Last week’s newsletter was a survey of perspectives on friendship. Today we continue. We examine intimacy in friendship and what it means when one loses a friend.
Aside: The Socratic Method
I am using the Socratic Method to address this topic. This is a way of examining assumptions by questioning them in various ways. For instance, it is accepted that friendships are reciprocal; that they are a give-and-take relation. However, when does reciprocity become transactional? What about giving and expecting nothing in return? Surely, giving-and-not-taking is also a necessary condition for friendship. If this is so, it seems friendship is paradoxical: in some sense, it is a give-and-take relation, while at the same time it is a give-and-not-take relation. How do these assumptions fit together?
This is the nature of The Socratic Method, it reveals complexity where it was previously not assumed to exist. Legend has it that Socrates, the old philosopher, roamed the streets asking people what seemed like silly questions. After probing, however, it became apparent that many of his interlocutors were laden with assumptions they could not justify. This included assumptions about justice, love and whether the gods existed.
Today we celebrate Socrates for his courageous enquiry into topics that shape our view of life and the method used. However, Socrates himself was sentenced to death by poison precisely for the reasons we celebrate him today. He was accused of corrupting the youth by leading them to questioning the existence of the gods of the time. When given the chance to renounce his views and his method, he defiantly drank the poison in his prison cell among friends, arguing that a commitment to truth is more important than the preservation of one’s life. At any rate, the eternal soul, he argued, would be truly liberated once unhinged from this temporary body. And so he drank and died.
Friendship and Intimacy
Intimacy is often thought of in an erotic sense. But as you can guess, I do not mean it strictly in that sense here. I draw on Laurence Thomas (1987) who holds that intimacy is a kind of mutual self-disclosure: a way of exposing oneself to the other in such a way that builds a strong connection of trust.
This is not the same as a confession, where one shares one’s deepest and darkest secrets, say, with a priest or a stranger. The difference in this case is two fold: First, confessions are self-regarding. We confess to lift burdens from our conscience, as it were. Second, confessions work precisely because there is no future for which to account. In friendship, however, one exposes onself with the intent to build trust, which implies care for a shared future. It follows that care for a shared future is a necessary condition for friendship.
But why is this so? To what end is care for a shared future necessary for friendship? Bennet Helm (2023) writes that a friend is obliged to intervene when they see the other acting strangely or not in keeping with their best interests. Take the example of a super drunk friend insisting on driving themselves and their children home. It is intuitive that a friend indeed ought to refuse that their friend drive home. This is an intervention on the grounds of abnormal behaviour. Also take a friend who has never drunk a drop of alcohol in their lives who suddenly starts drinking. Similarly, a friend ought to at least intervene by voicing their concerns. This is intervention on the grounds of abnormal change in interests.
It follows that such duties can only be plausibly acted upon if there is care for a shared future, achievable through intimacy. This is to say, the role of intimacy is to lay the foundations for caring for a shared future to the extent that one has the power to act on a friend’s behalf if the envisaged future is threatened by abnormal behaviours and interests. It follows that friends act as stabilizers in each other’s lives, intervening where necessary for the sake of the other. It might be a stretch, but it seems plausible to infer that a friend, insofar as they ought to act in one’s best interest when they see anormalies, is an extension of onself.
The End of Friendship
Now I draw on Roger Scruton (2017, 80), in his book On Human Nature, where he distinguishes things from stuff. He says water is stuff and so is gold. One might have a gold ring, which is a thing insofar as it is a different thing from, say, a gold chain. However, this is only incidental. The gold ring and chain can be melted back to their original stuff and made into another thing without a sense that anything is essentially lost.
There are other kinds of things, however, that seem permanently lost when their constituent parts are dissolved. Animals, of which we are, are things of this kind. We are made of stuff, including water and other minerals, but unlike artefacts like rings we cannot be taken apart and put together again, argues Scruton. If Vusi is divided or dissolved then Vusi is permanently gone because more than being a thing, Vusi is an individual. On this account, individuality acts as a veil that wraps around the thing, such that tearing the veil to get at the thing irreparably destroys the individual.
Some philosophers object to this notion, arguing that if an imaginary machine were to disassemble every single atom of an individual and reassemble it perfectly, as it was, the same individual would emerge, in tact as it were. In other words, the individual emerges from the assembly of parts in the same way that, as it were, the soul of a car emerges from its arrangement of mechanical parts. Scruton agrees with this insofar as a melody emerges from an arrangement of notes. However, he adds that once unleashed, the melody takes on a life of its own, residing in a different real of souls and minds. In other words, the individual is not merely a wrapper around stuff, it is also transcendent from its constituent parts – it also lives on beyond its parts as a kind of spirit.
Now, drawing on the previous assertion that friendship is the extension of self, it seems (if we are to draw on Scruton’s notion of individuality) friendship is an affair, somewhat similar to that of two stars caught in each other’s orbit. When the mutual orbit is destroyed, that is, when the shared care for the future is severed, each become disorientated and move in random directions, possibly crashing into each other. Nevertheless, the feeling of a loss of self is evident in the end of friendship. The end of friendship is the end of a version of self.
Conclusion
It follows that the beginning of friendship is the beginning of a new version of self. This leads us to the next topic, defining one’s mission and purpose in life. It seems that without a clear mission or aim, one is apt to enter into dodgy friendships that take away rather than add to one’s purpose I life. But is it even possible to define a mission. If yes, then how do we account for “life happening” in ways that disrupt our mission in life. Does one have to change their mission when life happens? Also, if one is to accept a mission, it implies that there must be a time when one changes it. On what grounds are these occasions acceptable?
Let’s examine these questions in the next newsletter.
As always, have a great week ahead.
Vusi.
