Friendship Needed

 I have never understood why I have friends. When I was hell-bent on self-destruction, I did my best job to drive what friends I had away. That worked to a great extent. That it was not wholly successful surprises me still.

One of what I will call my symptom's of depression was to think myself unworthy of friends and also feeling cut off from those same friends. Another one of those things where my thoughts and feelings fed upon and nourished one another at the same time.

Lucidity, when I finally got a grasp on it, pointed out my errors. That I did not want any eulogies has had unintended consequences, as I failed in attaining suicide.

Tow of my remaining friends tell me they do make friends. I guess that means they are stuck with me. I like them, I respect them, and I will stand with them in adversity. Because of them and my own experiences, I read Friendship as Soulcraft: How I made friends in my thirties. I quote extensively below, but do give the whole essay a look. This is what I found remarkable; you may find ideas more relevant to you.

There is security in the messy neediness of love, the occult magnetic fields that attract and repel. Passion means to suffer, to be set upon. This is not to speak ill of love, but only to observe that since friendship is more freely chosen, it rests on unstable ground. Romantic love holds us together through mutual awareness of our neediness, but friendship does not arise from any need. Filial love is so powerful because it is, ideally without caveat, the sort of belonging one can neither earn nor lose. Some of the deepest hurts in human life consequently arise when we do lose that love, when the familiar becomes estranged. Family members, even those in a family you have some choice in forming, are the same type—“kin.” But the friend is some “other,” a stranger I have come to prefer.

Aristotle says there is no justice between friends: We owe them nothing, and true friends do not consider who owes what to whom. Friends as friends therefore do not need anything from you besides your friendship, which is one reason why friendship presupposes leisure. People fall in love in an instant, at a glance, but friendship always takes time. This is why so many of us make our closest friends during the structured indolence of college and why children seem to do it so effortlessly. My chatty, companionable daughter Ruthie will quite often appear with a new “friend” at the playground and use the introduction “Dad! This is my new friend!” before the inevitable aside to her new chum: “What’s your name again?”

Pursuing friendship for pleasure or utility (Aristotle again) does not actually yield us friends, since these attachments dissolve when the pleasure or utility does. Think of those acquaintances made through professional conferences or other “networking” events, or, for that matter, of the damage done by multilevel marketing schemes. Both seek to instrumentalize social relations for the purposes of career advancement or sales.

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One of Jacques Derrida’s better books is a survey of the philosophy of friendship from the Greeks to the present, The Politics of Friendship. Putting “the politics of” in front of something is rarely illuminating about politics, but in this case Derrida’s concern is this: When we think about a friend, we tend to follow a “logic of fraternization,” repeatedly seeing in the friend “the features of the brother.” The friend as the “other self” cancels out the difference of the other, assimilating the friend into the self. Insofar as we always begin with the self in thinking about friendship, we place an undue emphasis on the act of loving at the expense of considering what it means to be loved. Even reciprocity, Derrida suggests, is based on an “unverifiable presumption” about the thoughts and feelings of someone else. Knowing is different from being known, loving from being loved. I can love being loved, or perhaps figure out how to become lovable, but being loved is something I can’t control.

I think Derrida neglects to consider how the friend as another self might also qualify our straightforward understanding of ourselves. If the self risks imposing on the other, can’t we also allow the other to challenge our view of ourselves? Can’t friendship make us a little strange to ourselves? My friends have changed my tastes in music, forced me to reconsider issues in philosophy, exposed me to the extraordinary world of watches—that is, time pieces. But they have also sometimes helped me understand the ways my image of myself has sometimes worked deliberately against the person I really am. Friendship is an answer to the question of how we can know what we do not know about ourselves.

Friendship is a sign that we are the sort of beings who not only transcend need and necessity but are also expansive enough to include others in our attempts to live good lives. Nevertheless, the advice that everyone from disgraced professors to sitting senators to criminal influencers gives to floundering men, young or not, stresses a traditional manliness that valorizes self-assertion in the face of fear. This entails the belief, implicit or explicit, that men are uniquely self-sufficient. So conceived, the “manly” man becomes another one of those simplistic yet beguiling types that stand in for the complexities of real life. But maybe men struggle with living meaningful lives precisely because they believe themselves complete without friendship. Friendship gives us a needed break from our own autonomy, from the need to figure everything out for ourselves. Friends refract the world back to us, taking what we thought we knew and making it new and different, but still capable of being understood. In this way, friendship is about alterity, about openness in the place of assertion. Friendlessness is often adduced as one of the symptoms of the “problem” with men, but such alienation is not a symptom of the lack of flourishing—it is, rather, its cause.

I tried thinking of movies about friendships, and all I could come up with is The Banshees of Inisherin.

sch 12/8