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

On the Island of Despair and the Magic of Friendship. - By Edward Hobson

On the Island of Despair and the Magic of Friendship.

To shamelessly recycle a previously used metaphor, it is as difficult to know what’s going on in someone else’s mind as it is to know what’s going on in someone else’s country.  Though, I find that never stops anyone from attempting to do just that. In both cases. What genuinely interests me though, about the human mind, is not so much the modus operandi of “I know you but you don’t know me”, but the innate solitude of the mind. Any mind. This was, for a time the first limit of the mind that came to me when I started writing on this, but more on that later. The first fact of life is that the mind you have is the only one you will have full knowledge of, and, by extension the only thing you can never be in error of. Not in the sense that you can never be in error in your beliefs, or feelings, but in the sense that you know what is going on in your own mind. We don’t often think about this though, as to do so is, frankly, a bit of a downer. To do so is to see that we are alone on a desert island with only a simple palm tree, and our own carvings in the sand for company, surrounded by an expanse of unknowable, abysmal ocean. With theory and delusion we attempt to sail away from this small speck of land, and I’ll argue that the most delusional of all is The Delusion of Love. For more on the innate ability of love to break down barriers of varying manner, transcend the bitterest of conflict, and unleash an almighty, righteous beam of atomic amour, (often pink or purple) see Love, The Power Of.

Tales of someone who made a catastrophic error of judgement by loving another person unconditionally to such an extent they were unable to see that the balance of affection between one partner and the other was somewhat asymmetrical cover our real life anecdotes, books and films like shipwrecks littering the bottom of the aforementioned ocean. Though, from this perspective, love is always doomed to fail, as to love unconditionally is to suspend all critical faculty, to let down our guard of critical vigilance to breach the shores of the island of despair, and find that we can know another mind as well as we know ourselves, to be as sure that we know something else about the world, outside or our minds, as well as we know our own. From the sound of things it looks as if I’ve painted a rather bleak picture, so what are we to do? The main solution, it seems, is to be in love with a philosopher who is in recognition that to love something is to love it unconditionally, but that critical faculty should be maintained. Since that is easier said than done, the more convenient answer, to myself at least, is to be happier with solitude.  There’s nothing to stop you from carving a Mona Lisa into the sand on your little solitary island, and once your learn that said island is surrounded by a metaphorical sea of error, one comes to appreciate its beauty. We go through life terrified of error and also of solitude, in a culture which coordinates error with weakness, and solitude with bitterness and abnormality.

To stay on familiar ground, railing at “the culture”, and how it is often the greatest stumbling block to the expansion of the mind beyond its limits, I draw the example which was virtually inescapable to anyone who was on the internet in 2011, which is the phenomenon of the “Bronies”. The Bronies (a portmanteau of the half word Bro and the proper word Pony) are males who are fans of the animated television series My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. A study of the Brony community conducted this year called “The Brony Study” found that most respondents were in their teens to late twenties, were educated at a college or university level, and that 81% identified as heterosexual. This contradicts the popular first hand assumption anyone who has just found out about the bronies in our culture might have made. I’m willing to bet the first image that came to mind, unless you are in fact a brony or (female equivalent) pegasister, when I said grown men were watching My Little Pony was that of a basement dweller, emotionally stunted half-wit, or unrealistically camp homosexual. The fact that Friendship is Magic is a show for little girls does bring some confusion to the fore, namely over why grown men would want to genuinely, not ironically, want to watch and celebrate a show about small multicolour horses learning about the magic of friendship. Sometimes the reaction is of outright anger or derision.

Speaking as someone who has seen the show, I propose the reason is that it’s actually a good show, regardless of who it was created for. John Stewart Mill said that we accept as normal that which is usual, and let us recall that at the outset of World War One the French Army decided to kit out their soldiers in bright pink trousers, as it was considered an aggressive, martial colour, and later abandoned their use when it became apparent they made their frontline troops stick out on the battlefield like a rainforest on Mars. There was also a time when it was unbecoming for women to wear trousers.

The mind is limited, by perception, and it is the duty of art and media, to change our perception. Bronies are changing the nature of masculinity, and are expanding their perception beyond the cultural demands of what it means to possess the Y chromosome, and thus breaching the limits of the mind. So I suppose what you can take away from this is; don’t be afraid to be alone or wrong, as we’ll spend much of our time being both before we’re done here, and that what seems unusual may not be as abnormal or detrimental as it first seems.

Friendship sure is Magic,

By Edward Hobson

The Philosophy Takeaway 'Open Topic' Issue 31