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The Meaning of Friendship [email protected] Also by Mark Vernon THE PHILOSOPHY OF FRIENDSHIP AFTER ATHEISM: Science, Religion and the Meaning of Life WELLBEING (Art of Living Series) TEACH YOURSELF HUMANISM 42: DEEP THOUGHT ON LIFE, THE UNIVERSE AND EVERYTHING WHAT NOT TO SAY: Philosophy for Life’s Tricky Moments PLATO’S PODCASTS: the Ancients’ Guide to Modern Living CHAMBERS DICTIONARY OF BELIEFS AND RELIGIONS (editor-in-chief) BUSINESS: The Key Concepts [email protected] The Meaning of Friendship Mark Vernon [email protected] © Mar k Vernon 2010 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.

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First published in 2005 as The Philosophy of Friendship by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN This revised edition published 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limit\ ed, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Vernon, Mark, 1966–The meaning of friendship / Mark Vernon. p. cm.

Summary: “In this book, Mark Vernon offers penetrating insights on th\ e idea of friendship, using philosophy and modern culture to ask about friendship and sex, work, politics and spirituality. He also explores ho\ w notions of friendship may or may not be changing because of the internet\ , and looks at the psychology of friendship” – Provided by publisher\ . Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Friendship. I. Title.

BF575.F66.V47 2010 177’.62–dc22 2009047551 10987654321 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 Transferred to Digital Printing in 2012 ISBN 978-0-230-24288-3 ISBN 978-0-230-27535-5 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-0-230-27535-5 [email protected] In memory of Susan Frances Vernon [email protected] [email protected] Contents Acknowledgementsviii List of Illustrations ix Introduction 1 Friends at Work 15 Friends and Lovers 43 Faking It 73 Friending Online 104 Unconditional Love 122 Politics of Friendship 152 Prophetic Friendship 188 The Spirituality of Friendship 222 Friendship Beyond Self-help 242 Further Reading and References 257 Index 267 vii [email protected] Acknowledgements This book is in part a product of friendships, amongst whom I think of Denise Inge, Craig Mackenzie, Jeremy Carrette, Guy Reid, Chris Biddle, Paul Fletcher, John Inge, Angie Hobbs and Richard Jenkins. I must thank other individuals who have read various chapters and drafts, notably Michael Savage, James Davidson and particularly Lisa Mackenzie. Great thanks also goes to those who signed me up and then steered the book through at Palgrave Macmillan, especially Luciana O’Flaherty, Dan Bunyard and Lisa Dunn, and also to my copy-editor, Peter Andrews.For the new edition, thanks too for the support of Priyanka Gibbons and Sam Burridge. I would also like to thank those at The School of Life for providing the opportunity to develop my ideas about the subject, by test driving them on folk who have friends. Underpinning all, for me, is the love and friendship of Nick. viii [email protected] List of Illustrations 1 ‘The desire for friendship comes quickly.3 Friendship does not.’ (Aristotle) 2 ‘A true friend stabs you in the front.’ 24 (Oscar Wilde) 3 ‘Man naturally desires, not only to be loved, 36 but to be lovely.’ (Adam Smith) 4 ‘We disdained, as every person not a slave of 48 his animal appetites must do, the abject notion that the strongest and tenderest friendship cannot exist between man and woman without sensual relation.’ (John Stuart Mill) 5 ‘Friends have all things in common.’ Plato (left) 60 walking with Aristotle in Raphael’s famous depiction.

6 ‘When the ways of friends converge, the whole 90 world looks like home for an hour.’ (Hermann Hesse) 7 ‘Let us believe in our star friendship even if we 101 should be compelled to be earth enemies.’ (Friedrich Nietzsche) 8 A Copernican sketch of the cosmos 112 9 Manuscript letter and envelope that Dickinson 116 sent to Higginson, in which the poet talks about love.

10 ‘What madness, to love a man as something more 125 than human!’ (Augustine) 11 ‘An honest answer is the sign of true friendship.’ 141 (Proverbs) Thomas Aquinas, pictured here, saw friendship as a school of love. ix [email protected] 12 ‘I hope I’d have the courage to choose my friend 169over my country.’(E. M. Forster) 13 ‘Even when he is dead, he is still alive.’ Cicero, 185 pictured here as a reading youth.

14 ‘We have indulged freely in criticism of each 192 other when alone.’ Elizabeth Candy Stanton on her friendship with Susan Anthony, pictured here.

15 ‘The development towards which the problem of 208 homosexuality tends is the one of friendship.’ (Michel Foucault) 16 ‘In everything we were halves.’ (Michel de 225 Montaigne) 17 ‘I hate the prostitutions of the name of friendship 240 to signify modish and worldly alliances.’ (Ralph Waldo Emerson) List of Illustrations x [email protected] 1 Introduction ‘Their relationship consisted In discussing if it existed.’Thom Gunn For a long time I was single. I relied heavily on friends for company, support and affection. And most of the time I was happy about that. Implicitly, I agreed with Aristotle: who would choose to live without friends even if they had every other good thing, he said. Moreover, I regarded myself as exceptionally lucky with my friends and still do. But for all that, I was often alone and sometimes lonely. The friendships I enjoyed only went so far. The limits were most obvious when compared to the relation- ships I witnessed between lovers or within families. It seemed to me that notwithstanding the occasional exception, friendship simply cannot bear the demands and intimacies, great and small, that are the very stuff of these other relationships of love and blood. This set me thinking because my experience seemed very differ- ent from the way friendship is portrayed at a cultural level. Here it is frequently heralded as nothing less than the deﬁning rela- tionship of our age. In TV soaps, the characters always have their friends to return to when their sexual adventures fail; lovers come and go, but friends remain. Or, according to agony aunts, friendship is the ingredient that makes partnerships work (a suggestion that would have surprised many of those same agony aunts’ aunts who might have suggested the ingredient of partnership to make relationships work). For sociologists, a common assumption is that friendship is now most people’s relationship of choice, and people often see their friends in opposition to traditional relationships of obligation: as marriage [email protected] and family ﬂounders, to say nothing of lifestyles becoming more mobile, the belief (or hope) is that friendship will carry them through the serial monogamies and speedy pace of life.

And for politicians, the idea of civic friendship is also gaining ground. Here the thought is that democracy can be reviviﬁed by a notion of citizenship that includes a concern for others’ wellbeing. Such civic friendship would counterbalance disparities between rich and poor, and an individualism that seems so per- vasive, as well as provide a way of humanising a civic space which is often otherwise about the exercise of freedoms, an obe- dience to rules, and a claiming of rights. All in all, friendship is conceived of positively, as the new social glue to paste over-networked lives: because it is ideally structured to cope with the stresses and strains, great and small, that modern life throws up, it will stop them falling apart. But will it? My experience told me that whilst friendship can be great, its affections and commitments are often ambiguous.

When a lover calls they automatically get ﬁrst priority and family commitments are, well, family commitments. So perhaps the soaps are romanticising friendship, the agony aunts are falling back on it too fast, and the sociologists and politicians are being overly optimistic? There is statistical evidence to support the concern too.

Professor Ray Pahl, the sociologist of friendship, spoke with about 1,000 individuals. He found that nearly two-thirds say friends are one of the biggest causes of stress in their life; over a quarter that friends are the main cause of arguments with part- ners and families; around 11 per cent admit to taking a sick day in the previous year due to friendship problems; 25 per cent say they can’t cope with making new friends; and well over three- quarters admit to wanting to lose at least 5 ‘ﬂabby friends’ as part of a New Year friendship detox – ﬂabby friends being like those extra pounds that a healthy workout would shed.

In fact, questionable friendships are regularly debated in TV programmes, newspaper columns and learned journals. How- ever, upon further reﬂection it seemed to me that another, The Meaning of Friendship 2 [email protected] perhaps even more fundamental, question is rarely being asked – and it is one with which philosophy should be able to help.

What exactly is friendship? What is its nature, its rules, its promise? How can one differentiate between its many forms?

How does it compare to, and mix with, the connections shared between loversand within families? If at least a kind of friend- ship is elastic enough to survive the relational stresses and strains of our ﬂexible ways of life, is that friendship also strong enough to bear the burden of the human need to belong, to be connected, to be loved? These questions are trickier to answer than it might ﬁrst seem because friendship is hugely diverse. Although it is relatively easy to come up with deﬁnitions that account for part of it, it is much harder to ﬁnd one that does not exclude any of its facets. Aristotle,\ whose writing on friendship still sets the philosophical agenda to Introduction 3 Figure 1: ‘The desire for friendship comes quickly. Friendship does not.’ (Aristotle) [email protected] this day, found as much 2,500 years ago. Friendship, he proposed, is at the very least a relationship of goodwill between individuals who reciprocate that goodwill. A reasonable starter for ten. How- ever, as soon as he tried to expand it, the deﬁnition seemed to unravel. He looked around him and saw three broad group ings of rela- tionships people called friendship. The ﬁrst group are friends primarily because they are useful to each other – like the friend- ship between an employee and a boss, or a doctor and a patient, or a politician and an ally; they share goodwill because they get something out of the relationship. The second group are friends primarily because some pleasure is enjoyed by being together; it may be the football, the shopping, the gossip or sexual intimacy, but the friendship thrives insofar, and possibly only insofar, as the thing that gives the pleasure continues to exist between them. Aristotle noted that these ﬁrst two groups are therefore like each other because if you take the utility or the pleasure away, then the chances are the friendship will fade. This, though, is not true of the third group. These are people who love each other because of who they are in themselves. It may be their depth of character, their innate goodness, their intensity of passion or their simple joie de vivre, but once estab- lished on such a basis these friendships are ones that tend to last. Undoubtedly much will be given and much taken too but the friendship itself is independent of external factors and immensely more valuable than the friendships that fall into the ﬁrst two groups. That there are better or higher friendships – different people may call them soul friends, close or old friends, or best friends – as opposed to instrumental and casual friendships, or mere friendliness, is surely right. But to say that great friendship is deﬁned solely by its goodwill seems to miss its essence. Goodwill exists in these best kinds of friendship, but, unlike the lesser types, best friendship – arguably the quintessential sort – is based on something far more profound.

The Meaning of Friendship 4 [email protected] Aristotle recognised as much, and whilst his discussion of friendship contains many important and illuminating insights – that we will make much of here – he knew, I think, that ultimately a deﬁnitional approach to friendship has its limits. This ambiguity as to what friendship is reﬂects, then, the ambiguity that appears to be part and parcel of friendship in life. Try listing some of the friends you have – your partner, oldest friend, mates or girlfriends, one or two family mem- bers, work colleagues, neighbours, friends from online chat rooms, family friends, a boss perhaps, therapist, teacher, personal trainer – whoever you might at some time think of as a friend.

A look at such a list puts your friends in front of you, as it were, and highlights the vast differences. For example, the friendship with your partner will in certain key respects be unlike that of your oldest friend, though you may be very close to both. Con- versely, although friendship is for the most part a far less strong tie than say the connection to family, you may feel less close to members of your family in terms of friendship than others with whom you have no genetic or legal bond. Then again, lovers might make you blush and families can make you scream, but friendship – even soul friendship – is usually cool in\ comparison. As you continue further down the list to the friends who are in many ways little more than acquaintances, associates or individu- als for whom you have merely a sense of friendliness, it is obvious that friendship stretches from a love you could scarcely do without to an affection that you’d barely miss if it ended. Some people would say there is some minimal quality which means that it makes sense to call all of them friends (perhaps Aristotle’s good- will). Others would disagree: they are the sort who say they have a handful of friends and that others are people they only know.

In other words, the ambiguity of friendship extends to the very possibility of proliﬁc and profound friendship-making. The diverse range of ‘friends’ that people say they have is entertainingly portrayed in Tim Lott’s novel, White City Blue. A Introduction 5 [email protected] couple are planning their wedding,trying to sort out the list. He asks her about her friends. She replies:

For a start there are friends you don’t like. I’ve got plenty of those. Then there are friends you do like, but never bother to see. Then there are the ones you really like a lot, but can’t stand their partners. There are those you just have out of habit and can’t shake off. Then there’s the ones you’re friends with not because you like them, but because they’re very good- looking or popular and it’s kind of cool to be their friend.

Trophy friends … Then there are sports friends. There are friends of convenience – they’re usually work friends. There are pity friends who you stay with because you feel sorry for them. There are acquaintances who are on probation as friends.

Personally, I think that Aristotle is on to something in his belief that the closest kind of friendship is only possible with a handful of individuals, such is the investment of time and self that it takes. ‘Host not many but host not none’, was his formula. He would argue that less is more and it is easy to sub- stitute mere networking for the friendships it is supposed to yield. He actually went so far as to express a fear of having too many friends, ‘polyphilia’ as it might be called. There is an expression attributed to Aristotle that captures the concern: ‘Oh my friends, there is no friend.’ Michel de Montaigne, Fried- rich Nietzsche and most recently the philosopher Jacques Derrida have picked up on the phrase, though as Aristotle used it, he was not worrying about the loneliness of the modern individual, as Derrida muses on, but rather the dangers of knowing so many people, you really know no one. One of the things I think the philosophy of friendship tells us is that life produces personal rela- tionships of many types, but out of these connections good friendship may or may not grow. Certain associations or institu- tions like work or marriage can foster friendship but those same associations or institutions need not necessarily be characterised The Meaning of Friendship 6 [email protected] by deep friendship themselves; friendship emerges, as it were, from below up. It is a ﬂuid concept. Another dimension to the ambiguity of friendship is its appar- ent open-endedness. Unlike institutions of belonging such as mar- riage which is supported and shaped by social norms, or work where individuals have contractually deﬁned roles, friendship has no predetermined instructions for assembly or project for growth.

People have to create their friendships mostly out of who they are, their interests and needs, without any universally applicable framework. On the one hand, this is a potential weakness, because a friendship may ‘go nowhere’ or ‘run out of steam’. On the \ other, it is a potential strength because there is also a freedom in this that is crucial to friendship’s appeal: it is part of the reason for \ the diversity within the family of relationships called friendship. In summary, then, it seems that it is not possible to say unequiv- ocally what friendship is. Sometimes it is intense, sometimes it is thin. Sometimes it appears to embrace many, sometimes only a few. This might seem to be a bit of a blow if the question is what is friendship. However, far from ambiguity automatically leading to philosophical impasse, an exploration of the very ambiguities of friendship is actually a very good way forward. After all, is not mis- taking relationships for what they are not – that is being blind to their ambiguity – arguably the greatest cause of disappointment and failure? A married couple may assume they are friends in some deep sense when really they only have goodwill for each other because of the kids; unless they realise that, when the kids leave home, the marriage may falter too. An employee and a boss may think they are good friends after all the late nights, trips abroad and hours spent together: but when the day arrives for the appraisal or pay rise, and both turn out to be modest, the friendship stumbles and falls. Alternatively, consider this thought experiment suggested by Nietzsche:

Just think to yourself some time how different are the feelings, how divided the opinions, even among the closest Introduction 7 [email protected] acquaintances; how even the same opinions have quite a dif- ferent place or intensity in the heads of your friends than in your own; how many hundreds of times there is occasion for misunderstanding or hostile ﬂight. After all that, you will say to yourself: ‘How unsure is the ground on which all our bonds and friendships rest; how near we are to cold downpours or ill weather; how lonely is every man!’ Honesty about any relationship is likely to improve it, even if the honest thing to do is not put too much hope in it! The mistakes that people can make in friendship are also exempliﬁed in some of the things people commonly say about it. For example, many would say that the test of good friend- ship is being able to pick up immediately where you left off even if you haven’t seen the friend for some time. Aristotle, though, thought that good friendship depends on shared living and spending substantial, regular, quality time together. ‘Cut off the talk, and many a time you cut off the friendship,’ he said. The question is how much time, how much talk is needed? Or again, are not the Life columns of newspapers and maga- zines increasingly scattered with tales of friendship’s labour lost? A piece on ‘Google grief’ caught my eye, the twenty-ﬁrst century phenomenon of learning of the death of an old friend on the web. The writer, Michele Kirsch, complained that having had such a shock, she was not allowed to grieve for her dead friend because those with whom she lived now were implicitly asking, ‘If he was so brilliant, why haven’t you been in touch for\ 18 years?’ Fair question, she is forced to admit; the friendship she had was nostalgic and only in her head. And yet, if it is really quite easy to make mistakes by thinking the relationship is something other that what it is, the best kinds of friendship (however that is judged) are essential for a happy life: human beings need people they can call friends and not just people who are relatives, partners, acquaintances, col- leagues or associates. In other words, the corollary of friendship’s ambiguity is that it is packed with promise and strewn with perils. The Meaning of Friendship 8 [email protected] This, then, sets the agenda for this book. It is these perils and that promise which I hope to track down, the ambiguities and points of contention that I address. My aim is not to try to produce a comprehensive deﬁnition or theory of friendship. Rather, the value of asking about friendship lies in the asking, not necessarily in coming to any incontestable conclusions. I am taking a lead here from Plato. According to him, at the end of a lengthy conversation on friendship with the Greek youths Lysis and Menexenus, no less a person than Socrates concluded that he had not been able to discover what friend- ship was. He feared looking ridiculous because paradoxically it also seemed that he, Lysis and Menexenus were friends. But he had good reason for not tying friendship down. Although everyone has friends of some sort and friendships appear to share similarities, and thus be deﬁnable, they are in life as varied as the people who form them. This is the irre- ducibility of friendship; people have an inﬁnite variety of expe- riences of it. So another way of putting it is that this is a book of the sort which invites you to test its ideas against your experi- ence. In fact, with a subject like friendship it is almost imposs- ible to do otherwise. It is a search through philosophy for the things that may thwart friendship and for the conditions within which it may best thrive. Philosophy is frequently overlooked as a resource for thinking through friendship in this way. This has much to do with the fact that only a relatively small number of philosophers have written on the subject at any length. What is more, those who have, although generally agreeing that friendship is essential for a happy life, also say that it provides no automatic satisfaction of human desires for deeper relationships or society’s need for con- nection. Friendship is ‘a problem worthy of a solution’, as Nietzsche gnomically put it. Or as Aristotle wrote: ‘The desire for friendship comes quickly. Friendship does not.’ The implication is that the best kinds of friendships are only possible between people who properly value it and who understand how many things from the personal to the political can compromise, undermine Introduction 9 [email protected] and destroy it. There is an art to friendship. Nonetheless, the hope is that philosophy can teach us something about it. The tradition that we will major on here is that of the west.

That said, this is not necessarily to exclude conceptions of friendship from Indian and other Asian traditions. For one thing, it’s becoming increasingly clear that Plato and Aristotle derived a lot of their ideas by looking East. Then there is Taxila, in modern day Pakistan, which was a veritable crossroads of the world, a place to which ancient Greek philosophers ventured.

Aristotelian and Platonic insights informed the development of Islam too. There’s also the fact that whilst Confucian ideas can’t\ have inﬂuenced the development of thought in the ancient Mediterranean, Confucian conceptions of friendship aren’t always so different: if Confucius envisaged society as a concen- tric series of circles, with the closest relationships in the centre, rippling out to generate a sense of civic affection and place in the body politic as a whole, then Aristotle has a not dissimilar model in mind too, as we’ll see. Each chapter looks at key ambiguities that may exist in any friendship, testing for the perils, searching for the promise. The ﬁrst begins with the world of work because work friends frequently exhibit some of friendship’s chief ambiguities. On the one hand, the workplace is a good place to ﬁnd and make friends. But, on the other, it is also one where supposed friends can show remarkable indifference – as in the speed with which the friendship is forgotten when someone leaves the ofﬁce. The workplace also has an insidi- ous capacity to undermine friendship. The ﬂy in the ointment is the culture of utility that pervades it. People are there to do things, they are paid for doing them, and they are often encouraged to compete against each other in so doing. Of course, all friends use each other from time to time. But friends at work are at risk of coming to feel that they are merely being used. Therein lies the ambiguity of friendship at work. Moreover, the workplace is not an isolated environment in the western world. It informs a culture that tends to colour society as a whole; productivity often counts for more than perspicacity, the professional touch more than the The Meaning of Friendship 10 [email protected] personal touch, being praised more than being praiseworthy, wher- ever you are. All this is detrimental to friendship and so this chapter also provides us with a ﬁrst look at friendship in a social context, and how we might thrive in it. The second chapter considers another source of ambiguity in friendship, namely, sex. The downside is that sex can clearly imperil friendships by its possessiveness or its inappropriateness.

