Had written several posts but couldn't find appropriate time to post it up. However this article really caught my eye, despite the number of my friends discuss the issue of friendship in their blog, think tat i should contribute some idea as well.
One way to construe the question of the value of friendship is in terms of the individual considering whether to be (or continue to be) engaged in a friendship: why should I invest considerable time, energy, and resources in a friend rather than in myself?
Sum claims that friendship is “life enhancing” in that it makes us “feel more alive”—it enhances our activities by intensifying our absorption in them and hence the pleasure we get out of them. Friendship is pleasant in itself as well as useful to the friends, it helps promote self-esteem, which is good both instrumentally and for its own sake.
Living well requires that one know the goodness of one's own life; however, given the perpetual possibility of self-deception, one is able accurately to evaluate one's own life only through friendship, in which one's friend acts as a kind of mirror of one's self. Hence, a flourishing life is possible only through the epistemic access friendship provides.
The sort of shared activity characteristic of friendship is essential to one's being able engage in the sort of activities characteristic of living well “continuously” and “with pleasure and interest”. Such activities include moral and intellectual activities, activities in which it is often difficult to sustain interest without being tempted to act otherwise.
Friendship, and the shared values and shared activities it essentially involves, is needed to reinforce our intellectual and practical understanding of such activities as worthwhile in spite of their difficulty and the ever present possibility that our interest in pursuing them will flag. Consequently, the shared activity of friendship is partly constitutive of human flourishing.
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