Perfecting Friendship

Politics and Affiliation in Early American Literature

Ivy Schweitzer

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9780807876718
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Contemporary notions of friendship regularly place it in the private sphere, associated with feminized forms of sympathy and affection. As Ivy Schweitzer explains, however, this perception leads to a misunderstanding of American history. In an exploration of early American literature and culture, Schweitzer uncovers friendships built on a classical model that is both public and political in nature. Schweitzer begins with Aristotle's ideal of "perfect" friendship that positions freely chosen relationships among equals as the highest realization of ethical, social, and political bonds. Evidence in works by John Winthrop, Hannah Foster, James Fenimore Cooper, and Catharine Sedgwick confirms that this classical model shaped early American concepts of friendship and, thus, democracy. Schweitzer argues that recognizing the centrality of friendship as a cultural institution is critical to understanding the rationales for consolidating power among white males in the young nation. She also demonstrates how women, nonelite groups, and minorities have appropriated and redefined the discourse of perfect friendship, making equality its result rather than its requirement. By recovering the public nature of friendship, Schweitzer establishes discourse about affection and affiliation as a central component of American identity and democratic community.

CHAPTER ONE

Smoke and Mirrors

A History of Equality and Interchangeability in Friendship Theory

Friendship always either finds or makes equals.

—Marcus Minucius Felix, Octavius (third century C.E.)

The absence of women, the presence of the question, reveals that women call into question the constitutive myths.

—Anne Norton, Reflections on Political Identity

I begin with a question that philosophers have been asking for centuries: What does it mean for friends to be linked as mirrors of each other? Understood in political terms, can individuals ever be interchangeable or equal, and can we construct a community based on this reflective dyadic unit? As philosopher Paul Ricoeur remarks in his 1992 study of ethics bearing the Aristotelian title Oneself as Another, this question is ‘‘in no way rhetorical. On it, as [political theorist] Charles Taylor has maintained, depends the fate of political theory’’—that is, how we envision community, what constitutes persons and their rights, and the mediating role of others in determining ethical actions (181). Jacques Derrida, who examined the politics of friendship extensively in the late 1980s and 1990s, contends that ‘‘friendship is freedom plus equality’’ and summarizes his complex musings in a similarly deceptively simple question: ‘‘Is the friend the same or the other?’’ (Politics 282, 4). Perhaps the crucial issue is not similarity or difference, however we construe these, but a paradoxical postmodern form of both-and, the experience of being ‘‘in relation’’ that is constituted precisely through separation. Near the end of his study of friendship, Derrida quotes approvingly the words of fellow philosopher Maurice Blanchot, who believed that friends ‘‘reserve, even on the most familiar terms, an infinite distance, the fundamental separation on the basis of which what separates becomes relation’’ (291; Politics 294). Largely left out of this discussion, however, is gender, sexuality, racial identity, and class status. All of these identity markers complicate the vexed questions of sameness, difference, and equality that emerge in representations of friendship. In order to begin to understand how difference and these specific differences and their intersections function within and challenge theories of similitude, I offer in this chapter a history of friendship discourses that highlights tropes of similarity, equality, and interchangeability. Beginning with the preclassical sources for Aristotle’s important notion of philia, we will see that equality and likeness are requirements for and thus constitutive elements of perfect friendship, which produce a fiction or illusion of interchangeability. Similitude, in different guises, continues to be a force in Christian adaptations of classical ideas; in the Scottish Common Sense philosophers whose theories inform modern notions of sociability, sympathy, and universal benevolence; and in postmodern and feminist conceptions of friendship.

Each age, no matter how different its vision of sociability, politics, or the role of affect, retains a version of dyadic friendship based on adaptations of the Aristotelian idea that ‘‘friendship is equality’’ (NE 8:5, 8). Other classical thinkers, such as Plato, Aristotle’s teacher, and Marcus Tullius Cicero, Aristotle’s Roman redactor, produced friendship discourses that shaped particular historical understandings of gender, identity, affect, and politics. As I mentioned in the introduction, the amicitia of elite men in the Stoic Ciceronian model underlies early Whig and later American republican notions of homosocial friendship, while Platonic ideas of transcendence shape homosocial friendships of the romantic era and help distinguish them from a sentimentalism increasingly associated with women’s bonds. I argue, however, that the perfect friendship of second selves formulated in the Nicomachean Ethics exerts the most pervasive hold on our imagination of friendship and democratic politics and provides women and people of color with a conceptual means to produce rhetorical equality. We are then left with a question, the answer to which remains problematic: Can we have equality or equity within difference and differences within equality?

