Friendship by A. C. Grayling

Author:A. C. Grayling
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 978-0-300-17535-6
Publisher: Yale University Press

There is no reason to think that ‘situational homosexuality’ does not occur outside the intense environment of boarding school, given that almost all societies, even our much more integrated contemporary Western society, still practise sexual segregation of the young. But the question is whether these considerations are pertinent to friendship as such. With what frequency is it the case that if two men are close friends there is something more to it than friendship? I address this question at the end of the next chapter. At this juncture, though, it has to be said that in the absence of public anxieties about homosexuality, and in line with the Romantic privileging of intense emotions and sentiment, friendships between men were allowed to be close and emotional, arm-in-arm, full of openly expressed affection, and absorbing. The best proof of this is the photographic record, showing men hugging, holding hands, sitting on one another’s knees for the posed studio shot. Of course some of the pictures might be of gay couples, but the likelihood is that most were not; there are far too many of them, the poses adopted by friends in front of the camera being intended as visual records and expressions of their bond.45

What, though, is the ideal of friendship being expressed in these treatments of it? It is a straight reprise not so much of the classical ideal of the philosophers as of the classical example of the heroes. In the jungle or on the battlefield, as on the sports field, your friend is the one who will not let you down. He can be trusted, relied upon. He will do the honourable thing. More, he will sacrifice himself for you; one recalls Sydney Carton doing a far, far better thing than he has ever done at the end of A Tale of Two Cities, and (in real life and death) Captain Oates leaving the tent in the Antarctic. He will ‘play up and play the game’ where you are concerned – and this therefore applies to you where he is concerned. Whatever other differences there are in rank or station, you are equals as friends. There need be no explicit contract of loyalty and service, because it is implicit in the very terms of friendship. If you wish to know how friends behave towards one another, you go to those classical sources, to the examples in legend and myth, and you do as friends did there.

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