Friendship & Influence

Amicitia

This course is a formation in friendship and the person friendship requires — what a friend is and what an audience isn't, how friendships actually start and what they run on, genuine interest in other people as a discipline of attention rather than a social trick, the hard offices of a friend, and what remains when a friendship ends. Cicero's De Amicitia — an old man talking about the friend he just lost — runs through the whole course as its touchstone, alongside Aristotle's three kinds of friendship, Montaigne, Emerson, and David and Jonathan. The course moves from what friendship is, through the interest that feeds it and the character that grounds it, to the counterfeits, the hard offices — telling a friend he's wrong, refusing the wrong favor, the repair after a falling-out — and the endings.

Each lesson pairs a focused read — a friendship, or its counterfeit, shown in motion, with a short touchstone passage where it earns its place — with a 20-minute applied drill: the student holds the lesson's claim against a real friendship of his own and ends with one act, a thing to do, never a line to perform. This is a faculty course: it forms the person rather than the performance and installs no conclusions about whom to befriend or what a student's social life should look like; no scripts are handed out, and grading never rewards charm. The influence in the subtitle is stated plainly in the first unit as a byproduct — people trust the genuinely interested and the genuinely reliable — then set aside until the final unit cashes it out and names the seam with How Influence Works.

The full course opens September 1. Founding Families watch the ladder fill in — at a price that never moves.