The Good of Friendship PDF

Meeting of the Aristotelian Society held at Senate House, University
of London, on 10 May 2010 at 4:15pm.
XIITHE GOOD OF FRIENDSHIP
ALEXANDER NEHAMAS
Problems with representing friendship in painting and the novel and its
more successful displays in drama reflect the fact that friends seldom act
as inspiringly as traditional images of the relationship suggest: friends ac-
tivities are often trivial, commonplace and boring, sometimes even crimi-
nal. Despite all that, the philosophical tradition has generally considered
friendship a moral good. I argue that it is not a moral good, but a good
nonetheless. It provides opportunities to try different ways of being, and is
crucial to the processes through which we establish our individuality.
Problems with Friendship and Its Representations. Around the year

1522, the Florentine artist Jacopo da Pontormo composed a paint-
ing of two men, one of whom is holding a page with a few lines of
Latin text while the other is pointing at it (Fig. 1). Since the text
turns out to be an extract from Ciceros dialogue De amicitia and
Giorgio Vasari (1976, p. 316) tells us that both men were friends of
Pontormos, the painting has come to be known as Two Men with a
Passage from Ciceros On Friendship or The Two Friends, but its
purpose overall remains enigmatic and continues to provoke many
art-historical questions.1 I, too, propose to ask a question about it
a question much more elementary than those asked by art historians
but central to the purpose of this essay. I can best explain its impor-
tance by contrasting Pontormos work with two others, one of a
killing (Fig. 2), the other of an erotic scene (Fig. 3). We can tell that
this is what they are simply by looking, and with a little iconograph-
ical knowledge we can tell that we are seeing Judith beheading Hol-
ophernes in the first and Mars after one of his encounters with
Venus in the second. We can determine what these paintings are
1
See, among others, Strehlke (2004a, p. 66), Cropper (1986, 2004) and Cropper and
Dempsey (1996).
2010 The Aristotelian Society

Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Vol. cx, Part 3
doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9264.2010.00287.x
268 ALEXANDER NEHAMAS
about with considerable accuracy on the basis of their visual fea-

tures alone. But what would we make of Pontormos painting with-
out Ciceros text or Vasaris account? How could we see it as a
painting of friendship?
Figure 1 Jacopo da Pontormo, Portrait of Two Friends, c.1522.

Oil on panel. Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice.
We couldnt. Nothing that depends on the visual features of

painting is associated with friendship firmly enough. The visual in-
dications of sexuality or killing are many but their range is limited.
Friendship is different: it has no sure signs. In painting, friends can
be of any age or gender, cool or passionate, reserved or affectionate,
absorbed in each other or in their own interests, active or passive: in
fact, they can be doing almost anything together.

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THE GOOD OF FRIENDSHIP 269
And so they can in the world as well. We cant tell whether two peo-
ple are friends simply by looking at them on a particular occasion any
more than we can do so in painting, because there is no clear path that
leads from a discrete interaction between two people to their friend-
ship. Even dying for methat staple of our mythology of friendship
does not necessarily show that you are my friend. In A Tale of Two
Cities, for example, Sidney Carton dies for Charles Darnayin his
placebut only out of lovefor the sakeof Lucie, Darnays wife,
and their child. Similar things can happen in life.
Figure 2 Caravaggio, Judith Beheading Holofernes, 15989.

Oil on canvas. Galleria Nazionale dArte Antica,
Rome.
There is another problem as well. Friendship is manifested only

through a series of actions that occur over time, and painting has
trouble with subjects that are temporally extended. Literature might
then seem better suited to its representation, but, although epic po-
etry has given us some of its most enduring images, the novel has
not taken friendship up as a major subject despite the fact that, as a
genre, the novel focuses on relationships that span large tracts of
time. Its not that novels dont include friends among their charac-

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Sandro Botticelli, Venus and Mars, c.1483. National Gallery, London.

Figure 3

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ters; of course they do. But only a few novels build their narrative
around friendship, as others do with love, marriage, adultery, fami-
ly, education, treason, art, revenge, or war and peace.2 Part of the
reason for such a perhaps surprising omission must surely be that,
as William Hazlitt remarked,
in our habitual intercourse with others, we much oftener require to be
amused than assisted. We consider less, therefore, what a person with
whom we are intimate is ready to do for us in critical emergencies,
than what he has to say on ordinary occasions. (Hazlitt 1837, p. 77)
The fact is that friendship is not nearly as often associated with ex-
treme situations or feelings as the epic tradition, which glorifies pas-
sion and heroism, sacrifice and death, has taught us. Passion
between friends, in any case, has always proved suspicious: Achilles
desperate mourning for Patroclus death and his bloody revenge in
The Iliad prompted classical Athens to see them as lovers;3 and in
Montaignes ardent description of his feelings for tienne de la Bo-
tie, his readers have sometimes felt the stirrings of lust.4 Ordinarily,
friendship is manifested in the most, well, ordinary situations,
which all but the friends themselves are likely to find inconsequen-
tial. To establish a friendship, a novel would have to include many
inconsequential moments and events, only against the background
of which, when the extraordinary occurs, would we be able to tell
that the characters act out of friendship and not out of duty, love or
recklessness.
That, though, may not be peculiar to friendship. Little, for exam-
ple, seems less consequential than the unhistoric acts of George
Eliots characters, people who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest
in unvisited tombs (Eliot 1908, p. 445). But there is a serious differ-
ence. Eliot creates characters who spend themselves like that river
of which Cyrus broke the strength in channels which had no
great name on earth (p. 444) precisely in order to endow their acts
with significance, to trace the growth that springs to life when the
rivers waters finally find their way into the earth. But the events
2
Among great works, one might cite, with reservations, Huckleberry Finn and parts of In
Search of Lost Time. Some recent examples are Verghese (1998), Lott (1999), and perhaps
Ann Patchetts novelistic memoir, Truth and Beauty (2004).
3
The tradition (for which see Plato, Symposium, 180ab) may have begun with Aeschylus
Myrmidons (fr. 228a in Mette 1959).
4
Montaigne (1957); and see Schachter (2001).

