Get Your Smart On
Friendship allows for shared standpoints, and gives us access to new insights about ourselves, others, and the world that expands our horizons, and our hearts.
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“Friendship is a close relationship in which trust, intimacy, and disclosure open up for us whole standpoints other than our own.” (Friedman, 198)
In this post, I would like to continue working through Marylin Friedman’s What Are Friends For? in the same way as before: presenting a quote and then riffing-off of that quote. This time around, we are focused on friendship as a way of knowing, as opening up “standpoints other than our own.” In feminist epistemology, a standpoint is a perspective grounded in socially situated, lived experiences. As situated knowledge — rather than abstract, disembodied knowledge — standpoints provide unique and valuable insights into how what is known is known. Friendship allows for shared standpoints, and gives us access to new insights about ourselves, others, and the world that expands our horizons, and our hearts.
*“Among friends, there is generally a mutual sharing of stories about past and present experiences. Friendship enables us to come to know the experiences and perspectives of our friends from their own points of view. So long as our friends confide their experiences authentically, sensitively, and insightfully, we can gain knowledge of lives lived in accord with moral rules and values that differ from our own.” (*Friedman, 197)
Empathy makes it possible to see things through our friend’s perspective, as if it were our own experience. A friend tells me about being wronged, I’m absorbed into her viewpoint as I listen deeply. I may feel outraged for her, offering epistemic validation. In some cases, she may be processing the event with me, and not yet be able to be outraged, or be able to see herself as a victim. I would go so far as to say that I may feel for my friend — literally in her stead — things that she may not yet be able to feel, helping her eventually come to terms with her own feelings.
Our individuality dissolves into a joint or shared subjective experience. Through empathy, this shared viewpoint is affectively indistinguishable from our own, and we may say that our friend’s standpoint becomes available to us. The closer we are, the closer we may feel to that experience, but we can do this, to some extent, even with new or more casual friends.
A lack of friends may lead us to become more self-involved, and we may fail to develop the empathy we need to be in community. From this perspective, maintaining the boundaries of our individuality could be a failure of empathy, an erosion of our shared humanity. At the same time, common garden-variety friendships can help us restore and augment the good in being human.
Friendship doesn’t just help us understand others—it also helps us understand ourselves. Say I’m acting grumpy and it is obvious to my friend that I am in a bad mood. She asks me about it, and I stop and reflect on why I’m in a bad mood, and I’m prompted to reflect on my feelings. This is really very common, that we can’t see ourselves and how we are showing up in the world unless someone is there to prompt us to think about it. This dynamic reveals how friendship expands our self-awareness and encourages self-reflection.
As I have mentioned in the previous piece, friendship provides a different model for the problem of intersubjectivity — the speculative account, in Continental Philosophy, of a primordial encounter with an Other that inaugurates the subject. In this literature, the encounter is always characterized in agonistic terms, as a duel for recognition or a challenge to our own sense of ourselves. I believe that our human instinct bends towards friendship and the desire to build trust.
In friendship, we can come to know things that we might never have come to know, and from a friends’ particular standpoint. In so doing, we extend the base of our knowledge. We are very limited beings, and are only able to take in and process so much. We need our friends to help us round-out our experiences, and even expand our sense of reality. On occasion, our friends may surprise or challenge us to see things quite differently. If the friendship is strong, and built to support differences, it is one of very few ways we have to change hearts and minds.
Typically, we choose our friends from a set of acquaintances who are very much like us in terms of class, age, race, nationality, etc. But if we take friendship as a tool to expand our humanity, we could choose to make friends with those who are not like us in socially significant ways. Becoming intentional with who we choose to befriend, we can safely test our ideas, broaden our perspectives, and develop greater empathy. We can become stronger, while fostering greater social awareness and solidarity.
I’ve mentioned before that friendships can succeed in reaching those who may have fallen down a conspiratorial rabbit hole, or gotten mixed up in a cultish high-demand organization. But we are just as likely to be misled under the right conditions. Especially when we are young and haven’t fully developed sound judgement, we can fall into the wrong crowd and join a friend group or a relationship that is harmful to ourselves and others. At this stage of life, the push of friends and the pull of family helps to balance this out. It is important to learn how to make friends that will help us become better versions of who we can become, while there is a counterbalance. But of course, we can all be misled and conned, a built in human vulnerability that is also the condition for our greatest strength — the ability to be open to others.
