One of the greatest problems of modern life is the loss of the Other. We have sophisticated means of communication but we feel isolated. But to have a true friend is to never be alone. As the biblical proverb reads: “A friend loveth at all times”. Friendship is love. Love not only experienced in the company of the friend, but in every moment. In true friendship we stand in relation to the other person. We are pulled beyond the prison of the ego and into greater contact with the world.
Of all the forms of love the ancient Greeks identify – familial, erotic, agape – it is from philia, the love of the friend, that philosophy is born. The philosopher is a friend (“philos”) of wisdom (“sophia”). For the Greeks, thinking itself relied upon friendship, hence why all Plato’s works are written in the form of dialogues between friends. The Phaedrus, a dialogue on love and rhetoric, is a conversation between Socrates and his friend as they stroll in the countryside. In The Lysis, a dialogue on friendship, Socrates says “I should greatly prefer a real friend to all the gold of Darius: I am such a lover of friends as that”. This is the greatness of Socrates. He “knows nothing”. He is no self at all, except as existentialist Martin Buber writes, one “lived continually in relation with others which is bodied forth in dialogue, that never ceases to believe in the reality of others”. In fact, all western philosophy is a dialogue with Socrates, whether the philosopher treats him as a close confidante or friendly adversary. To paraphrase philosopher Gillian Rose, “to be a philosopher is to fall in love with Socrates”.
No-one can really think creatively without the friend. Whenever I think about an idea, I do so in imaginary conversation with a friend or group of friends. The “friend” changes with the subject. If I need to work something through, dialectically, I have a certain friend in mind. Other times, I form ideas in the joyful anticipation of sharing them with a friend, and this imaginary conversation becomes the substance of the thinking. If I did not have the friend, I could not have the thought. In What is Philosophy, philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari write: “Does not the friend reintroduce into philosophy a vital relationship with the Other that was supposed to have been excluded from pure thought?”. Without friendship, thinking becomes banal, bloodless, egoistic. The same is true of all conversation. For Buber, there are two forms of dialogue, first where one speaks to the other essentially in the form of monologue. One may as well be talking at a mannequin. A second “where each of the participants really has in mind the other in their present and particular being”, where one’s intention is to establish “a living mutual relation between oneself and the other”.
We may remember a time when we established such a relation in the deepest sense. We talked to another person and there was a sense of movement, of internal change, of a dam being broken open. The feeling is of inspiration, of destiny, of love. We could talk endlessly. We know, implicitly, the feeling is mutual. Even when we part the imaginary conversation goes on in our heads. We think: in the company of this person I am truly myself. Not only this. We see another version of ourselves emerge, a fuller, more complete self that, through our conversations, we might yet become. This is love’s work. “To love anybody is to expect something from them”, says philosopher Gabriel Marcel, “something which can neither be defined nor foreseen; it is at the same time in some way to make it possible for them to fulfil this expectation”.
True friendship is mutual. There is no unrequited friendship. We mould a friendship, we inhabit a friendship, we renew a friendship as we change. Friendship is, in this sense, a creative act. When we make a friend, something new is brought into the world which exists independently of the two of us. And in conversation with our friend we may occasionally become conscious of this third presence which hangs above us, that lingers between every word we speak, that drew two isolated souls such as we together in the first place. This presence is otherness itself. Or as Christ says in the Gospel of Matthew, “where two or more are gathered together, I am with you”.