Philia can, of course, exist between lovers, kin, cities, fellow voyagers, soldiers, neighbours. But in its highest form, as Aristotle interrogates it in the last two books of his Nicomachean Ethics (350 BC), genuine friendship is more than either pleasurable conviviality or mutual usefulness, or indeed relations of respect or care. Genuine friendship is itself a virtue and a relationship involving virtue. Even more than generosity, wit, truthfulness and intelligence, friendship is something that we would not choose to live without, ‘for no one would choose to live without friends, even if he had all the other goods’. Friendship is core to our happiness. For Aristotle, it is the happiest and most fully human of all loves, the apogee of life and the very school of virtue.
Arriving at this genuine friendship, which assumes equality and character as its base, is a matter not only of acts, but of reciprocal words, of getting to know each other through shared conversation. In his fascinating gloss on Aristotle in Cities of Words (2004), Stanley Cavell writes that the highest form of friendship comes into being by ‘granting and overcoming inequalities as [the friends] study themselves in each other… The friend becomes, as it were, my next self.’ And at the heart of this friendship is conversation: ‘friends are each other’s pasture, providing indispensable food for thought’. And this thinking together, Cavell goes on to say, is a stepping-stone to the constitution of political life: ‘Listening to each other, speaking one’s judgment with a point that matters to others who matter to you, is the condition of the formation of a polis, the reason Aristotle makes language the condition of the highest of human formations.’ So through friendships incorporating conversations about what might be involved in living the good life, we develop a shared idea of the good and how to pursue it. With loving friends we envision the kind of society we want and develop our hopes of it.
Making liberal use of earlier philosophers, the Roman statesman and orator Cicero wrote a major analysis of friendship, De Amicitia (c. 44 BC). Here, it is a given that friendship can only truly exist between ‘worthy’ men, and can be a matter of neither self-interest nor profit since the friend is a second self: ‘For everyone loves himself, not with a view of acquiring some profit himself from his self-love, but because he is dear to himself on his own account; and unless this same feeling were transferred to friendship, the real friend would never be found; for he is, as it were, another self.’ In view of the instability and perishableness of mortal things, Cicero continues, we should be continually on the lookout for some person to love and by whom to be loved, ‘for if goodwill and affection are taken away, every joy is taken from life’.
The Christian exhortation to ‘love thy neighbour as thyself ‘ grows out of such classical treatments of friendship to become caritas, or benevolence. The generalization from a particular and worthy friend to a universal rule, while attempting to bind society in kindness, arguably hollowed out some of the value of individual friendship. With Jesus as a friend, it’s not clear that others can make the grade. Then, too–as the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan quipped–the injunction to love thy neighbour as thyself must be ironical, since it’s quite clear that people hate themselves. Arguably, they may have hated themselves less before selfishness–having become, with Thomas Hobbes, an irrefutably universal, though unlovely, attribute–grew into capitalist modernity’s defining driving force.
Montaigne, that most astute and self-analytically modern of Renaissance thinkers, left Christianity out of his essay ‘on affectionate friendship’–a relationship he valued above all other loves. His thoughts on parfaite amitié are based on his own bond with the political philosopher Étienne de la Boétie, cut short by the latter’s early death at the age of thirty-three. The loss haunted Montaigne throughout his life and he carried on championing his friend’s controversial writings. He compares this affectionate friendship with other kinds of love–familial, carnal, marital. He reflects that the ‘congruity and affinity’ that existed between himself and La Boétie made for greater love than is usual between brothers or between fathers and sons. Kin may be ‘of totally different complexions’. Their needs and ours ‘must frequently bump and jostle against each other’. Commanded by both law and nature, familial affections also have less ‘willing freedom’ about them. Put simply, you don’t choose your family.
The passion men feel for women, though also born of choice, suffers in comparison to friendship. Montaigne speaks as a connoisseur of Eros’s darts and flames. ‘Sharp and keen’ they may be, but they are ‘only a mad craving for something which escapes us’: subject to ‘attacks and relapses’, passionate bodily love soon gives way to satiety. Friendship has none of this fickleness. It is a meeting of minds which lasts beyond the death of a friend. And in the practice of friendship, souls are purified, nourish each other and grow.
