From Word To Word

I wrote recently about how knowledge without friendship is deficient, and I was reflecting, in a conversation with just such a friend, that friendship makes knowledge sufficient, at least in part, by deflecting it from its course.

When I am thinking with a friend, when this thinking is taking place between us as an expression of our friendship, our conversation will always find itself drifting from whatever course that we had in mind.  Whatever purposes and aims that I might bring to the conversation, they always find themselves distracted by the response of the friend, perhaps only for a moment, perhaps for a longer time, perhaps for the rest of the night, and this distraction calls me to think differently, apart from the course that I had planned.

In other words, the thoughtful and considered response of the friend does not allow me to remain under the illusion that my thinking is sufficient, but opens me to the other courses that it might take.  This kind of conversation takes the closed and linear character of my all too monological thinking and opens it, diverts it, distracts it, merely by exposing it to the kind of dialogical thinking that is peculiar to a friendship.  It reveals that thinking is never finished, if it is ever truly begun, just as the conversation at the heart of a friendship is never finished.  It pushes thinking off course in order that it might really become thinking.

Not just any dialogue will suffice here, not just any conversation.  Most kinds of dialogue are capable only of agreeing or disagreeing with a thinking that remains stubbornly on course.  Thinking does not in fact take place here, because it has become external to the conversation.  It is the subject rather than the product of the dialogue.  This kind of dialogue does not know how to do anything but stay on course.

It is only the  conversation at the heart of a friendship that produces thinking capable of getting off course, of discovering what it might still become.  It is only this conversation that allows thinking to find its way on the way to thinking.  This is why it is necessary to cultivate meaningful friendships rather than being content merely to check a box on some social networking application, because the quality of our friendships will determine the quality of our thinking.

Ivan Illich says this: “Knowledge without friendship that delights in the friend’s knowledge is deficient.”

This is a profound truth. Knowledge finds its sufficiency only when it is shared between friends. It finds its sufficiency only as the medium through which friendship is fostered and expressed, as the opportunity for friends to delight in one another. Knowledge certainly exists apart from such friendship, but it is a poor, sickly, deficient sort of knowledge, a mere pedantry, lacking in everything that makes knowledge a delight.

This kind of knowledge, and these kinds of friends, have been the great pleasures of my life. I will not try to name them all, because there have been many of them at many times and in many degrees, but those who have shared this pleasure with me will recognize what Illich is describing, and hopefully they will also accept my sincere gratitude for their friendship, for their knowledge, and for their delight. There is little that I value more.

I began reading On Friendship, a collection of Michel de Montaigne’s essays, mostly as a change of pace from Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, which is one of those books, at least for me, that is best enjoyed in smaller sections separated by sufficient time for reflection.  Rather than merely changing Bachelard’s pace, however, Montaigne soon set a pace of his own, and I found suddenly that I had read him from cover to cover, though I had intended to read him only an essay at a time.

The collection is seven essays long, but it is the first piece, “On Friendship”, that I found most compelling.  Some of the later essays in the volume, like “On the Affection Of Fathers For Their Children” or “That We Should Not Be Deemed Happy Until After Our Death”, are certainly interesting in their way and certainly fine examples of writing as well, but they lack the passion that is so clear in “On Friendship”, where Montaigne describes his relationship with Etienne de La Boetie with real intensity.  “In the friendship which I am talking about,” he says, “souls are mingled and confounded in so universal a blending that they efface the seam which joins them together so that it cannot be found,” and this kind of personal passion distinguishes the essay from all the others in the collection.

Interestingly, Montaigne locates the origin of this friendship, not in a face to face encounter, but in a text that La Boetie had written against tyranny.  “I am particularly indebted to that treatise,” says Montaigne, “because it first brought us together,”  and he goes on to say that this treatise was what prepared him “for that loving-friendship between us which as long as it pleased God we fostered so perfect and so entire that it is certain that few such can even be read about, and no trace at all of it can be found among men of today.”

While I am more than a little sceptical of Montaigne’s claims about the exclusive nature of his friendship, I am fascinated by the role that writing played in the development of his relationship with La Boetie.  Montaigne read the work of La Boetie long before he met him in person, and he claims that this reading made him acquainted with La Boetie, preparing the conditions which would enable their friendship to develop when they did at last meet.  Here, at least, whatever poststructuralist criticism might say about the absence of the author and the illusion of authorial intention and whatever else, here, a reader claims that the act of reading made him acquainted with a writer in such a way that a friendship became possible.

Writing is never adequate to its author, of course, to its author’s thinking or to its author’s intention.  It is only ever adequate to itself.  Its function is not to mean what the author thought or intended, but simply to mean what it comes to mean.  Nevertheless, the example of Montaigne and La Boetie shows, as does my own experience, that writing does return us to its author in some way.  It is not that writing allows us to determine anything about the author, and it is not that writing makes its author somehow present to us.  Writing merely turns us toward an author, indefinite and undetermined though this author may be.  It allows us to make an author’s acquaintance.  It opens the possibility of friendship.

It is this possibility that underwrites the act of reading for me.  Though many of the authors I read are now dead, and though it is not likely that I will ever meet and befriend those of them who are still living, I still read in order to be turned toward the author, toward this someone else who writes for me without knowing me.  I read in order to make the aquaintence of this unknown one, to open a possible friendship with this anonymous other, even and especially because the possible friendship will almost certainly remain unrealized.

I read to encounter this impossible possibility.