This may well be the result of the relatively recent disappearance of a specific worldview rooted in values dominant for centuries; its disappearance has made us reexamine the human condition. In his preface to the works of Seneca, Paul Veyne writes, “We retain the right to base our dreams on the thoughts of the ancients, which we reuse as the men of the Renaissance reused the columns of pagan temples to build their churches.” He goes on to demonstrate that the ancient concept of the self can still resonate with a modern sensibility: “Paradoxically, what was but a detail of Stoic doctrine—the autonomy of the self and the possibility of the self’s working on the self—has become for us a mode of survival, despite the disappearance of everything that Stoicism affirmed: nature, God, and the unity of the self.”2
To return to the question of terminological precision, its importance has been emphasized since Plato’s Lysis, which made it clear that the term philia is ambiguous and depends upon whether a particular friendship is active, passive, or reciprocal. The Greek term philia covered much more than the contemporary term friendship does and was not far from what we mean today by love. “If friendship is taken to mean all types of affection, it was, in Greek use, the strongest and the most developed affection. It eclipsed love; it had deeper roots than family feeling; it was sung of by the poets. […] In the ancient world, friendship was what courtly love was in the chivalric and Christian world,” wrote L. Dugas.3 This explains the difficulty we sometimes have when we read Greek texts that refer to sentiments that, like instruments out of tune or tuned to a different key, don’t correspond to what we mean today by the same words. In the ancient world, the word philia itself had already passed through a series of semantic slips. In Homer’s time, it had belonged to the vocabulary of law and indicated a type of possession, but in time it had evolved to mean a type of affective relationship founded on reciprocal esteem. As Pierre Macherey notes, “The word Homer always used to indicate the affective relationship between two people that we call friendship today was not philos, but hetarios, a companion, he from whom one is inseparable.”4 The Greek philia is most fully developed in the texts of Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca, and the Epicureans.
In the preface to their anthology The Wisdom of Friendship, Jacques Follon and James McEvoy note that the Greek New Testament used the Greek terms for love very selectively and slanted them heavily toward the new (Christian) doctrine. In it, eran and its noun eros are systematically sidelined, and stergueini, which means familial affection, is almost never used.5 Philein, because it is too theoretically loaded and is overly marked by ancient pagan doctrines, “is only applied to the relationship that Jesus had with Peter, Lazarus, and “the disciple whom he loved.” From then on, agapan and agape “were used to speak of love because, having been previously marginalized terms, they were ‘available.’ […] Our authors claim that, as a result, the word ‘love’ in all occidental languages (influenced by the expressions ‘the love of God’ and ‘the love of one’s neighbor’) has taken priority, and the word ‘friendship’ has been relegated to a second place. Thus the incontestable primacy enjoyed by the word philia in the Classical and Hellenistic periods gave way to the term agape, just as the Latin term amicitia had to cede its place to amor and caritas.”6
Since then, the notion of charity as the universal love of one’s neighbor has gained an advance on other forms of love, limiting friendship to a privileged relationship between two or more individuals in an essentially private experience. The possibility of inscribing this experience of friendship in the public sphere was a question that had already been debated by the ancients, but in a context in which conflicts of interest also belonged to the public sphere, opposing virtue to glory or power, without either’s arising from the private sphere alone (on the contrary, in fact, as domestic economy and the affairs of the home have nothing to do with friendship, even if, in some circumstances, Aristotle found relations of friendship at the heart of the family).
Friendship was theorized in the pagan world. Aristotle, more than anyone else, gave the concept the features that we still recognize today, such as an equality (of virtue) and an active reciprocity within a shared intimacy. However, this model was soon opposed by the concept of universal love as developed by the Christian church, in which humanity was the most valued aspect of the individual. The Christian community is founded on charity, not on friendship, and unlike friendship, charity does not require reciprocity. The relationship that brings friends together is undertaken consciously and willfully, which is entirely different from the open-ended category of all neighbors whom the church demands we love as we do ourselves.
Even today, there are echoes of this heritage that make friendship a troubled and generally neglected subject in philosophy. Sympathy, which Rousseau considered to be the basis of our relationship to others, was distrusted by antiquity, which thought that its affective nature was beyond us and that it fell outside the control of reason. For the Greeks, discourse was clearly the essence of friendship, while we today often think of it as vain chatter, and, philosophically, it’s stigmatized as an inauthentic mode of being in the world. As Hannah Arendt said of the ancient world, “with dialogue, friendship’s political importance—and its humanity—are revealed … For the world is not human because it was made by people, and it will not become human because the human voice resounds within it; it will only become human when and if it becomes the object of dialogue.”7
All this implies that friendship is not as obvious as is generally assumed. To have friends seems like the most natural thing in the world and the most culturally shared, and yet, in its primary sense, friendship implies a set of practices and values that is and remains for us a thing of the past—to borrow a famous phrase from Hegel. The social and intellectual conditions of its practice are different now, at least in the Western world, where individualism has taken precedence over every other value, and yet, to a large degree, we continue to live as if this were not the case. It’s as if we still need to believe in friendship, even though we live less and less with our friends—and this was an essential condition of friendship for the Greeks: a shared life. This is the root of the importance of the community of friends that more generally relied on the political community—which the community of friends had, in turn, made possible.