Classical Philia and the Requirement of Equality

By the time Aristotle delivered his great ethical treatises, he had inherited and systematized a long tradition of thought about philia.¹ This word—philotes in early Greek writing—has a range of meanings not completely synonymous with its most frequent modern translation as ‘‘friendship’’; furthermore, writers often referred to more than one of its possible connotations.

As an adjective, philos means ‘‘dear’’ or sometimes ‘‘own,’’ and as a noun it often connotes a broadly applicable ‘‘love.’’ Writers in the preclassical world employed the word in several related ways: to designate the members of one’s household to whom one was bound by ties of blood, law, or custom; to describe unrelated people whom one ‘‘loves,’’ the meaning nearest to the ‘‘elective affinity’’ of modern friendship; and also to invoke a reciprocal, though not necessarily affective, ‘‘trans-generational’’ relationship known as ‘‘guest-friendship,’’ a social institution that afforded hospitality to travelers of similar rank and status (Stern-Gillet 6). Thus, in the Iliad, Homer tells of Diomedes, an invading Greek soldier, and Glaucus, a Trojan defending his homeland. Upon entering the area for single combat on the battlefield at Troy, they realize that because their grandfathers were philoi, they are also bound by this connection though they are strangers and enemies. In order to publicly signify this status, they agree to exchange armor and to avoid each other’s spears (Iliad 6:119–282). This practice lends later Greek philia its aristocratic character, since the extensive networks of guest-friendship that linked upper-class families within ancient Greece and beyond formed the foundation upon which the organization of the Greek city-state or polis was superimposed (Easterling 15). These powerful and extensive networks enshrined the value of reciprocity in rituals of hospitality, gift-giving, and wishing or doing harm to one’s common enemies (a proverbial formulation) but were not necessarily relations of affection or individual choice.

This study focuses primarily on the second meaning of ancient philia, a personal relation of affection between unrelated peers. In Homer’s works, such affiliation was closely associated with male comrades and family ties. Thus, when King Alcinous questions Odysseus about his sadness upon hearing of the fall of Troy, he asks,

Did one of your kinsmen die before the walls of Troy,
some brave man—a son by marriage? father by marriage?
Next to our own blood kin, our nearest, dearest ties.
Or a friend perhaps, someone close to your heart,
staunch and loyal? No less dear than a brother,
the brother-in-arms who shares our inmost thoughts. (Odyssey 8:652–57)

Homer’s Odyssey also expresses, albeit ironically and in negative terms, the other important principle underlying this notion of philia. It occurs when Melanthius, an arrogant wooer of Penelope, reviles the disguised Odysseus as he and Eumaeus herd she-goats to the feast at Odysseus’s house: ‘‘ ‘Look!’—he sneered—‘one scum nosing another scum along, / dirt finds dirt by the will of god—it never fails!’ ’’ (17:236–37). In its positive form, classical writers considered this principle a general truth and cited it extensively. Erasmus includes it in his Adages as ‘‘God always leads like to like,’’ pointing to its origin in this scene in the Odyssey and giving Aristotle’s quotation of the proverb ‘‘Whence they say ‘like will to like’ ’’ from book 8 of the Nicomachean Ethics (Adages I.ii.22, 168–69).

While this important notion suggests a divine or natural origin for human friendship as well as community, it also posits an ineluctable attraction between ‘‘likes’’ that becomes the basis for a principle of exclusion. The great friendship between Achilles and Patroclus depicted in the second part of the Iliad and held up by ancient as well as modern sources as the model of ‘‘devoted comrades’’ shows that a specific heroic and moral code had already grown up around dyadic friendships (C. White 14). Learning of Patroclus’s death, Achilles calls him philos hetairos, ‘‘dear comrade . . . the man I loved beyond all other comrades, / loved as my own life’’ (Iliad 18:94–96; Konstan, Friendship 41). Through frequent citation, Homer’s famous pair reinforces philia’s persistently homosocial, suggestively homoerotic, thoroughly masculine, and often military character. Despite these prevailing connotations, scholars speculate that friendships between women existed in early Greek culture and elicited similarly eroticized language, though we have little evidence of it except for the surviving poetic fragments of Sappho (Easterling 18–20; Konstan, Friendship 47–48).

