Coffee and Freedom

Themes: Freedom, Friends, Uncategorized

Final Step Cafe, Melbourne. Murphy Street, Toorak.
Double Ristretto. I only risk the double rist when great rewards are offered.
Probably the best I’ve ever had – the real deal.

It refused to be relegated to the background, to quietly shuffle to the corner of my consciousness behind the smells, sounds, emails, projects, intentions. It asserted itself like a neglected love: “I demand that you savour me.”
I surrender.

I’m not sure if I gave it my concentration, pouring myself into the cup, or whether the coffee extracted myself out of myself. But for a moment, delicious moment, such rich, salty, complexity. I was the house blend.

There is in fine coffee an innocence of excellence. In the earnest communion of coffee, one enters into a little sphere of freedom. Read Hannah Arendt, she knows what I’m talking about… A field in which necessity does not rule, of action, that redeems the worlds of Labour (generating the necessities of survival from our environment) and Work (producing a durable world capable of historical consciousness).

Our society is marked by a terrible drive toward necessity, to rationalisation and computation. But in the laneways it is still possible to find certain quiet men, usually bearded (after all nothing says ‘Damn Necessity!’ than luxuriant foliage upon the face), who pass earnest conversation hand to hand. Among them ephemerality, particularity, extravagant care, unnecessary beauty, and yes, freedom live on.
Perhaps waiting for the one who put such things in the world?

In our cups we will live.

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On the Gradual Production of Thoughts Whilst Speaking

Themes: Friends, Knowledge, Speech

I was emailed this beautiful little essay by the convenor of a workshop I’m participating in next week. It’s on the value of discussing ideas with others rather than trying to work things out alone. The final paragraph on the foolishness of examinations is a particular highlight.

Long-live the reading-group! Death to examinations!!

 

From Heinrich von Kleist, ‘On the Gradual Production of Thoughts Whilst Speaking, in Heinrich von Kleist, Selected Writings, edited and translated by David Constantine, London: J.M. Dent (1997), 405-9.

If there is something you wish to know and by meditation you cannot find it, my advice to you, my ingenious old friend, is: speak about it with the first acquaintance you encounter. He does not need to be especially perspicacious, nor do I mean that you should ask his opinion, not at all. On the contrary, you should yourself tell him at once what it is you wish to know.
…

[Using his sister as an the example of this practice]

[It is not] by skilful questioning she brings me to the crux of the matter, though that might often be the way to do it, I daresay. But because I do have some dim conception at the outset, one distantly related to what I’m looking for, if I boldly make a start with that, my mind, even as my speech proceeds, under the necessity of finding an end for that beginning, will shape my first confused idea into complete clarity so that, to my amazement, understanding is arrived at as the sentence ends. I put in a few unarticulated sounds, dwell lengthily on the conjunctions, perhaps make use of apposition where it is not necessary, and have recourse to other tricks which will spin out my speech, all to gain time for the fabrication of my idea in the workshop of the mind. And in this process nothing helps me more that if my sister makes a move suggesting she wishes to interrupt; for such an attempt from outside to wrest speech from its grasp still further excites my already hard-worked mind and, like a general when circumstances press, its powers are raised to a further degree…

It is a strangely inspiring thing to have a human face before us as we speak; and often a look announcing that a half-expressed thought is already grasped gives us its other half’s expression. [Bold is mine]

…

That a certain excitement of the intelligence is necessary even to revivify ideas we have already had is amply demonstrated whenever open-minded and knowledgeable people are being examined and without any preamble are asked such questions as: What is the state? Or: What is property? Things of that kind. If these young people had been in company and for a while the subject of conversation had been the state or property they would by a process of comparison, discrimination and summary perhaps with ease have arrived at the definition. But being wholly deprived of any such preparation they are seen to falter and only an obtuse examiner will conclude from this that they do not know. For it is not we who know things but pre-eminently a certain condition of ours which knows.