One loves one’s friends, but not with the same love one has for the beloved, be it husband, wife, or child. One loves, but what kind of love is it? We don’t have a word to express it, to specify it. We’ve lost the diversity of terms that constituted the wealth of the Greek vocabulary, which not only could speak of friendship, but could also differentiate between various modes, while also taking into account social structures and practices that are, for the most part, not relevant today. Above all, we no longer have a verb to indicate friendship as an action, an ongoing activity; we have to make use of another vocabulary, which exposes the relatively confused ideas that we currently hold. With the loss of the word, have we not also lost what it means?
And yet, friendship is perhaps not so much lost as it is in need of being reinvented to fit a world that needs it more—and exactly to the degree that that world makes its reality problematic and makes it difficult to realize on a daily basis, in the sense that it has transformed human communities into institutions (“the European Community”), agglomerations (such as the collectivities of the same name also sometimes misleadingly called “cites”), or religious or ideological schools of thought.8 How can we truly live with our friends today? Various projects bring us together at times, but equally often drive us apart, allowing us, no doubt, to develop other friendships, but not to maintain them; they last only as long as we’re working together, and evaporate as soon as the work is done because we lack other points of connection, other shared values that form the basis of social practice.
So I find myself looking for a verb that will be to friendship what the verb to love is to love, one that will express that it is not a state, but an activity, a dynamic and continual engagement.
Amitier—to enfriend. As one might say “to engage”—with no time limit embedded in the term and a pledge of active presence implied.
***
Maurice Blanchot, thinking of Dionys Mascolo, considers friendship’s beginnings: “There’s no ‘at first sight’ with friendship; instead, it occurs little by little, the slow work of time. You’ve become friends before you’re even aware of it.”9 Though that’s not how I would put it; it seems to me that when one becomes a friend, one is necessarily aware of it. Friendship doesn’t happen without some degree of self-awareness. The things we say and do both to and with our friends are the words and the actions of a friend. They wouldn’t be if our intentions weren’t friendly, and how could our intentions be friendly if they were unaware of themselves? And yet a friendship must be born, which roots it in time, though it’s only after the fact that its birth is perceptible.
On the other hand, one can be misled by “protestations of friendship” that use the term for something actually alien to its principles, but that’s a defensive position that usually soon reveals its true nature and the background thoughts on which it’s founded. The true friend doesn’t worry about what could be; he affirms without reservation that which is. He’s not trying to mend a past whose shadow he fears; he engages a future from which he has everything to hope. Our earliest friendships, those of childhood and adolescence, are this sort. Then as time passes, we come to know others, less emotional and more professional, political, or literary, and perhaps more reasonable and temperate in their foundation. And, some would say, without illusions. And yet all friendships are nourished by projects, hopes, and promises—and therefore also by illusions. A friendship that doesn’t expose itself to possible deception is no more than a partnership, an association. To be connected to another person by a contract does not involve a friendship, though one might develop as a side effect. To paraphrase Stendhal, friendship, like beauty, is a promise of happiness, and there is always the risk that this promise might not be kept. The promise is not for anything specific; rather, it’s the link of friendship itself that is the promise.
Based on his analysis of philia, Aristotle tried to show that friendship is essential to our happiness precisely because it is an act, or a disposition (hexis), and not a state. Being kind is not enough because “he who is kind stops at good wishes, while a real friend also brings those wishes to fruition. Kindness is, in effect, the beginning of friendship: all friends are kind, but all kind people are not friends.”10
In other words, friendship does not rest solely with intention, but requires the actualization of those intentions. Moreover, his preference for action over state of being means that, for Aristotle, to like someone is superior to being liked. The connection might not be immediately apparent, but will be if we think of the sense of fulfillment we feel when an expressed feeling is reciprocated as opposed to when it is not. To be liked might touch us—though it might also leave us indifferent, or even irritated—but it doesn’t really change us overall. And yet, returning to Aristotle, what distinguishes liking a person (philia) from liking a thing (philésis) is that the former always asks to be returned; it supposes a reciprocal action. If mean-spirited people are incapable of friendship, it’s because they prefer things to people, or they treat people as things, not as themselves and not absolutely, but as part of an arithmetic of joys and sorrows—in other words, relative to themselves and as other things. The mean-spirited expect no more from people than they do from things. Solitary, with no sense of community—which also means no elementary sense of justice—they cannot know friends. It’s a case that doesn’t come up often, for, as Plato points out in The Republic, even a band of thieves who associate in order to commit unjust actions can’t completely transgress the rules of justice, which is the only thing that can maintain agreement and friendship.11
So, while in principle philia presumes a reciprocity of feeling, in practice, there’s simply something inherent in friendship that wants to share the feeling with another. And yet the desire is not enough in itself; it also must be realized in a “common life,” which for a friend is an end in itself; it’s the act for which the desire was only an impetus. “For,” as Aristotle rightly says, “there is no friend without an effort and no friend for a single day; it takes time.”12
Commenting on this passage, Derrida emphasizes the notion of time and the insistence on effort or shared experience: “To get to the act behind the hexis, to continually renew or reaffirm the viability of a friendship, presumes a reinvention, a reengagement of its freedom.”13 This does not devalue the childhood friendships that stay with us our entire lives, for the time he’s talking about is the time required for a friendship to develop, not how long it lasts nor how much time is shared—people are not necessarily better friends for having been friends longer.