Although Homer couches his preclassical example of ‘‘symbiosis’’ and ‘‘alter egos’’ in metaphors of physical similarity and interchangeability, Patroclus was not, according to Nestor, Achilles’ equal in lineage or strength (Iliad 11:939–40). Familial obligation also shaped their connection. But as in the example of Alexander and Hephaestion discussed in the introduction, this ‘‘inequality’’ reveals an important aspect of philia. A few years older, Patroclus was adopted into Achilles’ household as a youth and eventually became Achilles’ ‘‘squire’’ (Stern-Gillet 16; Konstan, Friendship 40). Rules of hospitality, long acquaintance, and mutual affection and the exigencies of war coalesced to form this powerful bond (C. White 15).

The discrepancy in the heroes’ status and Achilles’ fervent expressions of love and grief over the death of Patroclus have led ancient and modern commentators to speculate about the homoerotic/pederastic nature of this early representation of friendship.² According to classical scholars, there is no evidence that erotic pederasty as later practiced in fourth and fifth century b.c.e. Athens existed in this early period (Konstan, Friendship 38), though this does not rule out behavior later labeled homosexual. Athenian pederasty clearly defined the roles of erastes (lover) and eromenos (beloved) as complementary and unequal: the older man desiring, teaching, and being sexually ‘‘active,’’ and the beautiful youth receiving, learning, and being sexually ‘‘passive.’’³. According to Aristotle, erastes and eromenos take pleasure in different things and, thus, are not equal and cannot be friends (NE 8:4, 6). Writers in this period described the roles of friends as ‘‘symmetrical’’ and saw friendship requiring mutuality and equality. A ‘‘jingle’’ thought to have originated with Pythagoras in the sixth century b.c.e., which later writers associated with his ideas, expresses these crucial characteristics: philotes isotes (‘‘friendship is equality’’), wittily rendered as ‘‘amity is parity’’ (Konstan, Friendship 38–39).

Pythagoras, like other early pre-Socratic philosophers, understood philotes as a principle operating in a vast context; in fact, he considered it the essential quality of the cosmic sphere. Although much of what we know about this legendary figure remains speculative, the innovative practical ethics and philosophical ideas, distilled in acusmata or symbola—oral maxims or sayings—and attributed to Pythagoras by later writers, strongly influenced the shape of classical friendship doctrine. A mathematician, astronomer, and musician trained in Persia and Egypt, Pythagoras was said to have founded an academy at Croton in southern Italy, whose inner circle, known as ‘‘Pythagoreans’’ and mathematici (advanced students), lived and studied communally, sharing all possessions, following a restricted diet, and seeking intellectual, moral, and physical excellence. Less stringent rules applied to the ‘‘Pythagorists’’ and acusmatici (probationers), members of the society’s outer circle who did not live and study communally but received oral teaching. All members were bound by strict rules of secrecy and loyalty. There is no agreement on how large this school was, how far Pythagoras’s influence spread, or how long it lasted. We do know that both men and women were members of the society, and several women followers became eminent philosophers in their own right (Iamblichus 259).

In his De vita pythagorica, composed as an introduction to a ten-volume study of Pythagoras’s thought, the second-century c.e. Neoplatonist Iamblichus credits Pythagoras as the ‘‘discoverer and legislator’’ of a broad concept of ‘‘friendship’’ or universal harmony that governed relations between gods and humans, humans and each other, and humans and animals, as well as the ‘‘opposite powers concealed’’ in the human body (227). The governing principle in these related spheres was a striving for balance and a numerically based harmony through the avoidance of passion, dissension, and vice. Describing the ‘‘highest virtue,’’ chapter 33 of De vita pythagorica begins by recommending ‘‘Friendship of all with all’’ (227). While this ideal theoretically included everyone, reports suggest that the Pythagoreans practiced among themselves a radical mutuality, unselfishness, and loyalty that extended even to society members unknown to them but avoided relations with outsiders whom they considered immoral. These principles were epitomized in dramatic stories of emblematic friendship, most famously in the tale of Damon and Phintias (or Pythias), whose unswerving loyalty, discussed below, translated into physical interchangeability. The adage koina ta ton philon, ‘‘Friends have all things in common,’’ repeated by later writers on friendship, expresses the principle of koinonia practiced by the mathematici. The ‘‘jingle’’ philotes isotes may also have referred to the society’s practice of sharing property, but for later writers like Aristotle, it encapsulates the requirement of similar status, virtue, and temperament for the perfect friendship.