The upside is that a friendship which includes a sexual element is the best sort of relationship that many people hope to have. I will argue that the key is to recognise that whilst a sexual relation- ship will start with physical passion, a passion of a non-sexual sort needs to kick in too if a good friendship is to develop. This is actu- ally a natural if at times delicate step to take because the two kinds of passion are connected: a mature couple will realise that their deeper desires cannot be satisﬁed only in each other and that their relationship should nurture a search for fulﬁlment elsewhere too, in wider aspirations and achievements shared together. This chapter is also a good place to consider a related sort of friendship, passionate friendships that have never had a sexual element, and where to have gone down the sexual route would have destroyed it. The erotic element is here sublimated in the passion that these friends share; we say these friends have a passion for life. Work and sex are two sources of ambiguity and the third chapter turns to another, exhibited in the way in which friends dissimulate. I am talking here about ‘loving deceptions’ such as when an individual says they like their friend’s new boy- or girl- friend when they do not, or when someone else says that their friend’s cooking or clothing or opinion is good or right when they really think it is wrong or bad. Once you start thinking about it, it becomes apparent that these false colourings, eva- sions and occasionally out-and-out lies pervade friendship. Even close friends will routinely dissimulate because they judge that the time is not right to speak out, that current sensitivities are too great for the honest truth, or more humbly that, even though they are close, equivocation is best because one should not Introduction 11 [email protected] presume to judge another’s heart. The particularly odd thing about friendship is that this dissimulation, this feigning friend- ship, is often necessary for the friendship’s sake. The question is what does this say about it? It turns out that the answer again has a plus, for it reveals another aspect of what is possible in the best kinds of friendship. This, in turn, is nothing less than a reﬂection on what it is to be human itself. Talking of dissimulation needs naturally to the next chapter, the new phenomenon of friending online. Just what is friend- ship on sites like Facebook, or in virtual spaces like Second Life, really all about? Is the web a boon for friendship, or a place where it falls apart? Should we be worried about what it is doing to our social lives, or embrace the new without fear, recognising the way it brings people together?

A different kind of ambiguity is explored in the ﬁfth chapter, namely, the ambivalence with which the wider world tends to view friendship. Why do we dislike nepotism, when it’s just folk being kind to their friends? Why do we sense tensions between the commitments people have with their families and the ones they’d like to make to their friends? Is democracy itself wel- coming of friendship, or actually wary of it, since it encourages favourites and special interests not a vision of the common good? Is friendship the greatest of human loves or actually a cor- ruption of love, because it is irredeemably selﬁsh and particular? This ambiguity also sets up an observation that might worry us if we believe friendship is necessary for a happy life: why it is that few thinkers today have ch osen to tackle the subject at any length, when at certain times in the past – notably in the world of antiquity and the Middle Ages – friendship was a major concern. The suggestion is that in these periods of history, friendship enjoyed a social standing that it does not today. Ancient Greek political life seems to have incorporated quasi-institutions of friendship. The medieval world did so too, to the extent that some people entered ‘marriages of friend ship’.

This stands in marked contrast to our own situation, in which friendship is thought of as an almost wholly private relation- The Meaning of Friendship 12 [email protected] ship. Are we missing out on this key component of life as a result?There are what might be called prophets of friendship to be found in the modern world – the area we explore next – in partic- ular in feminism and the women’s movement, and more recently in gay and so-called queer thought. Here, friendship is viewed as subversive of social norms and liberating of individual lives.

Think of the anxiety provoked by the idea of gay marriage: I suspect that this has little to do with sexual acts and much more to do with forms of friendship that challenge tight notions of family. This chapter also raises the question of possible differences between the friendships of men and those of women. The evi- dence on this is mixed and hard to read. On the one hand, there are sociologists who have argued that intimacy has been transformed in the modern world: in the same way that distinct gender roles are eroding at a social level, so differences between male and female friendship are soft ening too. On the other hand, there are others who argue that the evidence shows that gendered patterns of friendship still form in childhood and continue into adult life: from this view follow conclusions such as that women’s friendships are more to do with self-disclosure and empathy, whereas men’s friendships are more about the sociability of enjoying or doing things together. It’s a fascinating question. The ﬁnal chapters return to the question of what friendship ultimately aims at on a personal level, and asks how best to strive for it. I call this the spirituality of friendship, not least because th\ e most profound kind of friendship that people hope for is often referred to as soulmateship. Having said that, this is, I think, a much misused and sentimentalised concept. The philosophical tradition portrays it as an exceptional and difﬁcult love. It necess-\ itates nothing less than being able to overcome the ambiguities of amity – though, if that is never wholly possible, it also suggests how one might live with regards to the very best that can be hoped for in friendship. Introduction 13 [email protected] So it turns out that philosophy is indeed illuminative of friendship. In fact, I think it offers a better resource for friends than much of what is found in books of self-help. We seek its wisdom, but ﬁrst we must get to work.

The Meaning of Friendship 14 [email protected] 15 Friends at Work ‘In the desert no man meets a friend.’ Eastern proverb Some people say that they cannot watch The Ofﬁce, the tragi- comic TV docudrama of life at work written by Ricky Gervais, because for all its laughs and for all its humanity, it makes them squirm. It is too close to life. It holds up a mirror to the endless hours people spend in strip-lit rooms and ﬁnds the experience wanting. The friendship between the characters is never far from the surface of the plot. Or rather the edgy, forced relationships that often have to pass for friendship at work. As Tim, the sales rep, comments in one episode: you spend so much time with these people, more time than with your family, and yet you don’t know them; all you might have in common with them is that you tread on the same carpet for eight hours a day. Experience has made Tim sceptical. He has long nursed a love for Dawn, the receptionist. Everyone in the ofﬁce knows about it and the agony it has caused him. And yet no one is really able to care for him. Gareth, the team leader, wants to make light of it but, like everything else he does, he botches it and ends up just poking fun at Tim. The new woman, who sits opposite Tim, empathises but trivialises his love: wherever she works she is always fancied by blokes, she tells him with a smirk. Then there’s Keith, in accounts.

He simply rides roughshod over Tim’s feelings by offering his, frankly, disgusting advice on how to win women. All in all, the people in the ofﬁce cannot share Tim’s burden, as true friends might, though they know all about it, in embarrassing detail. We might call this ‘pseudo-intimacy’, the state in which work colleagues can know so much about each other but can care so little. [email protected] The Meaning of Friendship16 However, pseudo-intimacy is not the fundamental problem with which relationships at work must contend. It is, I think, the product of a deeper ambiguity, one which The Ofﬁce also portrays well. Here’s another incident. It features David Brent, the regional manager and fool por- trayed by Ricky Gervais. ‘You will never have another boss like me,’ he boasts. ‘Someone who’s basically a chilled out enter- tainer.’ By this episode, though, he’s been sacked and has taken to coming back to the ofﬁce with his dog, to catch up with his former employees whom he calls friends. They ‘listen in’ as he holds court. In this episode Neil, the managing director, arrives and bans David from the ofﬁce for persistently wasting people’s time. David protests, and appeals to his supposed ofﬁce friends:

to show Neil up for the inhumanity of banning him, when he only wanted to visit his friends, David asks cheeily: ‘Who fancies a drink after work?’ His request is met with silence. David pleads: he is free tomor- row. Silence. He is free Thursday. Silence. Finally, Tim, out of grudging goodness, volunteers to go for the drink. David gri- maces at Neil – the awkward smile of the Pyrrhic victor. The truth is that he not only has no real friends in the ofﬁce. He barely has any allies. It is a painful moment but the interesting question for us is why everyone stopped acting as friends the minute David asked them out for a drink? Were they not friendly before? And if not, why were they so two-faced? The answer, I think, lies in the fact that prior to the invitation David gave them something they wanted: a distraction from the working day. There is the disruptive force of his personality too, of course. But they were prepared to show him faux friendship because he broke the tedium of life at the ofﬁce. However, to go for a drink with him after work would be another story entirely. That would be a hassle with minimal pleasure; it would risk becoming trapped as David’s captive audience, perhaps for hours. And crucially, there would be no beneﬁt in terms of mitigating the dreariness of work. Hence no one wanted to go out for the post-work drink. There is silence. [email protected] Friends at Work17 So, alongside the pseudo-intimacy of work life, there’s another factor that shapes such relationships: people’s useful- ness to one another. Take that usefulness away – in this case, David’s purpose as a diversion – and the friendliness tends to unravel too. Put quite generally we have the fundamental source of the ambiguity of many friendships at work. They are determined by their utility. People’s utility at work extends way beyond just being a welcome distraction or even performing a role or a function. It goes to the heart of the working environment, underpinning why people are there at all. They work to do something, for a client, for a team, for a boss. And work is not work without one key utility for the employee, namely, the paycheck. Ideally the work is rewarding, doubly so when there’s a sense of achieving something with friends. And if you receive what you believe you are due that generates friendly feeling too. So, this is not to say that people do not or cannot feel genuine friendship towards one another in the ofﬁce, or work- shop, or on the road. In surveys, friendship routinely comes up as one of the most important factors for people in their working lives. That only makes sense: a friendly face to greet you in the morning humanises the day. Some research from Gallup showed just how good that is. A friendly working environment increases an employee’s satisfaction with their employer by nearly 50 per cent. People with good friends at work are twice as likely to think they are well paid. And people with at least three close friends at work are 46 per cent more likely to be extremely satisﬁed with their job. The research revealed more. Those 30 per cent of people who report having a best friend at work gain in unexpected ways.

They will have fewer accidents, engage more customers and work more productively. They also feel that what they are doing is well aligned with the company’s aims, in other words their work feels more purposeful. They are better at being inno vative, and are more prepared to share ideas. Further, friends at work provide a sense of belonging: they make you feel that you are informed [email protected] about what’s going on, that your opinions are being heard across the organisation.Nonetheless, work is not work without sweat and toil. It is the impact of that on friendship we’re pursuing here.

On being useful Think more on this distinctive feature of working life, its utility.

Mark Twain captured its characteristic with wit and insight in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Tom persuades his friends to whitewash Aunt Polly’s fence, and he does so by convincing them that they can’t afford not to, it’s such a rare experience.

This deludes them into thinking the work is not work, and they don’t really have to do it – though they do, and willingly.

Twain reﬂects on what this means:

[Tom should comprehend] that Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do. And this would help him to under- stand why constructing artiﬁcial ﬂowers or performing on a treadmill is work, while rolling ten-pins or climbing Mont Blanc is only amusement. There are wealthy gentlemen in England who drive four-horse passenger-coaches twenty or thirty miles on a daily line, in the summer, because the privilege costs them considerable money; but if they were offered wages for the service, that would turn it into work and then they would resign.

That it is the fundamental operating principle in work relation- ships is revealed in a variety of ways. When people are friendly with the boss, in addition to being civil or polite, is it not at least in part because they depend on the boss for pay, for perks and for a peaceful life – that is, the utility the boss performs for them? Alternatively, why is it so easy to dislike a colleague who doesn’t pull their weight, or someone else who makes work for others, even when outside of work they may well be perfectly The Meaning of Friendship 18 [email protected] Friends at Work19 likeable people? Is it not because at work their likeability is determined by their ability to fulﬁl their role or function; fail there and friendliness will not follow. Or again: why do people like the postman, the tea-lady or the receptionist? Is it not because they provide the service of being good for gossip and easing the day away? That’s the added value they offer, their additional utility. (Incidentally, research shows that gossip at work is good for your health too, so ofﬁce gossips really are doing something useful.) And what of perhaps the deepest conundrum of all. Why is it that you can have known a col- league for years, enjoyed their company day after day, worked with them, even helped them when personal matters spilt into the workplace, and yet, when they left, it was, overnight, almost as if you had never known them? You might miss them for a day, perhaps a week, and hope their new job is going well.

But, in truth, most of the people with whom we were once friendly at work disappear from our lives with little more than a toast in the canteen, or best wishes on a card. It is very odd, when you consider all the time you spend with these people, and the genuine exchange of good feeling. And yet, it is entirely understandable when you realise that the relationship was, at heart, one of utility, based mostly on what was done together.

Take that shared activity away, which is what happens when people leave work, and the friendship withers like a cut ﬂower.

It is not that they were not liked or had nothing in common with you. It is that the thing held in common – the work – is gone; without doing that together the relationship ceases to have reason or purpose. The ambiguity of most work friends is also illustrated by what happens to colleagues if they happen to meet outside work.

Many will have an inkling of just how unnerving, and amusing, this can be. Clearly few will be pleased to be spotted scanning the job section in the newsagents or to be caught buying luxury moist toilet tissue in the supermarket. But what of this? You’re in beds at Ikea and through a stack of ﬁling cabinets in home ofﬁce see the person who sits across from you at work; they’re in [email protected] kitchens. You spend eight hours a day in the same room as them, and have only friendly feelings towards them. So why do you now put your head down, fake a thorough assessment of the mattresses, and give them ample time to move on, just so you don’t have to talk? It feels too awkward, not right for a Saturday morning. Alternatively, at the cinema, heading for the screen, your eyes meet those of someone you’ve worked with time and time again. You approach, all smiles, and then note: they are of the opposite sex. You have a ﬂush of anxiety. Should you just say ‘hi’? Should you merely shake hands? Or should you exchange a kiss? What is appropriate in the non-work context? The reason for the discomfort is that stripping work relation- ships of their utility, and the environment in which the relation- ship makes sense, simultaneously removes their raison d’être. So outside work, people ﬁnd it hard to know how to relate to one another. Typically, they revert to work: talking about what you do together, though you’re not actually doing it, feels right, feels friendly. People become awkward because the framework within which they conduct the relationship is gone. (It might also be the case, of course, that someone doesn’t want to see their colleagues in the garden centre or at paintball because no matter how nice they might be, they only remind them of work.) Even if your rela- tionships at work involve a drink at the end of the day, or can cope with a casual encounter over the checkout, there will be limits to what they can sustain. This is why team-building away days are so dreaded. They so easily overstep the mark by forcing people together as if they were friends. They are often only saved by the identiﬁcation of a common enemy, the facilitator or boss, who as the recipient of mutual animosity creates the illusion of friendship in the group. Work is not the only place where these utility-type friendships predominate. Any friendship that is based primarily upon the fact of doing something together will share similarities with it. Polit- ical friends, mostly formed around the business of politics – the art of doing the possible, we might say – are an obvious case in point. In a study of amity and enmity in the highest echelons of The Meaning of Friendship 20 [email protected] American politics, Friend and Foe in the U.S. Senate , Ross K. Baker found that the most common type of interpersonal alliances are based on what he called ‘institutional kinship’. These relation- ships are not really intimate in a personal sense, but instead ﬂourish and ﬂounder insofar as they oil the wheels of political machination. Conversely, close friendships, carrying the everyday sense of personal intimacy, are the rarest. In fact, Baker concludes that they are probably unwise in politics: friendliness provides some ‘wiggle room’ when the going gets tough, but politically they are a liability. Moreover, if you want to be a leader, the evi- dence suggests you’re better off being a loner. This is not to say that some politicians do not become very good friends, as people may at work. It is just to point out that for most, the friendship lasts only so long as the alliance or advantage does too. Friendships from those that form between charity workers to those that stem from having been on a TV show provide further examples: take away the charitable work or the show and, for most, the friendship will fall away – if with a warm remembrance of the fun shared or aims achieved. Friendships formed online in virtual communities of interest are like this too. The thing that drives the friendliness of the chat room is the mutual usefulness or common enthusiasm that the internet is so good at propagating.

We’ll have more to say about this particularly modern manifesta- tion of friendship later, but the suspicion would be that few virtual friendships transcribe into the real world where what is shared online does not dominate.

On not being used Aristotle identiﬁed the principal characteristic of these friendships as he stalked the marketplaces of ancient Greece and Macedonia. He is hard to beat in his examination of the nature of them, characteristic of ‘business types’, as he put it.

Those who are friendly with each other because they are useful to each other do not like each other for the person each one is Friends at Work 21 [email protected] in themselves. They like each other only insofar as it does them some good. They are friendly because it is beneﬁcial to be so.

He identiﬁes the heart of the matter. It’s his ﬁrst type of fri\ end- ship, the people who share goodwill, at least in the ﬁrst instance, because they get something out of it. (The ﬁrst type of friendship may convert into Aristotle’s third type, when people know each other for who they are in themselves, and become close friends; but leave that relatively special case to one side for the minute.) Hence people can be friendly with colleagues without necessar- ily knowing anything much of the person as they are in them- selves. And this immediately points to the limitation of this kind of friendship. It’s weak ness as friendship, and the reason Aristotle believes it is a lesser, if humanising, type of amity, is that it depends on the thing that is done together, on the mutual exchange of utility. The affection ﬁnds it hard to reach beyond the beneﬁts gained by being friendly, and if such a friend ceases to perform the function or utility for you – be that because they change jobs or you move on – then the friendli- ness peters out: you have no other connection to draw on that can sustain this kind of friendship. Think of the word ‘friend’ itself, and its conjugates – friends, friendly, friendliness, friendship. I do a lot of freelance work and, consequently, work with a number of different people. I am more or less friendly with them all and imagine that my friendliness is one of the reasons they ask me to work for them again. When working together, we will enjoy friendly conversa- tions, gossip or otherwise; many of them might say of me, ‘He is a friend of our organisation.’ Others might ask me, from time to time, to do them a favour, which I do, partly to generate goodwill that I hope might have some return in the future, and partly out of friendship. If I’m honest, there’s always some of the former motivation in the mix. A relatively small subsection of the individuals I work with might call me ‘friend’ on occa- sion, perhaps at a Christmas party. But for most of my work friends, if I heard them describing me as a good friend, perhaps The Meaning of Friendship 22 [email protected] with a capital ‘F’, say to someone who was a close friend of theirs, I would think that was overstepping the mark. I do not really know them, I would think: I am friends but not really a close friend. The friendliness might share some of the attributes of a deeper friendship, such as trusting and liking one another, and suspecting we might like each other more, if we had the time to put into the friendship outside of work. But it is nothing compared with the friendship founded on the intimacy of know- ing and loving someone well, and knowing and loving them regardless of any mutual beneﬁt or common project we share. There is a risk, when analysing utility friendship in this way, of making it seem that work relationships and the like have more in common with the sycophancy of pleasing superiors, or gratuitous acts of self-interest, than friendship. It raises the question of whether the wise person should be sceptical of any and all friend- ship at work, and quietly write it off altogether. To do so, though, would be to come down too quickly on work relationships. They will all contain an element of utility, though that does not neces- sarily imply that they are all merely exploitative. And a work friend might become a close friend, of course. We need a more subtle language to describe the conditions of friendship in these highly structured environments. It’s good to be able to draw distinctions between the ways in which we might proﬁt from the friendliness of other people, on a scale from out- and-out exploitation, through mutual beneﬁt, to an encounter we might come to count as providential. Unmoderated exploitation is never going to provide fertile grounds for friendship. But soft mutual beneﬁt is not only bearable in work relationships but also actually common to all friendships. Indeed, even best friends are, in part, a good thing to have because of what they can do for you, for the function they can perform – from small kindnesses like feeding the cat, to being there to pick up the pieces when life falls apart. Some would say that the deﬁning mark of a good friend is that they are always there for you and thus have a kind of unconditional utility. ‘I’ll be there, yes I will. You’ve go\ t a friend’, are James Taylor’s words. That sounds like a blessing. The Friends at Work 23 [email protected] difference between that and mostrelationships at work is that in the ofﬁce people are friendly generally because of the mutual gain. You are liked ﬁrst, not for who you are, but for what you give. And yet, this means that the possibility of genuine friendship at work is not automatically excluded. A common project is an excellent way of bringing people together which must, on occa- sion, result in good friendship. Some individuals do come to like each other having met at work. Moreover, they can not only survive an encounter at Ikea without embar rassment, but they might even choose to go to Ikea together at the weekend.

Work may be one of the best sources of friends, as well as one of the most desirable places to have one. The point is that these relationships are always, at least initially, inﬂuenced by the utility factor. The trick is to ensure any nascent friendship is not determined by it.

The Meaning of Friendship 24 Figure 2: ‘A true friend stabs you in the front.’ (Oscar Wilde) [email protected] This, though, is harder to do than might ﬁrst meetthe eye because the work environment throws up all sorts of hurdles to relationships based primarily on liking someone for who they are, as opposed to what they contribute to a common task. To see the extent of the problem we need to break the matter down into two constitutive elements. One operates at a personal level:

how to negotiate the debilitating tendency of the functional nature of friendliness at work. A second operates at a broader, social level: why does the modern workplace cultivate such a powerful culture of instrumentality and how can friends at work cope with it, even overcome it?

On winning friends, not merely inﬂuencing people They’re big challenges, and many of Aristotle’s thoughts on friendship are focused on them. In chapters VIII and IX of his Nicomachean Ethics, his most sustained piece of writing on the subject, he makes a number of suggestions as to tackling the pressures friends at work, and elsewhere, must negotiate. His advice stems partly from his analysis of such friendships and also from the tone he adopts when discussing them. This is important, I think: he has an attitude of unsentimental honesty.