Friendships in youth, though, do have a very particular status. They are involved in the beginning of our lives. They’re “full of promise,” being the intensified sensation of all friendship. Such a friendship is a founding moment, one of oaths that bind, of projects that call, and of promises that tie us to others. This doesn’t mean that it’s a purely virtual relationship—quite the opposite; the founding gesture of the friendship is always occurring again, always reactualizing itself. Evoking the Aristotelian definition of nature, it could be viewed as the act of what is in force to the degree that it is in force, except that “it is much more beautiful to say ‘virtue’ than ‘nature.’”14
And childhood friendships aren’t flickering, tentative friendships; on the contrary, they affirm, with an overflowing force, a new link that seems as solid as its discovery is recent and charged with the enthusiasm of an approach to an unknown shore. Once the attraction of novelty has passed, if the friendship lasts, something of its capacity for wonder will remain the age at which the link was forged, and its value will be recognized by comparing it with other links forged that were forged afterward without replacing it.
This kind of friendship corresponds to the Aristotelian category of things principally founded upon pleasure, “for young people live in the empire of passion, and are engaged, above all, with what pleases them and with the pleasure of the moment.”15 For, when the object of pleasure changes, friendship changes too, which happens often because “the pleasures of this age are subject to abrupt variations.”16 These are the friendships of our youth, those that go back to the time that we were creating ourselves, in that time between childhood and adulthood.
The concept of adolescence in the modern sense is fairly recent, dating back to the second half of the eighteenth century. From that period on, it has been considered a stage of life separate from childhood, an intermediary stage that some consider the product of a new system of the transmission of knowledge.17 Be that as it may, Rousseau, for whom “adolescence is the age of neither vengeance nor hate,” but rather that of “commiseration” and “generosity,” thought that “the first feeling that a carefully raised young man is open to is not love, but friendship”18 because people are first sensitive to people like themselves before being affected by the opposite sex—which raises the question of friendship between the sexes.
Adolescence is a period of innocence, when our feelings are so strong that the pleasures and, above all, the pains of the other are our own. The logical outcome of Rousseau’s principles and social vision suggests that self-love, that sensation that leads people to self-preservation, as long as it’s held in check by compassion, spontaneously engenders friendship. When an adolescent enters the world, this self-love is transformed into the sense of self-esteem, which leads us to put ourselves before others.19 As soon as this shift occurs, friendship is lost whenever self-consideration becomes the guide. Reason, on the one hand, is exclusively calculating, while on the other, it has no power over emotion. This means that the one cannot be conquered, elided, or led astray by the other. Besides the fact that Rousseau is describing friendship in the modern sense, founded first on feeling20—and without consid
ering what it means for his own philosophy—it’s worth noting that this is the same account that people today evoke, at least implicitly, when they claim to be skeptical, whether slightly or extremely, of feelings of friendship.
The friendships of youth are sometimes exalted in order to compare them to friendships between adults, casting the latter in an unfavorable light. The idealization of friendship in some nineteenth-century novels, as well as the implication that the feeling is no longer possible in our modern world, is largely responsible for friendship’s reputation for being chimerical and utopic. The time of promise corresponds to “l’age des possibles.”21 It’s this stage of life that inspired the Bildungsroman, or the coming-of-age novel; according to the romantics, Wilhelm Meister was the epitome of the genre. The guiding concept of such works and of the bonds of the friendships they depict is that of a consciousness developing a sense of self through being tested by the world, usually by a series of encounters that also gives the work its narrative structure. One strain of romanticism tended to privilege internal friendships over the more “heroic” version—also estimable in their eyes—of external friendship, which “always demands that one win new brothers,” as Schlegel put it in Lucinde. He thought of internal friendship as “entirely spiritual”; it does not need action in order to be tested. It’s a universal feeling that binds us to others, and “he who feels humanity and the world in his deepest self cannot, without difficulty, seek a universality, a universal spirit where there is not one.”22 Curiously, here we again find the progression that leads from the ancient concept of philia (which, again in Schlegel’s words, “always uses virtue to tighten the ancient knot”) to the vision of Christian love, which “in its humility, knows how to honor the divinity of the other.”23
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