Abstract
The sages of friendship are found in the most unlikely of places. Take Friedrich Nietzsche. This nineteenth-century philosopher spoke in the language of fire and ice, proclaimed the death of God, and created the character of Zarathustra who wanders alone in mountains and deserts. If people know one thing about Nietzsche’s life, apart from the fact that he went mad, it might be that he fell out with his sometime mentor and friend Richard Wagner. The split was of operatic proportions. So to most, including those philosophers who have studied his work, he is not readily associated with the affectionate spirit of amity.
‘Most friendship is feigning.’
William Shakespeare
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Further Reading and References
The quotes from Nietzsche in this chapter come from three books, unless otherwise stated. A more or less complete list of his aphorisms on friendship in this middle period is:
Human, All Too Human Volume I, 354, 368, 376, 378, 390, 406, 499; Volume II, 241, 242, 251, 259, 260.
The Gay Science Book 1, 14, 16; Book 2, 61; Book 4, 279, 328; Book 5, 364, 366; and from the Prelude, Rhymes 14 and 25.
Daybreak Book 4, 287, 313; Book 5, 489.
Ruth Abbey puts them into academic context in her article ‘Circles, Ladders and Stars: Nietzsche on Friendship’, in The Challenge to Friendship in Modernity, edited by Preston King and Heather Devere, published by Frank Cass (2000).
To read more of Kant’s view see ‘Of Friendship’ from Lectures on Ethics translated by Peter Heath and J. B. Schneewind, published by Cambridge University Press (1997).
The article by Giorgio Agamben, entitled ‘Friendship’, is published in the online journal Contretemps, 5 (December 2004).
Proust’s attitude to friendship is examined in Duncan Large’s ‘Proust on Nietzsche: the Question of Friendship’, Modern Language Review, 88/3 (July 1993): 612–24.
For more on Stanley Cavell’s thoughts his Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: the Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism (University of Chicago Press, 1991) is a good place to start.
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© 2010 Mark Vernon
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Vernon, M. (2010). Faking It. In: The Meaning of Friendship. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-27535-5_4
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