The point seems to be that it is vital to recognise work relation- ships for what they are. Right discernment will show the extent to which any friendliness that they exhibit depends on what the individuals do together and the extent to which a friend- ship can be deepened into knowing, liking and maybe even loving the individual for who they are themselves. There are a number of insidious factors that can impede such progress; that they may seem slight contributes to the real chal- lenge. First, Aristotle notes that friendships based on doing some- thing together are easy to form. And second, he notes that they can easily be confused with deeper friendship. They are easy to form for the reason that such friends don’t have to reveal much of themselves and can focus instead on what they are up to. That means they don’t have to share much of themselves, which Friends at Work 25 [email protected] anyway takes time, and can instead immediately start to draw on the pool of common experience. We call it the camaraderie of doing things together or, conversely – and perhaps especially at work – the solidarity found in both not wanting to be there.

This feature of work friendship might explain why so-called progressive employers increasingly provide things for employ- ees to do alongside the work for which they are employed. Find work with a large enough company and you will not only have a desk but gyms, coffee shops and cafés to hang out in with col- leagues. They are locations for the forging of friendships. Is it going too far to suspect that the captains of industry have their eye on statistics such as those thrown up by Gallup? They showed that employee satisfaction increases markedly if staff consider the workplace to be friendly, that they are more likely to be happy with their pay, to engage better with customers and be more productive too. Such feelings undoubtedly humanise the workplace: the gossip over the photocopier or the emailed joke about the boss are vital too. But such activities are in themselves poor indicators of the possibility for deeper friendship that may evolve from jovial company. For example, a mutually shared indiscretion may be taken as a sign of friendship. ‘Did you hear about Jim and Pamela in the store cupboard?’ Immediately, you feel the pleasure of being in on the conspiracy against Jim and Pamela. But there need be nothing very intimate about that when it is founded on shallow grounds. The indiscretion may create an illusion of intimacy, when you’re just being used as a sounding board, not real conﬁdant. It \ is readily mistaken as a sign of deeper friendship. Second, Aristotle sees that friendships characterised by their instrumentality are transient too: the things that bring the indi- viduals together often change – be it the project, the gossip, or the job itself – and in qu ite arbitrary ways. Once that happens any friendship dissolves as well, for it existed only in relation to that which brought it about. Such transience, may mean that the relationship is over before there was even a chance for anything of any depth to take root.

The Meaning of Friendship 26 [email protected] Third, work friendships can be shaky because the individuals concerned do not always get the same thing out of the relation- ship. The ofﬁce joker will demand an audience and think them friends, when the individuals on the receiving end can just feel used. What is more, so-called friendships formed on this basis are not even necessarily with or between pleasant people. The relationships depicted in the movie Trainspotting are an extreme version of this. It features a bunch of friends caught up in the underworld of the Edinburgh drug scene. There is the loser, the liar, the psycho and the junkie, and throughout the ﬁlm they use and abuse each other. The workplace equivalents of the loser, the liar and the psycho are the careerist, the sycophant and the person who will step on anyone in their way: they will be your friends, for as long as it suits them. This leads us to another set of issues, around what happens when friendships at work go wrong. The problem here is that because they are conditional on mutual beneﬁt, they are also prone to accusation when that beneﬁt is not, or is perceived to have not been, delivered. In the workplace, this can be dangerous.

Not only has a possible friend been lost but a possible enemy may have been made. Once the damage is done and bad feeling has set in, one party may then have it in their power, say, to spoil the other person’s career prospects. Backstabbing and insidious rumour can cause tremendous trouble. It is for this reason that sociologists of the workplace report that colleagues often pretend to remain friends with others even when they secretly despise them; they’d rather be phony than risk animosity. Similarly, self- help books often advise avoiding friendships at work and letting no one become more than an amicable acquaintance. One title I saw recently, on how to get along with difﬁcult col- leagues, expressed such deception perfectly. It was called The Frog-Snogger’s Guide. Incidentally, it was sat on the shelf bang next door to The Science of Inﬂuence: How To Get Anyone To Say Yes In 8 Minutes Or Less. The latter tomes’ ﬁrst big tip was to make sure you come across as a friend. If you want to have it your way, you have to secure that illusion within the ﬁrst four seconds. Friends at Work 27 [email protected] The Meaning of Friendship28 Even if people are not so manipulative, the omnipresence of utility can be confusing. It makes for another illusion of friend- ship that, again, is ambiguous. A friendly character or admirable temperament might look like an attitude of friendship but is still strictly in the service of getting on at work. Or someone may show goodwill towards you that is nothing of the sort. This last possibility is sometimes known as the ‘Hawthorne Effect’, after an experiment done in Western Electric’s Hawthorne fac- tory in 1927. Investigators turned the lights up in the factory and worker productivity went up. They then turned the lights down in the factory and strangely productivity went up a little more. The conclusion they reached was that just an impression of care and goodwill makes workers more productive. In the same way, a letter of thanks from your boss will please you even if you know he doesn’t particularly care for you. Finally, discerning friendliness built on utility from close friend- ship is difﬁcult because many people want to maintain a degree of privacy at work and are guarded about what they reveal of themselves. For the same reason it is generally deemed inappro- priate to enquire into a colleague or employee’s personal life – unless, of course, it affects their employability, as in the case o\ f ill health. The result is that, on one level, colleagues assume that they know a great deal about each other, as a by-product of spend- ing all that time together, whilst on another level they actually understand little – the issue of pseudo-intimacy. Similarly, profes- sionalism compromises the extent to which people can get to know each other too. Consider the way people dress: it is usually indicative of their sense of their worth to the company, not who they are in themselves. And experiments with ‘dress-down Fridays’ prove the point: many would rather wear their usual work clothes even when they have a choice, because it causes them too much anxiety to think how they want to present themselves to their peers otherwise. Jeans or slacks? Shift or top? The fear is of reveal- ing too much, and that mitigates against friendship. Looking at these problems as a whole, we can see that although an attitude of unsentimental honesty might seem too steely for [email protected] the fostering of friendship, it has the great advantage of enabling one to discern the amicable wheat from the utilitarian chaff and thereby the relationships from which friendship can grow. If friendship is about knowing someone truly and being known by them, it is also about knowing which relationships are likely to foster goodfriendships; the relationships that contain the seeds of deeper friendship, as opposed to shallow, instrumental friendliness. It all depends on the attitude people have to their tasks and what they expect of others. And perhaps when genuine good feeling rises above the quest for jolly camaraderie, or devious inﬂuence, an admiration for character over profes- sional achievement – a virtuous spiral of regard – can blossom into friendship.

Befriending bosses Consider now a subset of the personal dimension of work rela- tionships that one must contend with, namely, that of friend- liness with the boss. This is inevitably tricky. It might be thought of as the ultimate test. It may be that you like your boss, they like you, they like the work you do for them, and you the rewards you receive in return. But even such happy circum- stance is rarely stable. At the heart of the relationship lies an imbalance – in terms of power, money and status. ‘Work is of two kinds,’ wrote Bertrand Russell. ‘First, altering the position \ of matter at or near the earth’s surface…; second, telling other people to do so. The ﬁrst kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid.’ Problems for friendship readily arise from such disparity. So is it possible to be friends with the boss? Some factors touched on already have a bearing on the ques- tion. But speciﬁcally in relation to this issue, the concerns can be broken down into three parts. First, how are the overtures of friendship that a boss may make to a subordinate to be under- stood, and the reverse – the friendliness of a subordinate towards the boss? Second, what of the complications that arise if and Friends at Work 29 [email protected] when work is, at least in part,rewarding for its own sake? And last but not least, what of the business of working for friends? It is worth doing a little reverse engineering and thinking, ﬁrst, about the structure of the relationship between employees and bosses. Aristotle is illuminating once more. He divides the relationship into two parts. One is a contractual part, namely, the terms on which someone is employed that has to do with tasks, time and money. ‘Not a penny off the pay, not a second on the day,’ it is sometimes said. The second is a goodwill part, that is, the human bit of the working relationship, or the extent to which you’re prepared to gift your talents free of charge to the boss. The ﬁrst part being contractual is, by deﬁnition, impersonal. The second, goodwill, is where the potential for friendship lies. Unhappiness stems from the confusion of the two. Perhaps the most common complications stem from the con- fusion that arises as to the nature of the demands that a boss may make. Are they made on the basis of the contractual part of the relationship or the goodwill part? It is often not easy to tell the difference. For example, if a paycheck is late or it is neces- sary to work after hours, does the boss call on goodwill or con- tractual leeway to cope with the immediate crisis? The answer is probably an uneasy amalgam of both. The confusion is compounded because people are inconsis- tent when it comes to what they will put up with. Typically, we say that we are happy to give freely, in theory, when in practice we choose what is most beneﬁcial for ourselves. So, it might be an excellent and virtuous thing to do the extra labour without expectation of reward or gain. But when it comes to it, such high-minded character dissolves in the acid of instrumentality:

one is primarily there not to indulge goodwill but to earn a living. Hence a boss might think that an extra hour or two in overtime is a small thing, whereas an employee could well regard it as a big deal. For all that, Aristotle identiﬁes a general rule. When asking employees to go the extra mile, the boss should operate on the side of caution if they want to keep them sweet: ﬁnancial com- The Meaning of Friendship 30 [email protected] pensation and clear thanks for what has been given forms the basis of best practice. Moreover, the payment and thanks must be offered up front: that keeps the relationship free of the com- plications of delayed or unrequited returns. And it must be offered generously, for people vary in their assessment of what they think their efforts are worth: the boss who over-remunerates at the time will reap goodwill in time. So much for the responsibility of bosses. What of the other situation, when employees ask for something, perhaps time off, and thereby call on the boss’s goodwill? Different forces come into play. The fundamental issue is that because the boss is gen- erally in a position to help, the situation is actually loaded against them morally speaking – a friend in need and all that.

What is more, the boss may fear losing what friendship they enjoy with their staff if they do not respond positively, and staff may well ask what worth there is in having a friend who is powerful if it does not deliver beneﬁts, at least from time to time. What keeps the issue within the bounds of friendliness are the principles of voluntarism and generosity again. A second rule comes to look very much like the ﬁrst: when someone calls on the boss’s goodwill and asks for a favour, the boss should act reasonably and give freely, and the employee should be reason- able and willingly show gratitude too. True friendship, as Aristotle puts it, does not place the scales centre stage. What now of work that people enjoy and ﬁnd rewarding? The complication here is that a job might be thought to be its own reward. This leads to the assumption that friendship can ﬂow more freely between managers and subordinates because ﬁnan- cial gain is not such a big issue. Not so, says Aristotle. He tells the story of a lyre player at a party who was promised payment and more, the better he played. When dawn came, he asked for what he thought were his dues. However, his employer regarded him- self as something of a connoisseur. After hearing such beautiful music he could not comprehend the demand for more cash:

‘Surely, the beauty of the playing is payment enough’, he rea- soned. ‘Your playing is its own reward.’ Unsurprisingly the lyre Friends at Work 31 [email protected] player did not see it that way, and departed bitter and dis- appointed. The moral of the story is not that the lyre player did not enjoy making music: he may have taken more pleasure from it than anyone. Rather, it is that whilst the party-giver sought music, the lyre player sought a living, and though the former received what he wanted in good measure, the lyre player did not. Work may include its own rewards but for the employee working for someone else it is still a means to an end. The ﬁnal scenario is that in which people work for a friend.

Once more, the ambiguity of the roles played by individuals in this situation makes it tricky at the best of times. In particular, the money that will necessarily change hands has an inexorable ability to draw all value to itself, sapping the goodwill of even the strongest friendships. The situation is hardly different if the friend in question is not the wage payer, but rather, say, a line manager; being subordinate is quite enough to cause trouble. Typically, the rot sets in unawares. I once worked for a friend, an arrangement that started off very well. I was deeply grateful to them for the break it gave me; they were glad to offer me a generous share in the rewards of the business, and a good work/life balance. When asked about how it was going by other friends, I told them that we were the exception to the rule: money and friendship can mix! But that was when the going was good. When the business was hit by a particularly deep cash-ﬂow crisis, I fell into the unhappy confusion between contract and goodwill that Aristotle identiﬁes.

It was clear what friendship demanded of me: work for a while without pay. But cash-strapped, I was not able to do so. As it hap- pened, this spared me the harder question of whether I was willing to work unsalaried, but, that aside, I could not deliver for good- will’s sake and I quit. My action inevitably called the friendship into question and things were never the same again. The moral of that story is work for your friend at your own peril. In general, then, the advice at the personal level is that friend- ship ﬂourishes best when it can rise above the utility of the work- place, though that is easier said than done. If friendliness is a The Meaning of Friendship 32 [email protected] feature of the ofﬁce, as you might hope, you’re best either not to expect too much or quickly to establish ways of deepening the friendship that have nothing to do with work whatsoever – perhaps by trying a drink together after work, or making an arrangement at the weekend. This will show the relationship up for what it is, so start small: if it is merely a work relationship then\ the attempt to form a deeper friendship will ﬂounder; if it is truly a friendship, it will ﬂourish. The philosophical principle is that friendships which depend upon doing something together also depend upon the mutual beneﬁt that comes fromthat. If the beneﬁt is cut for some reason then the relationship will be curtailed too. Such is the fragility of utility-based friendship.

Commercial culture If the workplace presents barriers to friendship that are difﬁcult to negotiate at a personal level, then the broader culture of work and the economic milieu in general present a challenge to friendship-making too. This is the second dimension of the impact that instrumentality can have on friendship, namely, that the underlying ideals of a commercially-minded society – in which utility, competition, proﬁt and exchange are highly valued – shape a socio-economic climate that people’s friendships must contend with too. To develop this aspect, we can turn to another thinker, one of the founding fathers of the modern workplace, Adam Smith. Smith was actually an optimist about the impact that commerce would have on the opportunities for friendship. He believed com- mercial life to be democratic and egalitarian, especially when compared to the feudal society of deference and inequality that it pushed aside. Because the industrial economy is a great leveler, people therefore ﬁnd themselves on a level too which means, he reasoned, that they have better opportunities for friendship.

Among well-disposed people, the necessity or conveniency of mutual accommodation, very frequently produces a friendship Friends at Work 33 [email protected] not unlike that which takes place among those who are born to live in the same family. Colleagues in ofﬁce, partners in trade, call one another brothers; and frequently feel towards one another as if they really were so. Their good agreement is an advantage to all; and, if they are tolerably reasonable people, they are naturally disposed to agree. We expect that they should do so; and their disagreement is a sort of small scandal.

Although to the contemporary ear this sounds a bit like the conviviality of a Pall Mall club, Smith is, in fact, that rare thing amongst modern philosophers as a thinker who takes friendship seriously. He resorts to it particularly in his book The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Here, he centres on the concept of sympathy, a notion of com- passion, empathy and consideration that underlines the impor- tance of love and friendship in his thought. Having said that, he approaches it ambivalently. Sometimes he appears to take sym- pathy as meaning the full affectionate feeling that is naturally associated with friendship. At other times sympathy implies merely fellow feeling, as if it were little more than an opinion held in common. This ambivalence is signiﬁcant, I think. It is as if love and friendship struggle against other less accommodating factors within commercial society, for all that Smith wishes it were other- wise. We are back again amidst the ambiguities of the culture of cost-beneﬁt analysis. Smith was aware of this predicament and he tried to come up with a theory which showed how people could be friendly not just because they found themselves on the level and involved in a common enterprise, but more powerfully because commercialism itself positively nurtures a culture of friendship. He took an idea from Aristotle. The ancient Greek thought that wellbeing was the goal of life. It could be achieved by moral individuals – people who were increasingly courageo us, open-handed, witty and charac- terful. What is m ore, he thought that by virtue of having these characteristics, friendship will come their way too. The Meaning of Friendship 34 [email protected] Smith took this link between the goal of life, individual char- acteristics and friendship, and adapted it to the world he saw around him. First, he interpreted the goal of wellbeing to mean a culture of ﬂourishing cooperation. If that seems a mediocre thing to aspire to then that is not to say that the virtues of sociality are themselves mundane: if anything quite the oppo- site, since social cooperation requires individuals to act justly, beneﬁcently and prudently. Moreover, when individuals act in this way, Smith argued, they should attract friends. The trouble, though, is that although the virtues of social cooperation may be admirable, it is not entirely clear that indi- viduals will readily aspire to them (unlike, say, happiness, which makes its own case as a goal in life). So Smith developed another idea that is not Aristotelian but which would, he hoped, motivate people nonetheless. He called it the ‘impartial spectator’\ . An impartial spectator is a ﬁctional presence that sees every- thing an individual does, not to pass judgement, but in order that the individual, believing that they are being watched, will act in the best way they can. If the idea of such an observer seems somewhat fanciful, its very shadowiness is part of Smith’s plan too. The point is that the impartial spectator will not satisfy the individual by merely praising them when they behave well; it is not an internalised father-ﬁgure. Rather, it operates more like\ a mirror to encourage the individual to see themselves as they truly are. That, surely, is a frightening thing to behold, quite enough to nudge anyone’s bad behaviour in the direction of the good. The hope is that this will cultivate the individual’s desire not for praise, a questionable if understandable goal, but for the per- ception that they are praiseworthy, a higher aim that nurtures the development of the individual’s character and actions. As Smith puts it: ‘Man naturally desires, not only to be loved, but to be lovely.’ This, then, is what he believes will inspire indi- viduals to act according to the values of social cooperation: they will seek to be praiseworthy, not merely praised. And in turn, because that praiseworthiness makes them lovely, they will ﬁnd genuine friends, who are lovely too. Friends at Work 35 [email protected] The Meaning of Friendship36 What is more, these people of good character should expect many good friends:

Such friendships need not be conﬁned to a single person, but may safely embrace all the wise and virtuous, with whom we have been long and intimately acquainted, and upon whose wisdom and virtue we can, upon that account, entirely depend.

As an added bonus, Smith also argued these people will be happy because they are content with themselves: ‘A great part, perhaps the greatest part, of human happiness and misery arises from the view of our past conduct, and from the degree of approbation or disapprobation which we feel from the consider- ation of it.’ Figure 3: ‘Man naturally desires, not only to be loved, but to be lovely.’\ (Adam Smith) [email protected] Realpolitik This is the high point in Smith’s doctrine of friendship. However, it begs a question. What kinds of behaviour or virtues are thought praiseworthy, and who decides? On the matter of who decides, Smith is clear that the answer is neither moral philosophers nor priests: however important they may feel their deliberations and dictates to be, they have little impact upon the behaviour of individuals. The best arbiter is the individual themselves, and the dialogue they have with their impartial spectator. Further, because they seek to be praise- worthy, the individual cannot simply justify their actions by saying that what they did seemed right to them; they must con- sider what society around them might consider to be right too. But this still leaves the issue as to what is praise worthy. That is more difﬁcult to decide. The problem is that commercial societies are pluralistic, so there is bound to be some debate as to the stan- dards according to which individuals should behave. One person’s praiseworthy efﬁciency is another’s blameworthy zealousness.

What seems like pure friendliness to the boss to one looks like toadying up to them to another. Not that Smith is alone in being vulnerable to such moral dilemmas. Deciding cases like these is a problem that any ethical theory has to negotiate, in the absence of moral absolutes. However, a more particular problem stems from the need Smith has for praiseworthiness to itself be thought praiseworthy. If commercial culture is confused about that too – compromising it in favour of utility, proﬁt, exchange and so on – then his theory collapses. The shadowy observer dissipates, as it were, in the harsh winds of what people might call the real world – the realpolitik of commercial activity. People then inevitably return to seeking praise for its own sake. It seems to me that this is just what happens at work. The determining instrumentality of the workplace means that praiseworthiness is typically secondary to delivery. At work people are praised for the things they do, and chastised for the things that they fail to do: remuneration comes to those who Friends at Work 37 [email protected] impact the bottom line; people act out of utility – their ‘role’\ .

Even intangible qualities that might be thought praiseworthy, like entrepreneurialism or simple human pleasantness, must indirectly prove their worth in terms of proﬁtability to be valued.

Employment is not like school where people are rewarded for trying hard regardless of what they achieve, though fat cat directors may be an exception. To put it another way, if few would challenge the idea that praiseworthiness is praiseworthy in theory, its value stands or falls on whether it is manifest in practice. If a commercial society, of which the workplace is a microcosm, is one in which praiseworthiness is in fact a marginal concern, it seems that friendship will in turn struggle: people will on the whole be merely friendly with each other, rarely truly friends in the sense of loving someone with no thought of gain. Hence, I think, the equivocation in Smith’s notion of sym- pathy. It is as if he wants the affection that he sees in commer- cial society to be an expression of the full love of friends. Only when that is set against the conditions of the real world he can only make it stand up as a kind of decent fellow feeling. Worse yet, there are reasons to think not only that praiseworthi- ness ﬂounders but also that friendship actually undermines social cooperation itself. Friends regard each other as special. They see each other as praiseworthy, or lovely, typically by way of a con- trast with what they regard as unpraiseworthy, or unlovely, around them. Take a value like loyalty. Someone will value the loyalty of a friend because it appears to be absolute compared to the loyalty one might have, say, to a boss, which clearly has its limits. From that it is only a short step to saying something else: if you are my loyal friend, then those others are not. Friendship may promote suspicion not cooperation. And Smith was wary of this. He argued that people should be ‘capable of friendship’ but avoid ‘ardent attachments’. Or t\ hey should restrict their attendance at ‘convivial societies’ because they will interfere with the ‘steadiness of industry’. Far from pro- moting friendship, commercial society seems to require us to be The Meaning of Friendship 38 [email protected] friendly, but not so close as to foment rebellion or forge alliances.

