On the nature and demise of friendship

Oh, if I had had a friend at this moment, a friend in an attic room, dreaming by candlelight and with a violin lying ready at his hand! How I should have slipped up to him in his quiet hour, noiselessly climbing the winding stair to take him by surprise, and then with talk and music we should have held heavenly festival throughout the night! Once, in years gone by, I had often known such happiness, but this too time had taken away.

Withered years lay between those days and now (Hesse, Steppenwolf).

Friendship is an increasingly forgotten art. Loneliness now seems to plague our inept attempts at social intercourse. Our isolating and debilitating technological additions sapping the life, the complexity and refinement of any normal and healthy human fellowship that previous generations could take for granted.

In modern literature (1500s onwards), one hears relatively little about the character and virtues of friendship. In classical antiquity, on the other hand, friendship, as a special kind of practiced love (love in general being willing the good of another), was often considered the most perfect and fully human of loves. A form of active relationship which disciplined our virtues and adorned our social lives, completing us as persons to an extent we could not hope to achieve otherwise.

On this view, friendship is something greater than mere affection and companionship.

It’s a way of relating to another that transcends the inevitable communal fellowship and mutual attachment that characterizes organic human society, and while even this foundation is evidently eroding, developing friendship in the proper sense becomes incredibly precarious.

I can only advise you to prefer friendship to all things else within human attainment, insomuch as nothing beside is so well fitted to nature, — so well adapted to our needs whether in prosperous or in adverse circumstances. But I consider this as a first principle, — that friendship can exist only between good men (Cicero, De Amicitia).

In ancient and medieval accounts, friendship in this sense is uniquely human in that it both affirms and refines our higher natures, while being relatively independent from the appetites and passions we share with the non-rational animals.

Friendship is a mutual and rational affirmation of the virtues I find in another (friendship can exist only between good men), and since virtue is an intentional cultivation of one’s capacity for the good in its various forms, friendship is thus both anchored in the intellect and deliberate intention.

If these things are so, men who are given up to pleasure are not to be listened to when they express their opinions about friendship, of which they can have no knowledge either by experience or by reflection. For, by the faith of gods and men, who is there that would be willing to have a super-abundance of all objects of desire and to live in the utmost fulness of wealth and what wealth can bring, on condition of neither loving any one nor being loved by any one (Cicero, De Amicitia)?

Friendship, with all its necessary foundations in mutual affection and companionship, emerges when you and I recognize in one another a special, common affinity for some external good that we both admire or consider important. This is where the virtue lies. The shared foundation may consist in almost anything conceivable - painting, soccer, the beauty of pinewood forest - and all of those who partake in this good will be our associates, often quite affectionate ones.

But the mystery of friendship is at hand first when our associate uniquely meets and affirms our special regard for this good we both enjoy.

When we together really love a third, and come to intentionally cherish one another’s singular attunement to the latter. The other’s special access to it, and our new part in this good now facilitated by our friend.

In this kind of love, as Emerson said, “Do you love me?” means “Do you see the same truth?” Or at least, “Do you care about the same truth?” The man who agrees with us that some question, little regarded by others, is of great importance can be our Friend. He need not agree with us about the answer (C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves).

In this my cherishing of your unique participation in, and capacity to know, something that I myself love and admire, respect is a necessary given. I immediately must humble myself before your unrepeatable access to this wonder of which we both are in awe, so that even when we disagree, and violently so, I still cannot dismiss or reject your point of view.

I can perhaps refute your interpretation of it (and hopefully to the benefit of us both), but I cannot disrespect your insight.

For these reasons, friendship is always a conspiracy.

Whenever friendship arises, two or three or a handful of souls are united against the world which cannot fully partake in their happy fixation. The totalitarian state offers little space for genuine friendship; the authoritarian order of modernity and the industrial society has eroded it into almost nothing.

It is therefore easy to see why Authority frowns on Friendship.

Every real Friendship is a sort of secession, even a rebellion. It may be a rebellion of serious thinkers against accepted clap-trap or of faddists against accepted good sense; of real artists against popular ugliness or of charlatans against civilised taste; of good men against the badness of society or of bad men against its goodness.

Whichever it is, it will be unwelcome to Top People. In each knot of Friends there is a sectional "public opinion" which fortifies its members against the public opinion of the community in general. Each therefore is a pocket of potential resistance. Men who have real Friends are less easy to manage or "get at"; harder for good Authorities to correct or for bad Authorities to corrupt. Hence if our masters, by force or by propaganda about "Togetherness" or by unobtrusively making privacy and unplanned leisure impossible, ever succeed in producing a world where all are Companions and none are Friends, they will have removed certain dangers, and will also have taken from us what is almost our strongest safeguard against complete servitude (C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves).

