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The Meaning of Friendship
Mark Vernon offers penetrating insights on the idea of friendship, using philosophy and modern culture to ask about friendship and sex, work, politics and spirituality. He also explores how notions of friendship may or may not be changing because of the internet, and looks at the psychology of friendship.
294 pages, Kindle Edition
Published April 30, 2016
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April 28, 2019
A philosophical and historical account of how great thinkers throughout time have grappled with what friendship means, both to society and the individual. At times a little dry and a slog to get through, this book still has fantastic sections and thankfully avoids the sentimental tripe this subject stirs up in popular non-fiction. Vernon even digs into the ambiguities and shadow side of the subject and though his arguments aren't always convincing (like his bit on reciprocal altruism), the heart of his thesis, that the ideal of friendship can be one of the purest joys of a good life, was beautiful.
Notes
“Is it not because at work their likeability is determined by their ability to fulfil their role or function; fail there and friendliness will not follow. Or again: why do people like the postman, the tea-lady or the receptionist? Is it not because they provide the service of being good for gossip and easing the day away? That’s the added value they offer, their additional utility... And yet, it is entirely understandable when you realise that the relationship was, at heart, one of utility, based mostly on what was done together. Take that shared activity away, which is what happens when people leave work, and the friendship withers like a cut flower. It is not that they were not liked or had nothing in common with you. It is that the thing held in common – the work – is gone; without doing that together the relationship ceases to have reason or purpose.” pg. 19
Adam Ferguson: He accused optimists like Smith of confusing virtue and utility: they would call a cow virtuous, he said, if it produced the right sort of milk. Pg. 39
Robert Luis Stevenson: ‘The two persons more and more adapt their notions one to suit the other, and in process of time, without sound of trumpet, they conduct each other into new worlds of thought.’ Pg. 47
He [Plato] also thought that erotic love can lead to philosophy, as much as the bedroom, because both erotic love and philosophy – the love of wisdom – ultimately aim at the same thing, that is, immortality. To borrow a phrase of Oscar Wilde, lovers are in the gutter but they may also look to the stars. For Plato, love roots us in our bodies and transcends the purely material. It’s both/and not either/or. Strictly speaking of course, what is immortal is beyond the reach of human beings as mortal creatures. But glimpses of immortality are possible, do in fact come in many shapes and guises, and it is these experiences that link eros to philosophy. Pg. 55
This movement from an erotic fixation on the beloved to a shared passion for life itself is well captured in an observation made by C. S. Lewis. He noted how lovers are typically depicted gazing into each others eyes, whereas friends portrayed together usually look straight ahead. Pg. 59
Indeed, suspense is as much a cause of erotic frisson as any actual sexual attraction might be: people do not even need to fancy each other, just be conscious that they might. In Evelyn Waugh’s phrase, even ‘a thin bat’s squeak of sexuality’ can frighten people off or distract them from becoming friends. People can misunderstand their feelings too. In a culture in which sexual consummation is seen as the highest expression of love that two people can hope for, a fascination for someone is easy to mistake for falling in love, even when it is simultaneously obvious that a sexual relationship would be inappropriate, unsustainable and possibly ruinous of the friendship. Pg. 66
To become lovers would have been to lose that passion and the opportunity a friendship brings to quicken it. Instead, they would have experienced the loss of self that a sexual encounter revels in. Friendship, in contrast, gave them the gift of being able to return to their lives with a sense of new possibility. Pg. 69-70
For contra the myth, there is a love that does not desire to possess. It is called friendship. It loves the other, and wants them both to be free. Once friendship has come to be the determining force in a relationship, individuals are able to find themselves and nurture a passion for life, not merely lose themselves in starry-eyed love. Pg. 72
Nietzsche: If we have greatly transformed ourselves, those friends of ours who have not been transformed become like ghosts of our past: their voice comes across to us like the voice of a shade – as though we were hearing ourself, only younger, more severe, less mature. Pg. 76
