The Two Faces of Friendship
This is an edited excerpt from Alexander Nehamas’ book,On Friendship.
The benefits of friendship are many. The love it provokes gives depth and color to life; the loyalty it inspires erodes the barriers of selfishness. It provides companionship and a safety net when we are in various kinds of trouble; it offers sympathy for our misfortunes, discretion for our secrets, encouragement for our efforts. All that is true, and it has been pointed out and discussed again and again. Under the influence of Aristotle, who believed that only virtuous people could be friends, the long philosophical tradition that follows him has found in friendship an unalloyed good.
Yet like every form of love, friendship begets joy and contentment but also leads to affliction and misery — the dull aches of abandonment, the sharp stabs of betrayal, the agonizing dilemmas of loyalty: “If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country,” E.M. Forster once wrote, and recalled that Dante cast Brutus and Cassius in the lowest circle of Hell because in assassinating Caesar they had forsaken not their country but their friend.
But that is not all. Among the most remarkable features of friendship is that even a good friendship, valuable as it is, can involve base, even abhorrent behavior: friendship transformed Homer’s Achilles into a raging beast, and Pylades helped his close friend Orestes murder his own mother in order to avenge her murder of his father, Agamemnon. And sometimes immoral behavior can actually provoke our admiration: that’s what we feel for Silien, the hero of Jean-Pierre Melville’s stunning film, Le doulos (1962), a gangster who lies, cheats, beats, kills and eventually dies tragically in what turns out to have been all along a vain effort to save his only friend in the world from getting killed. Most tellingly, immorality may sometimes be part and parcel of a good friendship and that means that its positive aspects may lie elsewhere, not in the moral domain at all but in another area of life. That aspect comes out most clearly in another film, Thelma and Louise (1991), whose uncomfortable, well, moral is that friendship and immorality are often found together.
(All these examples are drawn from fiction. But only works of art have the richness of texture and detail necessary for showing the two faces of friendship. And let’s not forget that most of the examples of the best friendships in our tradition are also drawn from fiction, beginning with the Iliad itself.)
Thelma and Louise are two working women from Oklahoma who take a weekend off together. At one point, they go to a bar and Thelma begins to flirt with a man who eventually attacks her in the bar’s parking lot. Louise shoots him dead. The friends decide not to turn themselves in and decide to go to Mexico. On their way and after they lose their money, they rob a grocery store, lock a policeman in the trunk of his car, and blow up a semi-trailer whose driver had been harassing them on the road.
In the process, they both become more self-reliant and confident and their friendship, which up to then had been an unequal relationship — Louise acting like a mother to Thelma — becomes a relationship of equals. They take responsibility for their future together, and they finally face it as two equal and sovereign individuals. They eventually get trapped at the rim of the Grand Canyon by an army of police officers. Seeing no point to giving in and living in prison, they drive their car over the rim and the film ends with their car frozen in midair and the voice of B.B. King singing “Don’t Look Down Now.”
Why is this disturbing? Because their friendship is a good not despite the fact that it leads them to kill, rob, intimidate, and destroy but because of it. They don’t just do bad things; they become admirable on account of doing them — or, rather, on account of what these things reveal about them and their new take on the world and each other.
That a good friendship can depend on immorality suggests very strongly that — contrary to what philosophers have said about it — friendship can’t be a moral virtue because no moral virtue can express itself in immoral behavior: we can never act with justice if our actions involve lies or crimes. When people, as they often do, appeal to justice in order to justify their atrocities, we explain them instead by thinking that these people have a wrong conception of what justice is: justice itself can’t possibly justify any atrocity. And although moral virtue comes in degrees and some people may not be very just, what little justice they have is still genuine and can never depend on or lead to immorality.
But while friendship, like moral goodness, comes in degrees, it is, unlike moral goodness, two-faced. Morality can’t ever employ immoral means but even the best of friendships can lead us morally (and practically) astray. Why, then, do we — and we do — consider friendship a great good? Whatever our answer to this question may be, it won’t try to justify friendship, as philosophy has done throughout its history, on moral grounds.
That may sound strange to contemporary ears because our culture is overly moralistic: moral values are the only values we generally recognize. These values depend on the idea that all human beings are in some important ways similar to one another, which means that the right way to treat people is to treat them impartially, without invidious distinctions among them. But friendship requires that we treat our friends differently from the way we treat everyone else. And yet we do think of it as a great good. That, I believe, is because there are also values that depend not on our similarities but on our differences. We admire people who follow their own path in life, whose character distinguishes them from others, who stand out as true individuals. And friendship is one of the values that both depend on and promote our differences from one another.
