Friendship

Friendship

In your life time, maybe you have heard that there is a saying going like this: a friend in need is a friend indeed. However, what is friendship on earth?

I often wonder what friendship is. It is such a broad-range topic to talk about either specifically or generally. I guess most of us are still in a puzzle about what friendship is and what true friendship is. Maybe people who define friendship according to his own life experience will say that they have a good concept of friendship, but I think it is too narrow to get an objective definition of it. Friendship, as understood here, is a distinctively personal relationship that is grounded in a concern on the part of each friend for the welfare of others, for the others’ sake, and that involves some degree of intimacy. As such, friendship is undoubtedly central to our lives, in part because the special concern we have for our friends must have a place within a broader set of concerns, including moral concerns, and in part because our friends can help shape who we are as persons. Given this centrality, important questions arise concerning the justification of friendship and, whether it is permissible to “trade up” when someone new comes along, as well as concerning the possibility of reconciling the demands of friendship with the demands of morality in cases in which the two seem to conflict. But how hard it would be to talk about friendship without mixing personal feeling in it, especially when it

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