At best, we should be amicable strangers, or ‘honorary friends’ as the contemporary economist Paul Seabright has put it. There is also the argument that organisations are inherently suspicious of friendship since they set up networks of loyalties that can act against the organisation’s best interests: the activ- ities of friends can easily be viewed as time-wasting, if not nepo- tistic and subversive – symptoms of cronyism.

Utility spreads The suspicion that social cooperation values proﬁt and polite- ness over praiseworthiness and knowing someone well was voiced by another eighteenth-century Scot. According to Adam Ferguson, commercial society is not merely indifferent to deeper friendships but positively cultivates enmity. This is because although it may promote interdependence, it does so at the price of substituting the virtues that would take care of others with those that take care of oneself. He painted a bleak picture of the market society he saw forming around him, ‘dominated by a spirit of individualism, competition and legalism where relationships are deﬁned and constrained by contracts and the proﬁt motive’. He accused optimists like Smith of confusing virtue and utility: they would call a cow virtuous, he said, if it produced the right sort of milk. For Ferguson, the workplace is alienating, soul-destroying and isolating, playing to the worst detached and solitary instincts in human beings. In the market economy, man [sic] has therefore, ‘found an object which sets him in competition with his fellow-creatures, and he deals with them as he does with his cattle and his soil, for the sake of the proﬁts they bring’. Karl Marx, the later philosopher who understood the work- ings of capitalism like no one else, put it even more bleakly.

We may work together with the ‘utmost amiability,’ he noted.

But we’re in effect constantly passing each other notes that read: ‘Dear friend, I give you what you need, but you know the Friends at Work 39 [email protected] The Meaning of Friendship40 conditio sine qua non: you know the ink in which you have to sign yourself over to me; in providing for your pleasure, I ﬂeece you.’ Another philosopher, Georg Simmel added a further twist to the impact that work has on relationships. In The Philosophy of Money, he notes that modern working lives are characterised by their dependence on technology: he wrote before the invention of the computer, but the way that the silicon chip has revolutionised work in recent decades, in a million intranets and websites, mas- sively underlines his point. And yet, something paradoxical happens when people interact via technology. It simultaneously draws individuals closer together anddepersonalises their interac- tions. Hence, in the computer age, individuals become entries on a database, accounts on the other side of the world, information providers, and disembodied email generators to one another.

‘What kind of people they are in other respects plays no role here,’\ Simmel concludes. And if the kind of people they are in other respects does not matter, then the opportunities for friendship are going to be substantially narrowed too. It should be said that the workplace and the culture of work that now exists in late capitalism has changed massively in the years since Marx, and even Simmel. Today, HR executives in many companies are seriously committed to moving away from command-and-control type management structures and to increas- ing the choices employees have in the workplace. They want to make time for people in and around work, not only for chores that otherwise eat into their weekends, or even to cultivate churn- quenching work friendships; but also for activities that build praiseworthy aspects of character, from learning a language to taking a sabbatical. I’ve heard the CEO of one multinational say that he refused to call his employees ‘human assets’, as the jargo\ n dictates, since he did not own his staff but rather asked them for their time, if in return for certain rewards. Alternatively, the male-dominated, heavy industry that char- acterised the industrial revolution of Smith and Marx’s time has largely collapsed in the west at least, and with it the grind- ing days it demanded – though so too have the industrial com- [email protected] munities that were arguably excellent environments for nurtur- ing a sense of connection. Or one can point to the place and inﬂuence of women in the workplace that might promote a more humanly considerate environment. However, these gains are themselves under threat, from utility again. Any positive effects are arguably being beaten back by the spread of ﬂexible labour markets and the huge emphasis on productivity in the modern economy. This is nothing if not self-interest with a vengeance. Indeed, many fear that such a culture is deeper now than it was in Smith’s day. Is not so-called vocational education little more than preparing students for greater productivity in the workplace, for an ever tighter ﬁt into the cogs of the economy? The current predicament is well portrayed in Douglas Coup- land’s novel, Microserfs, the story of a group of friends working for Microsoft, the software giant. Dan, the narrator, describes how in the 1970s companies installed showers and sculptures in the workplace, ‘to soothe the working soul’. This led in the 1980s to the blurring of the boundary between work and life. And now, inexorably completing the circle, people are asked to become their own corporations: ‘Give us your entire life or we won’t allow you to work on cool projects,’ he says of Microsoft’s attitude to its employees. Certainly, the number of hours people spend at work competes with time for friends elsewhere, to say nothing of what is owed to the family. This is doubly detrimental to friendship because apart from the adverse effects of time constraints, good friend- ships depend too on individuals nurturing a range of interests – a hinterland that modern work practices are quite possibly depleting. In other words, the spectre of utility still haunts the work- place today. Whilst the poles may have shifted, there is little reason to think that the challenge posed by it is any less strong.

Perhaps it is stronger because it is more subtle: if social coop- eration in commercial society has mutated into social productiv- ity under capitalism, our work culture is at least as indifferent Friends at Work 41 [email protected] towards friendship as ever it was. It’s a big theme, and will take more unpicking as a problem that has a tangible impact on us all, living as we do in a culture that assesses much more than just our productivity via cost-beneﬁt analysis. Deeper friendships may form yet, but perhaps in spite of, not because of, commercialism.

The Meaning of Friendship42 [email protected] 43 Friends and Lovers ‘If you wanna be my lover, you gotta get with my friends.’ The Spice Girls The year is 1559 during the brief reign of Mary Queen of France, also known as Queen of Scots. The scene is a festival in the renais- sance town of Bar-le-Duc. Two pairs of eyes meet across the crowd, a meeting which one of them later described thus: We were seeking each other before we set eyes on each other, and at our ﬁrst meeting, we discovered ourselves to be so seized by each other, so known to each other and so bound together that from then on none was so close as each was to the other.

A question: was this the start of an affair or a friendship? Move forward, just over a hundred years, across the channel to springtime in Deptford, South East London. A man and a woman are in the grips of love, attested to by their proliﬁc letters now in the British Library. Their relationship began the year turbulently, though Margaret is beginning to feel less anxious again for all John’s intensity. She writes:

What mean you to make me weep and break my heart by your love to me? Take me and all I have, give me but your love, my dear friend. Tuesday is longed for by me and nights and days move a tedious pace till I am near you.

A question: is it lovers or friends that will be reunited? Now to the present day, and a crematorium in North London, at the end of a relationship. At the funeral, the man who survives recalls:

I was barely coherent, shaking violently through the music, trembling, wobbly-voiced, as I read the Maupassant, taking [email protected] The Meaning of Friendship44 deep breaths to ﬁght off tears: ‘We must feel. That is every- thing. We must feel as a brute beast ﬁlled with nerves feels, and knows that it has felt and knows that each feeling shakes it like an earthquake. But we must not say that we have been so shaken. At the most we can let it be known to few people who will respect the conﬁdence.’ The question again: does the man remember his lover or his friend? The passion described in each case might suggest that these couples were lovers. They were, in fact, all friends. The ﬁrst is Michel de Montaigne, the essayist and author of one of the best philosophical pieces of writing on friendship, prompted by his relationship with Etienne La Boëtie. This excerpt, from that essay, usually published with the title ‘On friend ship’, describes their ﬁrst meeting. The second comes from a letter of Margaret Godolphin, a maid of honour at the court of Charles II, who had a ‘seraphic’ friendship with John Evelyn, a friend of Samuel Pepys.

The third comes from a book by the actor Simon Callow, enti- tled Love Is Where It Falls: An Account of a Passionate Friendship , a memoir of his relationship with the theatrical literary agent Peggy Ramsay. And of what passion, for the fervent obsession within which each of these friendships ﬂourished is arresting precisely because none of them were sexual. Montaigne and La Boëtie were both men and though same-sex relationships were a marginal concern of his, Montaigne thought them ‘rightly abhorrent to our man- ners’. Of the second couple, one might easily come to the con- clusion that they used Restoration religiosity as a cover for what would have been an affair, had Evelyn not been married. But that would be to misunderstand them: sex was never on the cards. It turns out that they enjoyed an intense friendship of a sort that had a long tradition up to the seventeenth century and is now largely forgotten. For Simon Callow and Peggy Ramsay the ques- tion of whether they would have a sexual relationship or not was relatively easily answered by numerous contingencies from Callow [email protected] Friends and Lovers45 being gay to Ramsay being 40 years his senior. They excluded the possibility, though this is not to say that their relationship was not charged with erotic elements and troubled at times because of that.

So, the friendships are intriguing. As what are often referred to as ‘Platonic relationships’, their passionate quality focuses us on a\ second set of ambiguities that can cause problems for friendship – now not r evolving around the matter of utility but rather the question of sex.

Sex and friendship This ambiguity is perhaps as familiar. At their best, sexual attraction and the feelings that exist between friends are both types of love. Sometimes, notably in the case of committed partners, this love shows itself as a happy synthesis of erotic and friendly affection. However, at other times, friendship and erotic love, whether or not actually expressed, form an unstable amalgam. It may be that two friends come to sense a sexual undercurrent between them that far from sweeping them off their feet makes them feel decidedly unsteady. That discomfort leads to the question of whether or not to engage in an affair for fear of the threat it poses to the friendship. The clichéd case in point is the routine confession made on daytime TV: ‘I had sex with my partner’s best friend!’ It generates such good material because\ friendship and erotic love can be so explosive. Conversely, it may be that two lovers, brought together by a powerful sexual attraction, start to realise that there are no grounds for any real friendship between them, and as a result the relationship begins to fall apart. It was this scenario that was portrayed in Bernardo Bertolucci’s ﬁlm, Last Tango in Paris.

Paul, played by Marlon Brando, meets Jeanne, played by Maria Schneider. An affair between them begins, though Paul insists they share nothing of their personal lives. Then, one day, Paul disappears. The affair is apparently over, until they bump into each other on the street, and in an attempt to renew the relationship, [email protected] go to a tango bar, where he begins to tell her about himself. The bubble of erotic fantasy bursts for Jeanne. Knowing about each other is too much like friendship. The movie does not end hap- pily. Bertolucci reportedly explained that the ﬁlm grew out of his own fantasy of ‘seeing a beautiful nameless woman on the street and having sex with her without ever knowing who she was’. That’s a fantasy of sex without any of the complications of friendship, though as a fantasy the suggestion is it’s not real.A third predicament is when sex hangs a question mark over a friendship even when a physical relationship is barely thought of.

Imagine a man and woman becoming friends at work – good friends – and deciding to go out for dinner together as an appar- ently natural extension of the friendship. Then, as they’re sat across the table from each other – starched linen, candles and a rose between them – they start to feel awkward. Unwittingly, they have been drawn into uncharted waters as dinner for two is the sort of the thing that lovers do, not friends. The evening is one of embarrassment, and the friendship ﬂounders. What’s happened is that cultural assumptions about the activities associated with a sexual relationship have imperilled a friendship quite as effect- ively as any actual erotic attraction itself. That Montaigne and La Boëtie, Evelyn and Godolphin, and Callow and Ramsay were able to overcome any such issues in their otherwise highly passionate friendships is what makes them so intriguing. There is, then, a play between sex and friendship that can be great, or conversely can complicate things terribly.

It’s an issue that is arguably particularly critical today. The tectonic plates of marriage are shifting ground, giving rise to a new geography of the institution that, at least in part, is based on an ideal of sexual friendship: individuals desire the ecstasies of marriage to be shared with a person who is simultaneously their soulmate. Hence, perhaps, one of the reasons that people are marrying later. They’re prepared to wait. You can see how much ideas of marriage have changed by com- paring these descriptions of a good marriage. The ﬁrst was penned only 150 years ago by Robert Louis Stevenson, author of Treasure The Meaning of Friendship 46 [email protected] Friends and Lovers47 Island. ‘The two persons more and more adapt their notions one to suit the other, and in process of time, without sound of trumpet, they conduct each other into new worlds of thought.’ It sounds like a prison sentence to the modern ear, which is why Stephanie Coontz, author of Marriage: A History, describes the ideal now in this way: ‘Individuals want marriage to meet most of their needs for intimacy and affection and all their needs for sex… Married couples should be best fri ends, sharing their most intimate feelings and secrets.’ It’s a dream that is reﬂected in many ways. There are sitcoms such as Friends, Sex and the City and Will and Grace. They thrive on the ambivalences of what the author Ethan Watters calls the ‘tribe years’ – the period when people are in their twenties an\ d thirties, during which they remain unmarried and order their lives around long-standing friends. The TV shows endlessly toy with their characters’ sexual liaisons, and the prospect of a perfect relationship, whilst keeping the friendships ﬁrmly centre stage. If and when the individuals do get married, or settle down, it is a sexual friendship that they want. Similarly, the tremendous success of Bridget Jones’ Diary stems in large part from the seriousness with which the book explores modern friendship and its relationship to sexual promise. She’s des- perate to be married, and yet ﬁnds all her married friends – the ‘smug marrieds’ as she calls them – almost unbearable, not leas\ t when they offer her their patronising advice on how to make her single life as perfect as their married one. Now, on one reading it may seem easy to untangle the ambi- guities of sex and friendship. It just seems ridiculous to suggest in some pop-Freudian kind of way that all friends of the oppo- site sex would go to bed with each other everything else being equal. The point was well made by the philosopher John Stuart Mill who had an intense and, before they married, controversial friendship with Harriet Taylor: ‘We disdained, as every person not a slave of his animal appetites must do, the abject notion that the strongest and tenderest friendship cannot exist between man and woman without sensual relation.’ [email protected] Alternatively, Freud had a point. The problem is not that the sex part always explicitly gets in the way, but rather that it hangs a question mark over the friendship unconsciously or from time to time: there could be a ‘faint undercurrent of excitement’ even between a St Francis and a St Clare. This erotic possibility, rather than a sexual inevitability, is no less powerful a manifestation of the possibly damaging play between sex and friendship. Another rather different way in which the question of sex can spoil friendship is in the realm of same-sex attractions. Here, the faint undercurrent does not need a boy and a girl to stir it up and given that the fear of homosexuality is as much of a threat as any actual homosexuality, even in our liberated times, just a suggestion of same-sex attraction is poten tially enough to muddy the waters of friendship. This is not to impute anyone and everyone with an innate gayness, like the suggestion that C. S. Lewis objects to so strongly in his essay on friendship, that ‘the absence of smoke proves that the ﬁre is very carefully hidden\ ’.

Rather, homosexuality complicates same-sex friendship primarily because of homophobia, that is the fear of gayness that may be The Meaning of Friendship 48 Figure 4: ‘We disdained, as every person not a slave of his animal appetites must do, the abject notion that the strongest and tenderest friendship c\ annot exist between man and woman without sensual relation.’ (John Stuart \ Mill) [email protected] Friends and Lovers49 taken as implied by a close friendship between two men (and I think it is fair to generalise that it is largely a male anxiety.) Th\ is means that the individuals concerned feel the need to demon- strate their lack of sexual attraction and make that explicit. They must prove to themselves, and to the rest of the world, that they are not homosexual. Physical intimacy is therefore moni- tored; emotional affection controlled – all to the detriment of the friendship.Philosophically speaking, the sources of the confusion stem from the fact that erotic love and friendship are similar in certain respects, and different in others. The similarities mean that people can easily, and happily, come to share the affections that are associated with both. The differences mean that less appropriate affections can then arise, generating the tension.

Similarities and difference So consider, ﬁrst, the ways in which erotic relationships and friendship are the same. For starters, both are excellent things to hope for, part of life in all its fullness: love and friendship both call us into and are constitutive of human happiness. We are ‘political animals’, thought Aristotle, by which he didn’t mean\ that we are invariably scheming but rather that we do not do well on our own. Alone, the human creature feels incomplete and unfulﬁlled. ‘It is not wrong to want to be happy, but it is wrong to want to be happy all alone,’ thought Albert Camus. What is more, whilst both love and friendship stem from the need to be with others, both help us rise above pure self- interest: a lover who demands sex and sex alone is usually thought exploitative; someone who only wants friends for what they can get out of them uses his friends, in a pejorative sense, and any friendships he or she manages to form are doomed. For similar reasons, both loves are deﬁned according to their ideals, for all that those ideals may be hard or impossible to achieve. If we offer the opinion that ‘Katie is in a manipulative relationship’ or ‘Joe has an exploitative friend,’ there is an implicit contrast\ [email protected] The Meaning of Friendship50 drawn with what the relationship could be like at its best.

Someone will say, ‘He only loved me for my money’, thinking that love is so much more. Someone else will realise, ‘She is only interested in me for what she can get out of me’, implying that they hoped for so much more too. Lovers and friends seem alike for what we might call tech- nical reasons too. Both relationships are entered into voluntarily, unlike the relationship one has with country, class or family.

Lovers and friends must both share a degree of trust, understand- ing and forbearance. Both loves can be jealous, one out of avarice, the other out of enmity. And both can operate apart from the law:

sexual desire is antinomian, though marriage and tax laws try to channel and control it; and friendship would, in E. M. Forster’s famous phrase, betray country before it betrayed itself. There’re some similarities. The other half of the story is the ways in which friendship and erotic love are different. It might be said that friendship is calm, reasonable, harmonious and sober, whereas erotic love is spontaneous, irrational, wild and orgiastic.

Or that friendship tends towards the mind, conversation and the spiritual, whereas erotic love is nothing without the body, touch and lust. Alternatively, friendship seems to develop over time: it loves to dwell on what has past and to ponder what is to come. Erotic love, though, delights in immediacy; it exclaims, ‘Now!’ Other differences apparently widen the gap. If friendship is not reciprocated it quickly loses its intensity and rapidly makes little sense: it is nonsense to say that someone is my friend but I am not their friend. Erotic love, in contrast, can quicken regard- less of whether the passion is returned. Indeed, unrequited love produces eros’ most exquisite passion – infatuation: a lover can be besotted with their beloved even in secret. Another differ- ence concerns the relative ease with which friendships and erotic relationships can be formed. Friendship seems easier, in the sense that every new day holds the promise of meeting a new friend, if only in a casual sense. Love, though, seems harder:

falling in love may come readily to some, but being in a success- [email protected] Friends and Lovers51 ful relationship requires work. And everyone knows the frustra- tion of unattainable love. How many, though, have sleepless nights over unattainable friendship?Or again, once a friendship has formed, it seems reasonable to expect that it will mostly bring out the best in people: friendly affection and moral behaviour appear to conspire together in a virtuous circle of love, since friends want the best for each other.

Should something slip, so that enmity comes to dominate the relationship, we’d say the friendship was over, or that at best, the friend became a frenemy. (Merriam-Webster Dictionary:

‘One who pretends to be a friend but is actually an enemy.’ You know you have a frenemy if your stomach knots as they walk into the room. You know you are a frenemy if a red mist falls across your vision when you see your ‘friend’ approaching.) The same does not follow in erotic relationships at all and it is easy to imagine all sorts of situations in which the purely erotic passion of lovers can descend into abuse, violence and hatred – and yet still the individuals concerned could believe they are in love. A quarter of all murders are committed by a lover, far more than are committed by someone who was a friend.

