On Love & Friendship

Anthony Rizzi is an accomplished physicist who specializes in general relativity, gravity  waves, quantum mechanics, and quantum field theory. He is also a philosopher well versed in the thought of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas. He views the core truths they expounded as essential for a proper understanding of science. He is director of the Institute for Advanced Physics (IAP) in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, an organization founded “to advance modern science in a balanced fashion that does not leave behind the correct philosophical foundations, nor the proper moral and spiritual components.”

I previously interviewed Dr. Rizzi on “The Effect of Divine Grace on the Human Intellect” (April 2023). In a follow-up interview, he offers his thoughts on friendship as they appear in his article “Love and Friendship: What is Love? What is a Friend?” published in IAP’s online magazine Physics and Culture.

NOR: In our earlier interview, we discussed knowledge, truth, and thinking, which are things customarily associated with a physicist. Friendship is a philosophical topic. What interested somebody with your background in this subject?

Anthony Rizzi: It started because IAP is constantly bringing in new people. We’re trying to transmit information that is not difficult in itself but is difficult for our modern culture and habits. It became evident that you have to make friends with people in order to be able to discuss things with them, because sometimes you have to say things that are uncomfortable, and if you don’t have that friendship, the discussion doesn’t work.

This became particularly evident as we worked more with women. The differences between men and women are great, but the fact that, in modern society, we’re not allowed to notice those differences made things more complicated. So it became apparent that we need to understand how male/female interactions work, because that’s the core social relationship. But we also need to understand generally how friendship works at all its different levels.

To understand something, you need definitions. And I realized that, surprisingly, there are no definitions, ancient or modern, of love or friendship that have the completeness or level of specification necessary for our modern world, especially given the great philosophical errors at the base of our thinking.

NOR: In classical Greco-Roman philosophy, friendship is a common topic. But it doesn’t seem to be these days. A colleague of mine, who taught philosophy to college freshmen, told me that of all the topics he covered, friendship was the one that seemed to interest young people the most. Have you found this to be so?

Rizzi: Here at IAP, I often teach college-age students. They tend to want to hear something new, and they are also the ones who feel the angst and loneliness of our culture most profoundly. They live lives of great busy-ness, and many are good at hiding in their busy-ness, doing stuff for pointless reasons. They’re part of what I call Billiard Ball Culture: we just bang off each other like billiard balls, but we never really interact.

As a result, the person is being lost, and though this loss is talked about in Catholic circles, it’s being skimmed past everywhere else and not rightly understood anywhere. A person’s core is his rationality. When you address or argue with someone, you won’t reach him as a person unless you’re talking rationally. You have to make friends with him in order to be able to discuss things with him, because, as I said, sometimes you have to say things that are uncomfortable.

Benjamin Franklin is alleged to have said that most people die at 25 and are buried at 85. That’s unfortunately true. At some point in their lives, people find a niche to do their billiard-ball activities, and they stop caring about interacting with people in any real way. And they’re comfortable with that. But that leaves young people, in particular, cut off, so their loneliness is more acute. They long for something more. Young people are hungry for true friendship.