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through which a friendship is manifested, if they are to serve their

purpose, must be represented as insignificant, and a narrative of in-
significant events is unlikely to absorb its readers.
That point is driven home by what may perhaps be, ironically
enough, the greatest novel of friendshipFlauberts Bouvard and
Pcuchet. While planning the novel, Flaubert wrote that he needed
to spit the gall that chokes me stupidity now crushes me so
hard that I feel like a fly with the Himalayas on its back! No matter!
I will try to vomit my venom into my book (quoted in Queneau
2005, p. xxii). To lift the weight of stupidity from his shoulders,
Flaubert transferred it to his heroes, two copying clerks who retire
together in the country. There, they devote themselves, although
they are comically incompetent, to a series of efforts to master every
dimension of human knowledgeagriculture, chemistry, medicine,
history, archaeology, literature, aesthetics, politics, love, and much
else besides. The two are very close friends, and they had to be, for
only friends could have possibly tolerated each other through the
miserable sequence of their failures, and their story is and had to be
repetitious, for only such an interminable series of incidents could
be a convincing display of their friendship.
The peculiar nature of this novel raises two questions regarding
its subject: If friendship enables this sort of farcical behaviour, what
is the good of it? and, Is it possible to represent friendship convinc-
ingly but in a book that retains its readers interest? Flaubert, who
would have probably answered the first, to which we will return lat-
er, with a curt None, was clearly exercised by the second. The
reader, he wrote, wont read methe book will put him to sleep
from the start There are no quotable excerpts, no brilliant scenes,
just the same situation over and over Im scared it might bore
people to death (Polizzotti 2005, p. xiii). And so it has. Bouvard
and Pcuchet has been hailed for many different reasons, but Julian
Barnes is surely right to find it far from a joy to read:
It is aesthetically stubborn in its constant refusal to grant readers the
narrative flow they traditionally crave. And it requires a stubborn
reader, one willing to suspend normal expectations and able to con-
front both repetitious effects and a vomitorium of predigested book-
learning. (Barnes 2006, p. 57)
Mark Polizzotti, the novels most recent translator, disagrees: Bor-

ing its not, once weve accepted the ground rules, he writes; its re-

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petitiveness is a huge part of its comic effect. Although that strikes

me as special pleading, it is useful to keep it in mind because Poliz-
zotis advice, to think of the Three Stooges head bonks and nose
tweaks, or Laurel and Hardys fine messes: the more we expect
them, the funnier they become (Polizzotti 2005, p. xiii), concedes
what I believe is true and will try to argue for in what follows: that
the action of drama is better suited to the representation of friend-
ship than the narrative of the novel. Unredeemed insignificance is
boring, and a novel that relates a long and repetitive series of unre-
deemed and insignificant occasions is bound to be to that extent,
whatever its other merits, a boring novel.
So far, then, we have seen that friendship is associated with no
particular type of actionalmost anything people can do may be an
expression of itand most of the actions with which it is usually
associated are insignificant, humdrum everyday events. Why, then,
to cite only two representative examples, does Cicero (1923, p. 102)
consider it absolutely essential to human beings and think it obvious
that if charity and goodwill are removed from life, all the joy is
gone out of it? Why does Ralph Waldo Emerson (1983, p. 346) see
fit to call it that select and sacred relation which even leaves the
language of love suspicious and common, so much is this purer, and
nothing is so much divine? What are the origins of the overwhelm-
ingly positive evaluation of friendship?
Although the philosophical examination of friendship begins with
Platos Lysis, it is, in fact, Aristotle who stands at the head of this
long tradition. Friendship, his deeply influential discussion in the
Nicomachean Ethics begins, is a virtue or involves virtue; and it is
an absolute necessity in life. No one would choose to live without
friends, even if he had all the other goods (Aristotle 2000, viii.1,
p. 143).5 And it comes, he adds, in three varieties. Some friends, he
seems to say, profit from their relationship; others care for the pleas-
ure they derive from it. But a special group consists of peoplegen-
uine, complete, or perfect friendswho are attracted to each
others virtue. Such people, however, are few and far between, and
5
The linguistic situation is complicated. The Greek terms philos and philia, which are usu-
ally translated as friend and friendship respectively, actually apply to a vast range of rela-
tionships, many of whichfor example, that between contractually bound buyers and
sellershave nothing to do with friendship. But since here I am concerned only with the
tradition that emerges from Aristotles discussion, and which has, by and large, understood
itself to be discussing friendship, I will continue to use the modern term.

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their friendships, which are unalloyed goods, are therefore exceed-

ingly rare. But, as I have argued elsewhere, relationships based on
advantage or pleasure are purely instrumental and only genuine
philiathe one form of philia that comes close to what we under-
stand friendship to beinvolves loving ones friends for their own
sake (Nehamas 2010). It turns out, then, that for Aristotle most of
us are actually friendless.
To an extent completely unparalleled in a discipline that some-
times considers agreement a form of discourtesy, the philosophical
tradition concurs. Cicero, Seneca, St Aelred, St Thomas, Francis
Bacon, and many others, including most recent authors on the sub-
ject, repeat Aristotles threefold classification, limit true friendship
to the morally virtuous, and consider it an unmixed moral blessing.
Without it, Miltons Adam laments, even Paradise is robbed of
pleasure: With me I see not who partakes. In solitude/What happi-
ness? Who can enjoy alone,/Or all enjoying, what contentment find
(Milton 2003, vii, 3636, p. 176).
It is difficult to know how virtuous the virtuous have to be, since
Aristotle rests content with a reference to Pericles as an example of
practical wisdom (Aristotle 2000, vi.5, p. 107). Cicero, for his part,
takes himself, in contrast to philosophers who make virtue humanly
unattainable, to be defending common sense, claims that he wants
to bring virtue down to earth, and refers to three actual individuals
(the third century bc statesmen Caius Fabricius, Manius Curius,
and Tiberius Coruncanius). His description of their qualities, how-
everthey were models of honour, integrity, justice, and generosity
[without] avarice, lustfulness, or insolence, and with unwavering
convictionleaves most of the people I know, myself included,
friendless. John Cooper, more realistic than Cicero, argues that nei-
ther in fact nor in Aristotle is friendship restricted to moral heroes
(Cooper 1977, p. 317). Genuine friendship requires neither perfec-
tion nor even outstanding accomplishment but only the binding
force within it of someperhaps, for all that, partial and
incompleteexcellence of the character and obtains between peo-
ple who come to love one another because of their good human
qualities (Cooper 1977, pp. 319, 320). This is a reasonable scaling
down of the requirements of friendship and acknowledges human
imperfection; it does, however, leave the connection between friend-
ship and moral virtue intact. Virtue is what prompts friendship in
the first place, and there is no friendship without it: a genuine friend