It’s not that there is anything wrong with long-lived friends per se; it is rather that time can suck the authenticity out of friendship... Such friends do not really share that much, beyond their association, and so wind away the hours talking about this and that, conspiring in indecision and perhaps in all honesty becoming nuisances to one another... He also suspects that such relationships are untrustworthy because when the dynamism disappears from a friendship, but the individuals concerned cannot quite bring it to an end, they constantly strive to reestablish their intimacy with each other – by dwelling on the ‘old times’ or college days; the past, not the future. This is a sign that habit has become a substitute for any real affection or closeness. Pg. 79
Nietzsche deploys an analogy of the self as a castle to describe this bit of human psychology. The thing about a castle is that it is a building that is both a fortress and a prison. The self is a bit like that too. Inside it is dark, full of shadowy corners and echoing chambers, though we find windows out of which we can gaze at the world. The windows allow us to see what’s around us, perhaps to look across to another guarded self, another castle. What that reveals is the barriers and defences that those other people construct for themselves too. ‘Man [sic] is very well defended against himself, against being reconnoitred and besieged by himself, he is usually able to perceive of himself only his outer walls’, Nietzsche explains. What’s tricky is seeing your own defences. Having the dark corridors of the mind brought into the light of day is not very pleasant. It is much more preferable to spot the weaknesses and breaches in the fortifications that others construct around themselves. To put it another way, if we feign friendship with others, to cover up what we think of as their faults, that’s probably only because we readily feign friendship with ourselves. Pg. 84
The philosopher, Giorgio Agamben, has drawn attention to the importance of this expression for Aristotle. He believes that Aristotle was arguing that friendship with another is constitutive of an individual’s own subjectivity: someone comes to a full awareness of their existence only as they become aware of the existence of their close friend. Agamben explains, ‘The friend is not another I, but an otherness immanent in self-ness, a becoming other of the self.’ With such a friend, we find ourselves; and in general, we only become someone with another person.
This observation would also help to explain why losing a friend can be so painful: you lose part of yourself. And if you fall out with a friend, and lose them that way, the pain is doubled: you are implicitly saying to yourself, I do not like the person I have become, even as you say to your former friend, I do not like the person you are.
Such a dynamic puts friendship in primary place in any account of human flourishing…It’s implying that a close friend is another part of you and that you can only fully become who you are in who they are too. Pg. 87
This way of life erodes the attention that is necessary for truthfulness. It is also strangely suspicious of joy for joy’s sake. Instead, everything must be instrumental, including friendship. Nietzsche notes, that in the modern world when people are caught doing something pleasurable, like walking in the country, they excuse it as necessary for their health. Pg. 98
Nietzche: We were friends and have become estranged... We are two ships each of which has its goal and course ... and then the good ships rested so quietly in one harbour and one sunshine that it may have looked as if they had reached their goal and as if they had one goal. But then the almighty force of our tasks drove us apart again into different seas and sunny zone, and perhaps we shall never see each other again ... Let us then believe in our star friendship even if we should be compelled to be earth enemies. Pg. 102
The sociologist, Zigmunt Bauman, believes that a consumer culture is precisely one that confuses quantity with quality, and struggles to tell the difference between measuring something and assessing its meaning: in preferring the prolific to the profound it takes the prolific to be profound. Pg. 108
This observation leads to a reflection on the quality of time you need to spend with someone in order to become close friends, namely that you must have time with them when you aren’t doing anything very much – what might be called non-instrumental time. Conversely, instrumental time is highly structured – it’s time for things, be that going to the match, doing the shopping, picking up the kids, getting the job done. Non-instrumental time is for nothing, and for that very reason is very good for close friendships. Pg. 109
According to Wineapple, the friendship of Dickinson and Higginson thrived because it was a tie that ‘neither of them expected or wanted ... to lead anywhere specific’. As Aristotle might have analysed, they had learned to love each other for who each was in themselves, and who they became together – in spite of, or maybe because of, the distance. Pg. 117
Kierkegaard: And then friendship gets caught up in all kinds of little acts of pride in the way that people congratulate themselves on the friends they have; they admire themselves for being so clever as to have such admirable friends, and so on. Friendship is a Vanity Fair...
