On maximally desirable forms of friendship

(Preliminary caveat: Note in what follows that I'm not really speaking from my philosophical side but rather from my essayistic, Montaigne-cum-Valéry side. This side draws from philosophy, but I certainly wouldn't commit myself to any of this as a philosopher without much more detailed arguments. This is just fun idle speculation. It's also a matter of exploring certain systematic opinions I have that I ought to formulate clearly and defend in some way.)

I've always been attracted to a very specific form of close friendship. It strikes me as the interpersonal pinnacle of sweetness and light. I feel obligated to explain its special value. Perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps there is no special value, and there are better forms that I should seek. Perhaps I am right, but I should have my reasons. Hence the following start of an attempt to justify this idée fixe.

Most people have a dominant vocation. Some lucky people love it deeply, so that it actually merits the full etymological force of the term I'm using. And then most people have an avocation. Few people fail to love their avocation, although it's not terribly uncommon, I guess, for people to fail to be utterly passionate about it. But, insofar as they fail to be wholly fervid about it, that's usually because they've picked the wrong one. One does, after all, engage in an avocation for its own sake and just for the hell of it, just to get it off. One would have to be irrational or psychologically defective if one had the time to pursue it, recognized it as desirable for its own sake, believed it to be highly pleasurable, and yet didn't get passionate about it.

We can abstract away from these little problematic quirks and idealize a bit to see clearly. By and large, it seems true that for each person S, there is a special class of vocations {V_i,S} that S could do better than she could do anything else. Moreover, it seems that, among the V_i,S, there will be one that S enjoys more than the rest. Call this S's haloed vocation, and pick it out by "V*_S". And it seems true that, for each person S, there is a special class of avocations {A_i,S} that S would enjoy more than she'd enjoy any others. Moreover, it seems that, among the A_i,S, there will be one that S can do better than the rest. Call this S's haloed avocation, and pick it out by "A*_S". Say that the ideal active profile for S is the pair (V*_S, A*_S).

I'm inclined to say in an Aristotelian vein that if a rational person can find her ideal active profile and realize it, she will flourish maximally. And so I'd then venture to say that a life in which S realizes this ideal active profile is the good life for S. (Right now, I'd say that mostly because the Aristotelian picture of the good life strikes me as intuitively on the mark, though there are surely things to dispute about it.) This is conditional, however, on everything else going perfectly well in her life. To use the cliched pop-psych way of talking about this, a person can't get to the top of Maslow's hierarchy without having the other tiers in the hierarchy firmly set up. I'll abstract away from this trouble, and presuppose for simplicity's sake that the people I'm talking about have all this background set up for them.

OK. Now I can state the ideal vision of close friendship to which I am attracted. Then I'll have to see whether it's rational to give it the haloed status that I give it. In the form of close friendship that I find most desirable, there are two people S₁ and S₂ who have ideal active profiles (V*_S1, A*_S1) and (V*_S2, A*_S2), where V*_S1 = A*_S2 and A*_S1 = V*_S2. In more causal words, S₁'s haloed vocation is S₂'s haloed avocation, and S₂'s haloed vocation is S₁'s haloed avocation. Call this form of friendship the Aristotelian Jigsaw. There's something extraordinarily beautiful about the Aristotelian Jigsaw. It seems perfect to me.

Why? Although I may be wrong that there is no better form of intimate friendship, it does strike me that there is a lot that speaks in favor of the Jigsaw. I'll get at this slowly, since this is the first time I've tried to justify my opinion on this score.

Assume what seems inevitable from the way I've set things up -- viz., that a person S is exercising her faculties in the way that is simultaneously best for her and good for the world when she engages in her haloed vocation, and hence is flourishing. Now suppose some other person S* comes along who naturally finds S's haloed vocation the most enjoyable of all pastimes. Moreover, among the pastimes that S* finds highly enjoyable, this is one that S* can do best, though it's not her vocation.

