Emerson’s “Friendship” is a philosophical essay about the ideal form of human interaction. The essay contrasts the superficial relationships that people tend to define as friendships with the profound connections that truly deserve the name. As in his essay “Self-Reliance,” Emerson proclaims in “Friendship” that most human interactions are a distraction from what is meaningful in life, yet at the same time the essayist offers a model of friendship that builds and enhances solitude, and helps “dignify” the “drudgery” of mundane life with “the rhyme or reason” of philosophy.
Like many of Emerson’s essays, “Friendship” begins with a long poetic epigraph that summarizes the essence of the work to come. Declaring that a drop of “manly blood” weighs more than the “surging sea,” the speaker of the poem explains that as the “world uncertain comes and goes,” the “lover,” or friend, stays constant. The speaker describes how, even though his friend was gone, his “unexhausted kindliness” continued to improve his life. The speaker addresses his friend, telling him that “all things through thee take nobler form”—that his friendship filters the way he sees the world. The speaker goes so far as to suggest that the “fountains of my hidden life”—his spiritual life—“[a]re through thy friendship fair.” This epitaph summarizes Emerson’s theory of friendship as a deep and constant relationship in the midst of the flux of the social and natural world, a relationship that, due to mutual admiration and respect, enhances and even “dignifies” the lives of both friends. Each friend should be a model or ideal of thought and behavior for the other.
In the essay that follows, Emerson insists that there is an unspoken sympathy that brings people together: a basic human connection that can unite even complete strangers and make them feel “affection” for one another. The relationships one forms with other people not only bring pleasure, but also inspire one to act well—so as to give a good first impression, for example—and even to think well, such as when a scholar thinks through a problem in a letter to a friend.
Friendships cannot be made—this “affection” cannot be forced. Friends are people who recognize in one another the presence of the “Deity” that animates nature. This means that one may find friends in unlikely places, and also that friendship will not necessarily take the shape that most people expect. The laws of friendship are “austere and eternal,” and friends should not be overly close, Emerson writes. There is an “infinite remoteness” that separates people from the world and from others; friendship is about profound communion of souls, not about the petty pleasures that defined the kind of high society of which Emerson was an uncomfortable member.
True friendship requires “sincerity”—complete honesty, such as one practices when entirely alone—and “tenderness,” a basic and real affinity between two people, not motivated by mere politeness or any ulterior motive such as social advancement. True friendship is therefore uncommon, requiring a “rare mean betwixt likeness and unlikeness” that allows people to at once feel a spontaneous affinity as well as a respect, even fear, for a friend as a formidable, independent, and fundamentally equal individual. Friends may enjoy deep conversation, in which there is “an absolute running of two souls into one,” while also remaining strangers “in a thousand particulars.” Just as a gemstone must be held at a distance to be fully appreciated, so must a friend remain at a distance to be appreciated and admired as an individual whose life is as big and complex as one’s own, a true companion in life, rather than a source of pleasure or profit. Emerson compares his friends to books that he reads deeply and then puts away, only consulting them from time to time: an alternation between solitude and company with true friends allows him to benefit from the company of great souls while also living his own life to the fullest. He closes the essay by declaring that friendship is “entireness, a total magnanimity and trust,” and encourages the reader to recognize true friendship as something that will “deify both” oneself and one’s friend.