Kierkegaard argues that neighbour-love is a blessed release from the burden of having to find someone to befriend. It does not require you to admire other human beings, or like them. Neither does loving your neighbour depend in any way on being able to love yourself. Rather it depends on renouncing yourself. (Neither should neighbour-love be thought of as a higher form of friendship. Neighbour-love abhors the idea that individuals can be united in a single self on the basis that they are the same, or indeed different. They love each other simply because they are equal before God who loves all equally and unconditionally. Pg. 131
The general point is that modern, secular ethics also finds it hard to cope with friendship because if everyone acted as they do with friends, there could be no universalisable moral laws… The net result is that friendship occupies a moral no-man’s- land today. Because it is at best wrestling with selfishness, and at worst positively encouraging it, amity gets pushed to the margins of moral behaviour. Pg. 136
At a deeper level, what this argument suggests to the modern mind is that individuals are inherently connected to one another. Thomas is able to say that selfless acts can emerge from self-love, and that altruism and egoism are not opposing opposites, because his idea of individuality is blurred at the edges. This contrasts with the atomistic, autonomous Kantian individual who is more or less bound to go about the world worrying over their selfish desires to excess. It is also distinct from the mentality of the modern individual who, as Alexis de Tocqueville characterised him or her, has become rich enough, and educated enough, to feel they can supply their own needs. ‘Such folk owe no man anything and hardly expect anything from anyone,’ he writes in Democracy in America. ‘They form the habit of thinking of themselves in isol- ation and image that their whole destiny is in their own hands.’ Modern ethics likewise tends to see people as billiard balls, smash- ing into one another as each tries to maintain their separate course. Thus, reconciling one individual’s happiness to another’s is treated as a problem – as is friendship.
But perhaps human beings are more like creatures of clay who are formed and moulded by mutual contact and even, on occasion, become attached. In fact, a number of concerns are encouraging such a renewed notion of connectedness in con- temporary moral debates, from global environmental calamity to the problems of social alienation. In that case, the choice between one person’s happiness and another’s does not seem so stark: my happiness is your happiness, the friend says; if I care for you, I care for myself, and vice versa. Alternatively, such con- nectedness can be thought of in relation to the question of utility and friendship. If someone feels blatantly used, as they too often do in the workplace, then the selfish aspect dominates and stymies friendship. If, in contrast, someone relies on a friend, they may still be using them to a degree but with an appreciative need that is also an opportunity to give. Pg. 147
Friendship as a school of love.
Virtue ethics: The idea is that instead of thinking of moral philosophy as a series of problems that need to be solved by sets of rules or decisions, one thinks of moral philosophy as nurturing a way of life organised around certain virtues that nurture human potential. Pg. 149
But because politics was assumed to be close to friendship, when functioning at its best, philosophers like Aristotle sought to articulate just what conditions might sustain and support the link between the two. This effort is not something that many muse on today. Our relationships as citizens are mediated between by impersonal institutions, like the law, possibly with detrimental effects on our affections for one another as a result. Pg. 162
As a result, bodily intimacy ceased to be an instrument that could be used to carry wider social meanings, including friendship, and came to be associated primarily with the more limited concerns of married couples.
In other words, public institutions of friendship were replaced by the private institution of the family. Pg. 175
As many feminists see it, many of the problems of the modern world arise from the dominance of individualism; the fact that being human is thought of in terms of being a ‘social atom’. This is the same social atomism at the heart of post- Kantian ethics, though let us now frame it in a different way. Think of the model of human individuality that is often referred to as ‘rational economic man’ [sic]. According to this model, individuals make decisions according to the rule of maximising things for themselves, and themselves alone... All in all, decisions are taken primarily with himself in mind. Any consideration of others is judged by the disadvantage, inconvenience or pain such an action would cause to him... However, the point about the model of a rational economic man is that the modern market economy favours behaviour that is like his. It is a competitive environment, driven by maximising utility, vying for scare resources, and encouraging predominantly instrumental, utility-based relation- ships. The net result is that behaving like rational economic individuals tends to be reinforced – in everything from government policy to the size of pay packets – and behaviour that is not like it tends to be marginalised.
Many thinkers, not just feminists… prefer instead an idea of people acting according to their attachments. Communitarianism is one alternative model. It is a way of thinking about socioeconomic behaviour based upon the belief that people make decisions about their actions in terms of their social, not individual, identity… The problem with communitarianism for feminists is that although it takes people’s attachments seriously, it can be blind to the possibility that these attachments may be oppressive... valorising social networks like family, school, church or nation can validate the relationships out of which injustice can grow by taking them as ‘the given’ of life. Pg. 196-7
Rather, she focuses on friendship to outline a way of engaging with society. First, it promotes networks of support...
