“In the future, it will become more important to be able to consciously avoid the increasing fleetingness of encounters and the increasing instrumentalization of personal relationships,” said Frieder Otto Wolf, President of the Humanist Association of Germany, yesterday in Berlin on International Friendship Day on 30 July.
“Current and upcoming crises as well as a challenging and complex present offer us good reasons to focus on class rather than mass when it comes to personal connections in the times ahead,” Wolf continued, “without therefore underestimating the ‘weak’ forms of friendship that make social interaction more human.”
Also because technology today makes it possible to get in touch with people and communicate with them in an unprecedented way, this day could provide a good opportunity for humanists to think again about the quality and personal significance of their own relationships with other people or to consciously cultivate existing friendships and fill them with new life.
“Friendship between people, as it was treated in our philosophical traditions under the concept of philia, has always been a creative achievement, a result of conscious effort,” says Wolf. “For this very reason, it is not bound to an already given agreement and equality and can even be built up across diverse, seemingly insurmountable differences.”
Friendships could therefore build bridges between different existing communities, develop a deeper understanding of cultural diversity and achieve an understanding of deeper commonalities. “Friendships are elementary prerequisites for human solidarity, they promote mutual understanding and reconciliation after conflicts. In this respect, they are indispensable conditions for any serious dialogue between civilizations and cultures.”
In terms of developing a culture of peace, which should be at the heart of actions characterized by humanistic thinking, friendship can therefore be described as something indispensable.
“Let us therefore take this day as an opportunity to reject the creeping trivialization, instrumentality and superficiality in our relationships, if we are not careful, and instead work on friendships through real encounters with others, attention to the other as an ‘end in itself’ and engaging in deeper communication, which then also makes deeper bonds possible.”