 

Only very commonplace intellects, people who yesterday learned by heart what the state is and today have forgotten it again, will have their answers pat in an examination. Indeed, there may be no worse opportunity in the world for showing oneself to advantage than a public examination. Besides the fact that it offends and wounds our sense of decency and incites us to recalcitrance to have some learned horsedealer looking into how many things we know who then, depending on whether they are five or six, either buys us or dismisses us: it is so difficult to play upon a human mind and induce it to give forth its peculiar music, it so easily under clumsy hands goes out of tune, that even the most practised connoisseeur of human beings, even he, not being acquainted with the one whose labour he is assisting at, may make mistakes. And if such young people, even the most ignorant among them, do most often achieve good marks this is because the minds of the examiners, if the examination is public, are themselves too embarrassed to deliver a true judgement. For not only do they themselves feel the indecency of the whole procedure: we should be ashamed to ask a person to tip out the contents of his purse before us, let alone his soul: but their own intelligences come under dangerous appraisal and they may count themselves lucky if they manage to leave the examination without having revealed more shameful weaknesses than the young finalist himself has whom they have been examining.

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Friendship and Asymmetry

Themes: Friends

Thesis: the biblical-canonical concept of friendship is not incompatible with radical different-ness between the friends. 

[This train of thought begins here and it part of a series I've been working on since last year. You can find earlier articles by searching for the theme 'friends']

The different-ness of friends can be seen more subtly when we seek to locate the character of biblical-canonical friendships against a broader background of biblical relations. The drama of the Old Testament takes place among a set of characters who are bound together, not by an act of originative free association, but as a family. Israel was begotten, not made. Early in the story, as the plot thickens, so does the blood. Over time the family becomes greatly extended, internecine conflicts erupt, the extended family becomes the dispersed family. But always with the memory that Israel is a family: with all the pre-structured obligations and responsibilities invoked by kin. When the biblical authors need to characterise the relationship of biblical characters, whether to lament or berate, enjoin or celebrate, they find brothers. The usage flows on into the New Testament, the shared participation in the ‘family of Abraham’ becoming one of the key sources (along with the Fatherhood of God) for the Christian practice of referring to co-religionists as ‘brother’ or ‘sister’.

To characterise a relationship as filial is to immediately imply mutuality, that the relationship has a symmetry. Either party could rightly be called the subject of the predicate ‘is my brother/sister’.¹ The biblical-canonical tradition also has plenty to say about other non-mutual, asymmetric relations like master/slave, father/son, etc. But if we consider the biblical-canonical descriptions of friendship, we find that they don’t map easily onto this taxonomy of mutual/non-mutual relations. Biblical-canonical friendship is capable of being quasi-mutual. Clearly, two men (or women?) are envisaged as being able to mutually address each other as ‘friend’. But in the outstanding narrative descriptions of friendship there is a significant reticence to predicate the relation mutually. Abraham is God’s ‘friend’, but the usage is never reversed: God is never Abraham’s friend. We find the same thing with Jesus and his disciples: we do not hear the words, ‘I am your friend, if you do what I command.’ It’s very safe to assume that in both these cases, this subtle lack of mutuality is due to the maximal ontological difference between the parties. As a result, it would be risky to apply this lack of mutuality straightforwardly to human/human friendships. But if it is fair to characterise these relationships as ‘friendship’, and the biblical authors press us in this direction, then our concept of friendship must expand to include a level of difference, of inequality between the friends, that could even result in friendship being asymmetrical, i.e., not having precisely the same quality as it flows from one party to the other.²

Could it even involve obedience?

 

 

Footnotes
1. It’s probably easier to see what I mean if we contrast mutual with asymmetric relations.  A master/servant relation is asymmetric: the master and the servant do not share the same relation to each other. A master and servant cannot change places without changing their relationship. A ‘brother’ or ‘neighbour’ relationship is one in which the parties are equally/mutually ‘brother’ or ‘neighbour’ to each other. This point shouldn’t be confused with the fact that in both asymmetric and mutual relations the parties can be mutually constitutive of each other, i.e., one cannot be ‘master’ without a servant, nor ‘brother’ without a brother.