The most genuine form of love, I think, is unconditional desire for another person's flourishing. If one person is just naturally disposed to find what makes another person flourish pleasurable and desirable, and, indeed, seeks what makes the other person flourish as a hobby that she does just because she finds it wonderful and can also do it pretty well, then the first person is in a perfect position to have the most genuine form of love for the other person. The form of friendship that I've envisaged is one in which this is a mutual thing. In the Jigsaw, two people are just naturally disposed to find the things that make each other flourish highly enjoyable as pastimes, and they are both good enough at these respective things that they can share them in a deep way. Hence, the form of friendship I've sketched is one in which it is maximally easy for people to have the most genuine form of love for each other. That's a pretty big consideration that speaks in favor of the Jigsaw.

And so there seems to be a Kantian kind of argument for the desirability of the Jigsaw. Kant's formula of humanity says that one should treat all persons never merely as a means, but always as ends. Two people in a Jigsaw are just naturally disposed to enjoy and to participate in what respectively makes them the people that they are -- i.e., what makes them flourish. As a result, it's just a cakewalk for two people who share a Jigsaw to satisfy the formula of humanity with respect to each other. They don't have to think about it: it just naturally falls out of the way they're set up.

Now, one might wonder why the best form of friendship isn't instead one in which two people share the same haloed vocation and the same avocations. In this competing form of friendship, we have (V*_S1, A*_S1) and (V*_S2, A*_S2), where V*_S1 = V*_S2 and A*_S1 = A*_S2. In other words, the ideal active profiles of two people here are just identical. Call this form of friendship Profile Identity. Why prefer the Aristotelian Jigsaw to Profile Identity?

I concede that Profile Identity is highly desirable. It would be crazy to deny that. We should want some cases of Profile Identity in our life. Phrased quite casually, we should want colleagues who have similar pastimes. But I'm still more attracted to the Jigsaw. And there are reasons.

The same kind of large-scale consideration that we used to support the Jigsaw does not seem to support Profile Identity.

Suppose A and B form a case of Profile Identity. A and B wouldn't desire to hear about each other's professions primarily because they think it would be enjoyable. They would rather primarily want to hear about each other's professions because, well, they're the same. They'd be engaging in "shop talk" with each other. Of course, because their jobs are their haloed vocations, it would certainly be pleasant to do this. But they wouldn't really be learning anything new. And they wouldn't be interested in hearing about what they did at work just for fun, just for the hell of it. If they'd be deeply interested, it would be because they're going to set forth in solving a vocational problem together, in getting some shared work done.

Now, of course, A and B also share the same avocations. And it is certainly nice to be with someone who wants to do the same things for fun. Again, I don't deny that this lends value to Profile Identity. But what's missing in Profile Identity is nontrivial, and it's present in the Jigsaw. People who share an Aristotelian Jigsaw want to hear about each other's haloed vocations just for fun, and are competent enough to be able to discuss them in a quite serious way. People in a Jigsaw value each other's flourishing in a way that people who share Profile Identity don't, and simply enjoy seeing and participating in each other's flourishing as an end in itself. This is a deeper and more substantial kind of interaction, one in which two people are profoundly affirming each other's foundations just for the hell of it, because that's naturally what they want to do. That is missing from Profile Identity.

Is there anything important missing from the Jigsaw that Profile Identity offers? I don't see anything. Sharing similar foundational commitments and similar hobbies is good. But when your hobby is to promote someone else's foundational commitments for the hell of it and vice versa, you're going to end up getting a lot more out of your friendship and your life. You'll enter into your job with renewed confidence and vigor, and you'll be inspired by the wonder that this other person has for what you do. At the same time, you'll be learning a lot from this person about something you do well that you just want to do for the hell of it. In doing so, you'll be promoting that person's foundational commitments. Everything that was really good about Profile Identity is present in the Jigsaw, and there's more in there, too.

I can set this in an older context to highlight the advantages of Jigsaws and to clarify why they're better than both Profile Identity and other, simpler forms of friendship.

