Montaigne's "On Friendship"
Sharing a beautiful passage on platonic love, romantic love, and the synthesis of the two.
Since taking a course on early modern philosophy in the winter, I have been focused on understanding the distinction between romantic and platonic love. If you think the distinction between the two categories is an obvious one, I encourage you to read my earlier post on the matter here. (It’s anything but!)
Anyway, since my younger brother’s literary advice has never failed me, I decided to finally get around to reading Michel de Montaigne’s short essay on friendship.1 Little did I know that Montaigne would venture to distinguish friendship from other types of love. He does so principally in the following passage:
As for comparing with it the affection that we feel for women, though this is born of our own choice, it cannot be placed in the same class. Its flame, I admit, is more active, hotter, and fiercer. But it is a reckless and fickle flame, wavering and changeable, a feverish fire prone to flare up and die down, which only catches us in one corner. In friendship there is a general and universal warmth, temperate, moreover, and uniform, a constant and settled warmth, all gentleness and smoothness, with no roughness or sting about it… [Friendship] is enjoyed even as it is desired; it is bred, nourished, and increased only by enjoyment, since it is a spiritual thing and the soul is purified by its practice.
If that description of friendship doesn’t strike a chord somewhere deep in your soul, I don’t know what will. But is Montaigne right that the affection we feel for women—romantic love—must be “reckless and fickle”?
I certainly hope not!
Montaigne has similar aspirations:
If such a free and voluntary relationship could be established in which not only the soul had its perfect enjoyment [friendship], but the body took its share in the alliance also [romance], and the whole man was engaged, then certainly it would be a fuller and more complete friendship.
Unfortunately, Montaigne erroneously claims that “there has never yet been an example of a woman’s attaining to this.”
I hate to break it to Montaigne, but he just didn’t find the right lady; rare though it may be for any gender to achieve, the union between two people in friendship and romance is possible. Despite not experiencing it himself, Montaigne is correct in deducing that such a relationship would constitute “a fuller and more complete friendship.”
I hope that my readers are experiencing such a full and complete friendship, will do so, or, at the very least, have experienced such a relationship, as I have.
Montaigne was also recommended to me by another brilliant person whose opinions I value.