1 post tagged friendship

The truest kind of friendship is that which exists between good men, as we have said more than once. For it is agreed that what is good or pleasant absolutely is lovable and desirable absolutely, and what is good or pleasant for a particular person is lovable and desirable for that person.

But friendship between good men rests on both grounds - the good are good and pleasant absolutely, and good and pleasant to each other. And when men wish well to those they love for their own sakes, this goodwill is not an emotion but a fixed disposition. Liking seems to be an emotion, but friendship a disposition; liking may just as much be felt for inanimate objects, but mutual affection is a matter of deliberate choice, and this springs from a fixed disposition. In loving a friend men are loving their own good, as a good man benefits a person whose affection he wins. Each party to a friendship therefore promotes his own good and makes an equal return in goodwill and in the pleasure that he gives. There is a saying, ‘Amity is equality’, and this is most fully realized in the friendships between good men.

Friendship is essentially a partnership. Also a friend is a second self, so that our consciousness of a friend’s existence, when given reality by intercourse with him, makes us more fully conscious of our own existence.

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, (emphasis added) excerpt found in The Oxford Book of Friendship, chosen and edited by D.J. Enright and David Rawlinson, Oxford University Press, 1991.

I do not wish to treat friendships daintily, but with the roughest courage. When they are real, they are not glass threads or frostwork, but the solidest thing we know.

Friendship requires that rare mean betwixt likeness and unlikeness, that piques each with the presence of power and of consent in the other party. Let me be alone to the end of the world, rather than that my friend should overstep, by a word or a look, his real sympathy. I am equally balked by antagonism and by compliance. Let him not cease an instant to be himself. The only joy I have in his being mine, is that the not mine is mine. I hate, where I looked for a manly furtherance, or at least a manly resistance, to find a mush concession. Better be a nettle in the side of your friend than his echo. The condition which high friendship demands is ability to do without it. That high office requires great and sublime parts. There must be very two, before there can be very one. Let it be an alliance of two large, formidable natures, mutually beheld, mutually feared, before yet they recognize the deep identity which beneath these disparities unites them.

We talk of choosing our friends, but friends are self-elected. Reverence is a great part of it. Treat your friend as a spectacle. Of course he has merits that are not yours, and that you cannot honour, if you must needs hold him close to your person. Stand aside; give those merits room; let them mount and expand. Are you the friend of your friend’s buttons, or of his thought? To a great heart he will still be a stranger in a thousand particulars, that he may come near in the holiest ground. Leave it to girls and boys to regard a friend as property, and to suck a short and all-confounding pleasure, instead of the noblest benefit.

Emerson, ‘Friendship’. (emphasis added), ibid.

Those we ordinarily call friends and amities, are but acquaintances and familiarities, tied together by some occasion or commodities, by means whereof our minds are entertained…If a man urge me to tell wherefore I loved him [his friend Étienne de La Boétie], I feel it cannot be expressed, but by answering: Because it was he, because it was myself. There is beyond all my discourse, and besides what I can particularly report of it, I know not what inexplicable and fatal power, a mean and mediatrix of this indissoluble union. We sought one another before we had seen one another, and by the reports we heard one of another; which wrought a greater violence in us, than the reason of reports may well bear; I think by some secret ordinance of the heavens, we embraced one another by our names. And at our first meeting, which was by chance at a great feast, and solemn meeting of a whole township, we found our selves so surprised, so known, so acquainted, and so combinedly bound together, that from thence forward, nothing was so near unto us as one unto another’s.

Montaigne, ‘Of Friendship’, ibid.

There are few nobler spectacles than the friendship of two great men; and the History of Literature presents nothing comparable to the friendship of Goethe and Schiller. The friendhsip of Montaigne and Étienne de La Boétie was, perhaps, more passionate and entire; but it was the union of two kindred natures, which from the first moment discovered their affinity, not the union of two rivals incessantly contrasted by partisans, and originally disposed to hold aloof from each other. Rivals Goethe and Schiller were, and are; natures in many respects directly antagonistic; chiefs of opposing camps and brought into brotherly union only by what was highest in their natures and their aims.

