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February 15, 2007
There is a common view that citizens of a polis or a nation-state are friends. The traditional accounts, valorize male friendship and downplay the conflicts between citizens. The tradition starts with Aristotle who takes up the subject of friendship in chapters eight and nine of the Nicomachean Ethics in which he argues that the basis of human political nature in their shared rationality and mutual friendship.
Aristotle's discussion in Nicomachean Ethics, Cicero's dialogue Laelius, and Montaigne in his essay Of Friendship, viewed friendship as more important than marriage and family.From what I can make out one account of friendship and politics, primarily associated with Aristotle holds that the two are positively related and no real tension could exist between them. Another tradition (primarily associated with Montaigne) holds friendship to be irreconcilable with politics. Elements of both traditions can be recognised in Nietzsche who, finding the radical deceptive nature of friendship unacceptable, moves to a solitude which is equally unbearable.
So let us look at Montaigne's Of Friendship (or "On Affectionate Relationships"), who uses his friendship with Etienne de La Boetie --his best friend---to launch an interesting discussion on different kinds of friendships, their utility and their limitations. In political terms, friendship offered Montaigne a dignified humanist alternative to the rebellion of civil war and the subservience of courtiership.
Montaigne distinquishes between friendship and the sexual passion or love between and women:
As soone as it creepeth into the termes of friendship, that is to say, in the agreement of wits, it languisheth and vanisheth away: enjoying doth lose it, as having a corporall end, and subject to satietie. On the other side, friendship is enioyed according as it is desired, it is neither bred, nor nourished, nor increaseth but in jovissance, as being spirituall, and the minde being refined by use custome.
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