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wishes his friend to prosper, because he recognizes his good charac-

ter and thinks that it is fitting for those who are morally good to
prosper (Cooper 1977, p. 323).
Consider, though, Frederick Moreau, the hero of Flauberts Senti-
mental Education. His lifelong friendship with Charles Deslauriers
begins when he sees him beat a servant who had called him a pau-
pers brat to within an inch of his life, and takes it as the brave and
honourable thing to do, while Flaubert gives us every reason to con-
sider it impetuous and excessive, typical of the hot temper that had
already provoked the mute hostility of Deslaurierss classmates.
Moreaus love springs not from a recognition of excellence but from
a mistaken interpretation (Flaubert 2004, p. 17).
Even so, and although it is certainly not excellence that binds
these two flawed characters to each other, it is hard to deny that
their friendship is genuine. In the novels final scene, reconciled
once again by that irresistible element in their nature which always
reunited them in friendship (Flaubert 2004, p. 247), they reminisce
about a long-ago visit to the village brothel. Their elaborate prepa-
rations came to naught because on entering the house Frederick,
overcome by nervousness, found himself rooted in the same spot,
unable either to speak or to move; after a few excruciating mo-
ments, he turned on his heels and, followed by Deslauriers and the
sound of the prostitutes laughter, ran away in fear and embarrass-
ment. Distracted as the two boys were, they forgot to follow the se-
cret route by which they had arrived and returned through the
center of the village, where they were seen and thus provoked a seri-
ous scandal. These are the novels closing words:
They told one another the story at great length, each supplementing
the others recollections; and when they had finished:
That was the best time we ever had, said Frederick.
Yes, perhaps you are right. That was the best time we ever had,
said Deslauriers. (Flaubert 2004, pp. 24950)
Virtue? Excellence? Distinction? No, only two trivial characters,

revelling in the banalities that sustained their close and intimate
friendship.
All that notwithstanding, Sentimental Education is not primarily
about friendship. The true place of friendship is not in narrative but
in dramain theatre, film and television. And Thelma and Louise,
Ridley Scotts 1991 film, shows that it can also be manifested

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through actions that are positively wrong. The two main characters,
Thelma, who seems pathologically flighty and insecure, and Louise,
who appears in much better control of her life and treats Thelma
like a child, leave home for a two-day vacation. On their way to
their cabin, and despite Louises objections, they stop at a bar where
Thelma flirts with an obviously unsuitable man who eventually tries
to rape her in the bars parking lot. Louise arrives just in time and,
threatening the man with a gun Thelma had rather stupidly brought
along, stops the assault. As the two women are leaving, though, the
man makes a crude and nasty comment and Louise, almost gratui-
tously, shoots him dead. Afraid of the consequences, they decide to
flee to Mexico, but their troubles, mostly because of Thelmas fool-
ishness, multiply. When a young robber with whom Thelma spends
the night runs away with Louises life savings, effectively dashing
their hopes of reaching Mexico, two things happen: Louise finally
loses her self-control and Thelma, who despite her antics had al-
ready begun to show signs of independence during the course of
their escape, finds her self-respect. She becomes strong enough to do
things on her ownshe applies the method the robber had demon-
strated for her the night before to rob a convenience store, forces a
policeman who was about to arrest them into the trunk of his car
and, together with Louise, who gradually regains her own self-con-
fidence, blows up a gasoline truck because its driver had been mak-
ing vulgar and obscene gestures whenever they met him on the road.
Eventually, the two women are trapped at the rim of the Grand
Canyon by a throng of police cars blocking their escape and, or-
dered to give up, they refuse to turn themselves in. Instead, they
drive their car over the precipice, where it remains frozen in midair
to the sounds of B. B. Kings song, Better Not Look Down.
Thelma and Louise are not just friends who do bad things, as
friends often do. The friendship they acknowledge to each other be-
fore driving into the canyon is a friendship through which both
women, especially Thelma, become more admirable because of the
bad things they do. It is through bad things that they gradually be-
come equal to each other and to the world and find a way out of the
dead ends to which their lives would have inevitably led otherwise.
They choose, to use an expression that applies to a truly famous
friendship, a short and glorious life over a long and shabby one. We
dont have to think that Thelma and Louis are heroic on a Homeric
scale in order to describe their choice in the terms usually reserved

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for Achilles. And in any case, I am not certain that the behaviour to
which Achilles friendship leads, his bestial desecration of Hectors
body over Patroclus deathdeath, after all, being something that
happens to warriorsis so much more admirable than the crimes
these women commit for each others sake. Friendship can be ex-
pressed even through crime, cruelty and immorality.
I must now give an account of an episode on which I will rely cen-
trally as I try to give an answerpartial at best to the question of
the good of friendship. A visiting friend (Ill call him Tom, since
that is his name) decided, on a cold and rainy winter morning sever-
al years ago, to come along while I drove my son to school; we were
in a hurry and, since he did not intend to get out of the car, he threw
a raincoat over his pyjamas and didnt bother to wear any shoes. On
arriving at the school, I realized I had a flat tyre and no idea of how
to replace it. Since all the children were arriving at the same time,
traffic was very heavy and my disabled car provided a major ob-
struction. While I was standing there in confusion, Tom leapt out of
the carbarefoot, in pyjamas and raincoatand took over. The
children stared in complete fascination, some of the adults offered
to help, others just watched or made jokes (one, a colleague, told me
she loved my friends outfit). Oblivious to his audience, Tom fixed
the tyre, drove us to a gas station, where, still in pyjamas, he dis-
cussed the situation with the owner, and returned home ready to
start the days work while I collapsed in a useless heap.
If anyone ever asked why Tom is my friend, I most surely would
cite this episode and try to communicate his kindness, generosity
and strong practical sense (also his impatience). But that would miss
the point, which is that he did so in that ridiculous outfit, surround-
ed by well-dressed people and without a second thought, that his
practical sense exists along with a touching otherworldliness, that it
was completely in character, and so on. Yet even that would fail be-
cause it also misses the point, that most important element that can
be expressed but cant be described: that no one else could have
done what Tom did that morning. And if someone objected that fix-
ing a tyre in a silly outfit is not such a rare feat, nor something only
a friend would do, I would replyunhelpfullythat what mat-
tered to me was not just what Tom did but who he is, which no list
of his features, however long, could ever capture. Think how banal
we sound when we try to express our love for another person, how
disappointing the lists of positive features we can come up with