To look on these great rivals was to see at once their profound dissimilarity. Goethe’s beautiful head had the calm victorious grandeur of the Greek ideal; Schiller’s the earnest beauty of a Christian looking towards the Future. The massive brow, and large-pupilled eyes- like those given by Raphael to the infant Christ, in the matchless Madonna di San Sisto- the strong and well-proportioned features, lined indeed by thought and suffering, yet showing that thought and suffering have troubled, but not vanquished, the strong man - a certain healthy vigour in the brown skin, and an indescribable something which shines out from the face, make Goethe a striking contrast to Schiller, with his eager eyes, narrow brow - tense and intense - his irregular features lined by thought and suffering, and weakened by sickness. The one looks, the other looks out. Both are majestic; but one has the majesty of repose, the other of conflict…

In comparing one to a Greek ideal, the other to a Christian ideal, it has already been implied that one was the representative of Realism, the other of Idealism. Goethe has himself indicated the capital distinction between them: Schiller was animated with the idea of Freedom; Goethe on the contrary, was animated with the idea of Nature. This distinction runs through their works: Schiller always pining for something greater than Nature, wishing to make men Demigods; Goethe always striving to let Nature have free development, and produce the highest forms of Humanity. The Fall of Man was to Schiller the happiest of all events, because thereby men fell away from pure instinct into conscious freedom; with this sense of freedom came the possibility of Morality. To Goethe this seemed paying a price for Morality which was higher than Morality was worth; he preferred the ideal of a condition wherein Morality was unnecessary. Much as he might prize a good police, he prized still more a society in which a police would never be needed…

Having touched upon the points of contrast, it will now be needed to say a word on those points of resemblance which served as the basis of their union…They were both profoundly convinced that Art was no luxury of leisure, no mere amusement to charm the idle, or relax the careworn; but a mighty influence, serious in its aims although pleasurable in its means; a sister to Religion, by whose aid the great world-scheme was wrought into reality…They believed that Culture would raise Humanity to its full powers; and they, as artists, knew no Culture equal to that of Art…

At this time, then, that these two men seemed most opposed to each other, and were opposed in feeling, they were gradually drawing closer and closer in the very lines of their development, and a firm basis was prepared for a solid and enduring union. Goethe was five-and-forty, Schiller five-and-thirty. Goethe had much to give, which Schiller gratefully accepted; and if he could not in return influence the developed mind of his great friend, or add to the vast stores of its knowledge and experience, he could give him that which was even more valuable, sympathy and impulse. He excited Goethe to work. He withdrew him from the engrossing pursuit of science, and restored him once more to poetry. He urged him to finish what was already commenced, and not leave his works all fragments. They worked together with the same purpose and with the same earnestness, and their union is the most glorious episode in the lives of both, and remains as an eternal exemplar of a noble friendship.

G.H. Lewes, Life of Goethe, (emphasis added), 1855, ibid.

All animals have interests. They are interested in satisfying their needs and desires, and in gathering the information required for their well-being. Rational beings have such interests, and use their reason in pursuing them. But they also have ‘interests of reason’: interests which arise from their rationality, and which are in no clear way related to desires, needs and appetites. One of these, according to Kant, is morality. Reason motivates us to do our duty, and all other (‘empirical’) interests are discounted in the process. That is what it means for a decision to be a moral one. The interest in doing right is not an interest of mine, but an interest of reason in me.

