18-12-2012, 04:57 PM
ON FRIENDSHIP
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Introduction
A friend is a person capable of loving irrespective of whether he is being loved or not. Friendship can
exist between the same sex: man-man, woman-woman, or opposite sex: man-woman. It transcends age
and could subsist between even an old man and a small boy. Human beings also establish friendships
with their pet animals such as cats, dogs, horses, doves and parrots. Friendship can also be felt in
familial relationships between father and son, mother and daughter, husband and wife, brother and sister,
elder brother and younger brother. Yet, more than friendship, love is the binding force in familial
relationships. In a deeper sense, love is below friendship because it is an above/below relation, one of
hierarchy and condition. It is implied, then, that friendship is freedom plus equality. It involves choice
and volition. The concept of friendship needs exploration because often a man is known by the company
he keeps; knowing the company helps one to know oneself and develop his personality to the fullest.
Each of our friends mirrors a rejected or acknowledged trait in us. They happen to be our friends
because it is ourselves in different forms, and a unified vision of them constitutes to the sameness of our
identity.
Generally, friendship exists for three reasons: a) virtue b) usefulness c) pleasure. When virtue is the
reason, friendship exists for the sake of friendship; where both like each other and cherish each other for
some creditable values in the other’s personality. You wish to be the friend of that person for the sheer
personality that he/she has. It has a magic in itself. It attracts you. And it is mutual. You know that
you would even die to swear your friendship for that person. But you also know that the other would
make you live than die for him/her. It is somewhat platonic in concept inasmuch as the other may not be/
need not be all that intelligent and good looking, useful or capable of giving pleasure.
A friendship of the second kind is formed for the utilitarian value of it. How useful so and so is to me?
What can I benefit from him? Can I use his car? Will he use his reputation and influence to fetch me a
good job? Will he lend me money in need? Thus a person may ask and maintains relationship for
practical, professional, and political reasons. I remember the friendship I made with two others on a
train journey from Mumbai to Chennai. It was extremely useful for killing time during the journey.
Further, all of us had to go to the bus-stand to continue our onward travel. Therefore we took an autorickshaw
till the bus-stand and shared the money. But then, once we boarded our buses to our
destinations, we were looking forward to meet our people at the hometown.
Taking cues from Nietzsche we should not only concede the enemy in the friend but also recognise in
advance so that we may not be caught unawares and be saved of increased blood-pressure levels and
doctor bills. Our best friend is endowed with the capability of becoming our worst enemy. It is always
for sure. A stranger can be an enemy but not worst enemy. Remember Brutus, for instance. We always
say that Caesar was so strong that he would not have died even if millions of daggers were to pierce him
but for the one dagger of betrayal that penetrated his heart and took away his last breath. That others
were interested in the death of Caesar was of no matter to the mighty emperor, but his bosom friend saw
a point in it made him give up all his hope for survival. If my death would benefit Brutus, so be it,
thought Caesar and died of heart-break, not of haemorrhage, we may categorically conclude.
Nevertheless, this does not always happen in Shakespearean dramas and present Hindi movies, but in
reality too. A person who had this soul-bending/mending experience wisely knows that love is just an
absence of hate as day is just an absence of night. In the words of Jaques Derrida: if you want a friend,
you must wage war on him, and capable of it, capable of having a ‘best enemy.’ To be capable of this
friendship, to be able to honour in the friend the enemy he can become, is a sign of freedom. Freedom
itself. Now this is a freedom that neither tyrants not slaves know.”(1997: 282). One should be capable
of respecting the enemy, of honouring what one does not love. Incapable of such a respect, incapable of
the freedom entailed by that respect, one could never have either friends or enemies as such. “Only a
free and respectful consciousness could ever attain to this as such, this phenomenal essence of the friend
or enemy, as well as of the couple they form (ibid.).”