Sex is an overworked topic in the opinion page of The Daily Princetonian, and I am loath to contribute to the mania. But I think it is a worthwhile exercise to compare the Anscombe Society's recent manifesto in this paper with classics professor Alexander Nehamas GS '71's lecture of this past March on the Good of Friendship. Anscombe and Alexander may stand on opposite sides of an ideological chasm - I honestly don't know - but I do think they're attacking the same problem from opposite angles.
The Anscombe Society believes sex should not exist without love, and for that I applaud it: I disagree with important planks in its platform, but on this we can agree. Nehamas argued in his lecture - or, more accurately, assumed - that love can exist without sex, and for that I applaud him: On this we can agree. They are both in flat denial of the ethos of the 21st century, and on this we can all agree.
After delivering his lecture, Nehamas took questions from the audience, one member of which astutely observed that the professor had described friendship in such terms that it seemed indistinguishable from erotic love; and, could he, in fact, discern a difference between the two? "That's simple," Nehamas replied. "Lovers sleep together more often."
C.S. Lewis said something much the same in his classic "The Four Loves," when he offered his own, now-famous distinction between friendship and romance. "Lovers are normally face-to-face, absorbed in each other," he wrote. "Friends [stand] side by side, absorbed in some common interest." In the long, ferocious history of Western philosophy, this one sanctum seems inviolate: All philosophers, to the best of my knowledge, grant that friendship is a love and call it by that name.
Yet it seems strange, outside of a philosophy precept, to hear friendship so described. Our present culture is not, I think, accustomed to the idea that love can exist without sex. Graham Greene was performing very serious satire when he wrote in "The End of the Affair": "If two people loved, they slept together; it was a mathematical formula, tested and proved by human experience." This is what seems to most irritate the Anscombers - the argument that if two people have an interest in one another - be it of any degree - they do no wrong by sleeping with one another. And the Anscombers will not abide a loveless union, be it ever so pleasurable for the partners.
It isn't so far a stretch to see these positions as mirrors of one another: Nehamas represents the revolt of philosophy against a culture that has denied friendship any rank as a love, possibly because it has no physical manifestation. Anscombe, in its turn, rebels against a status quo that confuses morality with medicine and seems to have as its only ethical principle, "Thou Shalt Use Condoms."
Of course, when Nehamas talks about "friends," I don't think he has the facebook.com variety in mind: That's not the subject of Cicero's "De Amicitia." And I think that the casual use of the title "friend" in contemporary America and the concurrent devaluation of that relationship represents an impoverishment. This special type of relationship contributes to the human good, as Nehamas argued; with many references to Nietzsche that were, I should admit, often beyond my understanding. The ancients, for their part, called friendship "The School of Virtue" because in friendship we seek the good of another: We grow less selfish, less boastful, more patient and kind. It is the most natural study of them all.
Let it be very far from me to suggest that the majority of persons today do not have friends; what I mean to say is only that friendship as Nehamas represented it seems unusual, not nearly so common as the use of the word today could encompass. It is more along the lines of what we commonly call a "best friend:" the person with whom we are always seen, who has our confidence and steady affection. And if friendship is no longer understood in the same way, then it is hard to see how it can contribute in the same way to our lives. Which is not to say that the word must, or can, be restricted in its use; but that its first meaning, and value, should not be forgotten. For as C.S. Lewis wrote, "Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art ... it has no survival value; rather, it is one of the things which give value to survival."
Brendan Carroll is a freshman from New York, N.Y. He can be reached at btcarrol@princeton.edu.
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