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An essay about how we become ourselves thanks to others, how real friendship differs from other types of human relationships, and what happens to it today.
Friendship sometimes seems to us to be something almost ordinary - we call "friends" those with whom we share news, with whom we drink coffee during breaks and for whom we have more or less stable sympathy and trust. But for Michel Montaigne, his short-lived friendship with the humanist and philosopher Etienne La Boesy was something completely different.
In one of his "Experiments" he wrote: "In order for such a friendship to arise, the coincidence of so many circumstances is required, which is a lot, if fate sends it down once every three centuries [...] Knowing that this is an unusual thing and rarely I meet in my life, I do not really hope to find a judge who is versed in these matters."
However, Montaigne was not alone in his understanding of friendship. His words point to a great tradition that we have thoroughly forgotten about. For some time now, the most valuable and important way of establishing human ties began to be considered romantic love, passing into family relationships. But for Montaigne, as for many others, such an ideal was not love between a man and a woman, but friendship.
Friendship helps us fulfill the Socratic call and "know ourselves." To see yourself, you need to see us first. And who can do this if not a friend?
It is friendship that makes two people feel like they have one soul, divided between two bodies. "I am so accustomed to being always and in all his second" I "that it seems to me that now I am only half a person" - wrote Montaigne after the death of La Boesy. If this is love, then it is not at all the love-passion that we are used to talking and thinking about. As the modern philosopher François Fedier writes after Montaigne, friendship is "the perfect unity of connection and freedom." In friendship, "I become myself through the other, and the other becomes himself through me." No one here can be more important than the other.
Aristotle is rightfully considered the founder of this tradition of understanding friendship. A friend, as stated in his works on ethics, is a person's “second self”, a being closest to him. But at the same time, friendly relations are free and voluntary. This elevates friendship above family ties. We do not choose mother, father, brothers and sisters. They become friends only by mutual choice and sympathy. A friend is a “other”, independent of us, a free person. At the same time, we, looking at a friend, seem to look in a mirror and see ourselves as if we did not exist before this meeting.
Aristotle recognizes that some types of friendship exist solely for mutual pleasure or benefit. But the highest kind of friendship, its true essence for him is a relationship built on a common idea of the good. A friend wants to be with us not for pleasure or benefit, but simply because such is his nature, such is his life path. Montaigne says the same: trying to explain the roots of his friendship with La Boecy, he can only say the following: "because it was him, and because it was me."
This friendship has no other reason than itself.
Friends are not only free in their relationship, but also absolutely equal. As soon as one rises above the other or begins to depend on him, friendship is jeopardized. Therefore, it is difficult for parents to be friends with their children (no matter how they assure themselves otherwise). Falling in love and erotic attraction also hinder friendship. Lovers want to know everything about each other's life, to completely merge with the object of their love. A friend wants what his friend wants.
No other form of relationship respects the freedom of another so much. Probably, only friends can fulfill the Kantian imperative on this earth: to act with each other in accordance with a maxim that can be elevated into a universal law. Sharing with a friend is like sharing with yourself.
The Norwegian philosopher Helge Svare, describing the history of European friendship, states that before the 19th century, friendly relations contained much more feelings and forms of expression than today. From some point on, a person's life began to close in the family circle and more or less impersonal connections with colleagues and partners. Friendship began to be perceived as an excess, a luxury. Of course, no one interfered with the existence of friendly companies and communities. But friendship is not the same as friendship. Closer relationships between people of the same sex became suspicious:
Friendship, of course, has not gone anywhere. Many stories have come down to us about creative unions built on friendship: Goethe and Schiller, the Lyceum Society of Pushkin, Marx and Engels, Ilf and Petrov. As modern psychologists admit, creativity is born in pairs, in interaction. A lone genius could not create anything - not even himself.
Today, the importance of friendship seems to be beginning to be recognized again. We value personal freedom almost more than we value it in all other historical eras. But it is friendship that allows you to preserve this freedom, without depriving yourself of close human ties. Previously, these connections were necessary at least in order to simply survive - to protect your family, to provide yourself with the necessary things. Today, both the state and the market can do both. The fact that people standing in front of the window of some department perfectly understand each other even without words is a real miracle. But this understanding is clearly not enough for us.