“Most notably, voluntary friendship has the potential to support unconventional values and deviant lives, themselves a source of needed change in our imperfect social practices” (Friedman, 217)
The word “deviant” stands out here. I believe Friedman uses it to mean “deviation from the norm” rather than in any negative sense. She’s also referring to queerness—lives and identities that defy traditional social expectations. When family structures or social norms become hostile, friends can offer crucial support. They can help us become who we truly want to be and inspire us to create a world where we can thrive. Family often holds a fixed idea of who we are—one shaped by long histories and entrenched roles that may feel frozen in time. As we grow, our experiences may diverge from those of our family members, which can lead to conflict or feelings of constraint. In contrast, friends often meet us as we are now—supporting the person we’re becoming rather than clinging to a version of us rooted in the past. They can offer a perspective that feels more true to our evolving sense of self.
“But besides the traditions for critical thought, we also need practices that can inspire people, when necessary, to unconventional or disloyal action.… Friendships can support unconventional values, deviant life-styles, and other forms of disruption of social traditions. The voluntariness of friendship permits friends to evolve idiosyncratic values and lifestyles or to find others who support and affirm the idiosyncratic values and life-styles that they have already evolved. As the political theorist Horst Hutter has written, ‘Every friendship is... a potential culture in miniature and also a potential counterculture’.” (Friedman, 219)
Friedman here makes her argument for friendship as the basis for support for LGBT lives, and I have no doubt that this was her experience. Hers was a generation when young boys and girls where regularly kicked out of their homes and hometowns for bucking gender and sexuality norms. They would often make their way to cities, in search for their kin, and end up on the streets or adopted by elders. There is some interesting work on an all-gay youth “gang” in the history of San Francisco — alternative kinship structures born of necessity and solidarity. The Street Orphans, for example, were a group of lesbian youths based in San Francisco's Tenderloin district. They actively participated in the Compton's Cafeteria Riot of 1966, a pivotal event in LGBTQ+ history. In *Families We Choose, *Kath Weston documents how LGBTQ+ individuals often create “families we choose” to fulfill emotional and social needs unmet by traditional family structures. Friendship-based-kinship is an anchor for manifold forms of life and knowledges. It is an antidote to homogeneity, and a building block for counter-culture movements that build on tradition in counter-patterns.
“As mentioned earlier, friendship largely lacks the crusty rigidity of such formalized institutions as kinship.… Through shared affection and mutual support, which contribute to self-esteem, friendship enables the cultural survival of people who deviate from social norms and who suffer hostility and ostracism from others for their deviance."
The evolution of distinctive values and pursuits may lead friends to shared perspectives that generate disloyalties to existing social institutions. This gives friendship disruptive possibilities within society at large.” (Friedman, 219)
Some of us may no longer have a working family structure, or any family or family support to speak of. We may be socially alienated, for whatever reasons. Speaking specifically to people in the U.S. (and this may apply to others as well, you be the judge), our institutions are optimized to promote the interests of a very small minority, which means the majority of us are labouring under hostile conditions. Imagine you are seven feet tall in a world made for people who are four-feet on average — like that, but with additional blame for being too tall for the world.
Nuclear families, and the nation state for which they are an anchor, are conservative institutions — with few exceptions, their job is to provide continuity with traditions like patriarchy and colonialism, to continue the status quo. It is where gender norms are inculcated and enforced, as with many other cultural norms and traditions. As an institution, the family is a homogenizing force. Friendships and politicized associations are the antidote to homogenizing forces like these. But friendships are currently “toothless.” If we were to give them some energy, take them up intentionally as a anti-hegemony tool, and use the laws that do exist to create kinship-like bonds, I believe we can create communities that are not family-based or state serving.
J.P. Hill recently wrote a piece asking “Who radicalized you?” Friends radicalized me. Even if I had not experienced being an outsider as a 11-year-old immigrant, I may not have interpreted them as I have, as not moral faults with me, but as the workings of a system that is working exactly as intended. My outsider experience, I now recognize, could have just as easily pushed me in a more MAGA direction. So it wasn’t a particular experience, even though that is what J.P. Hill’s question is after. Experience in and of itself isn’t knowledge, but requires interpretation. The interpretation I gave my experiences are because of where I come from and the friends I have been able to cultivate.
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Foucault, Michel. “Friendship as a Way of Life.” Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, edited by Paul Rabinow, translated by Robert Hurley and others, New Press, 1997, pp. 135–140.
Friedman, Marilyn A., What Are Friends For? Feminist Perspectives on Personal Relationships and Moral Theory, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1993.
Hutter, Horst. Politics as Friendship (Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1978)
Marcus, Sharon. Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England. Princeton University Press, 2007.
Weston, Kath. Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship. Columbia University Press, 1991.