Earthly Considerations (and How to Overcome Them)

The imaginary body.— To worship pleasure is to empower pain, which in turn is to elevate the body and its distractions to the status of self-identity. But if I am my body, then I do not exist, for the body is merely the soul’s imaginary postulate of a hypothetical space radically distinct from space in general. Body is real; my body is not. The opposite, we may say, is true of the soul. A soul is, among other things, a distinct subject that imagines itself as occupying this or that corresponding distinct space, which is to say that the soul hypothesizes itself into materiality.

Despair.– Hope has its purview or purpose within the material realm, for it is exclusively related to temporal matters — we hope for change, or we hope to prevent change. To devote ourselves to a hope, then, is to concede the premise that time is of our essence, and therefore that fulfillment is fundamentally a matter to be gained through endurance. Similarly, to lose hope is to conclude, on the basis of the same premise, that endurance will bring no reward. But time entails motion, and motion entails matter. Hence, hope and despair are subordinations of the soul to the body, which is to say of essence to imagination — playful or enthusiastic projections in the case of hope, confused or self-denying projections in the case of despair.

Being yourself.– A friend, as we moderns are wont to postulate, is a person with whom one can “be oneself,” by which we mean a person with whom one feels comfortable assuming no airs, playing no roles, and in general “letting one’s hair down.” We would do well, however, to ask why it was that we had put our hair up in the first place, and why, exactly, it is considered such a mark of closeness and intimacy that we should let it down.

It was not always so. For Plato, the deepest friendship expressed a kind of elevated, spiritualized erotic attachment in which the friends inspired one another toward man’s noblest and defining pursuits: beautiful conversations, beautiful virtues, beautiful ideas, on a path to wisdom. Aristotle, who wrote the most thorough philosophic treatise on the subject, defined friendship in the highest sense as the implausible and profound union of the proudest and most independent souls, a union whose essence is the desire that one’s friend may attain all the highest and most unqualified goods that one seeks for oneself — short of such goods as would make the friendship itself impossible, for to desire those goods for one’s friend would entail desiring to lose a true good (the friendship), a predicament Aristotle exemplifies with a hypothetical case in which of the friends becomes a god, and therefore too subtantially superior to his mere human counterpart to remain a friend any longer, true friendship depending on a reasonable measure of equality between the friends. The logical solution to this striking example — a solution unstated but implied by the example itself, and perhaps even its purpose — would be for both friends to become gods, thereby maintaining the approximate spiritual equality that Aristotle deems a necessary condition of friendship.

In other words, far from our modern idea of friends as people who feel free to relax, to be “comfortable in their skin,” and to “be themselves” together, for the greatest ancient theorists on human intimacy, friendship was rather the most aspirational or idealizing of all human connections. A friend, in the classical understanding, would be the individual who makes us most uncomfortable with our relaxed, familiar self, and most motivated to be more, to be better than the private thing we see in ourselves when we “let our hair down.” Hence Nietzsche, one of the rare moderns who understands this classical model of friendship to some degree, has his Zarathustra insist that the truest friend must also be capable of being the truest enemy, which is to say a constant and disquieting challenge to that weaker part of us that is inclined to feel, “I am enough just as I am.”

You do not want to put on anything for your friend? Should it be an honor for the friend that you give yourself to him as you are? But he sends you to the devil for that. He who makes no secret of himself, enrages: so much reason have you for fearing nakedness. Indeed, if you were gods, then you might be ashamed of your clothes. You cannot groom yourself too beautifully for your friend: for you shall be to him an arrow and a longing for the overman.¹Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Walter Kaufmann translation, First Part, “On the Friend.”

The friend, he argues, is precisely the one before whom we do not wish to reveal our most casual and relaxed self, but rather our most self-edited and aspirational self — friendship, he insists, echoing in his own accent the Aristotelian doctrine, is not the path to being oneself, but rather to self-overcoming. In this regard, Nietzsche’s view is utterly ancient.

So what does all this imply about us moderns, with our common notion of the friend as the person to whom we present, and desire to present, our most unedited and, as it were, unpresentable self? In fact, the implication highlights nothing less than a clear dividing line between ancient and modern thought, and specifically between ancient and modern psychology. This is the line that distinguishes man viewed as essentially a soul from man viewed as essentially a body. To locate human nature in our immaterial element (the ancient mode) is to define us according to our purpose, which is to say according to the highest object of our longing. To locate human nature in our material element, by contrast — and even the modern psychological keyword, consciousness, has come to mean nothing more than an epiphenomenon of our material interaction with our environment — is to define us according to our inertia. This perspective is the root of our modern psychological mantra of “authenticity” and “genuineness,” by which we mean identifying ourselves with what we imagine we are, rather than with what we desire to be. From which perspective it follows that an intimate acquantance is a person with whom we feel most comfortable revealing and wallowing in the current, unevolving aspect of ourselves, our material present in all its nihilistic weakness and folly, which we imagine to be our deepest truth, although it is in fact merely our lowest truth.

For the deepest truths, paradoxically, we must turn to the heights, specifically to the farthest aspirational distance of our soul’s vision, the longing for which firmly identifies our essence beyond the chaotic nothingness of our transient material moment, and rather in the insoluble mystery that answers to the soul’s intractable desire for beauty and purpose. Hence, friendship, as the ancients, along with the rarest of modern outliers, understand that term, is not a “comfort zone” of the easy and reassuring — in other words, a mere idealization of the crowd — but instead quite the opposite, namely a call to the freedom of self-transcendence and eternity, a call audible only to those with something within them that is independent and strange enough to respond without fear to the unfamiliar and challenging, which is to say to the noblest part of themselves.