Hokchhay Tann
Philosophy 101
Topic: Analysis of contemporary social network ‘Facebook’ with the view of Aristotle’s philosophy
As described in Joe Sachs’ Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle claimed that all human activities aim at an ultimate goal, happiness (p. 14). He also explained that happiness cannot last without virtues
1
in which one performs the right action at the right time, not accidently, but knowingly and willingly. For every activity we do, there exist two states, one being virtuous and one being vice. Aristotle argued that being virtuous is to be at the mean between two vices.
Because our lives consist of many actions, which share the same goal being happiness, we can say that the goal of life is to live with happiness by being virtuous. According to Aristotle, one cannot achieve happiness in life without friendships, so being virtuous at our sociability is an ultimate factor to living a happy life. This essay aims to analyze the virtue of building friendships, not involving superiority, through online social network using Aristotle’s philosophy, and to see if this type of friendship is an active condition to a happy life.
As described in Nicomachean Ethics in Aristotle’s Book VIII, one is friend with another when there is certain likeness between the two people. This likeness may exist due to either one of the three possibilities, usefulness, pleasure, or goodness. For instance, when one has the ability to satisfy the need of another person who, in return, one also benefits from, the two tend to become friends. The exchange in satisfactions makes them likable to one another, and so friendship between them is possible. This type of friendship is based on usefulness, and can be dissolved easily because when one can no longer provide the satisfaction needed, the two tend to be annoyed by one another and the friendship falls apart. Also, when the exchange of service between them becomes unequal, their friendship is also weakened for one would feel like he/she is being used.
Another type of friendship is based on pleasure two people derive from one another. The enduring of this type of friendship can vary. For lovers, their friendship tends to fade away as soon as their youth ends since the sight of each lover no longer brings pleasure to one another.
However, this type of friendship may last longer for youngsters because friendships between them tends to be based on pleasure because the young live ‘in accord with feeling, and pursue especially what is pleasant to themselves and present at hand.’
Our friendships through social network would then fall into the type of usefulness and pleasure since there is no real contact between us and our friends, and so there is no way we can find out about our friends’ goodness or badness. For many people, online friends are in many cases the people they never actually talked to or even met in person but who share the same school or work in the same company or mutual friends. We add others to our friend list because we are in the same network and we want to be able to contact them when we need a favor from them, or simply just because we enjoy seeing their updates and looking at their profiles. For
1

instance, my experience with Facebook shows that most of the time I confirm a friend request only if he/she is in the same school or we had met in person. However, my meeting with the person is usually very short that I only get to know the basics about the person such as name and contact. So many times, I confirm this kind of request just to be polite or because I may need to contact the person at a later time. I also found that most of the time I go online, I do not contact my friends but I just read the news feed or look at other people’s photos, which may be something useful to know or pleasurable to see.
However, in my experience, what is posted by friends are a lot of time something negative such as complaints about their lives or some unpleasant or unimportant news and videos.
So how could such things be useful or pleasant enough to preserve the friendships? For one may become upset or annoyed by the posts, and so finds no use or charm in this usefulness-andpleasure based friendship, so, as Aristotle stated, such friendships are easily dissolved. (Page
146). But we can argue that what is useful or pleasant can vary according to one’s circumstances.
For instance, a person who is bored from school work would find his/her friends’ complaints about the workload useful or even pleasant. It is pleasurable because the complaint refuge them from the fact that they are lethargic, and so they do not feel bad about themselves or that they are having the hardest lives while others’ are joyful. Conversely, people who work very hard and finish their work ahead or on time would feel somewhat annoyed; for they think that those who complain do not work hard enough but are lack of patience. Therefore, such posts could be useful or pleasant only when we fall into a similar situation as described on the posts.
It is good, then, to have many online friends because that would increase the chance that at least one of them share the same situation as ours, so we can seek refuge in the friend.
Aristotle agreed that having many friends seems to a beautiful thing. (page 144). Furthermore, he added that not everything is loved, only what is lovable, and that is what is good and pleasant or useful; and what is useful would seem to be that by means of which something good or a pleasure comes about, so that the good and the pleasant would be the things loved as ends. (Page
145). Our online news feed show all sorts of updates and posts from our friends, but among all of those, we look for the useful or lovable one and ignore the rest. In my case, my friends sometimes share very useful or important information or links to different sources, but sometimes they also post things that I, personally, dislike. Yet since I have so many other friends,
I tend to only look for useful things and skip over those non-beneficial ones. In this way, I can maximize my utility and pleasure out of all the friends on the list.
As stated earlier, Aristotle claimed that friendship based on usefulness and pleasure ends as soon as it is no longer beneficial or pleasant, yet that is not the case for my online friends; once I become friend with someone on Facebook, it is very rare that I unfriend him/her because the person does not provide me any benefit after all. In fact, the person stays on my friend list forever. For instance, the person does not share anything at all or does not upload any interesting or charming photos. So according to Aristotle, this friendship is broken, yet it is not because the person remains on my friend list just like any other friends of mine. Although we do not communicate, the person is there, being my Facebook friend. However, Aristotle would disprove