As for marriage, Montaigne is pragmatic about its limits. Unlike affectionate friendship, marriage is a bargain struck for other purposes. Nor are women, he reasons, normally able to respond to the ‘familiarity and mutual confidence’ that friendship feeds on. They are simply, it seems, not educated enough: if they were, the possibility of a union of soul and body–where the whole human being is involved–would indeed be a ‘perfect love’, a parfaite amitié. And though he holds up the union of body and soul as the highest form of love, Montaigne brushes aside the ancient world’s example of homosexual union. Not only is it ‘rightly abhorrent to our manners’, he writes, but in its practice by the Greeks, the disparity of age and favours made it an unequal form of love. Did any of the Greeks fall in love with a youth who was ugly or with a beautiful old man? No. The friendship Montaigne cherishes is more equal, equable and equitable: ‘souls are mingled and confounded in so universal a blending that they efface the seam which joins them together’.
Montaigne’s thinking on affectionate friendship between men, its equality and permanence, emerged as something of a humanist ideal at a period when the feudal family and kinship networks were losing their hold and modern notions of individuality were in the making. A male friend becomes the trusted second self, the other through whom individual identity can be mirrored, measured and constituted. And as in so many other spheres, women hardly figure in these reflections on friendship: bound as they are, legally and socially, to fathers and husbands, they haven’t the freedom to be considered as equal ‘others’ who can be true friends. There is something of a historical irony here. As a ruthless capitalism takes hold in the nineteenth century and the solitary conquistadorial male emerges as hero, the affections are gendered female: ‘true’ friendship, grounded in conversation, gradually and increasingly becomes women’s sphere.
Without friends, ‘the world is but a wilderness’, Francis Bacon, that keen observer of men and matter, both statesman and philosopher of science, wrote in his essay ‘Of Friendship’ (1612). A vivid fear of loneliness colours Bacon’s essay: man alone, without fit society, topples from reason into brute animality. Those unfit for affection and friendship are more akin to beasts than humans. ‘It is a mere and miserable solitude to want true friends.’ Bacon’s is an uneasy, changing world where familial as well as political instability haunts all relations. Shifts in power abut on instrumental friendships and clubbable associations, one-time friends are ostracized in preference for the new. Cities may burgeon, but ‘a crowd is not company’. Bacon’s thinking seems already to herald the insecure world that his last amanuensis, Thomas Hobbes, brings to life in Leviathan, that reflection on legitimate government written during the strife of the English Civil War.
Like some contemporary therapist urging the advantages of talk to purge discordant passions, Bacon underscores the healing value of friendship:
A principal fruit of friendship, is the ease and discharge of the fulness and swellings of the heart, which passions of all kinds do cause and induce. We know diseases of stoppings, and suffocations, are the most dangerous in the body; and it is not much otherwise in the mind; you may take sarza [sarsaparilla] to open the liver, steel to open
the spleen, flowers of sulphur for the lungs, castoreum [secretion of castor sacs] for the brain; but no receipt openeth the heart, but a true friend; to whom you may impart griefs, joys, fears, hopes, suspicions, counsels, and whatsoever lieth upon the heart to oppress it, in a kind of civil shrift or confession.
A friend, it seems, is superior to a priest. Not only does the ‘communicating of a man’s self to his friend’ redouble joy and cut grief in half, but a friend also engages one in the kind of argument that clarifies thought. This second fruit of friendship ‘is healthful and sovereign for the understanding’, just as the first is for the affections. ‘For friendship maketh indeed a fair day in the affections, from storm and tempests; but it maketh daylight in the understanding, out of darkness, and confusion of thoughts.’ Furthermore, if a friend can provide wise counsel, he can also act as a better second self. He can deputize for one, speak one’s case and one’s merits to others. He can often do so more objectively and persuasively than one can oneself, particularly where one’s existing role, such as husband or father, clouds vision. With a true friend, a man can also rest secure ‘that the care of his works will continue after him’.
