Friendship and Aloneness

I hold this to be the highest task for a bond between two people: that each protects the solitude of the other. - Rainer Maria Rilke

Only those who savour solitude are capable of true friendship. Only when two people do not need one another can they become friends in the deep meaning of the word. In this intimate dance of souls, the self becomes the other and the other becomes the self. And yet, it is the separateness of the two that propels the movement. At the heart of friendship lies the Gelassenheit, the letting go of the other. Inevitably this is followed by the expectation of their return, when it happens, if it happens. Whilst solitude is essential for cultivating a state of not needing the other, paradoxically it is precisely the other that enables us not to need. The word ‘alone’ derives from ‘all one’ and a friend is someone with whom we can be all one, with whom we can be alone. Whilst “we live as we dream — alone” (Conrad, Heart of Darkness), we delight in sharing our aloneness.

One might think of friendship as a camaraderie of ‘free spirits’, who, at every moment, make a conscious choice to be close to each other without the need to possess, to enslave or to serve. While slaves cannot be friends, tyrants cannot have friends. “What we commonly call friends and friendships”, says Montaigne, “are no more than acquaintanceships and familiarities, contracted either by chance or for advantage, which have brought our minds together. In the friendship I speak of, they mix and blend into one another in so perfect a union that the seam which has joined them is effaced and disappears.” Such union can only take place between individuals, between undivided selves.

Friendship was greatly valued by the ancient Greeks. Yet, according to Aristotle, no friend is to be preferred to truth, which is greater than any finite human being can be. He stated of his friendship with Plato: “Plato is my friend, but truth is a greater friend”. A true friend is not some incarnation of the nymph Echo that only tells us what we want to hear; a friend tells us what we daren’t see in ourselves. When a self-induced disaster befalls us, we can invoke his soft yet persistent probing: “Could you have done it differently?”

Nietzsche, like the ancients, held friendship above erotic love and considered agon (a contest) to be an indispensable ingredient of it: “in your friend you should have your best enemy”! In this he echoed W.R. Emerson: “let him be to thee a sort of beautiful enemy, untameable, devoutly revered and not a trivial convenience to be soon outgrown and cast aside” (from his essay Friendship). Hence, beware of those who echo you in a flattering fashion, and also of those who reduce you to an echo!

Friendship is about sharing an ideal, sometimes more precious than life itself. Such was the camaraderie of those who were facing death in the desolate trenches of the Great War. Saving a friend from extinction sometimes required the sacrifice of one’s own life; serving one’s country in peril was a higher ideal still. Every heroic endeavour implies readiness to die for the ideal that stands above the earthly existence of the individual. It dispenses with utility and transports us into the realm of the transcendental. Nietzsche extolled the ideal of friendship thus: “There is, to be sure, here and there on earth a kind of continuation of love in which the greedy desire of two persons for one another has given way to a new desire and a new greed, a common higher thirst for an ideal that stands above them: but who knows this love? Who has experienced it? Its rightful name is friendship” (The Gay Science; I:14). A sense of uniqueness is implied here, uniqueness of the ideal and uniqueness of the friend who shares this ideal with us.

A friend makes us feel fully ourselves without the fear of being judged or rejected; he is like a mirror that helps us to become ourselves. In his presence, we can discard the mask. A friend sees the good in us when the rest of the world doubts it, when we ourselves doubt it; a friend is someone who walks in when others walk out. For Hamlet, it was the loyal, unwavering Horatio who quietly gave him courage to face the hostile, treacherous world. He was also someone to whom Hamlet was not afraid to show the vulnerable, anguished and also loving side of himself. It was in Horatio’s arms that Hamlet died, and it was Horatio who was left to mourn the ‘sweet Prince’ and tell his story to the world. Perhaps “to become what one is”, even the great ones must have a ‘Horatio’ by their side? Especially the great. And this is what Nietzsche, the advocate of hardness, solitude and self-sufficiency, wrote to his ‘Horatio’: “My dear friend; what is this – our life? A boat that swims in the sea, and all one knows for certain about it is that one day it will capsize. Here we are, two good old boats that have been faithful neighbours, and above all your hand has done its best to keep me from capsizing!” (in a letter to Franz Overbeck, November, 1881).