Aristotle recognized three forms of friendship -- friendships of utility, pleasure, and virtue. In the first, the friendship exists just for achieving some extrinsically worthwhile, temporary aim. It is not going to last very long at all. Other things being equal, it will be over when the aim is achieved. In the second, the friendship exists for the sake of getting it off. It will last as long as it's still easy and desirable to get it off, which may not be long at all. In the last form, the friendship exists for promoting virtue. This friendship will last insofar as the friends continue to give a damn about virtue -- insofar, that is, as they're substantively rational and so give a damn about flourishing and the promotion of intrinsic value. This form was, by Aristotle's lights, the best.

I like this idea. But Aristotle oversimplified things. He missed out on more complicated possibilities. What if your pleasure is the other person's virtue, and your virtue is the other person's pleasure? That's my Jigsaw. It has all the pleasant advantages of Aristotle's second type, all the moral advantages of the third, and the two reinforce each other and keep each other afloat indefinitely. Profile Identity, on the other hand, is just the mere sum of the second and third types. They both exist, but they don't reinforce each other. In this case, the pleasures of hobby might dissipate and linking of avocations might be cut, leaving only the promotion of virtue as the shared thing. But with the Jigsaw, there is a feedback loop. And what was dangerous about the pure friendship of pleasure has been avoided. And what seemed just a bit too stolidly moral and perhaps prissy about the pure friendship of virtue has also been shirked. The two are bound, not simply set side by side.

We could go on and point out the more obvious advantages of the Jigsaw -- e.g., the respects in which it is better than obviously inferior, simpler forms of friendship, or relationships that don't even amount to friendship. Since these things are obvious, I'll ignore them. The considerations we've so far set up at least start to make clear why Jigsaws are better than the only other forms of friendship that seemed good enough to compete -- viz., Profile Identity, the pure link of pleasure, and the pure link of virtue.

I should concede that even more complex possibilities are imaginable. I've oversimplified things just as much as Aristotle did. While it's true that people can be correctly represented as having haloed vocations and avocations, there's a lot more to people than this. There are many more minor avocations that people might share. And I'm perfectly willing to grant that a friendship in which there is not just a Jigsaw, but also a sharing of these further more minor avocations is better than a pure Jigsaw. This isn't incompatible with anything I've said. It just shows that we should generalize the Jigsaw a bit.

So, I'd say that if two people form a Jigsaw and share a bunch of more minor avocations, they're better suited to be deep, avid, intimate friends than people who just form a Jigsaw but otherwise diverge. I guess we can imagine beings that are much more cognitively talented and long-lived than us who can have several near-haloed vocations to which they can devote themselves equally. These better beings might then form even more complex Jigsaws. Suppose that one of them devotes himself to near-haloed vocations V_i,S and avocations A­_i,S. And suppose that another of them has near-haloed V_i,S* avocations A_i,S*. If each V_i,S = A_i,S* and V_i,S* = A_i,S, then we'd have an even more complex and preferable Jigsaw. But that, of course, is probably only possible and desirable for such sophisticated beings. Humans only have time and mental capacity for one or two near-haloed vocations and a fair but still smallish number of near-haloed avocations and minor avocations. So, we here have a case in which idealizing too much won't have any practical relevance.

In practical life, what should one look for? Well, I think we all have to first figure out what our haloed vocations and avocations are. One hard thing in life is just getting this straight. Another, even harder thing is finding jobs that allow us to pursue our haloed vocations and that leave enough free time to allow us to pursue our haloed avocations. Most people don't even get that far. But, to the extent that it can be achieved, we should then look for Jigsaws. They're awfully rare. We have to protect them when we find them, and pursue them as avidly as we can. (And, for heaven's sake, don't express too much avidity initially, which scares people away!) They will offer us something truly amazing, something that is the pinnacle of both pleasure and virtue, something deeply affirming in a Kantian way and thickly pleasurable in a straightforwardly utilitarian way. And, to be sure, we should look for other good but less haloed friendships. A given person will only have enough time and energy for one or two Jigsaws in a given stretch of his life. He should also look for cases of Profile Identity, and for plain and simple friendships of pleasure and virtue.

That, then, is a deep belief of mine. I'm probably missing out on something even subtler and better, but I've at least hit on some preliminary arguments for something that we really ought to desire very strongly, and value enormously.