Towards an Aesthetics of Friendship

The first part of this article argues that aesthetic aspects play a crucial role in the formation and maintenance of friendships. While most philosophers of friendship emphasize ethical concerns, I draw inspiration from Alexander Nehamas’s predominantly aesthetic approach in On Friendship (2016). Nehamas claims that deep friendships depend on a strong fascination with the friend’s unique characteristics.Although this may be true, I argue that friendship relies more fundamentally on the mutual appreciation of shared experiences, which includes a third entity: an object of interest, a situation, or the atmosphere created between those involved. The second part of the article analyzes how Ali Smith portrays friendship as a process of sharing experiences in her novel Autumn (2016), with a focus on forms of attention, observations, and discourse. The reading also supports the hypothesis that the novel genre is a particularly rich source for exploring the significance of friendship.