Rather, we condemn bias and personal privilege in politics, education, or medicine. Therefore, we do not understand the structure of the ancient polis, in which the basis of order was not the law, but friendship between all citizens. But only personal closeness gives us strength and joy to live. The effect of this closeness is even at the physiological level: people who maintain long-term friendships are generally healthier and happier than their loner peers.
As Hannah Arendt wrote, “no matter how beautiful the world of things around us is, it gets its true meaning only when it provides a stage for an act and a word, when it is stitched with threads of human concerns, relationships and stories. "No matter how comfortable and free our life is, no matter how many things we acquire, all this has little meaning for us. Only the fragile fabric of human relationships can give this world a value that it does not possess by itself.
Modern works on child psychology convince us that friendship is necessary for the normal development of the human psyche. Young children are friends in much the same way as Montaigne and La Boetie - fully reflected in each other. Through play with other children, a child can transcend his own limited view and see the world through the eyes of another. Sometimes this role is played by an imaginary friend who happens to almost every other child. Even such a friend can become a valuable travel companion and companion.
A friend is always a witness to your life, its reflection.
He does not try to interfere with her, change something in her. If your paths in life diverge, the friendship simply ends. Italian sociologist and writer Francesco Alberoni describes friendship as a complex intertwining of meetings. They don't live with friends, they meet with them. Sometimes this happens long years after the previous meeting. Friendship, unlike love, is not detrimental to such breaks.
If in the 19th century love began to supplant friendship - spouses were supposed to become the closest people to each other - now we are witnessing the opposite process. Love relationships are increasingly difficult to separate from friendships: they turn into a series of meetings between independent people who live separately from each other and do not impose any obligations on each other. Much has been said and written about modern solitude and the virtualization of life. But the value of friendship still doesn't need to be told to anyone. And everyone understands how Facebook “friends” differ from real friends.
Aristotle believed that only good people can be real friends. For true friendship, a person must have inner freedom. At the same time, a good and good life can only be lived together with other people. Today this may seem to us incomprehensible and alien to elitism, and friendship is not such a rare feeling as Montaigne describes it. Friendship should not be idealized - after all, good friends do not idealize each other, knowing full well that no one is devoid of shortcomings.
Whether our friendship will correspond to the ideas of Aristotle or someone else's is not so important. Real people and relationships with them will always be more complicated and more important than any abstract theory. True friendship may be rare, but that does not make the need for it less universal and constant.
Friendship sometimes seems to us to be something almost ordinary - we call "friends" those with whom we share news, with whom we drink coffee during breaks and for whom we have more or less stable sympathy and trust. But for Michel Montaigne, his short-lived friendship with the humanist and philosopher Etienne La Boesy was something completely different.
In one of his "Experiments" he wrote: "In order for such a friendship to arise, the coincidence of so many circumstances is required, which is a lot, if fate sends it down once every three centuries [...] Knowing that this is an unusual thing and rarely I meet in my life, I do not really hope to find a judge who is versed in these matters."
However, Montaigne was not alone in his understanding of friendship. His words point to a great tradition that we have thoroughly forgotten about. For some time now, the most valuable and important way of establishing human ties began to be considered romantic love, passing into family relationships. But for Montaigne, as for many others, such an ideal was not love between a man and a woman, but friendship.
Friendship helps us fulfill the Socratic call and "know ourselves." To see yourself, you need to see us first. And who can do this if not a friend?
It is friendship that makes two people feel like they have one soul, divided between two bodies. "I am so accustomed to being always and in all his second" I "that it seems to me that now I am only half a person" - wrote Montaigne after the death of La Boesy. If this is love, then it is not at all the love-passion that we are used to talking and thinking about. As the modern philosopher François Fedier writes after Montaigne, friendship is "the perfect unity of connection and freedom." In friendship, "I become myself through the other, and the other becomes himself through me." No one here can be more important than the other.
Aristotle is rightfully considered the founder of this tradition of understanding friendship. A friend, as stated in his works on ethics, is a person's “second self”, a being closest to him. But at the same time, friendly relations are free and voluntary. This elevates friendship above family ties. We do not choose mother, father, brothers and sisters. They become friends only by mutual choice and sympathy. A friend is a “other”, independent of us, a free person. At the same time, we, looking at a friend, seem to look in a mirror and see ourselves as if we did not exist before this meeting.
Aristotle recognizes that some types of friendship exist solely for mutual pleasure or benefit. But the highest kind of friendship, its true essence for him is a relationship built on a common idea of the good. A friend wants to be with us not for pleasure or benefit, but simply because such is his nature, such is his life path. Montaigne says the same: trying to explain the roots of his friendship with La Boecy, he can only say the following: "because it was him, and because it was me."
