De Cruz's *Friendship with the Ancients*

Jul 16, 2025

A recent post at digressionsimpressions led me to a wonderful paper by philosopher Helen De Cruz entitled "Friendship with the Ancients." ^[1] I enjoyed it immediately and intended to write about it right away. But every time I sat down to write - indeed, every time I thought about the piece - I found my feelings about it changing and difficult to pin down. One post became one very long post, which became sketches of a thousand posts, which then made me think that I was probably overthinking this blogging thing and that I should just dive in.

⊕ This idea of thinking in public is part of why I started this blog and site -- but it is harder to do sometimes than one might expect!

So this is my effort to do that: to think less about working out all the kinks, and instead use this as a place to think in public.

In the article, De Cruz argues for friendship with thinkers of the past as a creative practice that can cultivate epistemic humility and relational understanding. She uses a number of famous historical examples that model this sort of friendship including Du Bois, Mengzi, and Machiavelli. Her opening vignette, for instance, uses Du Bois's famous closing paragraph of "Of the Training of Black Men" from The Souls of Black Folk:

I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out the caves of evening that swing between the strong-limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil.

Examples such as these model the practice, which she defines as follows:

Friendship with the ancients: The set of creative practices and engagements with works of deceased authors that allows us to imagine them as friends and to enter into a parasocial relationship with them.

This practice, De Cruz suggests, is a "species of philosophical friendship," of the same sort that two living friends may have -- but in this case, the friendship is between one who lives and one who does not. For De Cruz, such friendships operate upon principles of "epistemic partiality," which really just means the trust and the slack that friends extend to each other beyond that which they might extend to others. In philosophical friendships, we extend a certain liberty and trust to friends that we do not always offer to strangers or those perceived as opponents.

This "letting others be" relieves some of the pressures of ego and self-consciousness, and De Cruz argues that the space provided by such friendships ultimately makes us better learners and thinkers:

The (at least prima facie justified) background assumption of heightened trust not only helps us to learn more from our friends, but also to reason better with them. We’re not merely biased to believe our philosophical friends; we also take their criticisms more seriously. We value criticisms of friends more, because we know such criticisms aren’t motivated by ulterior motives such as trying to get the better of us. We reasonably expect that our friends have our best interests at heart and that their objections are aimed at helping us see more truth, or to improve some lacunae in our reasoning.

Friendship redraws the boundaries and character of social relationships, creating a space where we are may be more honest with each other while simultaneously being more understanding of each other's differences. We assume the best of our friends, including in their intentions toward us.

Friendships function differently from other relationships and social interactions, such as our daily interactions with strangers, the relationship we have with our superiors in the workplace, or those with whom we transact business. And insofar as they function differently, with a different set of rules and assumptions and expectations, they allow us the space to function differently.

If they didn't, they wouldn't be friendships.

The examples De Cruz draws on all suggest that this sort of friendship provides space away from the immediate troubles of the moment, including hardships particular to their lived experience, a space without judgment or shame.

De Cruz suggests that friendship with the ancients involves a different set of practices than mere admiration or emulation (p. 10). But here, for me, the article stumbles a bit, as it's not especially clear what marks this as different from how we would generally approach thinkers of the past. It is hard for me to discern what is unique here.

One difference, she suggests, is that we must try to achieve a fuller understanding of the person's thought, including who they were and the time they lived in. We might read "testimonial encounters"

To engage these texts skillfully, we must, as Mengzi put it, examine the era of their authors, to understand what kind of people they were. We should not use the ancients as sock puppets that we can ventriloquize at will to say what we ourselves believe. We must seek to understand what they believed. Mengzi already starts out with an attitude of admiration and respect for the sage kings, much like we admire and respect our living friends. This mode of understanding is not neutral, but epistemically partial in the way friendship affords.

I think she is honing in on this as one of the distinguishing features (note the last sentence of the quoted passage). But isn't this a given? Shouldn't we want to understand the perspective of a deceased interlocutor as fully as possible before engaging with their arguments. It seems to me De Cruz has something deeper in mind here, but it is hard to tell what it is, or what it looks like in practice.

The most thorough example De Cruz gives uses the philosopher Clare Carlisle, who writes of imagining herself as one of Spinoza's circle of friends. For Carlisle, this practice of imagining provides a way to better understanding his thought. And this is where things get especially interesting, as De Cruz argues that the circle of friendship not only includes me and a given thinker - or me as a member of a thinker's circle of friends - but potentially other thinkers, too, from other times and places.

Worries about the relevance of our own contributions over time can dissipate if we see ourselves as participating in a series of ongoing philosophical conversations that stretch throughout the centuries and in which we have the privilege of taking part.

At first glance, this sounds an awful lot like the idea of the "Great Conversation" famously put forward by Robert Hutchins, his shorthand for the "Western tradition." That idea was and is notoriously problematic and profoundly ahistorical, and De Cruz is certainly not presenting her model as a defense or articulation of such a project. A fuller consideration of the differences will have to wait for another post, but even the most basic structure of the relationships considered by De Cruz are strikingly different, in that they are more intimate and more personal.

⊕ Note that De Cruz is writing explicitly from the perspective of philosophy, although her examples exceed that framing. I am interested in this as a more general approach to engaging with the past. With all of this in mind, here are some questions I have, having chewed on De Cruz's article for about two weeks.

1. What distinct value does the friendship aspect of this practice have? What does it meant to be friends here? What are the alternatives?
2. How is this different from, say, the 'Great Conversation' idea of Robert Hutchins? Or, perhaps, from the due diligence we would expect to do in approaching any figure of the past, in terms of understanding their background and era?

And importantly to me - and one of the reasons I am most interested in this article - are questions about pedagogy, as well as thinking about this in terms of studying (and teaching) history:

3. Could we imagine a way to cultivate this practice pedagogically, as a sort of teaching practice? What might that look like?
4. How might we connect and/or adapt this idea to the study of history? How does it complement or challenge ideas about historical empathy?

Lastly - and related to that last question - I don't think De Cruz gives enough consideration of the limits of this practice. Certainly there are people from the past we don't want to be friends with, or perhaps shouldn't be friends with -- no? How do we deal with ideas that are distasteful, or fine ideas in the words of distasteful people?

It's a fine article, as much for the questions it raises as for the practice it presents, and definitely worth a careful read.