In summary, friendship tends to be reasonable, whereas erotic love is irrational; friendship warms to the mind, whereas sexual attraction wants the body; friendship must be reciprocated to make sense, love need not; and friendship is mostly virtuous, whereas eros can be murderous. Inasmuch as that is right, it offers one way of understanding how sex can hang a question mark over friendship, or vice versa. It happens when the similarities between the two loves are forced into too close proximity with the differences. A friendship is disturbed by undercurrents of sexuality – be that because of personal chemistry or an awareness of contravening social norms: what is to be done about it? The early days of a passionate affair become the months and years shared by a man and his mistress: so can eros’ lion lie down with friendship’s lamb? Even a happily committed couple will from time to time be aware of the conﬂict between the loves their relationship [email protected] The Meaning of Friendship52 otherwise manages to synthesise. Eros’ possessiveness may be threatened by friendship’s desire to welcome others in – as when one partner becomes good friends with someone else of the opposite sex. Or friendship’s reasonableness may still occasionally ﬁnd eros’ spontaneity irksome – at bedtime, for example, after \ a hard day’s work. Eros is perhaps then like the sand in the oyster’\ s shell. It is the grit around which a smooth, lustrous coating of friendship may form. But pearls have ﬂaws and if they crack, the grit will be re-exposed. Just what’s going on here might be thought of in this way. The love that is called friendship could be deﬁned as the love that longs to know someone else, and be known by them. That love, then, wants the other person to remain another person, in order that there be someone else to get to know. Hence, say, friends love to talk: there is a separateness implicitly in the together- ness of conversation. The love that is labelled erotic, though, is different. It can be deﬁned as the love that longs to have someone else, and be had by them. That love wants the other person, period. Any gap that is sensed between will seem like a threat. Hence, lovers long to be with each other, body and soul. And to be apart is pure agony, unlike friends who are quite happy not to see each other every day, or week, or month. These distinctions are provisional. For we’ve the ideal of sexual friendship in mind, and possibly still ahead of us. And it is philosophy, I think, that has resources to shed a different and refreshing light on the matter, and to suggest a path towards a synthesis. First, we will look at what Plato says on the matter, because he almost uniquely amongst philosophers has a theory of love that offers a path of reconciliation between sexual desire and friendship. Second, we will use Aristotle’s thoughts again to consider how to negotiate the dynamics that arise out of the ambiguity of sexual and friendly feeling: in this respect, his ideas can be thought of as practical outworkings of Plato’s theory. And third, we will turn to the case of passionate friend- ships – for it turns out, I think, that when passion, as opposed [email protected] to sexual feeling, characterises a relationship, friendship is most able to ﬂourish.

Immortal longings Modern philosophy has typically fought shy of exploring the ins and outs of sexual love, though the increasing prominence of women’s voices is changing that. Men may fear looking like the trendy vicar who gives sex talks based upon the biblical Song of Songs. They may also worry about inadvertently divulging too much information, for, no matter how abstracted, thoughts on sexual matters are autobiographical to a higher degree than most:

this kind of philosophy is done ‘in the bedroom’, as the Marquis de Sade delighted in repeating. However, it was not always like this. Ancient philosophers were intrepid, none more so than Plato. For one thing, the chaste phrase now associated with his name – Platonic love – is a misnomer. His writing does try to guide us towards more spiritual longings but that is not to say Plato thought human beings were or should be free of physical desires. It is in his portrayal of Socrates that he works out what he thinks is the best attitude to have towards the starts, stirrings and satisfaction of sexuality. Indeed, Socrates, who was famous for claiming to know nothing for sure, made one exception to his wise ignorance: he was fully conversant with the wiles of erotic love. I think Plato suggests that there is a relationship between sex and friendship, and thus there is a link between friends and lovers. He argues that eros should lead to, though not necessarily be superseded by, friendship. How this might be possible is therefore of great interest in trying to unravel the harmony and discord that can be created by the interaction of the two loves. The sexual constellation that fascinated Plato the most was the desire that existed between a young man and a youth. It’s a tricky area on a number of counts. Given that the homosexual element is not in itself thought illicit, it is, ﬁrst, male sexuality\ Friends and Lovers 53 [email protected] that Plato appears to explore – though actually that’s not quite fair. He gives his best lines on eros to Diotima, a woman, and also discusses how eros longs to give birth and to nurture. So. I think there’s more in Plato on feminine desire than might ﬁrst appear.

Second, though, there is the matter of the age difference between the male Greek lovers and the concern to modern minds that their inherent inequality breeds abusive relationships. Third, there is the related anxiety over the criterion that the Greeks used to determine the ability to give consent – the appearance of a beard on the youth. We prefer the less ambiguous, and in practice more conservative, measure of age. So what can be made of these issues? What is often overlooked is that ancient homosexuality worried Plato too, and for reasons that are close to our own.

One of the places in which he raises the matter is in the Sym- posium. This dialogue portrays a dinner party at which various characters make speeches on love. One of the participants, Pausanius, argues that the reason why it is appropriate to love youths only after their beard has appeared is that it is only then that they can be thought to have developed a mind of their own, which means that the older partner will not be able to take advantage of the younger. In fact, Pausanius claims, with an optimism that would outdo most liberals, that the older partner will then want to share everything he has with his beloved and even spend the rest of his life with him. He goes on to express the opinion that individuals whose urges lead them to seduce any boy, regardless of maturity, are debauched; every legal obstacle should be placed in their path. Not that this is any reason to ban homosexuality outright, for all the clarity that comes with prohibition: that would be both tyrannical and would foster a dull and stupid attitude towards sexual matters.

Rather, he believes that the ambiguity of the customs and con- ventions that govern sexual behaviour is, in fact, their strength and virtue. They can steer the complexity of human desire without being oppressive. In other words, Plato saw perfectly clearly that sexuality is tricky. But the power of such feelings is no reason to don an emotional chastity belt. Rather, the trick is The Meaning of Friendship 54 [email protected] to steady yourself and take advantage of them. The question is how. Plato’s answer stems from a key insight. He draws a dis- tinction between sexuality, on the one hand and on the other, erotic desires considered more broadly. Sexuality, for him, is a fundamental component of human experience, but it is just one manifestation of a deeper force. This is eros, and Plato believes it drives us to penetrate more profoundly into things, to reach beyond ourselves, and to attempt to integrate and unify. It is a power of the mind and spirit as well as the body. It is the source of human creativity and innovation. It lies behind the scientiﬁc quest of discovery and the religious impulse for meaning. So sex is part of eros, perhaps the part of which we are most conscious; but it is only a part. He also thought that erotic love can lead to philosophy, as much as the bedroom, because both erotic love and philosophy – the love of wisdom – ultimately aim at the same thing, that is, immortality. To borrow a phrase of Oscar Wilde, lovers are in the gutter but they may also look to the stars. For Plato, love roots us in our bodies and transcends the purely material. It’s both/and not either/or. Strictly speaking of course, what is immortal is beyond the reach of human beings as mortal crea- tures. But glimpses of immortality are possible, do in fact come in many shapes and guises, and it is these experiences that link eros to philosophy. Consider one example, that of having children. According to the woman’s voice in the Symposium, Diotima, parents have children not merely as a by-product of their sexual congress but because of this broader desire for immortality. Sex pro- vides a ﬁrst taste of immortality because its ‘petit mort’ is ecstatic, which means literally to take you out of yourself. And children secure a deeper satisfaction of immortal longings because, in their offspring, parents live on. Bertrand Russell raised a similar possibility when he argued that the joy of having children comes in large part from the sense of contributing to the never-ending ‘stream of life’. Friends and Lovers 55 [email protected] Having said that, children are poor guarantors of such satis- faction since they rebel, change, and often died, until relatively recently. So, Diotima thought, individuals seek alternative inti- mations of immortality too. Achievement in sport and the accu- mulation of money are two: immortality here is sought in fame and fortune – which perhaps explains why celebrity and money are thought of as sexy, or at least have pulling power. However, they are fallible too, depending on various contingencies, not least pure luck. Thus, Diotima suggests, the best way to gain as great a share in immortality as is humanly possible is philosophy, the pursuit of wisdom. Wisdom imparts the best sense of immortality since it is timeless, beautiful and true. A wise insight, she says, is like a child of the soul and it can never be lost. The seeker after wisdom is, therefore, very close to the passionate lover. Or, as many teachers of adolescents know, knowledge is not just power, it is sexy – and if you play your cards right makes you seem something like a god. There other ways in which eros inspires the search for wisdom.

Anyone who has fallen in love understands the lure of the beau- tiful. They also know how love can transform and transcend the humdrum. It is these same things – the beautiful and the good, transformation and transcendence – that matter to the ancient philosophers, the lovers of wisdom. Moreover, since eros is operat- ing in all of us, Plato believed that love can make philosophers of us all. In ancient Greece, the way that young men conducted their youthful affairs encouraged such links to be made. Lovers, of the sort that Pausanias discussed, were ideally supposed not only to enjoy sexual passion but from that to develop a passion for things of the mind and spirit. Such an association between eros and learning was manifested in one of the best-known institutions of the ancient world, the gymnasium. Derived from the Greek for naked, gumnos, gymnasia were places for exercising and social- ising. They were both sexually charged – somewhere to watch and be watched – and were a key location for conversing, debate and The Meaning of Friendship 56 [email protected] Friends and Lovers57 instruction. To the ancient Greek mind, the two things went hand in hand. When it comes to the details of how these two elements might shape a relationship between a young man and a youth, there is currently some debate amongst scholars. However, the ideal would seem to be that the young man offered a mode of education to the younger, through talking with him, socialising with him, and introducing him to the virtues and vices of public life. The youth would reciprocate that attention with genuine pleasure and feeling, perhaps with, perhaps without, genital expression. Today, models of courtship are different (in case you hadn’t noticed.) I suppose that places of exercise may play a part, in the shape of the schoolyard and college court. What hasn’t much changed, though, is that falling in love is a complex, chaotic affair.

It can lift the eyes to higher concerns, though it may equally prefer to dwell on things lower down. The beautiful body can come to dominate an individual’s desire so completely that they have no energy left for much else. Plato understood this. It lay at the heart of his worry about sexuality. In short, he was faced with a dilemma. Whilst erotic desire seems to be part of what stirs people to become interested in the world around them, that same force can become obsessed, and might just as easily eclipse any passion for wisdom, thereby smothering the love that may be pregnant with insight. If sexuality is part of eros, it might easily become the whole part. Plato’s question is how is it possible to reduce those risks and so to love expansively and wisely? This is where friendship comes in. Just how is revealed in ano- ther dialogue, the Phaedrus. The critical section comes in what is often called the Great Speech of Socrates. Here he imagines human individuals to be divided into three parts, and then pictures that as like a charioteer being pulled by two horses. The charioteer can be thought of as the voice of reason in the human soul. Of the two horses, Plato describes how one of them is powerful though obedient, and so drives the individual towards success in life.

The other horse, however, is wild, and resists the wishes of the [email protected] charioteer. All three parts are susceptible to love: in Plato’s schem\ e, we all long for immortality, the beginnings of which is sexual desire. But trouble arises because, when the individual sees a beau- tiful youth, his two horses pull against each other, as it were. The wild one rears up in the compulsive desire for sex. It is all that the charioteer can do to muster his strength and bring the wild horse back under control. He must do so, though, if he is to unleash the higher powers of eros which the obedient horse represents.This talk of chariots and wild horses is, of course, partly sup- posed to raise a smile. If it reminds you of Freud’s division of the psyche into the sexually charged id, the morally upright superego and the embattled ego caught somewhere in between, that is no coincidence too: Freud was deliberating following in Plato’s foot- steps and tracing a path that the human individual might follow which is as potentially thrilling, and traumatic, as the one his forebear envisaged. The image of reigning in the wild horse of sexual desire conveys what Plato believes is necessary if someone is to love fully, and not merely give in to wanting to possess another human being. The implication is that it is only with some effort that it is possible to form relationships that are passionate and not sexually excessive, eclipsing the desire for more than merely having a great lover. Incidentally, if such discipline is lacking, Plato raises the possibility of another factor that can tame the wild horse, namely the passage of time. Time has the effect of making even the most exotic individual look familiar, of rendering even the greatest beauty less alluring. It provides an alternative mecha- nism for cooling the ardour. It too provides the space for a new element within eros to emerge. That element is friendship. It is friendship that a couple win as their love leads to a mature relationship, full ‘of bliss and shared understanding’, as Plato puts it. The erotic element is sublimated into a wider love of life, which not only enjoys its connection with the beloved, but is freed to focus its energy on other things – perhaps by entering the stream of life in the business of having children, perhaps by looking upwards and gazing at the immortal stars. Those couples who do manage to create a mature relation- The Meaning of Friendship 58 [email protected] ship will have discovered one of life’s chief blessings: the shared concern and understanding that is the basis of friendship, and very great friendship at that.

Platonic friendship ‘Love is the attempt to form a friendship inspired by beauty’, was one summary shared amongst the ancient Greeks. Plato describes it in an appealing way too: he says the young lover will be ‘amazed by it as he realises that all the friendship he has from his other friends and relatives put together is nothing compared to that of this friend who is inspired by a god’. What Plato is arguing is that a friendship between lovers is not only possible but also can, via a mutual concern for the best things in life, make for very close friendship. This happens because the relationship comes to embody its passion in a certain way.

The early fervour and erotic enthusiasm ceases to be primarily directed at the other lover, as is the case amongst new lovers, and can come to be directed towards the growing interests that emerge as the relationship develops too. It is a passion for the things that the couple, as friends, now enjoy together. This movement from an erotic ﬁxation on the beloved to a shared passion for life itself is well captured in an observation made by C. S. Lewis. He noted how lovers are typically depicted gazing into each others eyes, whereas friends portrayed together usually look straight ahead. Nietzsche is another philosopher who pondered the move from lovers to friends. With Plato he saw it as something of a struggle.

For example, in a deliberately provocative passage, he says that an obsessive love is actually the same as avarice – cupidity, we might say, noting the reference to the Roman god of love. It longs to possess the other at all costs:

If one considers … that to the lover himself the whole of the rest of the world appears indifferent, pale, and worthless, and he is prepared to make any sacriﬁce, to disturb any order, to Friends and Lovers 59 [email protected] subordinate all other interests – then one comes to feel genuine amazement that this wild avarice and injustice of sexual love has been gloriﬁed and deiﬁed so much in all ages … However, when lovers become friends a new passion becomes possible. Again Nietzsche does not pull his punches: Here and there on earth we may encounter a kind of con- tinuation of love in which this possessive craving of two people for each other gives way to a new desire and lust for possession – a shared higher thirst for an ideal above them.

But who knows such love? Who has experienced it? Its right name is friendship.

So, Plato’s theory of love is that sexual attraction can, with a degree of will power, and the gift of time, be channelled into a passion for things that the lovers share beyond (though not The Meaning of Friendship 60 Figure 5: ‘Friends have all things in common.’ Plato (left) walking with\ Aristotle in Raphael’s famous depiction. [email protected] necessarily excluding) their desire for each other’s bodies. This in\ turn makes way for a particularly wonderful kind of friendship. In a way, all Plato is doing is deepening the truism that a sexual rela- tionship will only continue to grow if friendship feeds or possibly supplants the early physical attraction. One way of putting this is to say that lovers must learn to love each other body and soul if they are to stay together. The Platonic conception is to focus on the passion: when two individuals share a passion for life, erotic love and friendship ﬁnd their best synthesis. So much for the theory. What of the practice? This brings us back to Aristotle, and his reﬂections on the links between love and friendship.

Practicalities Aristotle was Plato’s pupil, and he ventured into the same ter- ritory, taking a line which in certain respects can be thought of as building on that of his teacher. He is never so explicit about sex, at least in his surviving writings: ‘As for the pleasure of sex,\ no one could have any thoughts when enjoying that’, is one of his more memorable comments. However, if Plato has a theory as to how erotic love can lead to friendship, Aristotle is illuminat- ing when it comes to the practicalities of the move.

In his Nicomachean Ethics, wellbeing is the chief concern. He assigns close friendship top place in the hierarchy of human rela- tionships, regarding it as a key ingredient in any ﬂourishing life.

There’s a place for ‘friendly lovers’ too, if lower down: they \ can hope for some contentment. They belong in his second category of friendship, the kind that form because of some mutual shared plea- sure, in this case that being sex. A sexual friendship will thrive insofar as the pleasure it brings to both parties appeals and remains vigorous. However, if the erotic attraction dips or falls away, then the friendship is at risk: it hasn’t got much else to go on, and like\ the work friends who drift apart when one moves job or ofﬁce, the chances are that such a relationship will ﬂounder. The two have failed to get to love each other for who they are in themselves. Friends and Lovers 61 [email protected] Aristotle is clear, then, that a relationship based solely on erotic desire is compromised. Sexual pleasures vacillate. What individuals ﬁnd sexually attractive changes over time, as does the sexual appeal of their partner. So, relationships that are heavily dependent upon a sexual component tend to be ﬁckle. The more the sex counts, the more broken hearts, affairs and inﬁdelities accompany them. For lovers not so obsessed, though, Aristotle, like Plato, believed that friendship can ﬂourish. It is all a matter of overcoming the hurdles. One problem Aristotle identiﬁes is that relationships based predominantly upon sexual pleasures tend to form quickly. People can be attracted to one another after little more than a glance across a room, which makes for a speedy liaison, though with little need to disclose much of themselves – as in the Last Tango in Paris. As evidence, Aristotle cites young people who are particularly erotically inclined: ‘hence they love and quickly stop loving, often changing in the course of the same day’. The problem with this is that their desire tends to colour their vision of everything else: their newfound lover looks uncompromisingly physically beautiful to them and appears beautiful in mind and spirit too. The danger, in turn, is that their vision becomes so clouded by swirls of emotion that they may know only very little about the person they claim to love so well. The illusion will fade sooner or later, and then the love needs to root itself more deeply in the beloved’s true mental and spiritual character. Any potential for a long-term relationship rapidly disappears if nothing lovely is found there. It is for this reason that when a love affair cools, the question of the lovers’ future together is determined not by the intensity of their former passion, which may have been considerable, but by how deeply their passion has been transformed into the passion that can be shared as friends. And it is as friends, not lovers, that they know each other truly. Young lovers have an advantage, though, Aristotle continues.

They like to spend time together and if they are interested in a long-term relationship – that is, in becoming friends too – they The Meaning of Friendship 62 [email protected] should capitalise on the long hours they spend together. They might use some of the time to not only stare into each others’ eyes, but talk, ideally about something other than themselves.

Or they could go to the movies, and watch the ﬁlm. Or an art gallery, or a walk in the countryside. The point is that when you’re in love, everything looks lovely, if you care to look.

Aristotle’s advice is concise: choose the lover who you like the most, not only because the sex is great, but because it is easy to spend time with them. Thenyou will get to know them, and they you. And from that ground of affection, the world around you will start to look different as your eyes grow in the habit of catching sight of that which is good. The emerging friendship will shape the amorphous passions of romantic love and render it sustainable, along the lines Plato had suggested. What is more, a virtuous spiral will ascend carrying you higher, since if loving one another leads to knowing one another, know- ing one another leads back to loving better too. Lovers might even have a head-start over people who become friends outside of any erotic affair, since they are more fully charged with love. This sense that friendship lies at the heart of what it is to truly love someone, and not sexual attraction, is, I think, what John Bayley, husband of Iris Murdoch, calls a sympathy of understanding. It is wholly different from ‘that intoxicating sense of the strangeness of another being which accompanies the excitements of falling in love’, as he puts it in his memoir of his wife, Iris. He notices that after the heat of their courtship, and in the earliest days of their marriage, something new emerged in their relationship.

Already we were beginning that strange and beneﬁcent process … by which a couple can, in the words of A. D. Hope the Australian poet, ‘move closer and closer apart’. That apartness is a part of the closeness, perhaps a recognition of it: certainly a pledge of complete understanding. There is nothing threatening or supervisory about such an under- standing, nothing of what couples really mean when they Friends and Lovers 63 [email protected] The Meaning of Friendship64 say (or are alleged to say) to con ﬁdants or counsellors, ‘the trouble is that my wife/ husband doesn’t understand me’.

This usually means that the couple, or one of them, under- stands the other all too well, and doesn’t rejoice in the experience.

This is a friendship that thrives on the subtle process of growing, mutual understanding. Thus many a couple will confess that with increasing years together the companionship, the shared life, is as important as the sex, or more so. Their physical inti- macy comes to turn on intimate trivia as much as anything else, becoming partners who know a lot about each other’s physical likes, dislikes, needs and pleasures. Further, just because lovers become friends does not mean that their relationship will loose its passion. This is the crux of the value of Plato’s ideas about the friendship of lovers. It will include the humdrum, of course, for it is often on this level that friends like to share their lives together – ‘some drink together,\ some play dice together, others train, or hunt, or philosophise together’ was Aristotle’s list of activities: it is at this level \ that friendship brings good and remedial things to life such as fun, wellbeing, satisfaction and companionship. However, inasmuch as their shared passion moves on from being focused exclu- sively on each other, so too the sexual element will evolve, becoming much more an expression of the friendship as opposed to pure eros – a sign of friendship’s intimacies, secur- ities, commitments and ardour. The ecstasy will arise from what is known of the other rather than what is unknown. The sexual intimacy of eros becomes the embodied knowing of sexual friendship, which in turn becomes the physical and spiritual coexistence of partnership. Passion in this sense ‘feeds back’.

