Friends may have succeeded where many philosophers have failed
Matthew Perry, who starred Chandler Bing in the hit series Friends. Without taking anything away from the actors involved, the success of the show had a lot more to do with the subject matter of the sitcom than with the talents of the cast.
The recent death of Matthew Perry has resonated with millions of people, of different generations, across the entire world.
The intergenerational and international grieving for the death of this actor is a curious phenomenon that cannot be explained merely in terms of his thespian talents or sense of humour.
Matthew Perry was of course a fine actor, and a fine comedian, but certainly not the greatest of all time; he would have been the first to admit it.
This global trend of sorrowful mourning defies simplistic explanations.
With the passing away of Matthew Perry, we are faced with the death of the first of the sextet that made up , and for many, it felt as if a close friend had died.
Without taking anything away from the actors involved, the success of the show had a lot more to do with the subject matter of the sitcom than with the talents of the cast. was a hymn to friendship.
Starting in 1994 for half an hour each week our television screens projected the shadow of the ideal, abstract, perfect Platonic Form of ‘friendship’ that millions of people longed for, aspired to, and desperately craved.
The competitive spirit of modernity fosters a friendless society.
The fact that the six young people in the show were living in spacious accommodations in Manhattan that 99.9% of the viewers of the show would never be able to afford did not seem to detract from its appeal.
People watched the programme to immerse themselves in that dreamlike, intangible but still highly desirable human connection defined by the perfect friendship.
may have succeeded where many philosophers have failed. For centuries philosophers have tried to capture the essence of friendship.
Even Plato and Aristotle struggled to give a precise definition of this elemental human condition.
Plato said that the closest we can get to a proper understanding of friendship is via love, and he defined love as the desire for things that one lacks.
That’s not entirely convincing, although it may go some way towards explaining the spectacular success of : perhaps people were attracted by the friendship between Rachel, Phoebe, Ross, Monica, Joey, and Chandler precisely because they did not experience a friendship as pure as theirs.
The Roman philosopher Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BC) wrote an important philosophical treatise on friendship, which may bear on the question of friendship and its intrinsic value.
To paraphrase Cicero, we don’t go to the theatre merely to see a play, or to the stadium to watch a game, or to an art gallery to be aesthetically stimulated; we do these things also for the sake of sharing the moment with others.
I suspect many will resist Cicero’s proclamation, proudly claiming that they go bowling alone, that they read books alone, and they enjoy seeing a beautiful sunset before going out to a restaurant alone.
That may well be true, and yet somehow my social media feeds are full of photos of what people ate at the restaurant the night before, of the sunset they saw before going to the restaurant, of the book they read before sunset, and of their bowling score before they sat down to read their book before sunset and before dinner.
Perhaps we are compelled to share more than we realise; perhaps Cicero already understood this 2000 years ago.
When Cicero says that life without friends is simply not worth living, he is alluding to an alternative to Socrates’ famous dictum that “the unexamined life is not worth living”.
Socrates was right, but only as long as we examine life together, not in isolation.
Cicero also makes another claim about friendship that is often overlooked, in part because the author’s intentions in writing this line remain to this day mysterious: “Friendship shines the light of hope into the future”.
What I suspect he means here is that a shared future is the prerequisite of hope.
Where there is no friendship there is no sense of community, and where there is no community there is no hope.
The untimely death of a middle-aged actor is heartbreaking but insignificant compared to the slaughter of innocent people taking place today in Ukraine, Israel, Palestine, Sudan, and many other corners of the world.
And yet there is a connection.
When we lose a friend, we lose a part of ourselves, and perhaps we lose a bit of hope as well.
There is only one way to respond to the present unfolding tragedy: the world needs more friendship; more hope; more life. And yes, more laughter.
Dr Vittorio Bufacchi is senior lecturer in philosophy at University College Cork. He is the author of Why Cicero Matters (Bloomsbury 2023).
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