When we are in deep suffering and despair, no words can bring solace. The silent, compassionate presence of the other is all that is needed. This can be brief, but it must be sincere. A moment of shared, wordless stillness becomes a moment of friendship; it is also the moment when healing begins. We treasure the memories of these ‘spots of time’ in our hearts and return to them when despair returns to overwhelm us. To use the metaphor from Bergman’s unforgettable film of the same name, they become our “wild strawberries”.

Dr. Eva Cybulska

Socialism and Syllogisms - By Martin Prior

The other day I suggested that economic liberal would say...

(I) socialism is theft,

(ii) socialism goes totally against human nature,

(iii) theft is every bit part of human nature.

How scurrilous of me. In fact (iii) should read (iii) therefore [if socialism exists] some theft goes totally against human nature. Then we would have been consistent with the spirit of Aristotle's system of syllogisms, preceding predicate calculus and quantifiers by some millennia. But then maybe I was thinking politically, not logically. Maybe I should have said (i) capitalism is theft, (iii) theft is every bit part of human nature. (ii) therefore capitalism is every bit part of human nature.

Maybe we should look a little bit more closely at what syllogisms are about. There are basically two key models, ‘Barbara’ and ‘Dimatis/Disamis’:

(I, Barbara)
(i) All X is Y,
(ii) All Y is Z,
(iii) Therefore all X is Z.

Note that if we say that no capitalist has a heart, we mean that all capitalists are heartless, or more strictly ‘non-having a heart’. Note also the formulaic convention of using ‘is’ when it will often be replaced by ‘are’. The Wikipedia syllogisms article might well be read after this article, giving details of all forms as well as, ‘Barbara’ and ‘Dimatis/Disamis’, including ‘no X is Y’, etc.

Modern logician will say that X need not exist, and if so, Y need not exist, and if the latter, Z need not exist.
This brings us to our second format, where we change (i):

(II, Dimatis/Disamis)
(i) Some X is Y (Dimatis), or some Y is X (Disamis)
(ii) All Y is Z,
(iii) Therefore some X is Z.

Clearly all of X,Y,Z have to exist in the above. Now as I said, modern-day logicians say that ‘all X is Y’ does not imply that X (and therefore Y) exists, but the ancients regarded a universal assertion as implying an existential assertion as well, so:

(III, Barbari) (i) All X is Y, (ii) All Y is Z, (iii) Therefore some X is Z.

Since if our conclusion is that all X is Z, then surely some X is Z.
(Also conclusions such that if no X are Z, then some Z are not X!),

But another form is:

(IV, Daraptis)
(iv) All Y is X,
(v) All Y is Z,
(vi) Therefore some X is Z.

And this fits in with the initial corrected model, where we draw the conclusion that “therefore [if socialism exists] some theft goes totally against human nature”. But of course what we have failed to do is specify capitalism and socialism in terms of the point of view of the thief and the victim. Now we see that we must be precise about what we are talking about. The analysis of events is something I might talk about on some other occasion.

And I wasn't that scurrilous was I!

                                                                                                                    
Martin Prior

The Philosophy Takeaway 'Open topic' Issue 40

One axiom in logic for Aristotle’s three laws of thought

Aristotle has propounded three basic laws of thought:

(i)             Law of Identity,

(ii)           Law of Non-Contradiction,

(iii)          Law of Excluded middle.

To my mind these are in fact one law, when expressed in terms of formal logic.  But firstly let me return to my contribution to the previous issue (‘Axioms or Circularity’), where I argued that we needed axioms to avoid arguments which went ‘round and round in circles’.  I stated that we need at least one new axiom if we add a new concept.  Let us informally try this out:

- Negation.  Two negatives make an affirmative.

- One proposition.  p= p, p implies itself, p and ~ p (not p) cannot be true at the same time.

- Two propositions.  If p implies q, then if q is untrue, then p must also be untrue.