Shakespeare probes this humanist ideal of friendship on stage. Hamlet and Horatio, Prince Hal and Falstaff, provide two distinct trajectories.
Horatio is Hamlet’s only confidant. Self-avowedly ‘more an antique Roman than a Dane’ (V.ii.346), he has the classical attributes of learning, bravery, virtue and good judgement. He is not afraid to stand up to the ghost and question him in the opening scene. He listens to Hamlet’s tortured thoughts and emotions with marked sympathy and self-control. By acting as a reliable witness to Hamlet’s extremes, Horatio enables us to enter into them without judging Hamlet too harshly. Trusting Hamlet, he allows us to trust the Prince as well. It is Horatio’s sound philosophy that anchors Hamlet’s searing consciousness of self and world.
‘Horatio, thou art e’en as just a man/As e’er my conversation cop’d withal’ (III.ii.56–7), Hamlet says, admiring in him the stoicism and strength of mind he himself does not possess. A little later, he adds:
Give me that man
That is not passion’s slave, and I will wear him
In my heart’s core, ay, in my heart of heart,
As I do thee. (III.ii.65–70)
Hamlet’s libidinal attachment to Ophelia and to his mother propels disaster, but his friendship with Horatio lasts beyond his own death. Horatio’s loyalty is such that as Hamlet lies dying, he is prepared–out of duty and honour–to take his own life. Hamlet dissuades him. ‘Report me and my cause aright/To the unsatisfied,’ he pleads.
If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart
Absent thee from felicity awhile,
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,
To tell my story. (V.ii.357–60)
And good Horatio will, indeed, be Hamlet’s representative, bearing his voice to the world and explaining Hamlet’s actions after his death. It is he who judiciously apprises rash Fortinbras, Prince of Norway, of the ‘plots and errors’ that have led to this sorry tragedy. By doing so, he fulfils the bonds of ideal friendship and reinstates Hamlet’s ‘noble heart’.
If this is Shakespeare’s portrait of classical friendship at its best, then Prince Hal and Falstaff in Henry IV Part 1 provide its counterpart in what the critic Allan Bloom has called a ‘parody of Aristotelian friendship’. Rather than augment his young friend’s virtue, Bacchic Falstaff, no equal, educates him in vice. Prince Hal’s honour is restored only once he rejects his Rabelaisian friend. Yet the rejection is not effected without some regret. When Hal believes Falstaff dead towards the end of the first part of their conjoined dramas, he mourns:
What, old acquaintance! Could not all this flesh
Keep a little life? Poor Jack, Farewell!
I could have better spar’d a better man. (V.iv.102–4)
A better man would not have provided Prince Hal with half the school of common, yet excessive, life that Falstaff brings to him. If not quite an ageing sage in a Socratic, homoerotic academy, Falstaff does gives Hal some of the demotic wherewithal with which to rule in unruly times.
In their pairing, Shakespeare offers an early instance of those friendships with charismatic others that characterize the turbulence of adolescence. Forged in the sowing of wild oats, formed in companionable activity more than through conversation, such friendships may end when the responsibilities of more sedate maturity call. Yet, for all that, they remain emblazoned on the mind. And Falstaff, in some measure Prince Hal’s libidinal alter, provides a necessary transitional identification for the man who would be King, the responsible ruler whose body symbolically incorporates the many aspects of the state.
With the growth of cities and the development of a competitive commercial and industrial society, new pressures and pleasures attended friendship, as did new configurations of loving. In The Wealth of Nations (1776) Adam Smith worried that the increased division of labour in manufacture would have a damaging impact on relationships and impoverish human personality. Alone in an impersonal city, the poor labourer would be ‘sunk in obscurity and darkness’. Unobserved by friends or family, he would begin to neglect himself and his conduct. Friendship, Smith suggests, provides a mirroring effect, that recognition which bolsters character and a sense of self-worth. For the lonely urbanite, Smith urged the joining of associations and churches. Here companionship and mutual purpose would provide the solitary with the recognition that strengthens the self. Social policy planners today mirror such thinking and insistently align friendship with well-being.
