On Friendship

"Friendship must be about something." --C.S. Lewis

C.S. Lewis wrote a classical interpretation of many emotions central to human life. In his book, The Four Loves, he addresses the meaning of friendship. Drawing upon rich resources such as the ancient Greeks, Romans, traditions borne through millennia, his view may be termed as western, if not universal.

Lewis delineates the many views of friendship; he describes it as mutuality, as 'seeing the same truth, looking outward, much as French writer, St. Exupery does; he explores friends in the context of erotic love; the search for Beauty, the engagement of spirituality, companionship, and he asserts that it's the least jealous of all the loves.

Where Lovers seek privacy, friends experience enclosure between themselves and the 'herd' rushing around them, and they may not be jealous so are often willing to admit another into their circle.
The American poet Emerson posed the question of a friend several times, simply asking, 'do you care about the same truths as I do?' The answer to this is the point at which a companion may move to a friend.
Shared activities and insights may be a draw for companions who 'share the road.' But a deeper, inner sense recognizing certain truths brings them into the realm of friend.

And while friends may not fully draw the same conclusions, they generally agree on the importance of questions. Seeing the shape of the world in similar fashion draws them to similar questions, if not responses.

Further Lewis argues simple friendship is entirely free of the need to be needed. He writes, "in a circle of true friends, each is simply what he is: stands for nothing but ones' self."

While Eros seeks out naked bodies, friendship seeks naked personalities. There is no absolute duty to friend anyone, nor is there a legal contract such as marriage. 

Friendship comes freely, entirely unencumbered with these other types of strictures.
Yet in modern, industrialized societies friendship is so often undervalued in favor of contractualized relationships as if these are somehow inherently better, more legitimate.
One cannot fail to notice the number and degree of divorces that abound in any given community.

Friends form moreover an appreciation of each other. They not only travel the same roads but their values within the realm of truths inform their judgement, leaving them more clear-eyed about one another.
They are observant of a mutual love and knowledge, and this forms itself into an appreciation a sentiment that often leaves one feeling in his deepest heart, humbled, what is he among those seemingly better, how lucky to be.
And when together among these friends, there is the knowledge that each brings out as if by magic the better in one self, the best, the funniest, the most clever, the beauty. In the conversation, the mind opens to something more, a perception of the self previously unknown comes into view. Life has no better gift to give than a good friend or two.

Love and Death

"Death is our enemy, our last enemy." Love is Stronger than Death by Peter Kreeft

Death the stranger, death the friend, wait... death is all of us. Death is a mother, death is a lover...  Philosopher and author, Peter Kreeft will not allow his reader to loiter in Love is Stronger than Death. The topic for many is wholly unexamined, and yet at some time it will greet each and all. "Life is always fatal. No one gets out of it alive... It is a mysterious country...a bottomless pit... we have not unraveled her riddle...little chance we will." Kreeft writes in addition, that there is the meaning of life in the meaning of death. The empirical absolute of life is death. It is the backdrop, if you will, against which all of life plays out.

Death makes a life have either more or less meaning; it provokes some to be more mindful and others to become more and more forgetful. If death is meaningful "then life is startlingly more meaningful or startling less meaning-full than we usually think." Kreeft goes on to say that his book is about death, not about the feelings we may have towards death. He asks and examines questions about what is ultimately a reality, death, a measurable and empirical fact, like the sun rising and setting.

The 'democracy of the dead,' as C.K. Chesterton called it, refers to death as the great leveler, the one force in life that makes all equal. He asks what is the 'end of life?' Is it death? Can we know what the purpose of life is when faced with its 'death' shadow? How can it be like love, a desired end, the goal, a consummation? In the view of death, these terms seem strange, strange indeed. He, Kreeft, says we cannot begin to know why we die until we begin to know why we live. Knowing one's purpose in life sets the course for a whole host of other directions and priorities.