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beautiful, elegant, kind, generous, intelligent, imaginative, open,

sensitive, loyal, witty, and so onalways are. Its not that I dont
love my friend for his practicality: I do; there is something right,
though not quite right, about that way of speaking. Still, there are
plenty of people in the world whose practical sense gives me no rea-
son to love them; why, then, is it a reason to love this particular per-
son? Could it be that I am attracted by his particular kindness,
kindness as only he can express it? Yes, but explaining how one per-
sons particular kindness differs from anothers is exactly as prob-
lematic as explaining why I love them: both always leave the most
important thing out. And so we say that we love our friends not for
this, that or any other of their features but for themselves, and wrap
our original mystery in the enigma of a self that seems to stand be-
hind, over and above, or separately from the totality of its features.
Still, as I said, there is something to that way of speaking. My re-
lationship with many people is impersonal: waiters, grocers, drivers,
and so on. They are able to satisfy desires I already have and I gen-
erally know what to expect from them and how well they have ful-
filled my expectations. My interest in them, beyond a minimum of
necessary respect, is limited to the features that enable them to serve
my purposes, and although I know that there is more to them than
that I dont for that reason feel the need to come to know what it is:
they are means to my ends. But others I treat not only as means but
also as ends in themselves: I take what they want seriously, some-
times as seriously as I take my own desires, and I am ready to want
new things, and so to change myself, because of them. These are the
people whom, to one extent or another, I love; and some of them, in
turn, are my friends.
If we are friends, I am of course attracted to what I already know
about you, but I also expect that what I dont yet know will be at-
tractive as well and, with that expectation, I want to come to know
you better and more intimately. Friendship, like every kind of love,
is a commitment to the future, based on a promise of a better life to-
gether than either one of us can have alone. If ever that commitment
wanes, if one day you find yourself feeling that you already know
everything that matters about me, that there is nothing more you
want to learnon that day our friendship will be over. That prom-
ise of a better future for us both, which depends specifically on our
relationship, is exactly that most important thing that every expla-
nation necessarily leaves out: how can we possibly express what we

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dont know? It is also exactly what underlies talk of loving our

friends for themselves. Where others saw an amusing eccentric or a
bother (both of which he was), I saw in Toms action an expression
of much that I knew of him already and, in addition, a promise both
fulfilled and newly made through his actions that morninga
promise only he, with his history, could make, and only I, with my
own history, could see, a product, in fact, of our history together, in
which no one else can share. In his action, I saw Tom himself, and
that self is what love is about.
To see Toms behaviour in those terms, I had to take everything I
knew about him into account, including his decisiveness, his move-
ments and gestures, his tone of voice, his way with practical things
and a myriad other details that were, to me, visible in his behaviour.
But no words could ever describe what exactly I saw. Friendship, like
the self that emerges through it, is always embodied; its depictions
require embodiment as well and they must include the looks, ges-
tures and bodily dispositions that are essential to textured communi-
cation. Since these are irreducibly visual, friendship is a difficult
subject for narrative. But since they are also inherently temporal, it is
a bad subject for painting. They are actions, the stuff of drama.
I have stayed with the problems facing the representation of
friendship because they show something about friendship itself.
They show that it can be expressed in every kind of action, not just
distinguished or heroic but also trivial and commonplace, not only
virtuous but also criminal. And they also show that it is inherently
dangerous. To be betrayed by a friend can be among a lifes greatest
misfortunes. To remain loyal to one can be responsible for the deep-
est conflict, as E. M. Forster saw: If I had to choose between be-
traying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have
the guts to betray my country (Forster 1939, p. 68).6 But friendship
is also dangerous because, despite the certainty love inspires, it is
impossible to know in advance what it will eventually bring.
Friends, I said earlier, dont take their wishes for granted. If I ap-
proach you in friendship I hope that I will become able to wish for
things I couldnt even have thought of without you. In that, I give
you power over myself and so I put my identity at risk. We never
know exactly what friendship promises, whether its promise will be
fulfilled, and whether, once fulfilled, it will be for better or worse.
6
Some of the dangers of friendship are well discussed in Cocking and Kennett (2000).

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Nothing assures me that my feeling or judgement is right and that I

wont one day come to see that you have actually been a disappoint-
ment or even harmful to me. Worst of all, I may never realize that as
a result of our relationship my judgement was gradually debased
and that I may find myself happy to have become someone I would
have hated to be had I not submitted to you.
And so we ask, once again, if friendship does all that, what good
is it?
II
The Good of Friendship. The path to an answer begins in an unlike-

ly place, a notorious passage in Nietzsches On the Genealogy of
Morals (i.13):
Just as the popular mind separates the lightning from its flash and
takes the latter for an action, for the operation of a subject called
lightning, so popular morality also separates strength from expres-
sions of strength, as if there were a neutral substratum behind the
strong man, which was free to express strength or not to do so. But
there is no such substratum; there is no being behind doing, effecting,
becoming; the doer is merely a fiction added to the deedthe deed is
everything. (Nietzsche 1968b, p. 481)
Nietzsche here charges Christianity, whose origins he traces to a re-

volt of the weak of the Roman Empire against their strong op-
pressors, with a particular interpretation of the notion of the
subject, a false idea that makes it possible to attribute everyones
manner of life to a free choice. He thinks that Christianity and the
secular tradition that has followed in its footsteps conceive of the
subject, of who I am, as something distinct from everything I do. If
that is right, I should be able to stand back from everything I have
been so far and, unconstrained by anything that is particular to me,
examine the various alternative courses of action available, and
choose among them. I can choose, therefore, whether to act weak-
ly or strongly, and that allows the weak to think that the strong,
who can be dangerous to them, have chosenthough they need not
and should notthe wrong way of life. They can then consider
strength as a vice and so elevate their weakness, that is to say, their
essence, their effects, their whole ineluctable, irremovable reality