Concerned by the decline in civic and communal spirit that a newly market-driven society based on contract might engender, Adam Ferguson, a leading figure in the Scottish Enlightenment, stressed that benevolence was a primary source of human happiness. Malice, fear, envy, greed, jealousy, all the nether emotions prompted by rivalrous competition, he argued, promoted no felicity. ‘To abstain from harm, is the great law of natural justice,’ he wrote in his Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), ‘to diffuse happiness is the law of morality.’ Loving friendship came high on Ferguson’s list of social goods. Stressing the sociability of human nature, he draws on Pope’s pithy formulation in the Essay on Man: ‘Man, like the generous vine, supported lives;/The strength he gains, is from th’embrace he gives.’
For David Hume, who based his ethics on feeling rather than on abstract moral principles, urban life offered more optimistic prospects than it did for Ferguson. The city, after all, fostered ‘urbanity’, a growth of a new sociability and politeness. Friendship and kindness sparked more of the same. Human psychology, Hume observed, was characterized by a reciprocal flow of passions. Sympathy with another led to love and to the good of social benevolence:
It is remarkable, that nothing touches a man of humanity more than any instance of extraordinary delicacy in love or friendship, where a person is attentive to the smallest concerns of his friend, and is willing to sacrifice to them the most considerable interest of his own… The passions are so contagious, that they pass with the greatest facility from one person to another, and produce correspondent movements in all human breasts. Where friendship appears in very signal instances, my heart catches the same passion, and is warmed by those warm sentiments, that display themselves before me. Such agreeable movements must give me an affection to every one that excites them.
This is the case with every thing that is agreeable in any person. The transition from pleasure to love is easy: But the transition must here be still more easy; since the agreeable sentiment, which is excited by sympathy, is love itself; and there is nothing required but to change the object. Hence the peculiar merit of benevolence in all its shapes and appearances.
Known as the great enlightening Age of Reason, the eighteenth century in its last four decades is also often dubbed in England the Age of Sensibility. After the long civil unrest and the wars of the previous century, overseen by a dour, punishing and om
nipresent God, peace broke out and the heavens gave way to a newly interpreted, kinder, more distant and reasonable deity, happy to allow his subjects to get on with the pursuit of science, to dream more equitable regimes, do business, and engage in affectionate, companionate marriage. The times emphasized the faculty of feeling as a mark of civilization. Sensibility was understood as the capacity for refined emotion. It was both a physical, sometimes sexual, susceptibility and a mental and moral one. A quickness in displaying compassion was seen as a good, as was reflecting on sentiment. Generous hearts were praised, as were quick minds and tongues.
Exaggerated, however, sensibility could topple over into its own parody. The adjectives used to describe it change as the century turns. Janet Todd charts the movement from Addison’s ‘exquisite sensibility’, Hume’s ‘delicate sensibility’ and Sterne’s ‘dear sensibility’ to Austen’s ‘acute’, Coleridge’s ‘mawkish’ and Byron’s ‘sickly’.
Friendship was extolled throughout the period, between and across the sexes. Wives and women, too, could now be friends. Amorous friendships flourished in the French Enlightenment salons, sometimes drifting into the realm of the sexual but often enough stopping short at the pleasures of flirtatious conversation. For the early Romantics, feeling, fellowship and friendship ranked equally high, whatever their extolling of the sublimities of solitude. The young poets banded together, worked and argued and created a movement in the same way, if not with the same effect, that the Revolutionaries had done across the English Channel. At their gatherings Mary and Charles Lamb entertained a host of artists, politicians and poets, Coleridge amongst them. Letters teemed, extending affectionate and intellectual dialogue in times of absence. Goethe wrote thousands, dedicating some three hours before the start of the working day to correspondence. Bettina von Arnim poured out her rebellious heart to the poet-scientist-statesman, who was some thirty-five years her senior: published, her letters influenced Emerson and the tenor of American transcendentalism. Voltaire’s letters–witty, amorous, philosophical and, yes, networking–fill 102 volumes.
All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion Page 41
