The Roger Scruton Reader by Mark Dooley

Author:Mark Dooley
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780826420497
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2010-06-07T16:00:00+00:00

The lover is focused on the beloved; but he does not really accept the otherness of the beloved – does not accept that the other’s life is a life apart and does not place the other’s interests above his own interest in being first in the other’s affections.

In friendship there is a recognition and acceptance of the otherness of the friend. Friendship involves loyalty not to a cause or a common concern but to an individual. This loyalty involves both closeness and distance. The friend seeks the other’s company but also seeks the other’s completeness as an individual and therefore his full autonomy as another, with a life of his own.

Hence friendship tends to be mutual. Although friendship does not seek a return, it dies if the return is never offered. The reward of friendship is friendship, but it is granted only if it is not sought. At the same time, the one who persistently offers friendship to a person who never returns it is not acting as a friend. In such a case, there is another motive at work – love, for example, like the love of a parent towards an ungrateful child, or desire. The concept of unrequited erotic love causes us no difficulty; the concept of unrequited friendship is less easily understood. We recognize in such an idea no motive to which a rational being might easily succumb.

While friendship may be full of feeling, it is not an emotion. Friendly feelings are no more the essence of friendship than respectful feelings are the essence of respect. Friendship is a complex relation between persons, in which each takes the other into consideration. Love, by contrast, is an emotion, which may exist even without the relation for which it yearns. Hence there is no Platonic ascent, no ‘overcoming’ of friendship, as there is an overcoming of love. Nor do you bask in your friendship as you do in your love – those writers who try to present friendship as a feeling (Montaigne, for instance, in his immensely misleading account of his attitude to La Boetie), seem always to be writing of something else: a sublimated erotic love, perhaps, or a passionate attachment such as that between parent and child.

Friendship, unlike love, is not exclusive. A person may have several friends, all equally dear, and all accepting the fact with equanimity and even pleasure. Why erotic love should be otherwise is one of the great mysteries of our condition – for afterall, both love andfriendshipare focusedonthe individual; both involve a kind of surrender of the self; and the most important difference – the presence or absence of desire – seems hardly to prepare us for so momentous a divide.

Friendship is nevertheless like erotic love in certain respects. For example, it occurs only between rational beings. (Animals are companions but never friends, just as they are mates but never lovers.) Friendship involves dialogue and togetherness although it may stop short of intimacy (whereas erotic love stops short of intimacy only when thwarted or renounced).

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