Thus, folk in long term relationships may well say that he or she has become more attractive to me now than ever. Or they have the sense that their partner’s body has almost become an extension of their own, which is why it is natural to hold hands whilst sitting together, or to fall asleep as spoons. That kind of [email protected] physical intimacy may come to feel more substantial than the momentary peaks of genital sex.Eventually sexuality ceases to be a threat to friendship al- together for the two loves learn to speak the same language. A synthesis of similarity and difference becomes possible: friendship speaks the language of the body as well as the mind, and sexuality becomes a manifestation of the friendship. Then the love called friendship need not think erotic love perilous. With passion widened, and the beloved well known, there is every reason to think that lovers might aspire to the best kind of friendships there are.

Better than sex?

Lucky lovers! But what of the case of friends who, although aware of a sexual frisson between them, resist the temptation, and never indulge it. And there are also the passionate friends for who there is no apparent desire to engage in any physical intimacy at all. The latter case is easier to explain. Here, the erotic is spon- taneously and uncomplicatedly sublimated in the friends’ delight and enthusiasm for life together. Their passion exists only in the broader sense – Nietzsche’s higher thirst or Plato’s shared\ understanding. One can think of examples of this kind of friendship. It is what happens when intellectual friends share a passion in their studies, reading, insights or wisdom; or when artists seek friends who are motivated by the desire to create something beautiful or expressive; or when friends who are interested in science together delight in the wonder of nature or noetic entities – strange as that may seem. Further friendships may well form between, say, a philosopher and an artist, or a scientist and a musician, or a gardener and an actor, since each recognises the passion that their friend has for something which, in turn, encourages and fuels their own interest. Even someone who has a passion for making money can ﬁnd friends with a similar passion for power – say a politician. Friends and Lovers 65 [email protected] I’ve a sense of this passionate potential in friendship myself when I think about the dynamic between myself and a friend, Guy Reid, who is a sculptor. He has a great gift for carving human ﬁgures in wood that have the uncanny appearance of being almost alive. When I ﬁrst met Guy I found this ability of his quite intimidating since any creativity I possessed seemed woefully pedestrian in comparison. It was a privilege just to write an occa- sional press release for him when he was having a show. But as our friendship developed, I allowed myself to be inspired to pursue my own more creative hopes in writing. Our friendship awoke that passion in me. I recall going to a literary festival to catch a whiff of the creative energy in writers I admired and at the festival being very conscious of my friendship with Guy. The friendship, I realised, was nurturing my desire to write. When it comes to the case of friends struggling with sexual undercurrents in their relationship, the matter is, unsurpris- ingly, more complex. In fact, the question of sex may appear to hang in the balance almost indeﬁnitely – even if the rational part of the mind knows that nothing sexual will or should ever happen. The complication that comes from such an unresolved sexual frisson is the suspense. Indeed, suspense is as much a cause of erotic frisson as any actual sexual attraction might be:

people do not even need to fancy each other, just be conscious that they might. In Evelyn Waugh’s phrase, even ‘a thin bat’s squeak of sexuality’ can frighten people off or distract them from becoming friends. People can misunderstand their feelings too. In a culture in which sexual consummation is seen as the highest expression of love that two people can hope for, a fas- cination for someone is easy to mistake for falling in love, even when it is simultaneously obvious that a sexual relationship would be inappropriate, unsustainable and possibly ruinous of the friendship. Of the three relationships with which this chapter opened, the friendship of Simon Callow and Peggy Ramsay is closest to this state of sexual possibility, at least when they ﬁrst met.

Callow has written about it honestly, insightfully and often The Meaning of Friendship 66 [email protected] colourfully in his book-length account of their friendship. It provides excellent material for philosophical reﬂection and a way of thinking through this set of sexual ambiguities.

He begins by noting that it was not so much a bat’s squeak of sexuality that they had to confront as the squawk of love at ﬁrst sight.

At this ﬁrst meeting we spurred each other on higher and higher with great thoughts and ter rible truths until we ﬁnally fell silent, having com pletely exhausted ourselves. I got up to go and we shook hands, oddly, awkwardly. She sat at her desk, combing her hair and repairing her lipstick as I left the ofﬁce. Going back through the reception area to pick up the script which I dimly remembered had been the occasion of my being there at all, I caught the eyes of the secretaries and blushed. It was as if Peggy and I had been making love.

Callow is, and was, well known as a gay man: when he met Ramsay he was in the middle of a love affair with a man called Aziz Yehia. However, partly because sexual orientation is rarely entirely clear cut, and partly because passion can be close to erotic feeling even in the most high-minded, the sexual sus- pense persisted between him and Ramsey, expressed in the passage above in the guise of the ‘as if’ they had been making love. This question had to be resolved if his friendship with Ramsay was to grow. Callow describes the way the suspense was at least tempor- arily lifted a few days later as a result of Ramsay inviting him to an intimate, exotic dinner à deux. He reports how she shud- dered when he kissed her on the cheek in greeting. She trem- bled when he said she was beautiful. She was, as Callow says, Tatiana receiving Onegin. But the bloody obvious was now clear even to our Tatiana; Callow did not desire her. Luckily, that was not the end of the story, for it might have.

The challenge now was to sustain ‘that most beautiful and elusive thing, a passionate friendship’. At ﬁrst, it did not look \ all Friends and Lovers 67 [email protected] The Meaning of Friendship68 that promising. Callow writes of a kind of uneasy ménage à trois that evolved: he loved Yehia and Yehia loved being loved by him; Ramsay loved Callow who in turn gained much from that love and returned it, though without consummation. But they survived a moment of truth, the ﬁrst time they were all together, and after that Callow talks interestingly of how his friendship with Ramsay became more permanently established.

They identiﬁed the areas they enjoyed talking about and edu- cating each other on, notwithstanding the recognition that some things should be off limits. Later, for example, when they took to spending evenings together listening to records, he writes: Sometimes, as we listened, we would hold hands, but that was a little too explicit. Generally we sat in separate pools of emotion, as if contemplating some grief that was beyond physical or verbal expression, a grief that we both knew about but could not name.

What is arresting about those evenings is that although they did not touch, their mutual separateness was not experienced as aloneness but as the deepest moments of friendship. They were, it seems, ascending a spiral of love. Callow later recalls that those evenings were among the best evenings of his life. How can we describe this friendship? Some might be tempted to say that the boundaries they had to enforce were the product of unresolved sexual tensions that persisted between them; their relationship was irreconcilably ambiguous, as if they were like tempestuous lovers endlessly delaying gratiﬁcation, swinging from one emotion to the next and never ﬁnding a resting place.

I think that Callow and Ramsay’s friendship is much more than that. If they had been unable to redirect their passion to any- thing other than an unhealthy absorption with each other, Ramsay would not have awakened in Callow a talent that he now confesses to valuing even more than his acting, that of writing. He dedicates his ﬁrst book to her as a monument to their friendship. [email protected] This is a crucial clue for understanding the thing that hap- pened between them and is another example of the redirection of passion Plato encourages us to contemplate. Like a painting, that works with the mean materials of canvass and oil to conjure up a world that barely existed before, their friendship transformed the dollops of colourful passion which were given to them upon ﬁrst meeting, and which might have been merely thrown together in an affair, so that with a kind of discipline and restraint, as well as a joyful enthusiasm, they could rework them into a life on an altogether higher plane. The celibacy that this involved is not supposed to evoke a prohibition or a stigmatisa- tion of sexuality. Rather it is to point to a voluntary renuncia- tion that emerges from within a relationship when friends of this sort sense that self-control in one area will make for a trans- formation of themselves as a whole. Friends like Callow and Ramsay have distinguished, and discarded, a physical kind of love in favour of the other person’s intellect, creativity or soul.

They do not seek a desire for close physical intimacy – though they simultaneously do not compromise the passion that ﬁres their friendship. A further example of how this can come about, and this time in a case when an affair was certainly on the cards, is beautifully por- trayed in Soﬁa Coppola’s ﬁlm, Lost in Translation. Bill Murray plays Bob Harris, an old movie star, who when in Tokyo on a mindless trip to endorse a brand of whiskey, meets Charlotte, played by Scarlett Johansson, who is similarly stranded in the city while her husband, a photographer, is engaged on a shoot. The story is of their encounter, and what is striking is that whilst there is an erotic charge between the two from the start they do not embark upon an affair. Part of the ﬁlm’s brilliance stems from the way it toys with the audience’s Hollywood assumptions that they will fall into bed, whilst simultaneously conveying the sense that something would be lost if they did. That something is the passion they have for their own lives. To become lovers would have been to lose that passion and the opportunity a friendship brings to quicken it. Instead, they would have experienced the Friends and Lovers 69 [email protected] loss of self that a sexual encounter revels in. Friendship, in con- trast, gave them the gift of being able to return to their lives with a sense of new possibility.

Getting with friends Callow’s story raises a ﬁnal set of complications, that of the ménage à trois of two lovers and a friend. The complexity here arises when a new lover ﬁnds an old friend threatening, or in Callow’s case when a new friend troubles an old lover. Is it poss- ible to have one person who is your committed lover and another who is your profoundly close friend? And what of the relationship between those two individuals, for is there not the possibility of threat again, should the lover ask what the friend gives that they cannot? In such love triangles, those who suddenly ﬁnd themselves playing third ﬁddle may ﬁnd it difﬁcult to deal with the inti- macy of the other two. Unsurprisingly, in Callow’s case, it was his partner, Yehia, who was intimidated by Ramsay. Callow writes when all three met together:

It could have been the end of a number of things: my friend- ship with Peggy, but also, to my amazement, it seemed to threaten the continuation of my relationship with Aziz. Next to Peggy, everyone seemed less: less passionate, less percep- tive, less brilliant, less honest, less absolute. And Aziz had seen, not only how important Peggy was in my life, but a side of me, fervent and wild, which was only brought forth by Peggy.

What Callow sensed was that his friendship with Ramsay somehow threatened his lover because his relationship with her was more passionate, though chaste. Clearly, on one level, the resulting sense of threat was groundless. Sexually speaking, Yehia had no competition in Callow’s eyes. But Ramsay was a threat not because she might have become Callow’s lover; that The Meaning of Friendship 70 [email protected] faint possibility had been pushed aside. Rather, the problem was that her passionate hold over him challenged the ideal of romantic love that was part of Callow and Yehia’s relationship. This, then, is the nub of the ﬁnal issue to do with friends and lovers. In today’s world, there is a myth of romantic love based upon the idea that two lovers become one ﬂesh, a totalisation of life in the other, supremely enacted in sexual ecstasy which is symbolic of that union. The myth or ideal tends to exclude others, not because lovers do not want friends, but because it tells them that their friends are incidental – pleasant but non- essential adornments to the lover’s life together. Although few people in real life believe the myth in its entirety, it is difﬁcult to ignore entirely too. Thus, Yehia could not ignore the fact that Ramsay was essential to awakening Callow’s passion for life, and this seemed to contravene the romantic awakening that ‘should’ have been exclusive to their relationship. It was as\ if there was a third person in the marriage; hence the sense of threat. It is indeed a brave soul who would come between lovers.

Think of the estrangement that can come about between friends after one of them marries another. What place for the friend is there, given that ‘what God has joined together no-one should put asunder’, as the old marriage service puts it. Or recall just how hard it can be to sustain a friendship when your friend started a new sexual relationship: the thrill of such attraction, and the collapse into the new lover’s arms, will appear to eclipse all previous cares and affections. That said, there is deﬁnitely a place for the third party friend. After a period of time, the old friend can provide the lovers with a break from the burden of the romantic myth, with its dictatorial insistence on total, exclusive involvement. Perhaps friendship should assert itself more strongly in our romance obsessed world. Perhaps friends should refuse the other- wise overwhelming pressures of the quixotic and declare the joys of their own kind of passion, though that would be a hard thing to do in a culture besotted with the power of erotic Friends and Lovers 71 [email protected] possessiveness. The thought provides us with a conclusion. For contra the myth, there is a love that does not desire to possess.

It is called friendship. It loves the other, and wants them both to be free. Once friendship has come to be the determining force in a relationship, individuals are able to ﬁnd themselves and nurture a passion for life, not merely lose themselves in starry-eyed love.

The Meaning of Friendship 72 [email protected] 73 Faking It ‘Most friendship is feigning.’ William Shakespeare The sages of friendship are found in the most unlikely of places.

Take Friedrich Nietzsche. This nineteenth-century philosopher spoke in the language of ﬁre and ice, proclaimed the death of God, and created the character of Zarathustra who wanders alone in mountains and deserts. If people know one thing about Nietzsche’s life, apart from the fact that he went mad, it might be that he fell out with his sometime mentor and friend Richard Wagner. The split was of operatic proportions. So to most, including those philosophers who have studied his work, he is not readily associated with the affectionate spirit of amity. But contrast that image with this reality. On 19 November 1877 he wrote this to Paul Rée another philosopher:

In my entire life I have not had as much pleasure as through our friendship during this year, not to speak of what I have learnt from you. When I hear of your studies, my mouth waters with the anticipation of your company; we have been created for an understanding of one another.

Alternatively, on 22 January 1875 he penned this to his sister Elizabeth: It is precisely we solitary ones that require love and com- panions in whose presence we may be open and simple, and the eternal struggle of silence and dissimulation can cease. Yes, [email protected] I am glad that I can be myself, openly and honestly with you, for you are such a good friend and companion.

Even in the case of Wagner, for whom his antagonism was real, Nietzsche acknowledged his continuing debt to his former friend throughout his life. Private lives do not automatically translate into public philo- sophy but Nietzsche also devoted many words to the subject of friendship in the books of his so-called middle period, words which because of his aphoristic style pack a punch that the word count alone only hints at. His deep concern with the nature of friendship was undoubtedly connected to the struggles with Wagner, as much as the strength of the friendships that he shared with others. The details of the friendship provide an illu- minating introduction to his thoughts – and the nature of the split, for in Nietzsche’s analysis friendship is never far from faili\ ng, and it’s what he has to say about this ambiguity of friendship that is so valuable to us. ‘Friendship is two knives,’ novelist Patrick White wrote: ‘They will sharpen each other when rubbed together, but often one of them will slip and slice off a thumb.’ Nietzsche and Wagner had met in 1868 and within 12 months he was a close friend of both the maestro and his mistress, Cosima, the daughter of Liszt, visiting them frequently on the calm shores of Lake Lucerne. Their affection revolved around an admiration for Wagner’s music – Wagner was not given to modesty where great- ness was concerned – and an enthusiasm for the philosophy of Schopenhauer. A philosophical pessimist, he believed that the world was an illusion, the emanation of a daemonic Will. The way people commonly experience this Will is sexually, a yearning which, Schopenhauer argued, leads to either frustration or excess.

Not the best grounds for human happiness and friendship one would have thought, though his gospel of gloom found an audi- ence at the time. The reason Wagner and Nietzsche liked him was that he thought art was the only way out of the Will’s bind because only the aes- thetic is disinterested or ‘unwilful’, supremely so in the case of\ The Meaning of Friendship 74 [email protected] music. It provides a particularly direct means of transcending the human creature’s animalistic lot. Wagner opened Nietzsche’s mind to the possibility of that transcendence. And the depth of feeling that Nietzsche owed him in this early period of his develop- ment is shown in his book of the time, The Birth of Tragedy. It begins with nothing less than a ‘Preface to Wagner’ and includes material he had presented at Cosima’s 33rd birthday celebration.

The friendship ﬂourished. However, only a handful of years later, in what we now know as his middle period, Nietzsche had changed. The transitional book is Untimely Meditations . It includes another chapter on Wagner, entitled ‘Richard Wagner in Bayreuth’, and is interesting because it shows Nietzsche’s affection for Wagner beginning to turn sour; he was moving on but could not yet leave Wagner behind. A clean break itself came in 1876 at the ﬁrst Bayreuth Festival.

Wagner presented his latest masterpiece, and Nietzsche was revolted by it, along with the philistine crowds that he charged Wagner with wooing merely in order to pay the bills. The young philo- sopher ﬂed to the countryside with blinding headaches. He should have seen it coming. If he loved Schopenhauer he would have known that the one form that Schopenhauer excepted in his praise for music was that of Grand Opera. It was an unmusical invention for unmusical minds. That said, Nietzsche’s histrionic revulsion does not feel quite reason enough for what was to become a per- manent break. It is as if Nietzsche used his disapproval of Bayreuth as an excuse for the friendship to falter. The question is why, and what does that tell us about friendship? Petty factors, such as the extent to which Wagner’s b rilliance eclipsed Nietzsche’s rather pathetic abilities as a composer, could have played a part, though these animosities again do not feel like reason enough and cannot have been the whole story. When the rift happened, Wagner was not aware of it for some time and when Nietzsche later offered another reason, that the cause had been his horror at Wagner’s conversion to Christianity, that does not ring true either: Wagner’s Christianity had been in evidence for some years before. Faking It 75 [email protected] It seems that Nietzsche had come to the realisation that he had to remove himself from Wagner’s sphere of inﬂuence if he was to make anything of his own life. That meant he had to manufacture a break, at least in his own mind. In other words, it was not that he came simply to loathe Wagner and everything he stood for, though he did represent a way of life that an evolving Nietzsche now wanted to critique strongly. It was that Nietzsche recognised the deep impact Wagner’s friendship had had on him and would have continued to have had, so that, like a child who must viol- ently leave the womb to be born, he too had not only to turn his back on Wagner but sever the cord as well. Paradoxically, the break was out of a respect for the power of such profound friendship, the kind that can shape and determine a life: only friends who have at one time identiﬁed closely may at a later time come to a deﬁnitive\ split. Mere friends will merely drift apart – or, to put it another way, if someone who you hardly know unexpectedly off-loads the secrets of their heart to you, you’ll sense its inappropriateness.

‘I hardly know them!’, or ‘too much information’ you protest\ . It is easy to see Nietzsche exploring the echoes of this complex matter in his philosophical reﬂections. He writes:

The friend whose hopes one cannot satisfy one would rather have for an enemy.

And, If we have greatly transformed ourselves, those friends of ours who have not been transformed become like ghosts of our past:

their voice comes across to us like the voice of a shade – as though we were hearing ourself, only younger, more severe, less mature.

Or, Just as in order to walk beside an abyss or cross a deep stream by a plank one needs a railing, not so as to hold on to it – for it The Meaning of Friendship 76 [email protected] would at once collapse if one did that – but to give the eye a feeling of security, so as a youth one has need of people who without knowing it perform for us the service of a railing. It is true that, if we were really in great danger, they would not help us if we sought to rely on them, but they give us the quieting sensation that there is protection close at hand (for example fathers, teachers, friends, as all three usually are).

Conversely, perhaps he feared developing a habit in relation to Wagner that he saw in other people who disparage and dimin- ish those that they know in order to maintain their own sense of self-respect: Many people mistreat even their friends out of vanity when there are witnesses present to whom they want to demon- strate their superiority: and others exaggerate the worth of their foes so as to be able to show with pride that they are worthy of such foes. Friendship with a future Another longer paragraph extends the theme and suggests a framework within which to ﬂesh out Nietzsche’s understanding of friendship and its tensions. He observes that amongst people who have a real gift for friendship – these are not people who are simply bad at friendship – two types predominate. Some are like ladders; others, circles. Ladder-types are individuals who are in a continual state of ascent in their lives. Life for them is a journey of change, evolu- tion and progress. At each stage of their development, these people ﬁnd friends who aid and encourage them and who in turn they aid and encourage. One can imagine, say, the life of a politician whose career is dotted with such friendships. At college they hang out with malcontents who inspire them. During their twenties they are nurtured by mentors who discipline them.

In their prime they befriend individuals who are interested in Faking It 77 [email protected] power,which they want to exercise at this point in their careers too. And then, in their dotage, disillusioned with power, they reﬂect on the vanities of life with those who are wiser and less sure. The trouble that ladder-types ﬁnd with friendship is that through no fault of their own this succession of friends produces people who rarely get on with each other. The malcontents will despise the mentor, as complacent, who will critique the power- ful, as crooked, who will be irritated by the wise, as corrupt. So, passing friendships are a consequence of the ladder-life that such individuals lead, with later phases of their careers inevitably abol- ishing or infringing upon the earlier, with friends ditched as a result. The ladder-type has a philosophy of friendship which says that it is a mistake to expect or to try to cultivate close, life-long relationships. Amity is sacriﬁced on the altar of progress. The second type of individual who is good at friendship, the circle-like, is different. They also collect around them individuals with different characters, dispositions and talents but in a way that diffuses any awkwardness or antagonism. Typical of such a person might be the celebrity. They count amongst their friends people as diverse as their management team, their peers, a hand- ful of journalists, their family, their favourite charity-workers and even some fans. The force of their charisma provides the focus for this circle of friendship, showering it with warmth, and so like the sun, powering it over long periods of time. To be a friend with the circle-type is like being known by the host of a party who greets you with smiles and small-talk, champagne and charm. Nietzsche thought of himself as a ladder-type. The impli- cation of his analogy is that not only do circle-types com- promise themselves, by being all things to all people, but that their friendships tend to be shallower to boot. It’s is an interest- ing point. In Nietzsche’s book, longevity is not the determining measure of friendship. A short-lived friendship may nonetheless be the most important of your life. It’s not that there is any- thing wrong with long-lived friends per se; it is rather that time The Meaning of Friendship 78 [email protected] can suck the authenticity out of friendship. Friendships that have gone on for too long become idle – the ‘ﬂabby friends’ we me\ n- tioned above, that perhaps should be shed like surplus pounds.

