Preface: Friendship as an Art of Living

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I’ve come recently to the question of friendship, come contingently, as it were, from a number of convergent lines of preoccupation. I put it this way so as to underline the fact that I do not approach friendship from some supposed organic or a priori appreciation of its essential virtue. Rather, friendship as a value to think and live with comes into view for me within a certain problem-space or conjuncture. And it is from within this historicized perspective that I want to reflect briefly on friendship as a dimension of an art of living. Part of what is inspiring about the conversations between Céline Condorelli and her friends (Nick Aikens, Avery Gordon, Johan Frederik Hartle, and Polly Staple) collected in The Company She Keeps is the way they question the conventional conception of friendship’s virtue.¹ The literary and philosophic story of friendship has depended so fundamentally on a certain picture of who friends are and what friends do with each other: typically, two white men of a certain age, wise, retiring, privileged, without pressing obligations or urgent projects, swapping confidences and memories and consolations. Friendship here, charged with sublimated love and charity and goodwill, and sustained by the recognition of an ineffable bond, is often meant to mark out a kind of haven, or anyway a relational space of exemption. This is doubtlessly an important description, but what Condorelli and her friends invite us to consider are some of the senses in which a conception of friendship can suggestively be embodied in a different picture of associative relations and cooperative solidarities less visible, perhaps, to the normative gaze of social convention—black slaves, for example, learning together to practice freedom on the run from plantation bondage; or middle-class women learning to practice dissenting companionship away from the constraining norms of family. This seems to me generative for a consideration of friendship as a dimension less of a mysterious and elite intimacy than of a quotidian art of learning to live and think together differently.

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What is the idea here of an “art of living,” and why should an idea of friendship be connected to it? I borrow this felicitous phrase from Alexander Nehamas’s compelling book, The Art of Living, published now more than a decade ago.² It is true, of course, that Nehamas doesn’t himself make a systematic connection between an art of living and the practice of friendship—though it is interesting to note that he has, recently, published a wonderful book on friendship that arguably embodies that relationship in more ways than one.³ Certainly I would be inclined to read it that way. However, I believe that the ideas of an art of living and of friendship belong to the same family of ideas—namely, ideas meant to help us unlearn the conceits of a disembodied practice of thinking and being and to reenchant or revivify the human scale of living and working and loving together.

Now, Nehamas’s idea of an art of living is activated as part of an attempt to work out a contrast between two rival conceptions of philosophy: on the one hand, the dominant conception of academic philosophy, understood as a professional, theoretical, and systematic discipline, with an arcane and highly technical language, addressed to universal questions and therefore only indirectly connected to individual and collective lives in their worldly condition; and, on the other hand, a conception of philosophy thought of as a “way of life,” that is, as a creative (and sometimes experimental) discursive activity not necessarily tied to academic philosophy departments but that grows out of, and reflects on, individual and collective lives as these are shaped by concrete historical circumstances and intellectual-aesthetic traditions.⁴ Notably, in the former conception, the philosophizing self is largely an abstraction having little or no bearing on the philosophic voice, which is meant solely to be an incorporeal or dematerialized vehicle for the content of truth. By contrast, for the latter conception, the philosophizing self is an embodied and integral dimension of the whole philosophic activity and...