Thank you George Foster for this great question!
In order to give you the best answer, it would be wise to turn to people who knew a thing or two about having a good time with their buddies: the ancient Greeks. There is probably no better reference in matters of friendship than Aristotle, who distinguished three kinds of friendship: that of utility, that of pleasure, and that of virtue. And, indeed, quid pro quo – “you scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours” – can be a good basis for the first two of them. But friendships of utility and pleasure are not what we usually look for in true friends.
According to Aristotle, there is nothing wrong with liking people for the benefit they bring. I think my local baker is a nice person, and we often enjoy a short talk whenever I buy a loaf (and it’s really good bread!). But I go to the bakery because I care about what I can get from them. Once they close down the shop or once a better one opens nearby, there is a good chance I will stop being their customer. Friendly relations based on utility are not exactly long-lasting; they are, well, about utility, not about the people involved in them. I could even imagine valuing a relation with a baker whom I found very unpleasant just because the bread was worth it. Quid pro quo can give us a foundation for some form of good relations, but I would not wish anybody to have their best friends be friends of utility.
Similarly, I might enjoy somebody’s company and like to have them around because of the pleasure I get out of it. But if the exchange of pleasures is all that there is to it, I do not see our relation continuing when we get bored of whatever connected us or when we get into an unpleasant argument. There is a reason why many relationships end with the phrase: “It was fun while it lasted.”
Aristotle’s third kind of friendship is a little different. Friends of virtue do not care about what the other brings to the relationship, but about the person for their own sake. This kind of friendship exists among people who just wish their friends well and want to be around them because they see them as good people. There will be benefits and there will definitely be some pleasure, but true friends stay by your side even when you have nothing to give them and when you are no fun to hang out with – you can count on them and they care about you without expecting anything back.
Of course, such friendships do not arise out of nowhere. We often engage with others when we exchange valuable things and share pleasurable moments, but true friendship begins only after several encounters, when we realise that it is the people themselves who occupy our attention, not what they bring to the relationship. After all, whatever value we might get from being around others, “maybe the real treasure was the friends we made along the way”.
What do you think? What do you base your friendships on? Let us know in the comments.
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I did a BA and MA in Philosophy at the University of Warsaw, where I focused on philosophy of technology, hermeneutics and social philosophy with a Marxist slant (which I was suprisingly able to combine in my MA thesis on Gianni Vattimo). I am currently working on a PhD at Dublin City University, where I research self-tracking technologies and practices from the perspective of virtue ethics. My favourite philosophical idea is that our understanding and beliefs change across history and cultures together with material circumstances and the interpretative context – they are ultimately the result of our choices and critiques.