Such friends do not really share that much, beyond their asso- ciation, and so wind away the hours talking about this and that, conspiring in indecision and perhaps in all honesty becoming nuisances to one another. ‘It is prudent to form friendships only with the industrious’, Nietzsche concludes. He also suspects that such relationships are untrustworthy because when the dynamism disappears from a friendship, but the individuals concerned can- not quite bring it to an end, they constantly strive to re-establish their intimacy with each other – by dwelling on the ‘old times’\ or college days; the past, not the future. This is a sign that habit has become a substitute for any real affection or closeness. Neitzsche is not saying that a shared past is not important to close friends. Rather, he’s arguing it’s not enough. His observati\ on about the future orientation of the best friendships is an arresting one. It’s so crucial because the quality that the future has, which the past does not, is newness. The future is a place of possibility and growth; to look to tomorrow is to step up into the not-yet and unknown. Conversely, the past is a place that can’t change; it roots us but, without the future, constrains us too. We must gather the past into the present and be drawn into what lies ahead. Therein lies the vitality of life, for the future is that which we do not possess. That makes it frightening, though invigorating too – invigorating of the friendships that move into the morrow as well. Moreover, seeing your friendships as future-orientated, as opposed to comfortingly shaped by the past, reﬂects an aspect that feeds friendship itself. Nietzsche was a philosopher who was con- vinced that on the whole we don’t know ourselves, or our friends, very well – though it’s part of the gift of friendship that with friends we can come to know ourselves, and them, better. There’s a parallel here, then, for the future is unknown too. It is not yet dis- closed to us, as we are not wholly disclosed to ourselves, and as our friends have not yet fully revealed themselves to us too. And yet, in Faking It 79 [email protected] close friendship – the kind that embraces the future – we impli- citly commit to these individuals. We agree to move into the future together, in directions not always foreseen. We agree to take the risks of showing more of ourselves to each other, and thereby to ourselves. That should deepen our humanity, all being well. And it is that deepening – that brave turning to the truths of the human condition – which inspires Nietzsche, and with him those who love friendship as a way of life.To put it another way, with friends, you become what you are.

Though there’s a warning implicit in that thought too: choose your friends well. You will walk the same path together.

Truth hurts Friendships with a future, then, are probably formed by individuals who have a mix of the ladder-type and circle-type within them.

They like to have friends around them, for it is good to have wide circles of friends. They ﬁgure that with most people it is better to be friendly even should you feel otherwise because, ﬁrst, at a day- to-day level, it makes for a happier life; and, second, because to expose every friendship to the full force and struggle of personal change and revelation would be asking too much. That’s only poss- ible with the closest friends, and anyway, friendships thrive on fun too. ‘He’s a bit intense’, we say of the mate who should lighte\ n up. But getting the mix right – ﬁnding a sustainable balance between the pleasures of the past and the exhilaration of the future – is tricky. It highlights another set of ambiguities. They are those of closeness and distance (what is appropriate and how do you redress the balance when someone ‘invades your space’); honesty and dis- simulation (how truthful can you be with a particular friend or is it often better to obfuscate, or even tell a small ﬁb); loyalty and the\ need, sometimes, to make a break. In fact, when you start to look, it quickly becomes apparent that in a million little ways, as well as some large ones, friendship is often a matter of nothing less than faking it. Or, to use Shakespeare’s phrase, ‘most friendship \ is feigning’.

The Meaning of Friendship 80 [email protected] In saying this, I am not talking about the ways in which people emote and just blatantly lie in the name of friendship.

The faux-friendliness of the call centre, the salesman and the chat show host is as nauseating, or amusing, as it is transparent.

Rather I am talking about people who would count them selves as friends to greater or lesser degrees but none theless employ what might be called the ‘kind vices’ of half-truth, evasion, pre-\ varication and pretence. The point is that they sense that the friendship would not bear the weight of the whole truth of what could be said. If that were voiced, ‘the pebbles [would be] set rolling, the friendship would follow after, and fall apart’, as Nietzsche put it. The examples of such pretence are legion. Someone smiles rather than admit their malign thoughts about their best friend’s new boyfriend. They scream inside rather than speak out on the disciplining of their friends’ children. They conveniently forget the suggestion of holidaying together, realising that to go away for two weeks would be a whole different ballgame to merely having dinner every other week. Alternatively, people can behave almost as if they were different people with different friends, a schizo- phrenia that provokes great anxiety at the thought of, say, a birth- day party at which you invite all your friends to come together:

you look out at the room, full of everyone you know, and panic that they won’t get on, that some will probably fall out. Then there is the competitive element to negotiate. If everyone confessed like Gore Vidal that ‘whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies’, friendship would soon die too. (Incidentally, I recently heard Vidal remark that he made that comment as a joke; he didn’t really mean it. Only, it is a comment that was remembered as if it were true, which actually underlines its veracity.) Friends are also complicit in each others’ feigning for fear, in Shakespeare’s phrase, of appearing ‘unlearned in the world’s fa\ lse subtleties’. Celebrities, again, are past masters at this. A newspape\ r proﬁle of Donatella Versace noted that her room was littered with signed pictures of her famous friends. A silver-framed photograph of Catherine Zeta-Jones clutching her Oscar in a black Versace Faking It 81 [email protected] dress had written across it, ‘Dearest Donatella, a friend to cherish,\ I love you, Catherine.’ It was next to a signed picture of Madonna and her children. That said, and much to her credit, Donatella protested that her real friends in life were not famous. ‘I go to parties for work’, she retorted. Nietzsche records friendship’s feigning foibles in a series of aphorisms and comments that are sharp, often playful and should perhaps be read as if uttered by Woody Allen, excusing the Germanic constructions.

In many people, the gift of having good friends is much greater than the gift of being a good friend.

One should not talk about one’s friends: otherwise one will talk away the feeling of friendship.

The man had the great works but his companion had the great faith in these works. They were inseparable: but it was obvious that the former depended wholly on the latter.

They were friends and have ceased to be, and they both severed their friendship at the same time: the one because he thought himself too much misunderstood, the other because he thought himself understood too well – and both were deceiving themselves! – for neither understood himself well enough.

All this is the art of friendship and a ﬁne art it is too. Its method\ is appropriateness. Its message is, ‘I know you know but we both know not to go there.’ Its medium is often gossip, because what is not spoken to one friend is usually whispered to another:

‘There will be few who, when they are in want of matter for conversation, do not reveal the more secret affairs of their friends’, wrote Nietzsche. ‘Life is not worth living unless one can be indiscrete to intimate friends’, was how the intellectual Isaiah Berlin expressed it.

The Meaning of Friendship 82 [email protected] What are we to make of this plethora of dissimulation? In short, both little and much. Nietzsche again helps. He did not give the lie to friendship to disparage it. Rather, he understood that for the most part friendship is human, all too human. For this reason a degree of dissimulation is required on occasion in even the closest of friendships.

There was a time in our lives when we were so close that nothing seemed to obstruct our friendship and brotherhood, and only a small footbridge separated us. Just as you were about to step on it, I asked you: ‘Do you want to cross the footbridge to me?’ – Immediately, you did not want to any more; and when I asked you again, you remained silent.

Since then mountains and torrential rivers and whatever separates and alienates have been cast between us, and even if we wanted to get together, we couldn’t. But when you now think of that little footbridge, words fail you and you sob and marvel.

He’s saying that there is no such thing as merely picking the right moment. If too much is said at the wrong time the con- sequences can be disastrous. So with regards to the dissimulation, one should make little of it, in the sense that even if you agree that most friendship is feigning you should, nonetheless, carry on as usual with one’s friends; and much of it, in the sense that to try always to be honest will for the most part be ruinous. The issue at stake here is this one of not knowing ourselves and others that well. It raises two practical problems. First, even if we think we know someone well, our judgements about them are usually a little off the mark and so would warrant their vex- ation were they made known; it is better to avoid offence by forming little habits of evasion, rather than to cause irritation by always getting it slightly wrong. If I’m pondering whether to critique my friend for the poor discipline of her children, the chances are I don’t know the half of it – how little Sebastian and Sophie are only picking up on the stresses that exist Faking It 83 [email protected] between their Mum and Dad, say. I’m better to remark that having kids must be totally exhausting. Second, and more profoundly, there’s the element in our critique of others which is actually a projection of our own dis- satisfaction with ourselves, stemming from not knowing our- selves very well. Maybe I can only cope with children in small doses because I’ve buried the memory of my own unhappy childhood; or I ﬁnd kids annoying because I’m really rather impatient. Nietzsche deploys an analogy of the self as a castle to describe this bit of human psychology. The thing about a castle is that it is a building that is both a fortress and a prison. The self is a bit like that too. Inside it is dark, full of shadowy corners and echo- ing chambers, though we ﬁnd windows out of which we can gaze at the world. The windows allow us to see what’s around us, perhaps to look across to another guarded self, another castle.

What that reveals is the barriers and defences that those other people construct for themselves too. ‘Man [ sic] is very well defended against himself, against being reconnoitred and besieged by himself, he is usually able to perceive of himself only his outer walls’, Nietzsche explains. What’s tricky is seeing your own\ defences. Having the dark corridors of the mind brought into the light of day is not very pleasant. It is much more preferable to spot the weaknesses and breaches in the fortiﬁcations that others construct around themselves. To put it another way, if we feign friendship with others, to cover up what we think of as their faults, that’s probably only because we readily feign friendship with ourselves. The tough question to ask is this: would I be my friend if I knew myself well? Thus, in a million little ways, friends reach for the mask and the world is a friendlier place for it:

Through knowing ourselves, and regarding our own nature as a moving sphere of moods and opinions, and thus learn- ing to despise ourselves a little, we restore to our proper equi- librium with others. It is true we have good reason to think The Meaning of Friendship 84 [email protected] little of each of our acquaintances, even the greatest of them; but equally good reason to direct this feeling back on to our- self. And so, since we can endure ourself, let us also endure other people. Another self But is the well meant but feigning goodwill we show others mostly little more than an implicit acknowledgement that we ourselves are not very nice people if truth be known and, for at least some of the time, our friends are not very nice too? The answer may be yes. The philosopher Immanuel Kant averred: ‘For everyone has his weaknesses, and these must be kept hidden even from our friends … so that humanity should not be offended thereby. Even to our best friend, we must not discover ourselves as we naturally are and know ourselves to be, for that would be a nasty business.’ Kant adds that to see the ‘crooked timber of humanity’, with its rotten core, would be ‘repulsive’. But that negative image covers a more positive possibility. It’s one that points to the future. For sometimes toleration and dis- simulation can give way to truthfulness and personal insight. It may only be achievable with one or two friends between whom a profound trust exists, and it may only come about only a hand- ful of times in life, when the moment is right. But when it does, friends can rise above the ambiguities of everyday interactions and enter a zone in which they speak to each other as truthfully and directly possible. That moment may offer nothing short of a revelation, and form the grounds for a better tomorrow. In such moments, your friend becomes another self to you, someone who feels as close to you as you do to yourself. It’s a rich and hopeful notion. Nearly all the great philosophers of friendship have recognised it as such, though in illuminatingly different ways. That a friend can be ‘another self’ is never m eant solely in the trivial sense that friends share similar interests or pleasures, though friends may clearly both delight in football, fashion or food. Some philosophers use it in a romantic sense; the Faking It 85 [email protected] friend as another self implies that friends almost become one person, ‘one soul in two bodies’, as Montaigne put it. That is a appealing thought. People have such a sense when they say they were ‘basking in reﬂected glory’: something has happened to their friend, but it is almost as if it has happened to them too, such is the sense of connection they feel with their friend. It’s as if our sense of who we are as autonomous individuals shifts a little, and relocates at some point in between ourselves and the friend, with whom we are one soul in two bodies.That points to Aristotle’s third type of friendship, the soulmateship in which you love someone for who they are in themselves, and are loved in return, because you know someone for who they are in them- selves, and are known. But if the friend as another self can mean, ﬁrst, something shared, and second, something overlapping, Aristotle pushes at a third sense too. He also implies that it is only in friendship that we can fully discover ourselves. What is meant by this was, perhaps, easier to convey in ancient Greek. This is because the language declines not only in the singular and plural but in the ‘dual’ too. The dual is used for things that come in twos or pairs\ , as in to ophthalme – the two eyes. Alternatively, when Plato describes two young friends laughing together in his dialogue the Lysis, he uses the dual when he writes ‘they laughed’. For friends, there is no laughing alone. The dual suggests that ancient Greeks could conceive of activities performed together that are so particular and intimate that they require their own conjugation. That connectedness comes up in other ways. The Athenian leader Perikles points to it when he uses the word idiot or idiotes in his famous Funeral Oration. The ancient meaning of ‘idiot’ was someone who believes they can live only for themselves, who thinks they do best on their own. Perikles argues that the idiot has no right to regard him- or herself as a citizen, since to be a citizen is to acknowledge your dependency upon the collective that is society. Only gods and beasts can live alone, Aristotle noted. Put these two elements together, and what emerges from the idea of ‘another self’ is that two friends are, in a sense, one; l\ ike The Meaning of Friendship 86 [email protected] the two eyes, their operation is conjoined or dual. The philo- sopher, Giorgio Agamben, has drawn attention to the importance of this expression for Aristotle. He believes that Aristotle was arguing that friendship with another is constitutive of an indi- vidual’s own subjectivity: someone comes to a full awareness of their existence only as they become aware of the existence of their close friend. Agamben explains, ‘The friend is not another I, but an otherness immanent in self-ness, a becoming other of the self.’ With such a friend, we ﬁnd ourselves; and in general, we only become someone with another person. This observation would also help to explain why losing a friend can be so painful: you lose part of yourself. And if you fall out with a friend, and lose them that way, the pain is doubled: you are implicitly saying to yourself, I do not like the person I have become, even as you say to your former friend, I do not like the person you are. Such a dynamic puts friendship in primary place in any account of human ﬂourishing. It’s saying more than just that a close friend is a mirror of your own independent self, someone in whom you ﬁnd personal resonances, thereby realising that though autonomous, you are not alone; there is someone quite like you. It’s implying that a close friend is another part of you and that you can only fully become who you are in who they are too. Nietzsche was rather nervous of these collapses of selfhood into another, even if a good friend. Perhaps it was his experience with Wagner that made him resistant; he did not want to ‘con- found the I and Thou’. So, for him, ‘another self’ must also carry the implication that friends are still ‘other’ to each other too.

The friend who is ‘an other self’ is someone with whom indi- vidual goals, personal aspira tions and private hopes coincide – at certain moments or over periods of time. The joy of the friend- ship is not the collapse of all boundaries between the indi- viduals. Neither is it a like-mindedness that any group of people might feel. Rather, it is the realisation that they are headed in the same direction. There’s the future element in that understanding Faking It 87 [email protected] of the expression again. Such are friends, as Ralph Emerson put it, who exclaim to each other: ‘Do you see the same truth?’ – ﬁr\ st, with surprise and then, with delight. This connection becomes more than a happy coincidence or pleasant discovery but a great blessing. ‘In loving their friend they love what is good for them- selves,’ Aristotle said. ‘For the good person, in becoming a frien\ d, becomes a good for the person to whom they become a friend.’ This is a subtle point which is worth dwelling upon and has unexpected consequences, not least of which is that the best of friends may be found in the most unlikely of places. The point is well illustrated in the story told in the Oscar-winning movie, Gods and Monsters, directed by Bill Condon. It relates the last days of the life of the Hollywood director James Whale, played by Ian McKellan, whose fame and fortune was made with his ﬁlm Frankenstein. Long after, in his declining years, Whale formed a friendship with his gardener, Clayton Boone, played by Brendan Fraser. This set tongues wagging in Tinseltown since Whale was a known homosexual, a fact to which the heterosexual redneck Boone was at ﬁrst oblivious, then horriﬁed, and only latterly indifferent. It is that transformation which was the key to a relationship that led to the discovery of a most unlikely and penetratingly honest friendship. In the movie, the relationship begins unpromisingly when Whale asks Boone to sit for him as a model, under the ruse that Boone has an artistically fascinating face. It is a gratuitous come-on though it provokes Boone into reﬂecting a little on himself and his life. Something deeper between them begins to emerge when, at a second sitting, they realise that, for all their differences, they have something in common; they are both originally from poor families. Whale has kept this hidden from his starry Hollywood ‘friends’, a dissimulation that he is awakened to in the openness of Boone’s face ‘that makes me want to tell the truth’. Trust grows, and they confess their great- est secrets to each other: Whale relives the painful story of the great love of his life and Boone reveals his shame that he never saw action as a Marine. This latter revelation is important not The Meaning of Friendship 88 [email protected] only because of the confession itself but also because up to that point Boone thinks that, unlike Whale, he has no interesting stories to tell about his life and indeed could not even tell them if he had. That is a very good story, Whale says tenderly; one to match his own. Their relationship has become a friendship because in the telling of stories they not only ﬁnd an equal and mutual respect for each other – many friendships get there – but because they have been able to be completely honest with one another. In the ﬁnal scenes, the ﬁlm cuts to several years later. Boone is watching a repeat of one of the Frankenstein movies on tele- vision with his son and he remembers his friendship with Whale.

The monster is heard wailing, ‘Alone bad. Friend good.’ The movie ends, and Boone shows his son a pencil sketch which Whale made of his original idea for Frankenstein, saying that he knew the man who made the movie. On the back is written, ‘For Clayton, friend?’ The question mark is wonderfully indicative of the ambiguity of honest friendship. His son retorts, ‘Is that just another one of your stories, Dad?’ It highlights the legacy of Whale’s friendship and the good thing which now characterises his relationship with his son. Boone has overcome the limitations of his origins in a new ability with and love of stories. In a sense, Whale the storyteller lives on in Boone: they’ve become other selves to each other. It’s a way, then, that a friend can be said to be another self; they nurture what we might think of as a side we never knew we had.

It is in such friendship that people ﬁnd the courage and humility to overcome the stalemate of the little lies or ignorances in which most friendships inevitable trade to a degree, and turn to work on themselves and achieve the good things which as individuals alone, in isolation, would be beyond them. Is it not the rare, close friend who shares the intimacy of faults that can speak gently and with precision to our own? The book of Proverbscaptures it well:

‘As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.’ The story of Whale and Boone’s friendship illustrates two further paradoxes in the friendship of another self. First, it is the Faking It 89 [email protected] differences between them that eventually count – what is unknown or unsettling – rather than the safe, familiar similarity that typically brings people together. What is strange challenges the friends to widen their horizons, search their souls and strive to speak honestly. ‘It is not in how one soul approaches another but in how it distances itself from it that I recognise their afﬁnity and\ relatedness,’ says Nietzsche. This issue has a bearing upon the business of making friends.

The agony aunt might advise looking for people with whom you share something in common, perhaps a hobby or a concern. ‘Like with like together strike,’ it is said. And that is quite likely to b\ e an easy way to open up conversation. Who knows, friendship may follow. But then again, perhaps it is the differences between people that generate deeper friendships. People complement one another, discover something new in life, are exposed to their shadow in their dissimilar friend. As the dry desert longs for wet rain, so we too can be drawn to those who embody something we feel we lack. Don’t be closed to that possibility too. Second, if the key to this kind of friendship is its challenge, its honesty can also be uncomfortable. To bear such frankness requires the right combination of timing and humility. In fact, in The Meaning of Friendship 90 Figure 6 : ‘When the ways of friends converge, the whole world looks like home for an hour.’ (Hermann Hesse) [email protected] Whale and Boone’s case, Whale comes to see his predicament as a lonelyold man perhaps too clearly for, though there is a certain catharsis in the act, he ends up killing himself. This is why such friendship is relatively rare and most of the time friends opt for at least a degree of feigning. Nietzsche provocatively suggests that someone who seeks a true appraisal from their friends might do better to turn to their foes, since enemies have the virtue of being honest and not counting the cost. Kant was alert to this too, and noted that people often prefer to tell their secrets to their doctor than to a friend, and hear the worst from the medic too. Foes as friends in any literal sense is, of course, nonsense. But when the ultimate test of friendship is the ability to challenge one another, someone who might for a while be regarded as a bad friend could prove themselves a good friend in the longer term. Like a difﬁcult book, the difﬁcult friend may teach us something; affront at an initial presumption of unfriendliness may turn into gratitude for speaking the truth over time. Dis- cernment is key. (Someone who is simply evil or unjust, impulsive or unsteady, will never be a good friend.) Nietzsche is not the only philosopher to have thought that such genuinely challenging friendships are scarce and that the moments of truth they offer are ﬂeeting in any individual’s life.