the fact that I am not receiving benefits by keeping the person on my friend list that it is actually in my favor to do so. Since the reason that I confirm the friend request can only be one of the three, one is to be polite, other is to keep in touch, and last is to create new friend, so there is no way it is unbeneficial. It may be that the friend is inactive in terms of interacting with me, but there are pros and cons in which the pros turn out to be greater. For instance, the cost of keeping this friend is really nothing if it is not privacy, but since I already confirmed the friend, I must have trusted the person enough in terms of what I show in my private information. On the other hand, removing the person from my friend list can be very impolite if the person finds out about it later. So to keep a good impression of myself to the person, I shall not delete the friend. But why should one care about impression when one is not the person’s friend? Because as a human being, we cannot feel stress-free knowing that someone else talks ill or thinks poorly of oneself.
This statement seems to be reasonable enough to show that I actually benefit from it.
But the big question remains whether we ought to call it friendship for this type of online communications. Aristotle stated that people ‘are not quite friends on account of not spending their days together or enjoying one another, which seem to be the things most characteristic of friends.’ (p. 150). He also stated that
‘Places do not dissolve friendship as such, but only the being-at-work of it; but if the absence becomes too long-lasting, it seems to cause forgetfulness of the friendship, which is why it is said that “lack of communication breaks up many friendships.”’(p. 149)
In Aristotle’s world, communication means to actually interact with each other face-to-face since there was no medium of communication. So when friends do not meet up with one another after a long time, their friendship weakens and fades away. In our contemporary society, which has thousands mediums of communications, our absences are usually only physical. So if what
Aristotle meant by absence is only the non-physical communication between two friends, then he would think our social networking is friendship, but if Aristotle meant both physical and nonphysical interactions, it would not be friendship in his perspective. Nevertheless, he mentioned about the enjoyment of one another being friendship, so it is safe for us, then, to assume that he would think online friends are real friendships because, as we said earlier, we receive somewhat pleasure or benefit from our online friends.
We were also right, then, to claim that online friends are based on usefulness and pleasure because it does not satisfy the third type of friendship Aristotle described, which is based on the virtues between two friends. The third and noble type of friendships exists between two virtuous individuals. They become friends not because of benefit or pleasure but the goodness they find in one another, and hence ‘they are good in themselves’ (p. 147). So the friendship between them lasts as long as their goodness does. But since virtue is enduring, this type of friendship tends to last long. However, this friendship is not incidental, and requires a long time between the two since they have to learn much before they learn the goodness and gain trust of each other. We can see that our online friendships cannot fit into this third type because we do not actually spend time together and get to know each other before we become friends with other people. Most of the time, we do not know whether our online friends are virtuous. It is of insufficient evidence to tell from their online activities since they are not the true active-

conditions, which is a way ‘in which one holds oneself deliberately in relation to feelings and desires’ (p. 201). This is because people tend to try to look good although they are not so in reality, and since they can hide their actual feelings or desires through their online activities, it is impossible to tell whether they virtuous or not. Hence, we cannot say that online friends are friendship based on goodness.
In conclusion, online social networking sites are a great way to create and keep in touch with friends, yet these activities have an end to themselves, which do not necessarily mean happiness. Since happiness can only be sustained when one is virtuous, one cannot be happy in life by creating and keeping in touch with friends online because these friendships are not based on goodness but utility and pleasure. So it makes sense, then, to say that online friendships have an end in utility and pleasure, and do not lead to happiness because one cannot become virtuous by having online friends. Although Aristotle mentioned that friendships are necessary to live a good life and that abundance in friends is beautiful, he seems to have referred to only the virtuous type of friends. Therefore, it is clear that our online friendships are, in Aristotle’s philosophy, for temporary satisfaction through utility and pleasure, but they do not lead us to the ultimate goal of life, happiness.