Reason also has an interest in the sensuous world. When a cow stands in a field ruminating, and turning her eyes to view the horizon, we can say that she is interested in what is going on (and in particular, in the presence of potential threats to her safety), but not that she is interested in the view. A rational being, by contrast, takes pleasure in the mere sight of something: a sublime landscape, a beautiful animal, an intricate flower, or a work of art. This form of pleasure answers to no empirical interest: I satisfy no bodily appetite or need in contemplating the landscape, nor do I merely scan it for useful information. The interest is disinterested - an interest in the landscape for its own sake, for the very thing that it is (or rather, for the very thing that it appears). Disinterestedness is a mark of an ‘interest of reason’. We cannot refer it to our empirical nature, but only to the reason that transcends empirical nature, and which searches the world for a meaning that is more authoritative and more complete than any that flows from desire. On this account, we should hardly be surprised to discover that the aesthetic is a realm of value. We perceive in the objects of aesthetic interest a meaning beyond the moment - a meaning which also resides in the moment, incarnate, as it were, in a sensory impression. The disinterested observer is haunted by a question: is it right to take pleasure in this? Hence arises the idea of taste. We discriminate between the objects of aesthetic interest, find reasons for and against them, and see in each other’s choice the sign and expression of moral character. A person who needs urgently to cut a rope and therefore takes up the knife that lies beside him, does not, in choosing that instrument, reveal his character. The knife is a means, and it was the best means to hand. The person with no such use for the knife, who nevertheless places it on his desk and endlessly studies it, thereby shows something of himself. Aesthetic interest does not stem from our passing desires: it reveals what we are and what we value. Taste, like style, is the man himself.

The same is true of all experiences and activities in which something is treated not as a means, but as an end in itself. When I work, my activity is generally a means to an end - making money, for example. When I play, however, my activity is an end in itself. Play is not a means to enjoyment; it is the very thing enjoyed. And it provides the archetype of other activities that penetrate and give sense to our adult lives: sport, conversation, socializing, and all that we understand by art. Schiller noticed this, and went so far as to exalt play into the paradigm of intrinsic value. With the useful and the good, he remarked, man is merely in earnest; but with the beautiful he plays. (Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man.)

There is an element of paradoxism in Schiller’s remark. But you can extract from it a thought that is far from paradoxical, namely this: if every activity is a means to an end, then no activity has intrinsic value. The world is then deprived of its sense. If, however, there are activities that we engage in for their own sake, the world is restored to us and we to it. For of these activities we do not ask what they are for; they are sufficient in themselves. Play is one of them; and its association with childhood reminds us of the essential innocence and exhilaration that attends such ‘disinterested’ activities. If work becomes play - so that the worker is fulfilled in his work, regardless of what results from it - then work ceases to be drudgery, and becomes instead ‘the restoration of man to himself’. Those last words are Marx’s, and contain the core of his theory of ‘unalienated labour’ - a theory which derives from Kant, via Schiller and Hegel.

Consider conversation: each utterance calls forth a rejoinder; but in the normal case there is no direction towards which the conversation tends. The participants respond to what they hear with matching remarks, but the conversation proceeds unpredictably and purposelessly, until business interrupts it. Although we gain much information from conversation, this is not its primary purpose. In the normal case, as when people ‘pass the time of day’, conversation is engaged in for its own sake, like play. The same is true of dancing.

These paradigms of the purposeless can be understood only if we take care to distinguish purpose from function. A sociobiologist will insist that play has a function: it is the safest way to explore the world, and to prepare the child for action. But function is not purpose. The child plays in order to play: play is its own purpose. If you make the function into the purpose - playing for the sake of learning, say - then you cease to play. You are now, as Schiller puts it, ‘merely in earnest’. Likewise the urgent person, who converses in order to gain or impart some information, to elicit sympathy or to tell his story, has ceased to converse. Like the Ancient Mariner, he is the death of dialogue.

The same is true of friendship. This too has a function. It binds people together, makes communities strong and durable, brings advantages to those who are joined by it and fortifies them in their endeavours. But make these advantages into your purpose, and the friendship is gone. Friendship is a means to advantage, but only when not treated as a means. The same applies to almost everything worthwhile: education, sport, hiking, fishing, hunting, and art. If we are to live properly, therefore - not merely consuming the world but loving it and valuing it - we must cultivate the art of finding ends where we might have found only means. We must learn when and how to set our interests aside, not out of boredom or disgust, but out of disinterested passion for the thing itself.

Roger Scruton, Modern Culture, Continuum, 2005.