The fate of friendship

guise as the conviction that friendship is fundamentally a form of other love. The politics of friendship is another kind of struggle.

The meaning of friendship by Mark Vernon

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In one mode friendship resists the limiting constraints of inherited social conventions, notably in terms of the dictates of tight notions of family; in another mode it is a protest against individualistic, competitive conceptions of what it is to be human; and in another it is an effort to create new forms of relationship founded upon the freedom of friendships that go against the norm. Friend ships may flourish for us in all these contexts. Finally, I have tried to outline a spirituality of friendship based upon the essays of Montaigne and Emerson. Success is found in circuit, to quote one poet. Or to use Keats’s phrase, soul friendship would seem to be a prime candidate for his ‘negative capability’, that ability to live life without certainty, but with an expectant open-heartedness. Given that philosophy illuminates the nature, potential and limits of the love called friendship, there is one further, final observ ation to make. It centres on the figure of Socrates. He has regularly popped up throughout the course of the book. At one level, this is unsurprising; he is nothing if not an emblem of wisdom. But to see his presence here solely as a result of the fact that he is a big-hitter is to miss a more subtle point. For Socrates, I think, philosophy and friendship are ultimately one and the same thing. According to Plato, Socrates understood the wily ambiguities of erotic love and argued that they should be seized upon as an oppor tunity to propel lovers along a course to a relationship based upon friendship. He also understood that true friendship is scarce. One may be friends with many, as indeed he was, the outcome of a way of life which took him around the streets of Athens seeking individuals to talk with. The complicating factor for him was that his vocation as a philosopher meant that he did not seek friends to be chummy but to encourage people to understand the errors in their beliefs and the failures of their character–in fact nothing less than the limits of their humanity. Rare is the individual who can embrace a relationship like that, and he was often left isolated, wondering whether he would ever find a true friend. At the same time, he never gave up hope.

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Putting it another way, Socrates thought that friends should not primarily hope for happiness in one another, though that might come, but should seek together to live fuller, truer lives. This hap pens, he believed, when individuals become wise to their ignor ance; the wisdom gained when one understands the limits of one’s capabilities is of supreme value. It is best gained in discoursing with others, particularly when the exchange is marked by the kind of honesty that can exist between the closest of friends. Then the individuals have the opportunity not only to learn about the limit ations of the beliefs that they hold true but also about the flaws in their character and the vulnerabilities of their temperaments. These are, after all, far deeper sources of delusion than mere ratio nal confusion. Thus it is possible, I think, to construe the Socratic way of life as one that puts friendship centre stage. Epicurus, who in many ways followed in the same footsteps, agreed: ‘The noble man is most involved with wisdom and friendship.’ Plato’s dialogues deploy a number of metaphors and encounters that describe and portray Socrates’ approach. Probably the most famous is that of the midwife: he takes his role to be that of one who knows he knows nothing but is committed to asking questions; sometimes his interlocutors ‘give birth’ to certain insights as a result – ‘It is I, with God’s help, who deliver them of this off spring [wisdom]’, he says in the Theaetetus. Alternatively, in the Meno, Socrates describes his method by drawing a contrast with the eristic ways of his contemporary philosophical rivals, the sophists: ‘If they are friends, as you and I are, and want to discuss with each other, they must answer in a manner more gentle and more proper to discussion.’ The implication is that his way of doing philosophy is in part the attempt to form a friendship. Socratic friendship is also a tough kind of love; it requires the roughest courage. Consider what he says to another character, Callicles, on the purpose of philosophy: I think that someone who is to test adequately the soul which lives aright and the soul which does not, needs to have three qualities: knowledge, goodwill and willingness to speak freely … You [Callicles] would never have agreed with me simply because you did not know better or were too ashamed to admit you did not know, nor to deceive me; for you are my friend, as you say yourself.