Another feminist thinker, Mary E. Hunt, develops this thought. For women, she argues, friendship is the context within which the political imperatives of mutuality, equality and reciprocity are best experienced. This is empowering at the personal level and becomes political because, as relational ‘experts in the field’, it gives women things to teach the world around them. In terms of the argument against individualism, what women’s friendships teach is what she calls ‘right relationship’ – exemplified in a balance of four elements: love, feeling more united than separated; power, the power to fight for the right to choose what is best; embodiment, the struggle to love ourselves and each other particularly in relation to our bodies; and fourth what she calls spirituality, the sense of being concerned for quality of life. When friendships manifest such right relationships they become both liberative and witnesses to it. Pg. 199
Anthony Giddens, for example, has coined the term ‘pure relationship’ to identify not just a type of relationship but a common characteristic of perhaps most modern relationships: ‘It refers to a situation where a social relation is entered into for its own sake, for what can be derived by each person from a sustained association with another.’ He believes that the pure relationship has arisen because the social function of marriage has changed: it is no longer required to secure the future population but has become an option in the enactment of romantic love. The pure relationship is also a product of a social change in which people value an integrity in their relationships based upon trust, an attitude which makes the older economic necessities that underpinned traditional marriage seem outdated if not repugnant. As Foucault might have put it, the pure relationship has arisen in part because society has impoverished relational institutions: couples may not want to marry for many complex reasons but a perception that the institution is moribund is one of them. Pg. 214
The trouble with this sentimental haze and commodification is that it cheapens an idea of enormous human value: the spirituality of friendship is not something that can simply be ceded to the market. It must be recovered because it captures the attitude best able to negotiate the ambiguities of friendship we have discussed, and make friendship nothing less than a way of life. Pg. 222-3
Nehamas has reflected that beauty – the thing which we see in someone we want to know, whether in their face or in their soul – ‘points to the future, and we pursue it without knowing what it will yield.’ He continues: ‘Beauty inspires desires without letting me know what they are for.’ Or we might say that to love someone is the promise, but only the promise, of happiness. Pg. 238
Emerson: Let the soul be assured that somewhere in the universe it should rejoin its friend, and it would be content and cheerful alone for a thousand years. Pg. 239
Perhaps the key to a fulfilled life is not to be self-centred but other-centred, to lose yourself in order to find it. That’s a common religious sentiment, and it’s one attested to by the experience of friendship too. Aristotle has a particularly powerful account of it, when he talks of the friend being another self, the person not just in whom you see yourself reflected but in who you discover yourself… As Iris Murdoch has it, love is ‘the painful realisation that something other than myself exists’. This perhaps partly explains why there is no end to self-help books. They are condemned to struggle with this conundrum: the solution they offer – attend to yourself – is actually part of the problem, being self-centred. Pg. 243
Notes
“Is it not because at work their likeability is determined by their ability to fulfil their role or function; fail there and friendliness will not follow. Or again: why do people like the postman, the tea-lady or the receptionist? Is it not because they provide the service of being good for gossip and easing the day away? That’s the added value they offer, their additional utility... And yet, it is entirely understandable when you realise that the relationship was, at heart, one of utility, based mostly on what was done together. Take that shared activity away, which is what happens when people leave work, and the friendship withers like a cut flower. It is not that they were not liked or had nothing in common with you. It is that the thing held in common – the work – is gone; without doing that together the relationship ceases to have reason or purpose.” pg. 19
Adam Ferguson: He accused optimists like Smith of confusing virtue and utility: they would call a cow virtuous, he said, if it produced the right sort of milk. Pg. 39
Robert Luis Stevenson: ‘The two persons more and more adapt their notions one to suit the other, and in process of time, without sound of trumpet, they conduct each other into new worlds of thought.’ Pg. 47
He [Plato] also thought that erotic love can lead to philosophy, as much as the bedroom, because both erotic love and philosophy – the love of wisdom – ultimately aim at the same thing, that is, immortality. To borrow a phrase of Oscar Wilde, lovers are in the gutter but they may also look to the stars. For Plato, love roots us in our bodies and transcends the purely material. It’s both/and not either/or. Strictly speaking of course, what is immortal is beyond the reach of human beings as mortal creatures. But glimpses of immortality are possible, do in fact come in many shapes and guises, and it is these experiences that link eros to philosophy. Pg. 55
This movement from an erotic fixation on the beloved to a shared passion for life itself is well captured in an observation made by C. S. Lewis. He noted how lovers are typically depicted gazing into each others eyes, whereas friends portrayed together usually look straight ahead. Pg. 59
Indeed, suspense is as much a cause of erotic frisson as any actual sexual attraction might be: people do not even need to fancy each other, just be conscious that they might. In Evelyn Waugh’s phrase, even ‘a thin bat’s squeak of sexuality’ can frighten people off or distract them from becoming friends. People can misunderstand their feelings too. In a culture in which sexual consummation is seen as the highest expression of love that two people can hope for, a fascination for someone is easy to mistake for falling in love, even when it is simultaneously obvious that a sexual relationship would be inappropriate, unsustainable and possibly ruinous of the friendship. Pg. 66