Death gives rise to questions about life after death. It forces the questions of the eternal, of God, of Bliss, of Nirvana and more. But first on to death as an enemy. It must be the enemy before we can recognize it as a possible friend. Many current, popular books on death teach confusion, in Kreeft's view. He says that, "denying, ignoring death, [it is] treated as a stranger...what this does is add to the denial of death."

He writes that as an enemy and yet the inevitable, somehow, we may come to befriend this one. But to say that it is merely natural, not to be overly played out is like the difference between tolerance and forgiveness. Forgiveness sees beyond the evil; it sees all the more. Tolerance refuses to acknowledge evil at all; therefore it is blinded. So instead of finding the way free of evil, tolerance is a block, a trap into evil. Thus the modern cycle of the enmity with death continues with tolerance.

Writing about the ways people consider death such as sleep, loss, or darkness, Kreeft writes we "find our selves at birth plunged into a madly rushing river", that flows towards a subterranean cave; within that cave, life co-exists. Between these two finite poles, we 'strut our stuff.' Always we fall in timeless direction. And finally he notes that "death is irreversible because time is irreversible... In fact time is another word for death."

And isn't death, like life, composed of both meetings and partings? we look forward to all the great and potential meetings in our life, despite the wistfulness  of departures. And so for the puzzle of it: we all rebel against this fact, eventual.  In a sort of lover's quarrel with the world, we diligently resist, rebel; railing against time. "Is that all there is?" We shout. But wait! There is joy, there is bliss. The religious and spiritual among us insist. The quest for meaning, for purpose, for love and friendship give to us what death will not.

There is a reason to live and a reason to die. Can modern society have fallen so far from the traditions that made these reasons clear? In Kreeft's view the answers and the results of our traditions, our ancient wisdom, in part, leads us back to the way of a rising heart of humanity, a rising to meet the One, the beloved. Death is then the friend.

Logic at the Edges

"Words do have edges. So do you." Eros the Bittersweet by Anne Carson

Continuing her thoughts into Sappho's poem, fragment 31, author Anne Carson writes, "When I desire you, a part of me is gone. Your lack is my lack..." In this classical view, then, Eros is expropriation. Robbed of vital senses, limbs even, the lovers are left with essentially less. This attitude is grounded in the oldest of western mythology, it lies well within the classical Greek world; lovers are losers, or so they reckon. "But this reckoning proves a quick and artful shift. " Reaching, striving for someone, something that is outside the immediate self provokes a lover to observe that they have limits, they have "edges." From this vantage point, one might call it "consciousness," he sees in himself a hole. His desire then is for something that previously he "never knew he lacked; it is defined by a distance, a shift towards a necessary part of himself..." It is not a new acquisition, but something that "was always, always, properly his."

But the apparent geometry of the relationship "is a trick," Carson writes. And his next move is likely to collapse the trigonomic dimensions into a circle; all desire is longing for that which properly belongs to the one who desires, but has been taken away or lost..." Socrates writes, "so if you two are loving friends of one another, then you quite naturally belong to one another." Carson protests this reckoning, "it is profoundly unjust... to recognize a kindred soul and to claim possession as if the blurring in love with distinction between self and other is acceptable."

Yet desire, it seems, does indeed change the lover. It brings a newness, an expanded sense of possibility; a view of a newly formed self, enlarged. As with the Greek poets, the new self, the 'sweet-bitter' of eros brings the experiences of both utility and painfulness. Why? The ancients would say that pain arises at the edges which have been adulterated; bitter verging suddenly on the sweet. "Eros' ambivalence unfolds directly from this power to mix up the self. A lover helplessly admits that it feels both good and bad to be mixed up. And once mixed, asks the question, 'who am I?' Change gives him a glimpse of himself that he never knew before. This gives rise to a powerful insight into the importance of what Carson calls, Eros the Bitter-sweet, or love that alters the edges, and therefore the sense of the previously known self.