micah (4) -friendship, love and enjoyment
my fourth post:
in a recent conversation with a friend, it occurred to me that dan and i have said very little about love in our discussion about friendship. i thought how differently augustine might have approached the topic of friendship: by beginning with the notion of our manifold loves, and then considering the place of friendship within these loves.
rather than providing such an account, however, i want to note briefly another very augustinian point -the connection between love and delight. to love something is to enjoy it, to take pleasure in it, to delight in it. i said earlier that the stuff of friendship is the shared, the common. perhaps it is better to say that the stuff of friendship is the affection that grows out of the shared, and the enjoyment that accompanies that affection. dan is my friend because he is dear to me; and the life in our friendship is the delight we take in each other's company and person.
in thinking about the pleasures of friendship, we can borrow a thought from aristotle: pleasure accompanies unimpeded activity, and it perfects that activity. the enjoyment that a friend finds in another friend seems to be connected to the way friends do things, and do them together. this is not to say that friends can't just sit around and 'do nothing' together; nor is it to say that friendship is merely pleasure, without commitment and resolve. still, the building blocks of a friendship seem to be the activities the friends engage in, such as sports (physical activity) or conversation (a mental activity). this is one reason that friends need to share (at least some) values and beliefs -because these values set the practical goals which determine which activities we pursue and how we pursue them.
two things can be noted about the enjoyment that friends find in their shared activities: 1) the enjoyment is not merely dependent on doing the activity together, but the very together-ness of the activity is part of what is enjoyed. for example, it may be that i enjoy playing tennis, and that i need a another person in order to play. in this sense, playing tennis with someone else is essential to the enjoyment. but in the case of friends, the enjoyment is more than this -precisely the shared nature of activity, the togetherness of the activity, is the very thing which is enjoyed. 2) the enjoyment is not simply in the activity, but is enjoyment of the other person. friends enjoy doing things together, but the delight of friendship is not merely the pleasure of the activities. rather, this enjoyment is somehow taken up into -perhaps transformed into- a delight in the other person.
the place of love and delight in friendship also suggests another aspect of 'mixed' friendships between christians and non-christians. for the christian, every friendship will not only be an occasion for 'natural' enjoyment and delight; the christian will also strive to love her friend 'in god' (a theme developed extensively by augustine). the christian will also strive to love her friend not only qua friend, but also qua neighbor, with an agape love that informs and transforms the love of friendship (a theme developed extensively by kierkegaard). presumably, a non-christian will not understand herself to have the same task in a friendship, and may very well see herself as having alternate tasks. thus, at least in this respect, it seems that christians and non-christians are likely to have different understandings of friendship, and different self-understandings of themselves as friends. (to say nothing about the actual difference in the kinds of love they might have for one another)
in a recent conversation with a friend, it occurred to me that dan and i have said very little about love in our discussion about friendship. i thought how differently augustine might have approached the topic of friendship: by beginning with the notion of our manifold loves, and then considering the place of friendship within these loves.
rather than providing such an account, however, i want to note briefly another very augustinian point -the connection between love and delight. to love something is to enjoy it, to take pleasure in it, to delight in it. i said earlier that the stuff of friendship is the shared, the common. perhaps it is better to say that the stuff of friendship is the affection that grows out of the shared, and the enjoyment that accompanies that affection. dan is my friend because he is dear to me; and the life in our friendship is the delight we take in each other's company and person.
in thinking about the pleasures of friendship, we can borrow a thought from aristotle: pleasure accompanies unimpeded activity, and it perfects that activity. the enjoyment that a friend finds in another friend seems to be connected to the way friends do things, and do them together. this is not to say that friends can't just sit around and 'do nothing' together; nor is it to say that friendship is merely pleasure, without commitment and resolve. still, the building blocks of a friendship seem to be the activities the friends engage in, such as sports (physical activity) or conversation (a mental activity). this is one reason that friends need to share (at least some) values and beliefs -because these values set the practical goals which determine which activities we pursue and how we pursue them.
two things can be noted about the enjoyment that friends find in their shared activities: 1) the enjoyment is not merely dependent on doing the activity together, but the very together-ness of the activity is part of what is enjoyed. for example, it may be that i enjoy playing tennis, and that i need a another person in order to play. in this sense, playing tennis with someone else is essential to the enjoyment. but in the case of friends, the enjoyment is more than this -precisely the shared nature of activity, the togetherness of the activity, is the very thing which is enjoyed. 2) the enjoyment is not simply in the activity, but is enjoyment of the other person. friends enjoy doing things together, but the delight of friendship is not merely the pleasure of the activities. rather, this enjoyment is somehow taken up into -perhaps transformed into- a delight in the other person.
the place of love and delight in friendship also suggests another aspect of 'mixed' friendships between christians and non-christians. for the christian, every friendship will not only be an occasion for 'natural' enjoyment and delight; the christian will also strive to love her friend 'in god' (a theme developed extensively by augustine). the christian will also strive to love her friend not only qua friend, but also qua neighbor, with an agape love that informs and transforms the love of friendship (a theme developed extensively by kierkegaard). presumably, a non-christian will not understand herself to have the same task in a friendship, and may very well see herself as having alternate tasks. thus, at least in this respect, it seems that christians and non-christians are likely to have different understandings of friendship, and different self-understandings of themselves as friends. (to say nothing about the actual difference in the kinds of love they might have for one another)
posted by micah at 3:35 PM
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