This friendship has no other reason than itself.
Friends are not only free in their relationship, but also absolutely equal. As soon as one rises above the other or begins to depend on him, friendship is jeopardized. Therefore, it is difficult for parents to be friends with their children (no matter how they assure themselves otherwise). Falling in love and erotic attraction also hinder friendship. Lovers want to know everything about each other's life, to completely merge with the object of their love. A friend wants what his friend wants.
No other form of relationship respects the freedom of another so much. Probably, only friends can fulfill the Kantian imperative on this earth: to act with each other in accordance with a maxim that can be elevated into a universal law. Sharing with a friend is like sharing with yourself.
The Norwegian philosopher Helge Svare, describing the history of European friendship, states that before the 19th century, friendly relations contained much more feelings and forms of expression than today. From some point on, a person's life began to close in the family circle and more or less impersonal connections with colleagues and partners. Friendship began to be perceived as an excess, a luxury. Of course, no one interfered with the existence of friendly companies and communities. But friendship is not the same as friendship. Closer relationships between people of the same sex became suspicious:
Friendship, of course, has not gone anywhere. Many stories have come down to us about creative unions built on friendship: Goethe and Schiller, the Lyceum Society of Pushkin, Marx and Engels, Ilf and Petrov. As modern psychologists admit, creativity is born in pairs, in interaction. A lone genius could not create anything - not even himself.
Today, the importance of friendship seems to be beginning to be recognized again. We value personal freedom almost more than we value it in all other historical eras. But it is friendship that allows you to preserve this freedom, without depriving yourself of close human ties. Previously, these connections were necessary at least in order to simply survive - to protect your family, to provide yourself with the necessary things. Today, both the state and the market can do both. The fact that people standing in front of the window of some department perfectly understand each other even without words is a real miracle. But this understanding is clearly not enough for us.
Rather, we condemn bias and personal privilege in politics, education, or medicine. Therefore, we do not understand the structure of the ancient polis, in which the basis of order was not the law, but friendship between all citizens. But only personal closeness gives us strength and joy to live. The effect of this closeness is even at the physiological level: people who maintain long-term friendships are generally healthier and happier than their loner peers.
As Hannah Arendt wrote, “no matter how beautiful the world of things around us is, it gets its true meaning only when it provides a stage for an act and a word, when it is stitched with threads of human concerns, relationships and stories. "No matter how comfortable and free our life is, no matter how many things we acquire, all this has little meaning for us. Only the fragile fabric of human relationships can give this world a value that it does not possess by itself.
Modern works on child psychology convince us that friendship is necessary for the normal development of the human psyche. Young children are friends in much the same way as Montaigne and La Boetie - fully reflected in each other. Through play with other children, a child can transcend his own limited view and see the world through the eyes of another. Sometimes this role is played by an imaginary friend who happens to almost every other child. Even such a friend can become a valuable travel companion and companion.
A friend is always a witness to your life, its reflection.
He does not try to interfere with her, change something in her. If your paths in life diverge, the friendship simply ends. Italian sociologist and writer Francesco Alberoni describes friendship as a complex intertwining of meetings. They don't live with friends, they meet with them. Sometimes this happens long years after the previous meeting. Friendship, unlike love, is not detrimental to such breaks.
If in the 19th century love began to supplant friendship - spouses were supposed to become the closest people to each other - now we are witnessing the opposite process. Love relationships are increasingly difficult to separate from friendships: they turn into a series of meetings between independent people who live separately from each other and do not impose any obligations on each other. Much has been said and written about modern solitude and the virtualization of life. But the value of friendship still doesn't need to be told to anyone. And everyone understands how Facebook “friends” differ from real friends.
Aristotle believed that only good people can be real friends. For true friendship, a person must have inner freedom. At the same time, a good and good life can only be lived together with other people. Today this may seem to us incomprehensible and alien to elitism, and friendship is not such a rare feeling as Montaigne describes it. Friendship should not be idealized - after all, good friends do not idealize each other, knowing full well that no one is devoid of shortcomings.
Whether our friendship will correspond to the ideas of Aristotle or someone else's is not so important. Real people and relationships with them will always be more complicated and more important than any abstract theory. True friendship may be rare, but that does not make the need for it less universal and constant.
