an act of freedom” even if this comes at their own expense (44). Rousseau considers the “mind [to] pervert the senses”, and the will and spirit to be the catalyst for our freedom from a determinate order in nature (45). Alternatively, Aristotle would attribute this aberration from natural and appetitive determinacy to our faculty of reason (1169a2). In humanity’s awareness of the freedom of their spirit trapped in a machine, Rousseau attributes this break from determinacy to “the spirituality of his soul” (45). As the “needs received by peoples from nature” developed in mutual correspondence with people’s desires, their minds also progressed (46). Before this progress, people’s souls were agitated neither by a wanting heart nor an inquisitive mind and were “given over to the single feeling of his own present existence” (46). By considering the state of nature to be antithetical to the state of reason, Rousseau views reason as the unnatural inauguration of human egocentrism. Reason sets humans apart from the affective unity of nature, and becomes a source of unbridled self-interest and the decline of empathy in social relations. Rousseau understands reason in the Platonic sense, as a function that distances an individual from their affective and sensory state, from their troubles, and from collective suffering. The intellect isolates us from the suffering of others, just as a viewer is isolated from the film they watch on a screen, or a reader is safe from the torments of a character in a book. All a person has to do to avoid the natural urge to feel with the friend murdered underneath their window, is “argue with himself a little” to keep them from identifying with the person “being assassinated” (55). The sentiment of pity however, while in decline since humans entered social and intelligent relations, mitigates “in each individual the activity of the love of oneself” and “contributes to the mutual preservation of the entire species” (55). 

​

Why does reason tame one’s self-love for Aristotle and renders it destructively boundless for Rousseau? For Heidegger, being doesn’t emerge from the kind of Roussean human nature of perfectibility, but rather from the struggle of a person to make “their home in the matrix of history” (Newell 776). These particular and dynamic historical worlds, inform the ideological landscape humans create meaning through. The cultural or national heritage of a person, even their own family’s historical struggles shape how individuals construct meaning. In this sense, human nature can neither be universalized as inescapably individualistic by a Roussean universal anthropology of human nature, nor idealized as an end towards which history marches triumphantly. Instead being emerges from independent worlds within which individuals can neither distinguish their compositions nor their ambitions from. Humans cannot be understood apart from others, and this kind of sociality with others is the “condition of possibility for all concrete relationships” including friendships (777). Rousseau’s individualistic logic goes as far as eliminating love and care from the basic instinct of human life. Given that the “notions of merit or beauty” are amiss in the savage person's experience, their heart isn't inclined towards “the sentiments of admiration or love” (50). In humanity’s state of nature, a person is first and foremost concerned with themselves and their preservation. Having hearts “devoid of any sentiment” people hold neither fielty nor affection to the person they procreate with, nor the others that bore them once “they could do without her” (60). Heidegger acknowledges a sort of epidemic of inauthentic, exhaustive, and individualistic everyday life that perforates members of society with the anxiety of living in avoidance of their true and relational natures. By assuming “an appearance of permanence and stability” in both our conceptions of the self and the friends around us, we neglect our indivisible involvement with others, with the dynamic and ever-changing landscape we’ll always fail to entrap or freeze in some still and a-temporal moment (Newell 777). This inactivity, reminiscent of Rousseau’s contention with the unempathetic escapism of reason, “alienated us from others” and given our self’s incorporation of the other in its very composition, it alienated us from ourselves too. Heidegger calls this unsociable and individualistic conception of being, the “they-self”. The “they-self” is consumed with self-interest, loneliness, the fearful urge to conform with the masses, disingenuous and inconsequential communication and relations with others (167). This “illusion of a perfectly self-sufficient, timeless and ongoing present” sedates the human population and treats them under calculative, utilitarian frameworks of “reckoning and balancing claims among egoistic individuals” (Newell 778). Heidegger is in accord with Rousseau that reason has shaped and been morphed by this conception of the still and isolated components of the world, however, unlike Rousseau, he treats it as redeemable. Different cultural and moral frameworks such as Ubuntu moral theories have aimed at incorporating the relational self’s commitment to the communal good (Metz 327), as a challenge to the western capitalist individualism that denies people their sociability. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Citations:
Aristotle, and W. D. Ross. The Nichomachean Ethics. Oxford University Press, 1959.
Heidegger, Martin, et al. Being and Time. Martino Fine Books, 2019.
Hooks, Bell. All About Love: New Visions. William Morrow, an Imprint of HarperCollins 
Publishers, 2022.
Metz, Thaddeus. “Toward an African Moral Theory.” Journal of Political Philosophy, vol. 
15, no. 3, 2007, pp. 321–341., https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9760.2007.00280.x.
Montaigne, Michel Eyquem. “The Complete Essays of Montaigne.” Stanford University
Press , Translated by Donald M. Frame , https://doi.org/10.1515/9780804780773.
Newell, W. R. “Heidegger on Freedom and Community: Some Political Implications of His 
Early Thought.” American Political Science Review, vol. 78, no. 3, 1983, pp. 775–784., 
https://doi.org/10.2307/1961843.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, et al. Basic Political Writings Discourse on the Sciences and the 
Arts, Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men, Discourse on   
Political Economy, on the Social Contract, the State of War. Hackett Publishing 
Company, Inc, 2011.