According to Plato, Socrates was aware of it too. In his dialogue on friendship, the Lysis, Socrates not only confesses that he has not been able to discover what friendship is really all about, but also that he wants a true friend more than anything else. The reason Socrates doubts whether he will ever ﬁnd such a friend stems from his life as a philosopher. When he was young, the oracle at Delphi had told him that no one was wiser than he.

This idea frightened him and so he took to wandering the streets of Athens in search of someone who would prove the oracle wrong. He was not able to. What is more his convers- ations with people increasingly revealed how little he knew. As a result he came to the conclusion that what the oracle must have meant was that no one else realised as profoundly as he did how little they knew. His wisdom was being wise to his ignorance. Faking It 91 [email protected] This left him in a quandary with regards to friendship. On the one hand, he could not shake off a lingering sense of loneliness, because no one he met shared this profound sense of ignorance in the way he did and so could be another self to him. On the other hand, talking to people all day long meant that he enjoyed wide circles of (admittedly) lesser friends. This is the paradox of putting a high value of honesty on friendship. Given that you have the capacity to be honest with yourself, many people will not be up to it themselves. But since placing a high value on friendship means that friends will be keenly sought, it is likely that such a life will be nonetheless lived within circles of friends. Plato provides an account of one particular occasion when these tensions came to a head for Socrates, in his relationship with an individual called Crito. Crito is an important friend of Socrates as far as history is concerned because he was present at Socrates’ death. The occasion on which their friendship was put to the test was on the day of Socrates’ execution, an encounter that Plato reconstructs in his dialogue called the Crito. The dialogue opens with Crito coming to Socrates in prison to tell him that the state galley is returning from Delos, a signiﬁcant event because it marks the end of the religious festival during which Socrates, although condemned, could not be executed; with the return of the galley, his reprieve is over and it seems he must die. Crito makes one last effort to persuade Socrates to allow his friends to pay off his jailers and secrete him into exile. Socrates refuses. He wants to drink the hemlock and die rather than ﬂee the city and live. Therein lies the quandary he faces in friendship.

It is not that Socrates does not care about Crito. Quite the reverse; apart from the intimate nature of their conversation, one reason why Socrates cannot escape is that to do so would implicate his friends who could then themselves face exile or injury. And more seriously as far as his beliefs about friendship are concerned, Socrates also knows that he must hold fast to what he holds to be true. Alongside the realisation of his wise ignorance, this includes the conviction that he should not be afraid of death. To run from the law would betray that conviction, though it is a burden The Meaning of Friendship 92 [email protected] he must ask his friend Crito to share with him. To go against his philosophy would be to go against his high ideal of friendship; his way of life as a philosopher and his search for true friendship – for another self – go hand in hand. Such is the price of honest friendship.

Other ways of honesty Now, there are a number of objections that can be raised against such high ideals of friendship. For example, is it not too unfeel- ing, harsh, and perhaps suspiciously drawn to a kind of ﬂagella- tory ambition to be called friendship? For some, perhaps the answer is yes. However, to see it only in this light would be to misunderstand its undoubtedly strong character. For one thing, not all friendships are asked to rise to this level of intensity, only those who would be friends of the deepest kind. And, it is impor- tant to remember the comments made by Nietzsche about bearing other people’s faults because they bear your own: the harsher ideals that friendship might demand are offset by the humane and compassionate behaviour that friendliness requires too. Alternatively, consider another comment Nietzsche makes:

‘Fellow rejoicing, not fellow suffering, makes the friend.’ Nietz-\ sche’s point is that given that it is natural to want to respond to a\ friend’s distress in some way, it is better to respond positively.

Create something, Nietzsche says, ‘that the other can behold with pleasure: a beautiful, restful, self-enclosed garden perhaps, with high walls against storms and the dust of the doorway but also a hospital gate’. He connects this more joyful approach to previous times in history when the paucity of medical science meant that much suffering was unavoidable, in response to which people developed an ethic of rejoicing. They put their efforts into a cul- ture of celebration rather than amelioration; happiness rather than pain. This idealisation of history can readily be questioned, of course: who wants to go to a party with toothache? But consid- ering the dominance of reality TV, chat shows and agony columns, Nietzsche is surely right to point out that these theatres of cruelty Faking It 93 [email protected] have proliferated in the modern world for the very reason that the spectacle of others suffering, and the opportunity it provides for us to show pity, distracts us from, and relieves us of responsibility for, facing the truth of our own pain. Another objection might be that even if such high ideals of friendship are not as harsh as they ﬁrst seem, because they appeal to a more genuine kind of compassion, are they still worth it? Are there not other ways to discover the truth of ourselves that do not require drawing others into the sometimes brutal truths of life? Or perhaps the effort that high friendship’s penetrating honesty demands would be better placed elsewhere? Some people have indeed concluded that truth is best sought not in friends but in substitutes for friends. Christina Rossetti, for one, wrote a poem about a tree, entitled with the ironic double entendre, ‘A Dumb Friend’. One verse reads:

So often have I watched it, till mine eyes Have ﬁlled with tears and I have ceased to see, That now it seems a very friend to me, In all my secrets wise.

More commonly, many might say that drowning the sorrow of their secrets in beer or wine is better and easier than bothering others; the alcohol seems like a good friend because it reﬂects their\ mood back to them. More idiosyncratically, the Victorian art critic John Ruskin con- fessed that pictures were his only friends because they were the only things with which he could form honest attachments. Or what of the case of a book as a friend? If ‘the novelist lives in his work’, as Joseph Conrad put it, then is not a book a friend- ship with a person, formed through its pages? Perhaps that’s rather like the relationship expressed by Anne Frank. She fam- ously called her diary Kitty, explaining that in the long hours of her hiding from the Nazis it was in a way a better friend than any person could be since ‘paper is more patient than man’. In fact, a\ book appears to provide a good alternative to friendship proper The Meaning of Friendship 94 [email protected] because what a book shares with someone is the potential to impart objective self-understanding. For example, when we say we know a book well, because we have returned to it several times, there is the implication that it resonates with our own experience, throws light upon it, and constantly reveals things to us about ourselves. Supreme examples would be religious books like the Bible or the Koran. Stanley Cavell, a philosopher who has written widely on friendship, goes one step further and uses reading a book as itself an analogy for friendship itself, pointing out that in friendship one is able to ‘read’ the other and one allows oneself \ to be ‘read’. So, one can easily question whether a bottle of wine is really a good friend, unless you are an alcoholic. And the perpetual tree hugger is likely to be unbalanced. However, the case of the book is less easily resolved. Perhaps unexpectedly, Marcel Proust is someone who makes a strong case in its favour. He believed not just that friendship with people was unbearable unless individuals wear masks of good manners, a necessity that makes any real friendship very difﬁcult if not impossible, but, more devastatingly still, he thought that people can never provide the opportunity for any real honesty anyway. In friendship, the greatest honesty that can be hoped for is a kindly acknowledge- ment that the request for friendship can never truly be given nor received. All friends can say to each other is, ‘I’d love to b\ e your friend.’ Books, however, overcome the limitations with which indi- viduals ﬁnd themselves encumbered when relating to one another.

Proust invites us to consider the fact that friendship depends on conversation. The trouble with conversation, he implied, is that it is ﬂawed: people get sidetracked, exchange only common places, cannot communicate considered positions, or respect each other’s self-delusion without challenging it. Novels, though, as means of communication are everything that conversation is not. They are focused, innovative, considered and disinterested. Because of that, he concluded that there is a purity in reading to which friendship can never aspire; books have no false amiability. Faking It 95 [email protected] When you are ﬁnished with a book, you shelve it without offence, something that is impossible with a friend. Proust even went so far as to misquote Aristotle and say that a book is another self, and better than a friend, since it is not susceptible to social habits, pressures or vices. However, I think this is precisely why books will not, ulti- mately, do as friends. They may appear to be substitutes for friendship inasmuch as a spirit of honesty drives the desire to write and be read. But although books may be the product of another self, they are not ‘an other self’ as the adage implies in\ its deepest sense. For example, the control someone has over books may prevent false feeling but it indulges narcissism, the great enemy of self-honesty: a book is shelved with impunity when one does not like it because there is no obligation to respect it, like one must another person. Or, a book may open someone’s eyes to dif- ference, but difference only fully confronts us and challenges us to change in an encounter with another human being. It is the irre- ducibility of these human elements that makes for the powerful, if troubling, experience of deep friendship. And if conversation, though drenched in goodwill, is hardly ever entirely authentic, it is irreplaceable in conjuring up those rare moments of truth.

Friendship of the honest sort may need the months and years of accommodation and propriety to produce it.

Solitude A different kind of response to the ambiguities of honesty in friendship is to turn from it entirely. Most scholars would probably say that this is what Nietzsche did in the last years of his life. In th\ e books of his ﬁnal period, the few comments he makes on friend- ship appear to advocate increasingly adversarial relationships that precipitate ever more courageous acts of overcoming, with the result that mere circles of friends come to be seen as a dangerous hindrance: ‘every person is a prison, also a nook and a corner’. Nonetheless, if we look at the sayings of the character Zara- thustra whom he creates in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, a more subtle The Meaning of Friendship 96 [email protected] position emerges than merely a rejection of friends. It is one that reveals another perhaps surprising dimension to this theme of truthfulness in friendship. Nietzsche’s Zarathustra is a prophet named after the founder of the ancient Persian religion Zoroastrianism. Nietzsche thought the original Zarathustra remarkable because he had struggled in his times with how to speak truthfully, how to pierce the smoke and mirrors of verisimilitude, how ‘to shoot well with arrows’. In oth\ er words, he personiﬁes a spirit of honesty. He ﬁrst appears in Nietz- sche’s book coming out of solitude in the mountains as a prophet.

He then utters a series of soliloquies to whoever will listen, one of which is entitled ‘Of the Friend’. What is striking about it is th\ at Zarathustra speaks as a hermit who longs for friendship. This is clearly a paradoxical state of affairs. How can someone who wants to be alone also want company? The answer is that the hermit does not really want to be alone for isolation’s sake, but rather that he seeks a retreat in order to achieve the state of mind that is rid of the clutter of life and allows him to see clearly. The difﬁculty Zarathustra’s hermit has got him\ - self into is that his isolation has caused him to turn in on himself.

Rather than ﬁnding clarity of mind, he ﬁnds himself having a conversation between the ‘I and Me’ in his mind that only leads to him ‘sinking to the depths’. This is where his desire for a friend comes in. The good friend is someone who can save the hermit from his downward spiral without destroying the tranquillity of mind that much human interaction brings and from which the hermit longs to be free.

More colloquially, we might say that one can be alone with a friend. Such an experience would point to Aristotle’s third kind of friendship again, the closest sort. With such good friends, it doesn’t matter what you are doing together, and you may well be doing nothing, just sitting silently; and there is no embarrass- ment. You are able simply to be together. No talking is required, no distractions. (There is another sense in which solitude can be good for friendship, namely, taking some time out to think about it! Faking It 97 [email protected] Reading or writing a book on friendship, activities that are mostly done in silence and alone, might provide a good case in point.) Nietzsche’s advocacy of solitude, then, has two senses. First, it implies a solitary solidarity of friendship between those who are other selves to one another. If the friend knows the individual better than themselves, then honest friendship is an opportunity to be alone together with the truth about one another. Second, I think Nietzsche is also pointing to a role friendship can play not only at a personal level but also at a social one. Solitude, in this case, is an isolation of a different sort: it is a mental separation from a world which loathes rest and reﬂection and has what is more mundanely called the wrong work/life balance. Nietzsche puts it like this:

One thinks with a watch in one’s hand, even as one eats one’s midday meal while reading the latest news of the stock market; one lives as if one always ‘might miss out on something’.

‘Rather do anything than nothing’: this principle, too, is merely a string to throttle all culture and good taste … Living in a con- stant chase after gain compels people to expend their spirit to the point of exhaustion in continual pretence and over- reaching and anticipating others. Virtue has come to consist of doing something in less time than someone else. Hours in which honesty is permitted have become rare, and when they arrive one is tired and does not only want to ‘let oneself go’ but\ actually wishes to stretch out as long and wide and ungainly as one happens to be.

This way of life erodes the attention that is necessary for truthful- ness. It is also strangely suspicious of joy for joy’s sake. Instead,\ everything must be instrumental, including friendship. Nietzsche notes, that in the modern world when people are caught doing something pleasurable, like walking in the country, they excuse it as necessary for their health. I’ve read reports commending friend- ship, not because it’s a good thing, but because it’s good for you\ r health too. This damages the capacity for deep friendship: ‘Soon The Meaning of Friendship 98 [email protected] we may well reach the point where people can no longer give in to the desire for a vita contemplativa (that is, taking a walk with ideas and friends) without self-contempt and a bad con- science.’ The concern is partly that friendship may come to be determined by utility, as we saw in the workplace. And partly that if honest friendship acts as a counter-cultural force to the multi- ple, frequently inauthentic ways that people have of interacting with each other, then other virtues like character or spiritual insight will come to an end too. Solitude with a friend is the antidote. Though, again, it is no easy option. The psyche is a complex entity and a cosy solitude can easily lead to a smug presumptuousness, on the one hand, or moroseness, on the other. Friends together may also go the way of the isolated hermit, turning in on each other:

If we live together with another person too closely, what hap- pens is similar to when we repeatedly handle a good engrav- ing with our bare hands: one day all we have left is a piece of dirty paper. The soul of a human being too can ﬁnally become tattered by being handled too continually.

Truthfulness and honesty, not self-justiﬁcation and self- indulgence, are the test.

Ending friendship His fear of being handled too close by Wagner is arguably what led to Nietzsche making a break. There was no solitude together to be had with the musician. Everyone around him was, instead, cast in his shade. So there is always the possibility that friendships may come to an end, not just because people ‘trivially’ fall out, but because sometimes it may be implicit in the dynamic of the relationship itself. What then on ending friendship? Friendship can come under threat when people ﬁnd themselves skating on thin ice; cracks of honesty that open onto icy water can destroy the surface on which the friendship relied. Add to this risk Faking It 99 [email protected] the fact that friendship is a game that is usually played out with many people at once. A new friend, for example, may give the game away because they have underestimated the subtlety of the rules by which the older friends are playing; the faux pas is easier to utter than the bon mot because it stems from ignorance not knowledge. The closest of friends are not immune from the damage that can be caused by feelings of envy, distrust or betrayal too. In Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale two childhood friends, Leontes and Polixenes, fall out when Leontes suspects that Polixenes is having an affair with his wife, Hermione. ‘Now my sworn friend and then mine enemy’, breathes Leontes: the friends who were yoked together in love are now yoked by that which ‘did betray the Best’. It turns out that Leontes is mistaken. But before he realises that, his son has died as, apparently, have his wife and daughter. The perception of disloyalty and deception can be as damaging to friendship as any actual deception itself. As serious are the difﬁculties that arise when someone changes or moves, ﬁnds happiness or success. Prejudices that have been hidden since the foundation of the friendship can suddenly ﬁnd themselves bursting at the seams – a double blow since it may well be that the friendship itself has opened up the new vista, as Nietzsche again laments:

The best of them are lenient with us and wait patiently for us soon to ﬁnd our way back to the ‘right path’ – they know, it\ seems, what the right path is! The others resort to mockery and act as though one had become temporarily insane, or they make spiteful allusions to the person they suppose to have misled us. The more malicious declare us to be vain fools and seek to blacken our motives, while the worst former friend of all sees in us his worst enemy and one thirsting for revenge for a protracted dependence – and is afraid of us.

However, in all these cases there are steps that can be taken before the end of the friendship is signed and sealed. Nietzsche’s advice is\ The Meaning of Friendship 100 [email protected] a conciliatory approach: at the ﬁrst sign of mockery or malicious- ness offer the friend a year’s amnesty during which they can reform their attitude. There’s a practical suggestion: have a 12 month cooling off period. But what happens when an amnesty is not enough? Or, more generally, how should one treat a friendship when it breaks up whether by deliberate action or unavoidable accident? Aristotle was alert to the pain and difﬁculty of ending friend- ships and devoted some thought to it. He noted that the prob- lem is particularly intense when someone thinks they are liked because of their character, for who they are in themselves, and it turns out that this was feigned and they were really only liked because of their wallet or their wit. Worse still, when the useful- ness ends or the pleasure the friends shared dries up, it is also easy for the one who has changed to feel duplicitous for having feigned the friendship to start with. ‘Quarrels between friends occur more than anything when there is a difference between what they think the basis of the friendship is and what it actually is,’ Aristotle wisely observes. In such cases, when very great offence is taken, there is little possibility of a good ending. Faking It 101 Figure 7: ‘Let us believe in our star friendship even if we should be compelled to be earth enemies.’ (Friedrich Nietzsche) [email protected] Another possibility Aristotle considers is whether friendships should be dissolved when one friend changes for the worst, to avoid the pretence that they are as likeable as they have always been? This perhaps happens more than we would care to admit:

principled character can be eroded by money or success; warm natures can become embittered by experience. With these changes the thing that was good about the friend, and that formed the basis of the friendship, goes too. Consequently, if the unchanged friend feels they can do little about it, the friendship will fade as faking it becomes too much. Sadly but honourably one might retain a memory of the intimacy that was shared in the past, Aristotle adds, and remember the former friend in a kindly way. A third possibility arises from Nietzsche’s concept of ladder- types. These friendships will feel under threat because although one or both friends have changed, and probably for the better, they will now be on different paths that may take them a long way apart. They have no future together. This, surely, is how he came to see his friendship with Wagner. And ‘star friendship’ is Nietzsche’s poetic way of describing this end to friendship:

We were friends and have become estranged. But this was right, and we do not want to conceal and obscure it from ourselves as if we had reason to feel ashamed. We are two ships each of which has its goal and course … and then the good ships rested so quietly in one harbour and one sunshine that it may have looked as if they had reached their goal and as if they had one goal. But then the almighty force of our tasks drove us apart again into different seas and sunny zone, and perhaps we shall never see each other again … Let us then believe in our star friendship even if we should be compelled to be earth enemies.

The picture he draws is of a star in the heavens that memor- ialises the friendship, as it were, and which we might see if we look up. It can be appreciated there, for although it shines like the things that were shared, it no longer casts a shadow over the The Meaning of Friendship 102 [email protected] former friends’ lives as they are now. Creating a star friendship out\ of a friendship that has turned bad will take a long time. Jealousy, envy and hatred don’t dissolve overnight. It seems they never did in the case of Nietzsche and Wagner. Moreover, if the friend has been another self, then you are not just losing someone who was in your life but was a part of you. And if you are losing a part of yourself in anger or bitterness, then you are rejecting part of your- self too. Such wounds take time to heal, if ever they do.However, the idea of star friendship can still help: it provides a sense of direction, the place you would like to end up, should you be able to get rid of all the bad feeling. It’s where you’d li\ ke to be in relation to the old friendship, free of it now, and remember- ing it well for what it was. There is, then, such a thing as a good and a bad break in friend- ship. The good break is a consequence of the positive thing that the friendship gave, the new path or insight, that then took the friends apart. The bad break is a consequence of negative change.

Perhaps, in most breaks there is a mixture of both, like the split between Nietzsche and Wagner. Whatever; past friendships should lend themselves to future graciousness, for, even if it was a gift wrapped in thorns, or less of a gift than it ﬁrst seemed, friend- ship is a gift nonetheless. For that, they are well remembered. Faking It 103 [email protected] 104 Friending Online ‘Garbage in, garbage out.’ IT department saying If friendships at work can be tricky, friendship with lovers com- plicated, and trusting friends more risky than ﬁrst meets the eye, then online friendships appear to be inducing something of a panic.

For social networking sites have put many social commentators in a spin. Websites like Second Life, Facebook, Bebo and Twitter have gath- ered users at astonishing rates. Millions are spending hours at a time pursuing friendships that, previously, they would have pre- sumably conducted in the playground or pub, or not at all. The anxiety stems from whether the virtual world is a good, safe and honest world in which to get to know and be known by another – or at least whether it is good, safe and honest enough. Panic is associated with the uncertainty that surrounds this question, and the fact that there appears to be evidence for thinking it is not. Take online bullying, one aspect of virtual culture that regu- larly grabs a headline, and the even nastier phenomenon of online grooming. These are clearly threats faced by children of the information age, and not just children. Teachers are being bullied too. In one poll for YouGov, ten per cent of teachers confessed that they’d been bombarded by instant messages and emails. Whilst it was happening, their life was a misery. What you might call the internet’s tendency to abuse rela- tionships can be a subtle thing too. Most people will have had an email that, written in a hurry, struck them more forcefully than was intended. These short messages, which now rule mil- lion