What is a friend? A
single soul dwelling in two bodies. – Aristotle
Reclaiming Friendship: A Visual Taxonomy of Platonic
Relationships to Counter the Commodification of the Word “Friend”
--by Maria Popova, syndicated from brainpickings.org, Sep 01, 2016
Friendship, C.S. Lewis believed, “like philosophy,
like art, like the universe itself … has no survival value; rather it is one of
those things which give value to survival.” But the poetic beauty of this
sentiment crumbles into untruth for anyone who has ever been buoyed from the
pit of despair by the unrelenting kindness of a friend, or whose joys have been
amplified by a friend’s warm willingness to bear witness.
I often puzzle
over the nature, structure, and function of friendship in human life — a
function I have found to be indispensable to my own spiritual survival and, I
suspect, to that of most human beings. But during a recent interview on Think Again, I found myself concerned with the
commodification of the word “friend” in our culture. We call “friends” peers we
barely know beyond the shallow roots of the professional connection, we mistake
mere mutual admiration for friendship, we name-drop as “friends” acquaintances
associating with whom we feel reflects favorably on us in the eyes of others,
thus rendering true friendship vacant of Emerson’s exacting definition. We have perpetrated a
corrosion of meaning by overusing the word and overextending its connotation,
compressing into an imperceptible difference the vast existential expanse
between mere acquaintanceship and friendship in the proper Aristotelian sense.
In countering this conflation, I was
reminded of philosopher Amelie Rorty’s fantastic 1976 taxonomy of the levels of personhood and wondered what a
similar taxonomy of interpersonhood might look like. I envisioned a conception
of friendship as concentric circles of human connection, intimacy, and
emotional truthfulness, each larger circle a necessary but insufficient
condition for the smaller circle it embraces.“I live my life in widening circles,” Rilke
wrote.
Within the ether of strangers — all
the humans who inhabit the world at the same time as we do, but whom we have
not yet met — there exists a large outermost circle of acquaintances. Inside it resides
the class of people most frequently conflated with “friend” in our culture, to
whom I’ve been referring by the rather inelegant but necessarily descriptive
term person I know and like.
These are people of whom we have limited impressions, based on shared
interests, experiences, or circumstances, on the basis of which we have
inferred the rough outlines of a personhood we regard positively.
Even closer to the core is the kindred spirit — a person
whose values are closely akin to our own, one who is animated by similar core
principles and stands for a sufficient number of the same things we ourselves
stand for in the world. These are the magnifiers of spirit to
whom we are bound by mutual goodwill, sympathy, and respect, but we infer this
resonance from one another’s polished public selves — our ideal selves — rather
than from intimate knowledge of one another’s interior lives, personal
struggles, inner contradictions, and most vulnerable crevices of character.
Some kindred
spirits become friends in the
fullest sense — people with whom we are willing to share, not without
embarrassment but without fear of judgment, our gravest imperfections and the
most anguishing instances of falling short of our own ideals and values. The
concentrating and consecrating force that transmutes a kinship of spirit into a
friendship is emotional and psychological intimacy. A friend is a person before
whom we can strip our ideal self in order to reveal the real self, vulnerable
and imperfect, and yet trust that it wouldn’t diminish the friend’s admiration
and sincere affection for the whole self, comprising both the ideal and the
real.
It is
important to clarify here that the ideal self is not a counterpoint to the real
self in the sense of being inauthentic. Unlike the seeming self, which springs
from our impulse for self-display and which serves
as a kind of deliberate mask, the ideal self arises from
our authentic values and ideals. Although it represents an aspirational
personhood, who we wish to be is invariably part of who we are — even if we
aren’t always able to enact those ideals. In this sense, the gap between the
ideal self and the real self is not one of insincerity but of human
fallibility. The friend is one who embraces both and has generous patience for
the rift between the two. A true friend holds us lovingly accountable to our
own ideals, but is also able to forgive, over and over, the ways in which we
fall short of them and can assure us that we are more than our stumbles, that we
are shaped by them but not defined by them, that we will survive them with our
personhood and the friendship intact.
For a
complementary perspective, see poet and philosopher David Whyte on the true meaning of friendship and John O’Donohue
on the ancient Celtic notion of “soul-friend.”
Maria Popova is a cultural curator and curious mind at large,
who also writes for Wired UK, The Atlantic and Design Observer,andis the founder
and editor in chief of Brain Pickings (which
offers a free weekly newsletter).
Be The Change: Call an
old friend today. Someone you haven't spoken to in awhile, and who holds a
special place in your heart.
Sourced From www.dailygood.org
Sourced From www.dailygood.org