- Three propositions.  If p implies q, and q implies r, then p implies r. (transitivity)

My main concern here is with item1 – one proposition – but I would to look a little at items 2 and 3 first. If we look at the question of two propositions, an important concept is that a&b is equivalent to (and indeed implies) b&a.  This is known as commutativity, and of course goes on the tree of logic.  But this is a bit of a red herring: we know that meeting the love of your life and getting married is not the same thing as getting married and meeting the love of your life.  But logicians can show that this is saying the same thing as “If p implies q, then if q is untrue, then p must also be untrue.”  And this is the important thing for reasoning.

Likewise transitivity is important for reasoning:  “If p implies q, and q implies r, then p implies r.”  But associativity is also important for logicians, and also for mathematicians (along with commutativity).  But associativity is likewise a red herring for the layman – and perhaps the non-logician philosopher – since there’s always degrees of association!  Which of course is important for ethics in matters that are not black and white.

 

So both associativity, along with double negation, go on the Tree of Logic.  … :] Well let us now get back to the question of item 1, one proposition, where a proposition is equivalent to itself, implies itself, and cannot be true at the same time as its opposite. Let us look more closely at Aristotle’s three basic laws of thought:

(i)             Law of Identity,

(ii)           Law of Non-Contradiction,

(iii)          Law of Excluded Middle.

The Law of Identity simply states that a=a, where to say p=q means that to say anything about p will always be equally true of q.  Aristotle argues in Metaphysics, Book VII, Part 17, that “the fact that a thing is itself is the single reason and the single cause to be given in answer to all such questions as why the man is man, or the musician musical…”

The Law of Non-Contradiction states, according to Aristotle, that “one cannot say of something that it is and that it is not in the same respect and at the same time”, and relates to what I stated above, namely that p and ~ p (not p) cannot be true at the same time.  In formal logic this is represented by

~ (p & ~p)

But Aristotle is talking about what things are, so that we consider object x, and property A, we can never have a proposition of the form

~ (Ax & ~Ax)

i.e. x is both A and not A.

Now the Law of the Excluded Middle deals with exactly the same issue as above, but makes clear that if a reference is ambiguous, a proposition may appear to be both true and false at the same time, but there can be no contradiction in addressing the facts themselves.

But in all of this, the axiom ~ (p & ~p) is ever present, either in this form, or in the form  (p É p), p implies p.  For logicians (p É q) is by definition saying the same thing as ~ (p & ~p).  This is not so clear in natural language, since if I consider whether p implies q, then if p is in fact false, our immediate reaction is that we cannot tell.

And “p implies p” is the same thing as “p is equivalent to p” - since equivalence here means that p implies p and  vice versa!

As I said earlier, if we look at formalisms, it is useful to see how they apply to robust argumentation, and here the idea that p implies p can be expanded to the following three principles:

(i)             p is equal to and equivalent to itself,

(ii)           if we say that x is A, x cannot also be not A at the same time,

(iii)          but just to be precise, if we say that x is A, it cannot also be not A at the same time.

Note the very subtle difference between (ii) and (iii).

(iota being the affirmative operator ! )

Martin Prior

The Philosophy Takeaway 'Open Topic' Issue 34

A poem for skeptics - By Ellese Elliott

A poem for skeptics

No word can depict the manifold

In a single living being

No names can imagine Gold

Nor the phenomena of seeing

No sentence could ever grasp

One's inkling of eternity

No language could describe

The meaning of infinity

Our logic renders us static

When we speak of one we love

We may seek refuge within mathematics

But then threatened by philosophy

All our dreams explained away

By the force of the enlightenment

But our science remains a foetus

In the belly of epistemology

A note on the poem:

Epistemology is the section of philosophy dedicated to thinking about knowledge: What it is and how do we obtain it. Episteme was a type of knowledge which was said to be divine or of the Gods and which only the gods could possess, however Protagorus (a pre-socratic philosopher (before Socrates)) pointed out that we can't know what the Gods know because we cannot know anything about the gods. Since then there has been much debate about what we can know for certain. Many philosophers have concluded we can always play the skeptic. To doubt everything including scientific claims as they rest upon a fallacious logic; for example, just because I observe something 'X' amount of times does not therefore mean it is now a golden rule. This form of reason is called induction and was said to have been founded by Aristotle, Plato's student over 2000 years ago. Even now Philosophers debate what we can know for sure and little has changed. The debate continues and will probably continue for some years to come. 

By Ellese Elliott