I have a few friends like these, thank God. The Aesthetic Resistance coterie quite fits the bill.

There’s also a certain atheist old-blood viking painter with whom I share this peculiar relationship, in spite of our many disagreements, which is therefore illustrative. Our mutual fascination is the good society, and perhaps not mainly considered politically, but as a fruit of real and healthy human relationships from the ground up.

We disagree on a vast number of issues apart from the importance and value of the thing, and our relationship is one of friendship as described above precisely because we somehow manage to value and respect one another’s insights and perspectives on the issue. On the good which we both esteem. Our differences are often almost immutable, but even when I certainly know his position to be false, I will not disdain his opinion because I can trust there to lie some important truth in his error, that his path from which he somewhere went astray will surely lead somewhere worthwhile if we could just properly explore it together.

Trox going astray

Anscombe’s friend Philippa Foot remembers an Oxford philosophy seminar in 1947, to which they invited Wittgenstein from Cambridge. One of the graduate students began to take part but, feeling his idea was somehow mistaken, broke off his comments and tried to change the subject. At that moment, Wittgenstein interrupted forcefully and asked him to him to please continue saying what he was going to say, because mistaken thoughts are also important: they might contain some fragment of truth that needs to be carefully recognized and retrieved, and the parts that are erroneous will trigger disputes that would eventually carry them even farther toward the truth (J. Wiley. (2010). “Elizabeth Anscombe: A Holy and Courageous Woman”).

For all that’s being said about friendship as uniquely human, I’m sure there’s a reflection of them in our relation to animals. You certainly don’t need rationality to love, and it’s obvious there’s some sort of friendship in mine and the dog’s mutual fascination with our weird game of tag and tug-of-war.

The dog going astray

In being the least jealous of all the loves, the friendship is inherently humble. It necessarily entails communion in one’s abandonment towards a good one cannot fully possess individually. In that way, the possession of genuine friendship is always also immediate evidence of the presence of a greater good outside of oneself and these narrow subjects we are. For the friendship would not be without this indirect, yet very real, participation in an abiding beauty or truth just beyond our own grasp.

This is why friendship also, ultimately, always implies sacrifice. It’s a sacrifice of my own self-conceit and sense of superiority. It’s a sacrifice of my own full independence in terms of knowing and reaching a sovereign truth - yet precisely for this reason it sometimes paradoxically also implies the sacrifice of the friendship itself in light of the more complete recognition of the greater good that once brought the parties together.

Friendship is always a sacrifice of comfortable affections and safe half-truths in the face of unyielding reality. It’s an affirmation of the real at the price of what I’d perhaps prefer or desire, and any friendship that strives to persist in spite of losing sight of that beauty, that reality, or that quest for truth that once kindled it, must inevitably recede back into mere association or nostalgia.

“Yes. We are going to leave him,” Glen said quietly. Larry stared around unbelievingly, as if he had been betrayed. “I thought you were his friend!”

“I am. But that doesn’t matter.”

Larry uttered a hysterical laugh and walked a little way down the gully. “You’re crazy! You know that?”

“No I’m not. We made an agreement. We stood around Mother Abagail’s deathbed and entered into it. It almost certainly meant our deaths, and we knew it. We understood the agreement. Now we’re going to live up to it.”

(Stephen King. (1978). The Stand.)

For indeed, the final and proper end of all friendship is inevitably the Good in Itself, that which ultimately cannot be approached for any other reason, and for which everything else, in the end, must be abandoned.

I will not now call you servants: for the servant knoweth not what his lord doth. But I have called you friends: because all things whatsoever I have heard of my Father, I have made known to you. (Jn. 15:15)

One dark night,
fired with love’s urgent longings
— ah, the sheer grace! —
I went out unseen,
my house being now all stilled.

In darkness, and secure,
by the secret ladder, disguised,
— ah, the sheer grace! —
in darkness and concealment,
my house being now all stilled.

On that glad night,
in secret, for no one saw me,
nor did I look at anything,
with no other light or guide
than the one that burned in my heart.

This guided me
more surely than the light of noon
to where he was awaiting me
— him I knew so well —
there in a place where no one appeared.

O guiding night!
O night more lovely than the dawn!
O night that has united
the Lover with his beloved,
transforming the beloved in her Lover.

Upon my flowering breast
which I kept wholly for him alone,
there he lay sleeping,
and I caressing him
there in a breeze from the fanning cedars.

When the breeze blew from the turret,
as I parted his hair,
it wounded my neck
with its gentle hand,
suspending all my senses.

I abandoned and forgot myself,
laying my face on my Beloved;
all things ceased; I went out from myself,
leaving my cares
forgotten among the lilies.

(St. John of the Cross. (1618). Dark Night of the Soul.