Friendship is a concept that everyone thinks about and is a practice that everyone is involved with one way or another.  But, like love, for example, the concept (and its associated practice) is notoriously difficult to define and explain.  When people involved in a relationship have differing expectations, because they have differing understandings of the concept of friendship, bad things can happen.  Thus, the need for some clarity regarding the meaning of friendship.  Vernon acknowledges the difficulty of defining friendship when he says, “it seems that it is not possible to say unequivocally what friendship is” (7).  He attributes this difficulty to the diverse application and ambiguity of the concept.  So Vernon aims, as he says, “not to try to produce a comprehensive definition or theory of friendship.  Rather, the value of asking about friendship lies in the asking, not necessarily in coming to any incontestable conclusions” (9).

Vernon is a philosopher and The Meaning of Friendship approaches the question of friendship from the best of what the philosophical tradition has to offer.  He believes, “[p]hilosophy is frequently overlooked as a resource for thinking through friendship in this way” (9).  He invokes insights form Aristotle, Augustine, Bacon, Bentham, Camus, Cavell, Cicero, Emerson, Foucault, Hume, Kant, Marx, Mill, Murdoch, Nietzsche, Plato, and others.  This book is by no means a philosophical treatise.  It is intended for a general reading audience.  The Meaning of Friendship is a revised edition of the 2005 The Philosophy of Friendship, though there is no indication in the book of just what has been revised.  The 279-page book consists of ten chapters, including an introduction and index.  The book is organized thematically.  “Each chapter looks at key ambiguities that may exist in any friendship….” (10).  Chapter topics include friendships at the workplace, white lies among friends, sex and friendship, online friendships, the role of unconditional love in friendship, political meanings of friendship, friendship in the context of feminist and gay thought, spirituality and friendship, and friendship and the self-help movement.

Visitors to the Metapsychology site might find the last chapter, “Friendship Beyond Self-Help,” of particular interest as Vernon provocatively claims, “when it comes to friendship, the broad characteristics of the self-help tradition may be doing us a profound disservice” (242).  As a philosopher myself, I find Vernon’s attempt to distance philosophy, no matter how practically helpful it might be, from what he calls the self-help movement admirable.  According to Vernon, the problem with self-help books on friendship is that they presuppose the centrality of the help-seeker.  As he puts it, “by placing yourself at the center of the universe, as self-help almost invariably does, it treats everyone else in the universe as bit players in the story of your life” (242-3).  It turns friends into “service providers” (243).  If one accepts the insight common to so many thinkers, from Aristotle to religious leaders, that life’s meaning is found not in a self-regarding attitude, but in an other-regarding attitude, then one can easily see that the basic assumption of self-help, to be self attentive, is actually the crux of the problem. 

Even more interesting to me is Vernon’s claim that “doing philosophy and becoming friends are one and the same thing” (256).  This thought had not occurred to me.  Vernon sees this as an important current in western philosophy beginning with Socrates.  For Socrates philosophy meant helping people to become self-aware.  But this is what friends do for one another.  To do philosophy is to make friends and to have friends requires being philosophical with one another.  These are rigorous demands.  The result is that meaningful philosophy, like meaningful friendships are rare indeed.

This book has an exasperating number of misspelled words, grammatical gaffes, and other assorted typographical errors.  The author chose not to use footnotes or endnotes, possibly intended for ease of reading, but the references section at the end of the book is not at all thorough.  The sources of some quotations are identified, some are not.  There are a number of long block quotations in the text, for example, that are unattributed.  In the text itself there are sentences that seem to be quotations, but are not clearly identified as such.  These sorts of editing problems will be as annoying to the general reading audience as it will be to the scholarly audience.  That said The Meaning of Friendship is an intelligent discussion of the difficult concept of friendship.  There is much here that a general audience will find useful and interesting.

© 2010 Ben Mulvey

Ben Mulvey, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the College of Arts and Sciences of Nova Southeastern University.  He received his doctorate in philosophy from Michigan State University specializing in political theory and applied ethics.  He teaches philosophy at NSU and is a member of the board of advisors of the Florida Bioethics Network.