In Ayn Rand's novel The Fountainhead, the villainous intellectual Ellsworth Toohey shamelessly states his attitude to other people: "I play the stock market of the soul - and I sell short." Because you can't go too far wrong by doing the exact opposite of what a wicked character like Toohey does, I've been thinking about what it means to buy long in human relationships.
In Rand's later writings, she enunciated what she called "The Trader Principle", in which people "exchange value for value" in their relationships. Leaving aside the questionable status of the word 'value' in ethics (see my 2024 post on Hannah Arendt's contrast between value and worth), it seems to me that Rand doesn't go far enough here - for the truly anti-Toohey stance is not merely to trade but to actively invest in other people.
Think, for instance, of Warren Buffett's approach to investing at Berkshire Hathaway: in many cases he hasn't merely purchased stock in other companies, but instead has purchased the entire company! Similarly, venture capital firms pour their own money into early stage companies, which means they are invested in the success of those companies.
In his book Dependent Rational Animals, Alasdair MacIntyre describes aspects of what it's like to invest in another person:
Each of us achieves our good only if and insofar as others make our good their good by helping us through periods of disability to become ourselves the kind of human being - through the acquisition and exercise of the virtues - who makes the good of others her or his good, and this not because we have calculated that, only if we help others, will they help us, in some trading of advantage for advantage.
Although MacIntyre's phrasing is rather academic, his point is clear enough, even if I prefer Walter Kaufmann's formulation: through mutual love and care we are "gradually led to more and more profound concern about the loved one's feelings, thoughts, and welfare."
Yet I think we can go beyond even MacIntyre or Kaufmann. Concern is one thing, but the long-term practice of love and friendship (φιλία) gets closer to the heart of things. To capture the essence of this practice, Aristotle used the little Greek word συζῆν: sharing in the activities of living, jointly pursuing fulfillment, making commitments together, taking action together, supporting each other's projects, celebrating each other's successes, supporting each other in times of trouble, feeling with and for each other, thinking things through together, seeking each other’s counsel, treating your shared life as one long conversation and intermingling of souls.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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