At what point do we call something a friendship?

Jul 22, 2025

In a bit of serendipity, philosopher Elizabeth Barnes shared a blog post at the Daily Nous that makes a complementary but also provocative companion to De Cruz's "Friendship with the Ancients": The Personal Value of Conversations Across Serious Disagreement. Reading the Barnes piece alongside De Cruz's article raises some questions about what makes friendship, and particularly philosophical friendship, unique. After thinking the two together a bit, I keep coming back to this question:

"At what point do we call something a friendship?"

In her post, Barnes reflects on her conversations with philosopher Peter Singer and the personal value of that relationship, despite significant points of disagreement. Through four points, Barnes suggests that their conversations, and getting to know Singer, has made her a better thinker, a better philosopher, and a better person.

The first two points for why such a relationship is valuable is pretty easy to grasp:

1. Opponents of a view never give me the best or most charitable version of it
2. People who agree with me are never going to push me the way I need to be pushed

I think most of us would affirm the value of debate in the abstract, and would describe the value of debate with statements of this sort. Having an "opponent" converse in good faith offers a real-world, in-the-wild example of an idea we might strongly disagree with, while also providing authentic opposition to our own ideas that can possibly be provided. People in close agreement with us cannot always provide these things.

3. Bogeymen only exist in my imagination
4. People are surprising and I can be a real jerk

These take a little more unpacking, but in a nutshell: our "opponents" - or those we disagree with - are rarely who (or what) we think they are. Just as we can caricature ideas we disagree with, we can also caricature people who hold or advocate for those ideas, missing their complexity and humanity (and perhaps goodness). We might also miss genuine connections. Or, to put it another way, engaging in real conversation with our opponents humanizes them:

It’s very easy for me to assume that if I disagree with someone on an issue that is extremely morally important to me, I’m thereby a better person than they are. It’s very easy for me to be kind of a judgy asshole. [...] I have been truly humbled by many of the ways in which someone I disagree with so starkly can continually fail to be a cartoon villain.^[1]

What's fascinating to me is that Barnes never uses the words "friend" or "friendship" in her article. Perhaps this is not surprising. Barnes is primarily writing about this relationship as a source of philosophical conversations in which she and her partner significantly disagree. She's describing value that stems from the productive tension of a difficult conversation.

Yet she shares an experience that, I think, led me to just project "friendship" onto what she described. After being diagnosed with Parkinson's but before sharing it beyond her closest friends and family, Barnes told Singer of the diagnosis, who responded with nothing but compassion. And in the post, she isn't quite sure what to make of this opening up to Singer:

I don’t know what it says, exactly, that someone with whom I have such substantial disagreements could also be someone who I can feel completely at ease with on an issue so relevant to our points of disagreement. But I feel like it says something, and I’m glad to have experienced it.

I certainly don't want to categorize what Barnes has described; that's not my place. But her description speaks of a certain comfort that I think many of us associate, indeed, with friendship, and that complements that trusting space of friendship that De Cruz describes.

When does a friendship become a friendship?

De Cruz suggests that philosophical friendships are distinguished in part by the way they provide space for partners to challenge and collaborate with the other without limiting or trampling on the other's independence. The intimacy of these friendships, then, is distinctive and productive. As I've thought about these two pieces together, I've wondered what makes the friendship De Cruz describes different from, say, a trusted conversation partner on shared matters of interest. Or, in Barnes's case, when would an ongoing difficult but productive conversation become a friendship.

Perhaps this doesn't matter. But as I mentioned in my initial post on De Cruz's article , I found one of its weaker points to be its ambiguity regarding the uniqueness of this sort of "friendship" with figures of the past. I also felt that De Cruz did not adequately explore how we deal with those aspects of figures that are not merely disagreeable but are truly morally compromised.

Friendship or not, Barnes's post does not resolve these issues, but I do think it encourages us to think more about what may or may not be distinct to the category of friendship. By extension, then, it helps us think about the type of creative practice De Cruz is suggesting.