Other classical writers attributed to Pythagoras the popular image of the friend as a ‘‘second self’’ and the idea that in friendship, many become one. Because he envisioned friendship extending ‘‘to all,’’ Pythagoras is said to have advanced a more humanitarian ideal of association—philanthropia, ‘‘the love of many’’—than that which prevailed in Greek thought (C. White 19). His practice, to the extent we can determine it, implied that intimate relations of choice and mutuality best created the conditions under which humans could achieve ‘‘some kind of mingling and union with God, and . . . communion with intellect and with the divine soul. For,’’ Iamblichus concludes in chapter 33, ‘‘no one could find anything better, either in words spoken or in ways of life practiced, than this kind of friendship. For I think that all the goods of friendship are embraced by it’’ (235). It is not surprising that the Neoplatonism of Iamblichus was a strong influence on early Christian thought.

By the time of Socrates, an ideal of friendship emerged as a primary personal connection that was separate from the exchange relations of marriage and commerce and vitally concerned the moral character and disinterested actions of the partners. This view of philia as a primarily affective affiliation revises the predominant view of classical scholarship, which holds that the Greeks understood friendship as a broadly applicable affiliation, deeply embedded in economic relations, while the Romans understood it in a narrowly political sense, shorn of emotion. Classicist David Konstan counters that despite cultural differences like the inseparability of economics and interpersonal relations and divergent notions of selfhood, Greek and Roman writers recognized a ‘‘domain of human sympathy’’ analogous to modern conceptions in which a specific facet of friendship operates. He makes this case philologically, distinguishing the broad meaning of the abstract noun philia, which like the verb philein connotes love and affection, from the concrete noun philos (plural: philoi), which means ‘‘friend’’ in a specific and restricted sense (and is not to be confused with the adjective philos, which when applied to family members means ‘‘dear’’) (Friendship 55–56).

The drama of the period, focusing on the lives of the Greek elite, illustrates the multiple meanings of friendship but also offers an example of dyadic male friendship that becomes as proverbial as the love of the Homeric heroes or Alexander and Hephaestion. In a tense scene from Euripides’ Orestes, Orestes and his sister Electra, fearing Menelaus’s vengeance for the murder of their mother Clytemnestra, resign themselves to suicide. Electra portrays their sibling connection with the words and imagery of philia, calling Orestes ‘‘[m]y dearest, you who have a name that sounds most loved and sweet to your sister, partner in one soul with her!’’ (1045–46). They are interrupted by Pylades, Orestes’ childhood companion and comrade in war and matricide, to whom he has betrothed Electra ‘‘from a deep regard for [Pylades’] companionship’’ (1080), thus closing the circle of kin and friends. Bound by love and honor as well as by obligation, since he regards Electra as a wife, Pylades invents a plot to save them all. And when Pylades refuses to part from his friend, even in adversity, misfortune, and death (1095), Orestes extols the immeasurable value of intimate friendship between virtuous men: ‘‘Ah! there is nothing better than a trusty friend, neither wealth nor monarchy; a crowd of people is of no account in exchange for a noble friend’’ (1155).

In the Lysis, an early dialo...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Tabel of Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction - The Renascence of Friendship
• CHAPTER ONE - Smoke and Mirrors
• CHAPTER TWO - ‘‘Familiar Commerce’’
• CHAPTER THREE - Hannah Webster Foster’s Coquette
• CHAPTER FOUR - Eat Your Heart Out
• CHAPTER FIVE - The Ethical Horizon of American Friendship in Catharine Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie
• Epilogue: The Persistence of Second Selves
• Notes
• Works Cited