Issue 36: Friendship

"It’s almost as if the Greeks are saying, “We just don’t want philia friendship to be this dangerous and to tempt people away from their civic duties. If it does, it must be because it’s actually eros and therefore allowed to be dangerous.” The quote about Achilles you mentioned, that just runs through the ages, doesn’t it? I’m thinking about E. M. Forster, who wrote in 1951 in Two Cheers for Democracy that if he had to choose between betraying his friend and betraying his country, he hoped he should have the guts to betray his country. That’s an extraordinary thing to say, especially just after all the spy scandals of the 1940s. And so you always have this tension between friendship as the building block and the glue of the state, as Aristotle wants it to be, and then all these literary models where friendship can work against authority, against political stability, and can sometimes be an immensely disruptive force. It’s partly this tension that later prompts the Greek philosopher Epicurus to separate friendship from politics and set up a community of friends in what was called the “Garden”—a real garden, as it happens—outside the polis.
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- Other Self: An Interview with Angie Hobbs