Fame and Friendship
Enduring fame is either an emblem of vulgar vanity or an indication of past virtue. In either case, vanity or virtue, the remnant is generic, in that it can in no way reveal what is personal or individual in the doer, but rather, if anything, obscures it even more completely than the mists of time can obscure the person who remains “unaccomplished” and “unknown.” Hence, personal fame is fool’s gold, and the desire for it comical.
“But what about Plato, Dante, and Shakespeare?” you inquire. “Are they not preserved in their fame?” Quite the contrary. For who was Plato, by which I mean the private Athenian citizen who held the pen that wrote The Republic? What in the world was the true content of Dante Alighieri’s midnight thoughts, if any, about a girl named Beatrice whom he first saw when she was nine years old, and whom he barely knew? What, above all, do we know of an actor and small-time usurer named William Shakespeare, apart from the conundrum that his words indicate an understanding of the real feeling of human life from more angles than any man could experience in ten lifetimes?
“Plato,” “Dante,” “Shakespeare” — these are just convenient words we use to label bodies of written work that astound and improve us, because it pleases our nature to assume an individual person behind words. Indeed, there was an individual person in each case. Was, but is no more, for all practical purposes. Ask yourself what any of those men sounded like, what his handshake felt like, how he would have reacted to your praise or questions, or whether he would have voted for or against your party. In all cases, your answers, if you dared to propose any, would be just that: your answers, not theirs, whoever they were. We have their names. We do not have them. To the extent that any of these men sought lasting fame, then, they failed. Plato, at least, being the philosopher’s philosopher, tells us fairly directly that he did not seek it, and his dialogues support this, to the endless consternation of our more simplistic scholars. The Plato we know, to the extent that we know him, is the universal Plato, the Idea of the philosophic life if you will, not an individual man.
This is just as it ought to be. For we turn to the great men of the past not in search of personal and all-too-temporal idiosyncrasies, immediate comfort, and transitory gossip, but in search of true friendship; and a true friend, as Aristotle teaches, is your soul in another body, which is to say a second self, from which it follows that precisely what is accidental or inessential to friendship is the transitory and idiosyncratic “person.” Friendship’s essence is the soul’s self-discovery by way of an accurate mirror, or self-love expressed magnanimously as an emanating superabundance, an overflow of virtue. Thus it is not “the famous Greek man, Plato” whose words we read, if we are serious readers. It is rather a trace of our own noblest thoughts, which we have dared to cast into the farthest distance in hopes of hearing a slight echo, a faint hint of our immortality. From which it follows that if you can hear nothing at all from the valley of greatness, this only proves you have nothing to give; you are a poor friend.