In some way, friendship is like alchemy. It has its own mortars and pestles, its own alembics and retorts: it comes closer to transmuting our selves than any alchemist ever came to transmuting his metals. Like alchemy, it sometimes delivers nothing but dross; unlike it, however, it sometimes arrives at gold. Whether for better or worse, what we become is very much our friends’ doing and the less settled we are in ourselves, the greater their contribution and the more pervasive their influence. Our friendships are indissolubly connected with who we are. As an old Greek proverb has it, “Show me your friends, and I’ll show you yourself.”
We often think of friendship as a relationship that brings people together, as if every bringing together is not also a pulling apart. As it joins us to each other, a friendship also separates us from everyone else and leads us to differentiate ourselves from them. And the process begins in early childhood and accompanies us through life.
We often say that when we are young we try to find out who we really are. It would be more accurate to say that we try to become something we are not, without knowing exactly what that is or how to go about it. When people feel that they have finally become something that they want (or, sadly, don’t want) to be, it feels natural to them to say that that’s what they really are and always have been. But it isn’t. We do not discover our “real” self — we create it.
Friends have a privileged role in this life-long process of self-construction not because they are good people, moral, wise, or generous but because we love them. And we love them not just for features of theirs we already know but also for what we hope we will find out about them as we get to know them better and as they change through our relationship. We also hope that what they make us be or come to know about our own selves will also be a good. Love is always forward-looking; it is a commitment to the future. “Friends bring out the best in one another”: not just what we believe is best in us already but something that we’ll come to recognize as a good (or not) only when we have acquired it, in which our best (or worst) self will be expressed. Whatever else we expect from our friendships, we also expect them to lead us to need and desire new things: that, they always do, though it isn’t always to the good. This constant possibility or error and failure — friendship’s contribution to the making of a new self — is the cause of both the best and the worst in it.
But there is a limit to how new that self can be. Our lives are firmly embedded in a social, cultural, and historical context. Our similarities to others are important, not to be overlooked and, along with our differences, help constitute who each one of us is. But so are the ways in which we differ from one another. In one sense, of course, everyone is different from everyone else: who we are depends on a combination of genetic background and personal history that is absolutely unrepeatable: we can’t possibly share it with anyone else in the world. But in themselves, such differences, which we possess simply by being alive, are nothing to be proud of, nothing to admire. The truth is that not every difference counts.
The differences that count are those that literally make a difference, differences that distinguish us from others in interesting, valuable, or admirable ways or even in ways that are base and contemptible. It is here that pride and joy, but also regret and disappointment, have their place. And it is here that friends make a difference that counts. Through them, and throughout life, we develop characteristics and capacities that emerge only because of our interaction: a new friend means a new way of approaching both oneself and others., Despite its dangers and pains, friendship can still be a good because, again, it is a mechanism of individuality, and we become who we are in great part because of the friends we have.
This effort to know our friends and ourselves is not passive: As John Williams writes in Stoner, “The person one loves at first is not the person one loves at last and love is not an end but a process through which one person attempts to know another.” It is a process that doesn’t leave untouched something that was already there. The knowledge it brings with it changes us in unforeseen and unforeseeable ways: ideally it leads us toward individuality. And individuality is itself a value. We honor and admire people who are importantly and engagingly different from the rest of the world. But, like all non-moral values, individuality, along with beauty, charm, elegance, character, style, and friendship itself, is two-faced. “Important and engaging” differences are not always admirable — or, even if they are, they can be sometimes be overridden either by their immorality or their destructiveness: great villains are individuals no less than great heroes.
Despite their double face, however, non-moral values are and remain values — features without which life would be pointless, without variation, intricacy, intimacy, or joy. They provide a justification of friendship that is independent of both its benefits and its moral or immoral features, and despite the pains, disappointments, and dangers it brings with it. Such values are not reliable guides to success, goodness, or happiness. But then what is? Our lives are uncertain, subject to the workings of a world over which, individually and collectively, we have the most minimal power. Some ancients thought that friendship binds the whole universe together. We are more modest. Friendship does no more than bind a few people together: they are the people who can say to each other, as Montaigne was willing to say of his dead friend, Étienne de la Boétie, “If you press me to tell why I love you, I feel that this cannot be expressed, except by answering: Because it is you, because it is I.”