To become lovers would have been to lose that passion and the opportunity a friendship brings to quicken it. Instead, they would have experienced the loss of self that a sexual encounter revels in. Friendship, in contrast, gave them the gift of being able to return to their lives with a sense of new possibility. Pg. 69-70
For contra the myth, there is a love that does not desire to possess. It is called friendship. It loves the other, and wants them both to be free. Once friendship has come to be the determining force in a relationship, individuals are able to find themselves and nurture a passion for life, not merely lose themselves in starry-eyed love. Pg. 72
Nietzsche: If we have greatly transformed ourselves, those friends of ours who have not been transformed become like ghosts of our past: their voice comes across to us like the voice of a shade – as though we were hearing ourself, only younger, more severe, less mature. Pg. 76
It’s not that there is anything wrong with long-lived friends per se; it is rather that time can suck the authenticity out of friendship... Such friends do not really share that much, beyond their association, and so wind away the hours talking about this and that, conspiring in indecision and perhaps in all honesty becoming nuisances to one another... He also suspects that such relationships are untrustworthy because when the dynamism disappears from a friendship, but the individuals concerned cannot quite bring it to an end, they constantly strive to reestablish their intimacy with each other – by dwelling on the ‘old times’ or college days; the past, not the future. This is a sign that habit has become a substitute for any real affection or closeness. Pg. 79
Nietzsche deploys an analogy of the self as a castle to describe this bit of human psychology. The thing about a castle is that it is a building that is both a fortress and a prison. The self is a bit like that too. Inside it is dark, full of shadowy corners and echoing chambers, though we find windows out of which we can gaze at the world. The windows allow us to see what’s around us, perhaps to look across to another guarded self, another castle. What that reveals is the barriers and defences that those other people construct for themselves too. ‘Man [sic] is very well defended against himself, against being reconnoitred and besieged by himself, he is usually able to perceive of himself only his outer walls’, Nietzsche explains. What’s tricky is seeing your own defences. Having the dark corridors of the mind brought into the light of day is not very pleasant. It is much more preferable to spot the weaknesses and breaches in the fortifications that others construct around themselves. To put it another way, if we feign friendship with others, to cover up what we think of as their faults, that’s probably only because we readily feign friendship with ourselves. Pg. 84
The philosopher, Giorgio Agamben, has drawn attention to the importance of this expression for Aristotle. He believes that Aristotle was arguing that friendship with another is constitutive of an individual’s own subjectivity: someone comes to a full awareness of their existence only as they become aware of the existence of their close friend. Agamben explains, ‘The friend is not another I, but an otherness immanent in self-ness, a becoming other of the self.’ With such a friend, we find ourselves; and in general, we only become someone with another person.
This observation would also help to explain why losing a friend can be so painful: you lose part of yourself. And if you fall out with a friend, and lose them that way, the pain is doubled: you are implicitly saying to yourself, I do not like the person I have become, even as you say to your former friend, I do not like the person you are.
Such a dynamic puts friendship in primary place in any account of human flourishing…It’s implying that a close friend is another part of you and that you can only fully become who you are in who they are too. Pg. 87
This way of life erodes the attention that is necessary for truthfulness. It is also strangely suspicious of joy for joy’s sake. Instead, everything must be instrumental, including friendship. Nietzsche notes, that in the modern world when people are caught doing something pleasurable, like walking in the country, they excuse it as necessary for their health. Pg. 98
Nietzche: We were friends and have become estranged... We are two ships each of which has its goal and course ... and then the good ships rested so quietly in one harbour and one sunshine that it may have looked as if they had reached their goal and as if they had one goal. But then the almighty force of our tasks drove us apart again into different seas and sunny zone, and perhaps we shall never see each other again ... Let us then believe in our star friendship even if we should be compelled to be earth enemies. Pg. 102
The sociologist, Zigmunt Bauman, believes that a consumer culture is precisely one that confuses quantity with quality, and struggles to tell the difference between measuring something and assessing its meaning: in preferring the prolific to the profound it takes the prolific to be profound. Pg. 108
This observation leads to a reflection on the quality of time you need to spend with someone in order to become close friends, namely that you must have time with them when you aren’t doing anything very much – what might be called non-instrumental time. Conversely, instrumental time is highly structured – it’s time for things, be that going to the match, doing the shopping, picking up the kids, getting the job done. Non-instrumental time is for nothing, and for that very reason is very good for close friendships. Pg. 109
According to Wineapple, the friendship of Dickinson and Higginson thrived because it was a tie that ‘neither of them expected or wanted ... to lead anywhere specific’. As Aristotle might have analysed, they had learned to love each other for who each was in themselves, and who they became together – in spite of, or maybe because of, the distance. Pg. 117
Kierkegaard: And then friendship gets caught up in all kinds of little acts of pride in the way that people congratulate themselves on the friends they have; they admire themselves for being so clever as to have such admirable friends, and so on. Friendship is a Vanity Fair...
