Ah Alan, it’s so wonderfully like you to execute the sudden swerve in our dialogue that you do, going from impersonal philosophical ruminations to offer a warm and generous statement of friendship. I mean, of course, your saying that I matter to you and that I have thereby achieved matterhood. There, in an elegant nutshell, you express the beauty and value of friendship.
There are various ways that particular people matter to us. Some are not so salutary, such as in relationships of unwanted domination, where the other person matters to me—I have to pay close attention to him—because my very wellbeing lies in his power.
Some mattering relations are far more agreeable. So among the people who have most mattered to me have been a handful of philosophers. They’ve mattered to me because philosophical understanding matters enough to me to have made it my profession, and they’ve helped me to make progress in this life goal. (Of course, whether or not philosophical understanding really matters is another question entirely.)
And then there are friends, where the mattering is non-hierarchical, mutually chosen, and, at least ideally, fully reciprocal.
To become someone’s friend is to commit a good chunk of one’s attention to him and to feel one’s self the recipient of the same kind of attention. And the attention is offered not because of how it can further each person’s interests—instrumental or transactional “friendships” deserve to be permanently scare-quoted —but because of something in each person’s own nature that is deemed by the other as eminently worthy of their focused attention.
And that’s why friendship feels so wonderful. We crave the attention of others as a validation that we intrinsically matter, and the most validating of all attention is when we feel we’ve earned it by our very own distinctively individual nature.
There’s some portion of attention that each person is owed by each of us, just in virtue, I’d argue, of being a thing with an inner life sufficiently complicated to produce awareness of, and concern for, the self. That’s the moral status you mention, and it needn’t be restricted to homo sapiens, nor even to carbon-based life forms. The moral mattering of all subjects with such inner lives seems the essence of morality, and the social injustices we still face—the racism, for example, most pointedly named by “Black Lives Matter”—are intolerable violations of it. Kant captured this essence of morality beautifully in the second formulation of the categorical imperative: a person must always be regarded not as means to an end but as a kingdom of ends in herself.
But beyond the moral attention that’s coming to each of us, and that feels so eviscerating when it’s denied us, there’s the more bespoke attention we crave on the basis of who we individually are, the highly distinctive reality of us. And that’s what we receive in friendship, just as we bestow it.
Thank you, Alan, for your friendship. It means the world to me.