You’ve got a friend

The Sydney Morning Herald & The Age

In the age of online relationships, the ''supreme human bond'' of friendship has never been more important.

Friendship, by A.C. Grayling, Yale University Press, 256pp, $36.95

So vital is the bond of friendship to the good of the self and others, for the wellbeing of family and community, that it is virtually impossible to address the subject at length without championing it and so becoming, as it were, a friend of friendship.

The English philosopher and humanist A.C. Grayling writes in this tradition when he introduces his new study of friendship with a firm assertion of its moral excellence: "The highest and finest of all human relationships is, arguably, friendship."

This axiom also alerts the reader to one of the weaknesses of Grayling's otherwise thought-provoking study. It is a meditation and celebration of "the idea of friendship … a philosophical (in the broadest sense) exploration of views about it".

But there is no urgent friendship problem driving or animating the discussion - in contrast to the God, liberty and truth problems at the heart of Grayling's recent books. One possible reason for the book's dispassionate tone might lie in its origin. Rather than a standalone thesis addressing a burning issue, it is the first of a series on vice and virtues.

A good two-thirds of the book is taken up with a ramble through friendship in the philosophical and literary tradition, beginning with the Greeks and their affective taxonomy of phila (friendship or regard), eros (erotic love), agape (generalised love) and storge (affection). Plato, who devoted his early dialogue Lysis to the subject, leads out first; and while it is often difficult to extract a take-home point from such a playful exchange between the probing Socrates and his stumbling interlocutors, Grayling nicely draws out the stress on mutual utility undergirding Platonic friendship. He concludes with a discussion of The Symposium, which is not so much about friendship as love, or eros, and perhaps not - as the argument develops - about human-to-human terrestrial love at all. Its true subject is incorporeal spiritual love, or the love of "pure beauty".

Plato serves as an appetiser before the "first truly classic statement of a view about friendship" by Aristotle. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle distinguishes between friendship for mutual advantage, friendship for pleasure, and friendship for the good anchored in mutual excellence. For Aristotle, friendship of the latter kind - based on appreciation of character - is the most lasting and complete. But it is not exclusive of these other kinds of friendship, for when fully realised, it will also give rise to mutual advantage and pleasure.

But the most influential Aristotelian utterance on this subject - "[a person] is to his friend as he is to himself, for his friend is another self" - is a rogue notion that Grayling wants to bring down. And in a passage that anticipates some of the subsequent discussion, he argues that real friendship, contrary to the suffocating ''another self'' principle advanced by Aristotle, involves "giving one's friend space to have some interests and tastes from one's own, and to agree to disagree about some things".

Although the book is not strictly historical, it is centrally concerned with the history of an idea. The string of chapters - on Ciceronian friendship, Christian friendship (St Augustine and Aquinas), Renaissance friendship (chiefly Montaigne), Enlightenment friendship (Kant, Smith, Hume and others) - narrate friendship's journey from pagan antiquity through mediaeval Christianity to the threshold of modernity.

What follows is an expansive chapter titled Excursus: Friendship Illustrated, composed chiefly of tales from mythical and literary sources, which prepares the way for the concluding discussions in Friendship Viewed, Friendship Examined and The Two Claims. In these, the philosopher, having reviewed the tradition, attempts a recapitulation, clarification and categorisation of terms: friendship as an ethical responsibility, friendship across and between genders, equity and friendship, friendship and reason, bad friendship.

The book's concluding chapter is seasoned with a few miniature autobiographical stories - friendships recalled from Grayling's childhood and university days - to illustrate the nuances of amity as a subjective experience. A persistent liberal, if not libertarian, theme to emerge from these final chapters is the importance of removing the boundaries to friendship.

"Children in a kindergarten will be unconsciously friends with anyone at all, of any persuasion, background, colour, faith or political family; it is society - that is, it is we who create the friendship-dismantling mechanisms of division and difference."

One of these barriers, in mature relationships, is sex. Grayling argues in "devil's advocacy" mode that personal and social penalties against marital infidelity are wrong if they inhibit a friendship from taking what in some instances is a "natural course" towards physical intimacy. This is to assign to friendship the role of supreme human bond, one that, in Grayling's words, "trumps other relationships".

One of the curious features of this book is its extreme rear-view mirror focus. The skew towards antiquity is pronounced. It is, at the same time, somewhat lacking. Absent from Grayling's account of friendship in antiquity is Seneca's ninth letter to Lucilius; Plutarch's moral essay How to Distinguish a Flatterer from a Friend; and some acknowledgment of friendship's supreme value for the Epicureans.

When the conversation returns to the contemporary world, it is backlit by the preceding literary-philosophical survey and largely unscarred by the state of friendship today. For example, social cohesion, or the lack of it, is surely an extension of friendship. It is a measure of Grayling's intellectual honesty that he does not attempt to fabricate a moral crisis from, say, the apparent debasement of friendship through the ubiquity of "friending" online. This would be the stuff of yet another decline narrative. And yet the mildness of his tone and the modesty of his ambitions reduce much of the book to a canter around its subject rather than an argument for, against or with a pressing issue of practical ethics. The result is never less - yet never more - than interesting. *