Kierkegaard argues that neighbour-love is a blessed release from the burden of having to find someone to befriend. It does not require you to admire other human beings, or like them. Neither does loving your neighbour depend in any way on being able to love yourself. Rather it depends on renouncing yourself. (Neither should neighbour-love be thought of as a higher form of friendship. Neighbour-love abhors the idea that individuals can be united in a single self on the basis that they are the same, or indeed different. They love each other simply because they are equal before God who loves all equally and unconditionally. Pg. 131
The general point is that modern, secular ethics also finds it hard to cope with friendship because if everyone acted as they do with friends, there could be no universalisable moral laws… The net result is that friendship occupies a moral no-man’s- land today. Because it is at best wrestling with selfishness, and at worst positively encouraging it, amity gets pushed to the margins of moral behaviour. Pg. 136
At a deeper level, what this argument suggests to the modern mind is that individuals are inherently connected to one another. Thomas is able to say that selfless acts can emerge from self-love, and that altruism and egoism are not opposing opposites, because his idea of individuality is blurred at the edges. This contrasts with the atomistic, autonomous Kantian individual who is more or less bound to go about the world worrying over their selfish desires to excess. It is also distinct from the mentality of the modern individual who, as Alexis de Tocqueville characterised him or her, has become rich enough, and educated enough, to feel they can supply their own needs. ‘Such folk owe no man anything and hardly expect anything from anyone,’ he writes in Democracy in America. ‘They form the habit of thinking of themselves in isol- ation and image that their whole destiny is in their own hands.’ Modern ethics likewise tends to see people as billiard balls, smash- ing into one another as each tries to maintain their separate course. Thus, reconciling one individual’s happiness to another’s is treated as a problem – as is friendship.
But perhaps human beings are more like creatures of clay who are formed and moulded by mutual contact and even, on occasion, become attached. In fact, a number of concerns are encouraging such a renewed notion of connectedness in con- temporary moral debates, from global environmental calamity to the problems of social alienation. In that case, the choice between one person’s happiness and another’s does not seem so stark: my happiness is your happiness, the friend says; if I care for you, I care for myself, and vice versa. Alternatively, such con- nectedness can be thought of in relation to the question of utility and friendship. If someone feels blatantly used, as they too often do in the workplace, then the selfish aspect dominates and stymies friendship. If, in contrast, someone relies on a friend, they may still be using them to a degree but with an appreciative need that is also an opportunity to give. Pg. 147
Friendship as a school of love.
Virtue ethics: The idea is that instead of thinking of moral philosophy as a series of problems that need to be solved by sets of rules or decisions, one thinks of moral philosophy as nurturing a way of life organised around certain virtues that nurture human potential. Pg. 149
But because politics was assumed to be close to friendship, when functioning at its best, philosophers like Aristotle sought to articulate just what conditions might sustain and support the link between the two. This effort is not something that many muse on today. Our relationships as citizens are mediated between by impersonal institutions, like the law, possibly with detrimental effects on our affections for one another as a result. Pg. 162
As a result, bodily intimacy ceased to be an instrument that could be used to carry wider social meanings, including friendship, and came to be associated primarily with the more limited concerns of married couples.
