Heidegger, Augustine, Smith, Friendship, and the rest

Who we could be, if friends

This post is part of an ongoing slow-reading James K.A. Smith’s On the Road with Saint Augustine, in case you needed some orientation to this post.

Heidegger

Smith begins his chapter on Augustine and Friendship with a deep dive, or long digression, through Heidegger. Heidegger is the one who is basically responsible (on Smith's account anyway) for giving rise to the modern quest for authenticity, for existentialism, and for a whole bunch of other things. The way Heidegger sets up the world, there is this "They" das Man, who is/which is the mass of humanity around us, society and culture, and their impositions upon us. And so, to assert myself against they, I do exactly not what they do. (The irony of late-capitalism is that every alternative to they is inhabited by yet another they, and so there is simply no real unique, authentic individualism. I am just buying a different package of rebellion, or conformity under a different label.) But Heidegger isn't there yet, neither is Sartre. Sartre really thinks you can somehow assert the individual against other people. And it's all or nothing. Sartre's freedom is not only absolute, it's tyrannical; it can receive no gifts, suffer no subjection.

Augustine

Smith traces Heidegger's negative construal of intersubjectivity to his reading of Augustine. And, indeed, it's there for the finding (in both Heidegger's writing on Augustine, and in Augustine himself). I happen to be reading Confessions at the moment, and so indeed when Augustine writes of the infamous pear incident, the transgression is a communal activity, "alone I would not have done it"; others draw us into vice. They are not true (Aristotelian) friends because no true friendship can exist with those who lead us away from virtue.

The serendipity of reading

One of the things about reading a lot of stuff (which is so 2023) is that you end up making connections between books, the whole vast conversation that the books are having in the library when you're not there. And sometimes that brings up surprising serendipities. Here we are, merry reading along in Smith's book, and he begins to describe the feeling you get when you're playing frisbee with two other people, and then suddenly they start passing it only to each other. Hold on, I think to myself, that sounds very familiar. Sure enough, there's a reference to Kipling D. Williams' work. Not to his book, which I read late last year, but to one of his studies. Williams formulated his basic ostracism treatment based on his own frisbee experience in a park with two strangers, who included him in a game for a while, and then shut him out; he then replicated this in his studies by having two fake-participants throw a ball between them and a third, real, participant, and then the two exclude the third.

Right at this point in Smith's chapter, he brings this story up as a way of addressing the topic of loneliness, and the human need for others. We fundamentally need other people. Humans are intersubjectivists.¹ But loneliness, and the oft-touted (and real) loneliness epidemic is the product of the modern world, the Taylorian "buffered self", our quest for a self without others has created a hunger we can never feed.

What if authenticity is the source of our loneliness? What if it’s precisely this unquestioned, unrecognized construal of others as threats to my freedom and autonomy that has sequestered us? Is authenticity worth it? Or could we imagine authenticity otherwise? (p. 130)

Augustine on amicitia

Whereas Heidegger "fixated on Augustine's portraits of inauthentic friendship", there is more to the picture. In Augustine we find genuine friendship too, of the Aristotelian kind. Smith points us to Confessions book 8, where friends keep popping up as the means by which God, the friend par excellence, draws Augustine towards himself. Simplicianus, Victorinus, Ambrose, Ponticianus, Alypius, each serves as an exemplar or a pointer towards who Augustine could be, dare we call it "his best self".

These friends are friends to Augustine, not because they come with affirming praise, but because they love Augustine enough to bring him face-to-face with himself, with who he is not, and unapologetically hold up a substantive vision of who he is called to be. A friend is not an enabler; love doesn’t always look like agreement. (p.133)

The true friend is the other who hopes you’ll answer the call, who’s willing to challenge you and upset you in order to get you to look at yourself and ask yourself: What am I doing? What do I love? Who am I? The true friend is the other who has the courage to impose a conviction, who paints a substantive picture of the good, who prods and prompts you to change course and chase it—and promises to join you on the way. (p.134)

I was reading something somewhere that touched upon this, that one of the problems of modern friendship and the loneliness epidemic is that we've functionally turned friendship into a transactional relationship. Whereas in a past age, you might just take the friends you've got, and stick with them through thick and thin, buy and build houses together, tackle life's adversities, etc.. But now, our way to tackle a lot of adversity is to commercialise our ability to deflect, avoid, overcome; and we value our friends by what they bring to the metaphorical table. When they cease to be useful, relationally or emotionally, we trade them in. Part and parcel of this becomes an inability to hear any criticism from them. If they're not affirming my truest self, they are haters and I cut those toxic people from my life.

Back to Heidegger

Smith presents Heidegger's two ways of being with others: leaping in and leaping ahead. The one who leaps in, comes to fix and alleviate and remove your burden by removing your freedom.

The friend who leaps ahead is one who’s glimpsed what you’re called to be and is willing to let you be uncomfortable as you wrestle with the call, who loves you enough to let you struggle for your soul but is standing by with a bandage and a map. p.135.

And such is Alypius to Augustine, in his moment of most decisive crisis and ultimate conversion.

Friendship is staying close enough to put a hand on their shoulder while giving them enough room to feel the weight. In a way, Alypius is an icon of the community of friendship that is the church. The church will fail at this in a million ways. And yet the church is still one of those places, in spite of itself, where you can count on people to be an Alypius for you: present, listening, leaving you room but not leaving you. p.136

The quest for the authentic self, over against others, is doomed to failure; it’s the Sartrean original sin, Lucifer’s rebellion perhaps more than Adam’s. To be, is to be in community, but to be in a community of grace is to be towards the friend beyond all friends, the one who truly makes us good, makes us who we were always meant to be. And yet, the journey there is a journey made with fellow travellers, friends of the good who are friends along the way.

Photo by Yoal Desurmont on Unsplash

1. That is not really the point of Williams' research, but I think it's a corollary. Ostracism hurts because it denies our humanity, because other humans refuse to recognise us as humans.