Being Born, Being Alone, and the Possibility of Friendship
What amazes me about friendship is that we seem to need it long before we understand what it is. I have been thinking about this lately because of my daughter. For some time, she was our only child. Of course, we played with her. We spent time with her, talked with her, and gave her our attention. However, there is something about the companionship of another child that parents cannot quite provide. The joy children find in one another is different. It is not about having someone around. It is about having someone with whom to play, discover, laugh, argue, imagine, and simply be.
Recently, she became an older sister. What has amazed me is how excited she has been. One might expect that she would become jealous knowing that attention might now be divided. Perhaps that will come later. She is still young, and perhaps she does not yet understand what the arrival of another child might mean for her place in the family. However, for now, what I see is happiness. She seems to have entered a new world.
For a child who has, in some sense, lived alone as the only child, the arrival of another being has opened up a new possibility of companionship. She now has someone with whom she can eventually play. The younger one is still discovering the world and has yet to discover who her sister is. However, that discovery will come. There is something beautiful about watching this happen. It reminds me that friendship begins before we fully understand one another.
Aristotle understood something important about friendship. In the Nicomachean Ethics, he treats friendship as much more than an optional addition to a good life. Friendship belongs to the conditions that make human flourishing possible. His discussion of philia includes relationships of family, companionship, pleasure, usefulness, and virtue, but what remains important throughout is that human beings are drawn into a shared life with others. Perhaps this is what I see on my daughter’s face.
She is not thinking about friendship philosophically. She is simply happy that another person has entered her world. And perhaps this is one of the things we lose as we grow older. I am reminded of that familiar line from the song by Alan Jackson, “The older I get, the fewer friends I have.” There is something painfully true about it. As adults, friendship becomes much more complicated. It is not always easy to make friends, and it can be even harder to develop the kind of friendship in which people can genuinely talk to one another, disagree, listen, and remain connected.
We grow older, but somehow our world can become smaller. We become more careful about whom we let in, more conscious of what people believe, where they stand, what they represent, and whether they belong with us. Perhaps we gain wisdom with age, but perhaps we also lose some of the openness that made friendship so natural when we were children. We are born into relationships, but somehow we can become significantly alone. Perhaps this is also why people increasingly turn to chatbots as companions. When genuine human companionship becomes difficult to find, we look for somewhere to place our thoughts, feelings, questions, and fears. However, the difficulty of finding friendship does not mean that friendship has ceased to exist.
Maybe we have something to learn from the way children make friends. Children can meet one another and play. They do not necessarily begin by asking what the other person believes, what political position they hold, what school of thought they belong to, or who their people are. They play. They laugh. They enjoy one another. They encounter one another before they have fully learned to organize the world into categories of belonging and exclusion. There is something deeply human about that.
Of course, adulthood requires a different kind of responsibility. We cannot simply live as children do. However, somewhere along the way, perhaps we lose something important. We become increasingly conscious of where we belong and where others belong. We begin to divide the world into us and them. We hold people accountable not only for what they do but sometimes for a statement, a position, an association, or even the people with whom they choose to engage. I see this particularly in academia. It is striking to me how easily intellectual disagreement can become personal separation. A professor takes a particular position, and someone who holds a different position is treated not merely as intellectually mistaken but as someone to be avoided.
Sometimes this goes even further. Students or mentees are encouraged, directly or indirectly, to avoid working with certain scholars because of the positions those scholars hold. People begin policing one another's relationships, citations, collaborations, and associations. I have even encountered the logic in its most absurd form. You cannot cite X because X believes P. But why? If X makes a compelling argument, why should X's other beliefs automatically invalidate that particular argument? Why should intellectual engagement require total agreement with another person's worldview?
We have, I think, confused disagreement with hostility and intellectual difference with moral deficiency. Someone can hold a position with which I profoundly disagree and still be someone I can learn from. Someone can challenge my assumptions and still be someone I respect. Someone can even be wrong, at least from my perspective, and still be worthy of friendship. The opposite of conviviality is not disagreement. It is the inability to live with difference.
This is where Ivan Illich’s idea of conviviality becomes useful to me. For Illich, conviviality is not about being friendly or getting along. It concerns forms of human life that allow people to exercise their autonomy and creativity in relation to others rather than being dominated by systems and structures. His Tools for Conviviality offers a way of thinking about how human beings might live together without allowing institutions and technologies to overwhelm human agency. I think there is something here for scholarship. A university should not just be a place where knowledge is produced. It should also be a place where people encounter one another through knowledge. And encounter requires difference.
This is where Francis Nyamnjoh’s work on conviviality becomes particularly interesting to me. Nyamnjoh connects conviviality to the idea of human incompleteness. We do not possess everything. We do not know everything. We are incomplete. And precisely because we are incomplete, the other can become a source of possibility rather than a threat. Conviviality creates the possibility of reaching toward others and encountering what we do not possess ourselves. This seems profoundly important for academic life. What if the person who disagrees with me is not a threat to my intellectual identity? What if their incompleteness reveals my own? What if intellectual difference is not something to eliminate but something that makes genuine scholarship possible?
This does not mean that every idea deserves acceptance. It does not mean that every position is equally defensible. It does not mean that we should abandon our convictions. It means that disagreement does not have to end the relationship. What saddens me is that we sometimes seem to be moving in the opposite direction. We cancel one another because X holds P, while Y believes that holding P damages everything Y believes to be true. We build intellectual and social walls around ourselves and then wonder why genuine friendship has become so difficult. Perhaps I am asking too much of academia.
Perhaps I am expecting the university to be a place of joy, friendship, and even something like ecstasy, as bell hooks invites us to imagine education. However, I do think there is something worth recovering. Maybe we need to learn again from children, not to become childish, but to recover something that adulthood has made us forget. We need the ability to encounter another person before deciding what that person means to us. To play. To listen. To disagree without destroying. To remain curious about the person who thinks differently. To recognize that another person’s difference does not make them less human or less deserving of our respect.
My daughter may not understand any of this. She is simply happy that there is another little person in her world. However, watching her reminds me that perhaps companionship begins with something very simple. It begins with the willingness to make room for another being. And perhaps that is what friendship asks of us too. Not agreement. Not sameness. Not the absence of disagreement. But the courage to remain together despite our differences. This is why I have continued to think about what I call conviviality scholarship. I do not mean scholarship without disagreement. I mean scholarship that makes disagreement possible without making relationship impossible.
I mean a way of doing intellectual life in which we can encounter people whose ideas challenge our own, learn from them without surrendering our convictions, and remain in conversation without immediately turning difference into hostility. Aristotle reminds us that friendship is not peripheral to human flourishing. Illich reminds us that conviviality concerns how human beings live and act together without surrendering their autonomy. Nyamnjoh reminds us that our incompleteness can become an invitation to encounter rather than a reason to close ourselves off from others. Perhaps the university needs more of this.
Perhaps scholarship needs more friendship. Perhaps we need more spaces where intellectual life is not built around the fear of contamination by difference, but around the possibility of encounter. We do not have to abandon our convictions. However, perhaps we can stop treating our convictions as walls. Perhaps, like children, we can learn to meet one another again.