In other words, public institutions of friendship were replaced by the private institution of the family. Pg. 175
As many feminists see it, many of the problems of the modern world arise from the dominance of individualism; the fact that being human is thought of in terms of being a ‘social atom’. This is the same social atomism at the heart of post- Kantian ethics, though let us now frame it in a different way. Think of the model of human individuality that is often referred to as ‘rational economic man’ [sic]. According to this model, individuals make decisions according to the rule of maximising things for themselves, and themselves alone... All in all, decisions are taken primarily with himself in mind. Any consideration of others is judged by the disadvantage, inconvenience or pain such an action would cause to him... However, the point about the model of a rational economic man is that the modern market economy favours behaviour that is like his. It is a competitive environment, driven by maximising utility, vying for scare resources, and encouraging predominantly instrumental, utility-based relation- ships. The net result is that behaving like rational economic individuals tends to be reinforced – in everything from government policy to the size of pay packets – and behaviour that is not like it tends to be marginalised.
Many thinkers, not just feminists… prefer instead an idea of people acting according to their attachments. Communitarianism is one alternative model. It is a way of thinking about socioeconomic behaviour based upon the belief that people make decisions about their actions in terms of their social, not individual, identity… The problem with communitarianism for feminists is that although it takes people’s attachments seriously, it can be blind to the possibility that these attachments may be oppressive... valorising social networks like family, school, church or nation can validate the relationships out of which injustice can grow by taking them as ‘the given’ of life. Pg. 196-7
Rather, she focuses on friendship to outline a way of engaging with society. First, it promotes networks of support...
Another feminist thinker, Mary E. Hunt, develops this thought. For women, she argues, friendship is the context within which the political imperatives of mutuality, equality and reciprocity are best experienced. This is empowering at the personal level and becomes political because, as relational ‘experts in the field’, it gives women things to teach the world around them. In terms of the argument against individualism, what women’s friendships teach is what she calls ‘right relationship’ – exemplified in a balance of four elements: love, feeling more united than separated; power, the power to fight for the right to choose what is best; embodiment, the struggle to love ourselves and each other particularly in relation to our bodies; and fourth what she calls spirituality, the sense of being concerned for quality of life. When friendships manifest such right relationships they become both liberative and witnesses to it. Pg. 199
Anthony Giddens, for example, has coined the term ‘pure relationship’ to identify not just a type of relationship but a common characteristic of perhaps most modern relationships: ‘It refers to a situation where a social relation is entered into for its own sake, for what can be derived by each person from a sustained association with another.’ He believes that the pure relationship has arisen because the social function of marriage has changed: it is no longer required to secure the future population but has become an option in the enactment of romantic love. The pure relationship is also a product of a social change in which people value an integrity in their relationships based upon trust, an attitude which makes the older economic necessities that underpinned traditional marriage seem outdated if not repugnant. As Foucault might have put it, the pure relationship has arisen in part because society has impoverished relational institutions: couples may not want to marry for many complex reasons but a perception that the institution is moribund is one of them. Pg. 214
The trouble with this sentimental haze and commodification is that it cheapens an idea of enormous human value: the spirituality of friendship is not something that can simply be ceded to the market. It must be recovered because it captures the attitude best able to negotiate the ambiguities of friendship we have discussed, and make friendship nothing less than a way of life. Pg. 222-3
Nehamas has reflected that beauty – the thing which we see in someone we want to know, whether in their face or in their soul – ‘points to the future, and we pursue it without knowing what it will yield.’ He continues: ‘Beauty inspires desires without letting me know what they are for.’ Or we might say that to love someone is the promise, but only the promise, of happiness. Pg. 238
Emerson: Let the soul be assured that somewhere in the universe it should rejoin its friend, and it would be content and cheerful alone for a thousand years. Pg. 239
Perhaps the key to a fulfilled life is not to be self-centred but other-centred, to lose yourself in order to find it. That’s a common religious sentiment, and it’s one attested to by the experience of friendship too. Aristotle has a particularly powerful account of it, when he talks of the friend being another self, the person not just in whom you see yourself reflected but in who you discover yourself… As Iris Murdoch has it, love is ‘the painful realisation that something other than myself exists’. This perhaps partly explains why there is no end to self-help books. They are condemned to struggle with this conundrum: the solution they offer – attend to yourself – is actually part of the problem, being self-centred. Pg. 243
October 14, 2022
this book is not worth your time.. there are buzzfeed articles that get to the point faster than this one
May 4, 2015
Oft refers to the writings and opinions of the philosophers of Ancient Greece - primarily Plato - as well as Nietzsche and authors of contemporary research structured by types of friendships from those with co-workers to that shared by lovers.
April 23, 2015
over generalized
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