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[into] a voluntary achievement, willed, chosen, a deed, a meritori-

ous act (Nietzsche 1968b, p. 482).
There may be several problems, both historical and psychologi-
cal, with Nietzsches view, but the most obvious difficulty is that his
dismissal of the subject as a fictionthe deed is everything
seems to make it impossible to explain what makes my actions
mine: why are they even actions in the first place and not mere
events that belong to no one at all?
In fact, however, Nietzsche does not reject the existence of sub-
jects altogether, but only of the subject as he claims Christianity
conceives it: a subject that, as he writes, lies behind, separate
from, its deeds, a neutral substratum undetermined by its location
in history and society, altogether free to choose between virtue and
vice. He claims that the agent is not behind but in the deed: our ac-
tions express precisely who we are and to a great extent who we
have to be, not what we have freely chosen to be among various dif-
ferent possibilities.7
Even so, however, Nietzsches view is still in conflict with a com-
mon understanding of actions as a special group of the events that
constitute the worldevents whose causes we take to be mental: de-
sires, beliefs and intentions. On a physiological level, raising my arm
and my arm going up (it is said) are exactly alike: a movement is in-
itiated as the result of a particular neural event in my brain. The dif-
ference is that in one case the brain event is caused by, or correlated
with, my desire to move my arm while in the latter it is only the out-
come, perhaps, of a direct electric stimulation of my brain. Nietzsche,
by contrast, denies that intentions are primarily distinct mental states
or events that precede the actions they cause and that, as their causes,
are only contingently connected with them. To think of intention that
way, he would argue, is yet another separation of the doer from the
deed, and it implies that there could be an intention that never leads,
even in principle, to the relevant action.8 The same separation occurs
if, for example, when I intend to tell you I like you but only manage
to sound ambivalent, we understand my action simply as a failure to
say what I wanted to say: on such an understanding, I do actually like
7
The case has been forcefully made by Pippin (2006, 2010). I have presented such a view of
action, applied primarily to the interpretation of literature, in Nehamas (1987). Needless to
say, any such approach to action must also account for the many cases of the failure of
action to fulfil the right intention.
8
See, for example, Davidson (1978).

doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9264.2010.00287.x
youI am, despite my failure, still the person who likes youand I
need to find a better way of expressing myself. If the intention,
though, is in the action, it is in fact expressed in my words, and so am
I: I turn out to be what my words indicate, the person who actually
has ambivalent feelings toward you and I need to consider whether to
acknowledge that fact and live with it or, if possible, to change my
attitudeand myselfin the appropriate way.
Thinking of behaviour expressively indicates that with actions
more complex than moving an arm or a fingercases as popular in
philosophical and neurophysiological discussions as they are un-
common (when you think about it) in real lifeit is difficult to
know exactly what the action and its intention are until the action is
complete. The character of both can change even as the action is be-
ing performed. Think, for example, how you often have to say or
write something before you know whether you believe it or not, or
how you find out what movie you want (or dont want) to see only
after your friend makes a particular suggestion. And that is not to
mention actions as complex as writing a poem or, come to think of
it, this essay. These never begin with anything more than a relatively
hazy idea of their purpose and character. To say that my intention in
this essay was to show that friendship is a good is only to say that I
began with that very general notion, which, I hope, I have managed
to refine a bit in the process, my intention gradually becoming in-
separable from the essay I produce: I cant tell you exactly what I in-
tended without having you hear or read the piece. Moreover, every
step I took in that direction affected what I could intend to do next
in ways I couldnt possibly anticipate beforehand, and what I took
myself to be doing also kept changing as a result. Whatever my es-
say has turned out to be reveals the kind of agent, the kind of phi-
losopher, I am. My ideas emerge as I formulate them and my actions
acquire their character as I perform them: it is through them that I
become (and realize) who I am.
Our sense of a particular action, therefore, goes hand in hand
with our sense of the agent expressed in it: we must fit the action
into what we already know about that agent.9 We must therefore try
to see how it is affected by other things the agent has done and how
9
If we are interacting for the first time, we will have to depend on generic assumptions
about the kind of person we seem to each other to be. As we get to know each other better,
our assumptions will become more specific and often force us to revise our earlier under-
standing. But the situation is in principle the same no matter how intimate our relationship.

doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9264.2010.00287.x
it affects them in turn, and what we already know about that agent
may change in light of that new action. The relationship between
what we already know about people and what we see them do in
the present is hermeneutic, and establishing hermeneutic connec-
tions of that sort is the business of interpretation. And as a present
action, in affecting what took place earlier, may require its revision,
so a future action may require a revision of the present.10 The issue
is not purely epistemic. Consider, for example, a married man who
is seeing another woman. Exactly what the man is doing is not sim-
ply unknown but actually indeterminate before a certain time: if he
ends up going back to his wife, then it will have turned out that he
was having an affair all along; but if he marries the other woman,
then what he was engaged in may have been a search for his true
self. Until one of these outcomes occurs, there is no fact of the mat-
ter about what he was doing.11 Our actions are not only affected by
their past but by their future as well.
Accordingly, our understanding of intention and action is often
provisional. When it comes to complicated and interesting activities
the activities of art are an obvious caseit is impossible to have ac-
cess to an intention independently of interpreting the action or its
product in each case. That makes it impossible to appeal, say, to art-
ists intentions as a useful standard for measuring how successfully
their works fulfil theman old yet still pervasive view, recently given
new voice by Nel Carroll (2008). If artists, no less than other people,
come to know their intention on the basis of the work itself, their
statements concerning their intentions are essentially third-person ac-
counts of their work. They can still be used as evidence for or against
an interpretation but they cant possibly have the final authority in-
tentionalist critics like Carroll attribute to them. When, by contrast,
our understanding is not provisional, it is partial, generic, and unil-
luminating. Carroll is right to insist that we have no conceivable
grounds for doubting that Davids Oath of the Horatii was intended
to be a historical painting (Carroll 2008, p. 176). But that attri-
bution, too, is based on an interpretation of the work and not on an
independent retrieval of Davids intention. In any case, the intention
10
For details on this conception of interpretation, see Nehamas (1987; 2005; 2007,
pp. 12038) and the comments of Pippin (2010, pp. 1012).
11
See Williams (1993, pp. 456). I am grateful to Robert Pippin for helping me identify this
reference.

doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9264.2010.00287.x
to create an historical painting (and everything that follows from it) is

incapable of justifying a judgement regarding the works success.
And so, sadly perhaps, who I am is constituted not by unrealized
possibilities or unfulfilled plans but only by the possibilities I realize
and the plans I fulfil. Regret for what I did or didnt do is not guilt
for having chosen the wrong path within a field of alternative possi-
bilities but the painful realization that in acting as I did I revealed
that I was inferior to what I had supposed or hoped I was: it is a
species of shame.12 On this conception, my action succeeds not be-
cause it fulfils the intention that prompted it but because I can see
myself (that is, the self I want to be) in it. To see myself in it, though,
I need, as I have said, to take account not just of that action itself,
but also of my other actions past and future, my character, my histo-
ry and even my place within a social tradition. And since I have no
privileged access to my intentions, my action can be successful only
if others can in principle also see it in similar terms, through a proc-
ess of continual readjustment: I havent performed the action,
havent volunteered for the mission, say, if nothing I do is under-
stood by others as such an act (Pippin 2006, p. 140).
So if intention is not the cause of action, what is it? Very often, as
Richard Moran and Martin Stone have argued, we appeal to inten-
tion in order to explain action by locating it within a larger action in
progress (Moran and Stone 2010, p. 146).13 Suppose I ask why you
are packing: you might reply either I am going to Boston or Be-
cause I intend to go to Boston. Both answers explain what I am do-
ing by showing that it is part of such a larger action, the difference
between them being that in the first case going to Boston, the objec-
tive of the action, is taken to be more a matter of course than in the
second. That, I think, is true and illuminating and applies even to
many of the questions we ask about works of art: Why are the satyrs
in Botticellis Venus and Mars (Fig. 3) playing with Marss spear?
12
What I am trying to describe is close to, though not identical with, what Bernard Williams
(1981, pp. 27ff.) has called agent regret. Pippin (2006, p. 143) notes that it fits well with
Nietzsches use (1968b, p. 519) of Spinozas account of remorse as the opposite of glad-
ness (Spinoza 1985, iii.18. Sch. ii, p. 505), although I am not certain that Nietzsches read-
ing of Spinoza is correct.
13
Moran and Stone make a stronger claim: they think that all expressions of intention
have that function. I am not certain, though, that such a model applies to the much more
complicated actions involved, say, in artistic (though not only in artistic) activity. Moran
and Stone are silent on that matter because they consider artistic intentions to require sep-
arate treatment and do not discuss them here (Moran and Stone 2010, p. 165 n.30). See
also Davidson (1963, pp. 910).

doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9264.2010.00287.x
Because Botticelli is showing (intended to show) Mars disarmed, in

every sense of the term, after making love to Venus. In the first in-
stance, this answer redescribes the satyrs activity and, in so doing, it
allows us to see it as part of the product of a larger action, which in-
cludes Marss slack pose and his imperviousness to the horn that is
blowing in his ear. But we could also ask a more general question:
Why did Botticelli paint Venus and Mars? That question, in turn,
can be understood in at least two ways. If we are asking why Botti-
celli painted an erotic picture, the answer will be Because he was
commissioned to produce a painting for a patrons bedroom, which,
once again, places his action within a larger one. But if we are asking
why Botticelli painted this particular picture when many other erotic
subjects, or different treatments of the same subject, would do, the
answerif Because he could is not enoughwill have to be more
complex. It will have to show, by means of pointing out things like
the satyrs playing with Marss spear, exactly what the painting Bot-
ticelli produced is; in so doing, it may also show how good a paint-
ing it is and simply in virtue of showing that it will also show why
Botticelli painted it: what further reason could we want?
In many cases, then, to specify the intention with which an action is
performed is to give as detailed a specification of the action itself as
possible. It is not, as we usually say, to specify an independent object
that the action means (even if it is a failure) but what the action itself
fully and exactly is. That may be an unreachable goal: an action is
specified fully only relative to the information we already have and
the extent of our interest, and both can change. The interpretation,
and the nature, of our actions can always be contested and there are
no neutral criteria for getting it right (the humanities and many of the
human sciences would be by now long dead otherwise). Some ac-
tions, of course, are not worth contesting, while otherswalking up-
right, casually greeting acquaintances, driving to my officeseem
unsuited for self-expression. But that is only because we sometimes
assume that self-expression displays only features that are peculiar to
me and not shared with many others. In fact, though, self-expression
is rarely that far-reaching: in many, perhaps most, cases it reveals the
countless ways in which we are similar to the people around us.
Still, we take our differences, such as they are, very seriously.
Now from one point of view everyone is different from everyone
else; our personal histories, in their particularity, make us all (as we
say) unique. But in so far as such differences are necessary ele-

doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9264.2010.00287.x
ments in everyones life, they are not on their own, despite the best
efforts of American elementary education, grounds for pride or joy.
In themselves, that is, differences dont count. The differences that
count are those that literally make a difference, features that distin-
guish us from others in interesting, admirable, or even contemptible,
but in any case remarkable, ways. Here, friendsclose friends
make a difference that counts. Perhaps Aristotle was right when he
said that to live alone one has to be either a god or a beast (Ni-
etzsche added their combination: a philosopher).
To see Aristotles point, we must reject not only his restriction of
friendship to men, as philosophy has already done, but also his re-
striction of it to adults, as, unlike sociology or social psychology, it
has not. When C. S. Lewis (1988, p. 77) described friendship as a
relationship that is almost wholly free from jealousy, he must have
been thinking only of the most idealized adult relationships. He cer-
tainly left the obvious and intense pain that broken friendships
cause children and teenagers (and not only them) completely out of
account. But why should being deserted by a friend provoke the
sharp pangs of jealousy or the dull pain of dejection? Not simply, I
think, because of the loss of a playmate, a schoolyard ally, a theatre
companion, or a tennis partner, and not because of the loss of a
secret sharer or someone in whom, as in a mental mirror, we might
be able to see what we couldnt see of ourselves on our own. At the
core of such grief lurks the anguish provoked by a deeper, more per-
vasive abandonment, a rejection not merely of what we have done
but of what we are. We dont just love our friends for themselves:
we also leave them for themselvesnot just for their behaviour but
for what their behaviour shows about the kind of person they are
which is why What have I done wrong? is always the wrong ques-
tion. And the reason is partly that, as Lewis in this instance was
right to observe, Friendship must exclude (1988, p. 86).
If I say These are my friends, I imply These are not. That is most
obvious in the friendships of children and adolescents, where it can
lead to crassness and cruelty, but it applies to every other friendship
as well. Our friendships make us different from the others and
many differences that are essential to each one of us emerge through,
and only through, our friendships. So when my friend abandons me,
she doesnt only reject me but also what both of us have become
through our relationship. She rejects my part in what she is, and that
is why saying Its not you, its me is never any consolation.

doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9264.2010.00287.x
Recall, now, the fact that much of what friends do together is un-
important or commonplace. Speaking that way is not exactly wrong:
it is like saying that for most of the people in the schoolyard that
morning Toms behaviour was just eccentric, which is also not exact-
ly wrong. To me, however, what he did was an expression of the gen-
erosity, independence, practicality and willingness to help that only
he can display. If someone else had been there instead and, as it hap-
pened, duplicated Toms behaviour (pyjamas and raincoat included),
I would have seen something else again. And what I actually saw did
not simply confirm what I already knew about Tom because, al-
though I knew he was generous, the generosity in his action was in-
separable from it; it was his particular way of being generous,
which could only be described by describing as exactly as possible
what he did on that rainy morning. That was something I could nev-
er have even imagined beforehand; for example, I would never have
thought him less generous had he not come out of the car at all.
What others may perceive as a more or less isolated action and in-
terpret on the basis of limited evidence, connecting it to the little they
know about the agent, friends understand in terms of everything they
know about each other. As their relationship continues, their actions
unfold and get connected to still other actions in light of which they
are reinterpreted. Their new understanding, in turn, can reveal still
other ways of both acting and understanding that, once followed,
again affect the action and the interpretation of its purpose, and so on
without an end that is externally imposed. What my action is, what it
expresses, and who I am are all in flux and come to be together.
But since others also have a hand in understanding my action,
they can affect both what I do and how I understand it, and so what
I am likely to become. The more intimate we are with them, the
more influential their view of me will bewhich is why we are told
to choose our friends with caution. Friends are by no means the
only people who can affect me, but the closer they are to me the
larger the body of knowledge they bring to their interpretation,
which implicates more aspects of myself and affects me more exten-
sively. What I become, therefore, is very much their doing and the
less settled I am in myself, the greater their contributions and the
more pervasive their influence. It is here that we can learn from the
friendships of children, particularly from the ease with which chil-
dren, adolescents and, to an extent, young adults make new friend-
ships compared to older people. We usually attribute that phenome-

doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9264.2010.00287.x
non to the growing professional and family obligations one

accumulates with age, but there is more to it than that.14 A crucial
factor, in my opinion, is that since we are considerably more
changeable in youth, when different identities are practised in front
of different audiences (Pahl 2000, p. 112), than we eventually be-
come, friendship comes easily while we are young. New friendships
necessarily bring with them the prospect of serious change, and the
more settled we are in ourselves the less we are willing or able to
confront that prospect.15
Friends have a privileged role in this lifelong process of self-con-
struction not because they are good people or wise or generous, but
because we love themlove them not just for what we know them
to be, but also for what they will become and how they will then af-
fect us. We expect from them help with our current needs, desires
and plans, but, more important, we give them the power to lead us to
need, desire, and plan things that we cant possibly anticipate. The
formation of the self begins at birth, open at first to a myriad of pos-
sibilities, and gradually narrows down. And although it is never, and
perhaps should never be, completed, in the life of many there comes
a time when one, knowingly or not, declines to pursue it further.
That is why it is important not to think of intention primarily as a
mental state that precedes and causes action and provides a stand-
ard for evaluating an actions success. Where that is possible, the ac-
tion is bound to express something simple, which the agent would
have known beforehand. David certainly knew that he intended to
compose a historical painting about the oath of the Horatii, but,
like any painter, he couldnt have known just what painting he
would end up composing. That was something that he had to nego-
tiate, each stroke of his brush foreclosing, and at the same time
creating, unforeseen possibilities. It is not just the existence of
pentimenti in so many paintings or Prousts obsessive revisions of
the manuscript of In Search of Lost Time that show that to be the
case. Even in the most smoothly executed worksin the most
smoothly performed actionsfeedback loops between ones con-
ception of what one is doing and what one actually does are con-
14
For the view that friendship becomes more difficult for the middle-aged because of their
many obligations, see Blieszner and Adams (1992, pp. 478).
15
Compared to a random-choice model, adults show a clear preference (strong bias) for
people with similar social and demographic characteristics and the less similar two people
are, the less like they are to become close friends (Verbrugge 1997).

doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9264.2010.00287.x
stantly affecting the direction, and so the nature, of both.

That is also what the interaction of friends, even when it seems
banal and commonplace, accomplishes. Friendship provides (in dif-
ferent degrees, depending on how close a relationship is) a place
where one can try, not necessarily consciously, new ways of being
of acting, feeling and thinking. The palpable sense of comfort that is
characteristic of spending time with a friend springs from the aware-
ness that one is in a safe haven where it is possible to strike out in
new directions without knowing what the final destination will be.
Such activity presupposes that one does not begin already knowing
what is to be accomplished, for that (when, ironically, it is success-
ful) can never lead to something genuinely new. Climbing Mount
Everest, once Edmund Hillary showed that it was humanly possible,
is still no mean feat, but it is no longer the stuff of legend, which is
why those who attempt it often try to accomplish it in a slightly dif-
ferent mannerfaster, for example, or without bottled oxygen.
Still, their accomplishments describe epicycles.
To become what one is, Nietzsche writes, one must not have the
faintest notion what one is (1968a, p. 710). That is not to say that
what we become is independent of us, governed by forces over
which we have no control. His point is that if we already know
what we are, we will not become what we are but what someone
else, more or less, has already become. This process doesnt have an
explicit, antecedent goal: it occurs step by step and, if we are strong,
gifted, committed, and lucky enough, it ends in a new place that
also makes a difference. When Nietzsche adds, Meanwhile, the or-
ganizing idea that is destined to rule keeps growing deep down
[and] begins to command, he means neither that this idea is there
already nor that something other than me is engaged in that process.
It is, rather, that the idea emerges as the process unfolds, and can
now be understood as the goal of my efforts: The Oath of the
Horatii is in fact what David intended to create although he could
not have had that intention when he began his work.
The sense that our knowledge of our friends, and everyone we
love, is always provisional and incomplete is a constant incitement
to come to know them better.16 Knowledge, in this context, is not
16
Of course, our knowledge of everyone (and everything) is provisional and incomplete.
The difference is that with our friends, and every thing that we love, the sense that what we
dont yet know of them will be valuable and make our lives better supplies a reason to come
to know them better that is lacking in the case of others.

doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9264.2010.00287.x
passive: it changes both the knower and the known, and the further
we look into and reinterpret our friends, and so ourselves, the more
extensively we are likely to change. Life is a habit, says Frankie
Blue, the hero of Tim Lotts White City Blue, as the novel begins;
you do something, then you do it again, then again, and before you
know it, thats what you are, and thats who you are, and you cant
imagine being anything or anyone else (Lott 1999, p. 2). But
Frankie doesnt yet know that he is about to fall in love with one
person and to reaffirm an old friendship with another and so be-
come able to acknowledge a painful truth in his past and a joyful
one in his present, which make it possible for him to imagine for a
moment that he might not remain, as he has been so far, forever
Frank the Fib.
Friendship, in short, is a mechanism of individuality; artmore
generally, everything that we find beautiful and to which, to some
extent or another, we abandon ourselvesis another (Nehamas
2007). They spark the need to come to know people and things as
intimately as possible, in their particularity, and understand just
what makes them different from every other thing. They highlight
distinction, they promote variety and differentiation, and that is
where their value lies. But they pull in a direction opposed to that of
morality. Morality demands that we treat every human or rational
agent fairly and impartially. In practice, that means that we should
try to extend such treatment to as many people as possible. That ef-
fort demands significant changes on both our parts. We cant as-
sume that people mistreat one another only because of ignorance or
irrationality, that they can always, at least in principle, be convinced
to change their ways: as Bernard Williams once asked, What will
the professors justifications do, when they break down the door,
smash his spectacles, take him away? (Williams 1985, p. 23).17 Our
affections need to change as well. Many significant moral and social
developments have occurred not so much because their proponents
convinced the world with their arguments but because (to cite two
parochial examples), as more women entered the workplace and
more homosexuals began to live openly, the others got used to their
presence and some of them gradually became able to treat them
with trust and respect. The net result of such changes is the creation
of common psychological, institutional and cultural ground be-
17
See also Rorty (1993).

doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9264.2010.00287.x
tween usthey make us more similar to one another than we used

to be, and that is where their value lies.
The values of morality promote our commonalities. But they are
not the only values there are, despite the moralism that permeates
both academic thought and the broader public and confuses even
professional courtesy and etiquette with ethics. Respect, duty and
obligation are not the only foundations of value. There are also val-
ues arising out of admiration and love, which impel us to look for
and establish differences from one another and set us on a singular
path through the world.18 Inevitably, that path and the path of mo-
rality will on occasion diverge: it is then by no means always clear
which path to follow.
As long as I am on the path of admiration and love, however, I
am engaged in trying to see how things are different from each oth-
er, and in so far as I manage to see something in its particularity, I
see something that is nowhere else in the worldsomething that
can only be expressed through that particular thing and nothing
else.19 My friends stand out against the rest of the world of my ac-
quaintance and make, to me at least, a difference that counts: they
are, to that extent, individuals. Since, when I see my friends in their
actions, I depend on our history together and I see something no one
else sees, I too am, to that extent, an individual. If another friend
had been in the schoolyard with me that day, our reactions to Tom
would have probably overlapped, but, since our histories together
would be different, they would also display some significant differ-
ences. That, according to C. S. Lewis, was Charles Lambs point
when he remarked (somewhere, Lewis says) that if one of three
friends (A, B, and C) should die, B loses not only A but also As part
in C, while C loses not only A but also As part in B: In each of my
friends there is something that only another friend can truly bring
out (Lewis 1988, p. 61).
Our lives and the lives of our friends interpenetrate, the more so
the closer we are, and they develop in ways made possible only by
our relationships with one another. If I and someone else are both
your friends, and love you for yourself, the self each of us loves is
bound to be at least a little different. Love of any sort depends not
18
See the excellent discussion of values that belong to this category, as opposed to values
that are strictly moral, in Railton (2010).
19
That is the central thesis of Nehamas (2007).

doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9264.2010.00287.x
only on what its object is like, but also on who the lover happens in
each case to be. And so to say, as we do, that I love you for yourself
is only a half-truth. The full truth is in Montaignes famous non-
explanation: If you ask me why I love you, I can only say, Because
it was you, [and also] because it was I.20
Department of Philosophy
Princeton University
Princeton, nj 08544
usa
nehamas@princeton.edu
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20
I am grateful to the many audience to which I have presented this paper in various forms
for their criticisms and suggestions. The paper itself is, very roughly, the core of a longer,
book-length project on friendship, and that may account for (some of) the casual manner in
which I treat several very complex issues.

doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9264.2010.00287.x
2004: Pontormo and Bronzino in Philadelphia. In Strehlke 2004b,

pp. 133.
and Charles Dempsey 1996: Nicolas Poussin: Friendship and the Love
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Meeting of the Aristotelian Society held at Senate House, University

of London, on 10 May 2010 at 4:15pm.

XIITHE GOOD OF FRIENDSHIP

Problems with Friendship and Its Representations. Around the year

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about with considerable accuracy on the basis of their visual fea-

Figure 1 Jacopo da Pontormo, Portrait of Two Friends, c.1522.

We couldnt. Nothing that depends on the visual features of

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Figure 2 Caravaggio, Judith Beheading Holofernes, 15989.

There is another problem as well. Friendship is manifested only

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Sandro Botticelli, Venus and Mars, c.1483. National Gallery, London.

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through which a friendship is manifested, if they are to serve their

Mark Polizzotti, the novels most recent translator, disagrees: Bor-

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petitiveness is a huge part of its comic effect. Although that strikes

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their friendships, which are unalloyed goods, are therefore exceed-

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wishes his friend to prosper, because he recognizes his good charac-

Virtue? Excellence? Distinction? No, only two trivial characters,

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beautiful, elegant, kind, generous, intelligent, imaginative, open,

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dont know? It is also exactly what underlies talk of loving our

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Nothing assures me that my feeling or judgement is right and that I

The Good of Friendship. The path to an answer begins in an unlike-

Nietzsche here charges Christianity, whose origins he traces to a re-

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[into] a voluntary achievement, willed, chosen, a deed, a meritori-

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to create an historical painting (and everything that follows from it) is

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Because Botticelli is showing (intended to show) Mars disarmed, in

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non to the growing professional and family obligations one

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stantly affecting the direction, and so the nature, of both.

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tween usthey make us more similar to one another than we used

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Acampora, Christa Davis (ed.) 2006: Nietzsches On the Genealogy of Mor-

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2004: Pontormo and Bronzino in Philadelphia. In Strehlke 2004b,

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Pahl, Ray, 2000: On Friendship. Cambridge: Polity Press.

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