In Praise of Friendship by Michał Herer

Author:Michał Herer [Herer, Michał]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781789043891
Google: _ICLzQEACAAJ
Publisher: Zero Books
Published: 2021-11-15T23:27:59.084359+00:00

Chapter 3

The Pathos of Closeness

But there is another kind of love, where the union is from the instincts of nature and the laws of consanguinity, whereby those of the same tribe, wives and parents, and brothers and children are naturally preferred to others, a thing which we find is the case not only with mankind but with all birds and beasts.

John Cassian, The Conferences of the Desert Fathers (XVI)

To speak about friendship in a supra-individual context, to think of it as a bond shared by all of society, much less a global community of people, seems to be a confusion of terms or naïveté. One of the things that sets modern society apart from its pre-modern precursors is that its cohesion is guaranteed by regulations of a formal, particularly legal, nature. Friendship, on the other hand, is something we think of in terms of a private affect, one that is unassociated with institutions, rules, etc. In this sense, such a broad understanding of friendship would be a confusion of terms or levels. From the psychological standpoint, meanwhile, it would be naïve to envision a large group whose members were bound by true friendship, considering how difficult it is to maintain friendships at a much smaller scale. Moreover, as history teaches us, such naïveté—or, rather, this naïve language used to describe social or geopolitical relations—frequently serves as ideological cover for all sorts of machinations of power. We all know the truth behind the “fraternal friendship of the peoples” in the Eastern Block, for example. All of these objections are valid as long as we begin with a psychological understanding of friendship and subsequently attempt to apply that same meaning of the term to social or political phenomena. A cursory glance at the history of friendship as a philosophical concept, however, reveals that this narrow psychological meaning is only one of many. The categorical problem here is one of a different nature, namely, how to express the psychology of friendship as the concretization of a more abstract logic. But before we address this issue, we must first examine other levels, other concretizations of this logic of friendship. In particular, what is its political meaning? How can we employ this word in a collective context without veering into utopian thinking or using it in a purely metaphorical sense?

According to a saying traditionally ascribed to Aristotle, “He who has friends can have no true friend.” This is the wording cited by Diogenes Laertius,1 and a similar observation is found in the few passages Aristotle devotes to friendship in the Nicomachean Ethics.2 They seem to harmonize with the philosopher’s sense of reason, his pursuit of measure in all things. Summarizing his argument about the optimal number of friends, Aristotle states in the ninth book: “The number of one’s friends must be limited, and should perhaps be the largest number with whom one can constantly associate.”3 Aristotle’s authority testifies that friendship is only possible at a small scale, and that it is a mistake to be excessive in one’s friendship (in other words, to attempt to encompass too many people with it).

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