↑
2. We must be careful not to overstate our claim at this point. Not every friendship must be founded upon the kind of radical difference presupposed by the Creator/creature divide, but the biblical-canonical history pushes us to recognise that equality, which forms the root of the pathological narcissism Derrida detects in the Western canonical concept – cannot be made an essential quality of friendship.↑

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The equal of his friends?

Themes: Friends

Thesis: the biblical-canonical concept of friendship is not incompatible with radical different-ness between the friends. 

Is equality between friends essential to the concept?

Consider Abraham the pilgrim, the one person in the whole length and breadth of biblical history who is known by the epithet ‘friend’. But whose friend?

But you, Israel, My servant, Jacob, whom I have chosen, descendant of Abraham, My friend (Isaiah 41:8 HCSB)

Are You not our God who drove out the inhabitants of this land before Your people Israel and who gave it forever to the descendants of Abraham Your friend? (2Chronicles 20:7 HCSB)

So the Scripture was fulfilled that says, Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him for righteousness, and he was called God’s friend. (James 2:23 HCSB)

Is there any question of equality between these two? Any possibility that they might mutually reflect each others’ greatness back, as in a mirror?

What about Moses, staggering out into darkness after a late night session in the Tent of Meeting, radioactive with the divine presence, spoken to ‘just as a man speaks with his friends’? Did Moses rejoice to see his power imaged in God?

And we have already traced the history of David and Jonathan. Those two who, though both firmly planted in the common soil of humanity, come from such very different fields: the heir of a kingdom, and a youngest son, whose inheritance could be measured in lambs.

It is of course, the echoes of different-ness which reverberate through, and make significant, Jesus’ description of Lazarus as ‘our friend’; And even more so, his deliberate  words to his disciples: ‘you are my friends’.

All these surprising friends! In most of these stories, we get the impression that the narrator reaches for the word ‘friend’ with a shake of the head and bemused expression. The Bible is basically silent on the question of whether friends should be equals, but it speaks volumes of wonderment on the subject of how different they can be. Even if we were to grant that within this history, friendship was normally regarded as between two equals (however that might be measured), the outstanding friendships, the places where the narrator nudges you and says, ‘check this out’, are friendships between two or more who can scarcely be thought together, let alone who belong talking face to face.

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The Friendship Hinge.

Themes: Friends

I’ve been plugging away at a series on ‘Friendship’ for quite a while now. I apologise for the pause and for the fact that this is a rather larger chunk of thought than usual. In a previous post, The Lord of His Friends, we discussed the difficult connection between friendship and obedience drawn by Jesus in John 15:14. “You are my friends if you do what I command”.

Jesus conceives of a compatibility between friendship and obedience which challenges the mutuality and equality at the heart of our received conception. Wouldn’t you be unsettled in the face of two ‘friends’, one of whom demanded obedience from the other? My instinctive reaction would be to try and persuade these two that they’ve misunderstood something about how friendship flows.

Faced by this, we can react in a number of ways: first, we could conceivably claim that Jesus has radically departed from and distorted the true meaning of the word ‘friend’ – that obedience is genuinely incompatible with the essential freedom that must obtain between individuals in friendly relation. But this is an unfriendly reading of Jesus’ words, not an interpretation open to anyone who has been washed with his hands.

Secondly, we could accept Jesus’ words as a true statement about friendship, but only inasmuch as it relates to friendship with him. Just as he is always Lord as Servant, and Servant as Lord, he is also, utterly uniquely, Lord/Servant as friend. Just because he is who he is, unlike any other, he is a friend unlike any other. And so, his Lordly friendship, while unquestionably friendship, cannot be the model for thinking about the kind of friendliness which might flow between us. The concept is too far transformed through contact with his person. But then, claiming us as friends, would Jesus leave us to our own devices to figure out what this means? Is he that unfriendly?

There might be a third way. Recognising there’s more than a little truth to the point above, perhaps we can plot our way forward by recognising that, with reference to himself, Jesus does work a variation on our generic understanding of friendship, but not in a way that runs against the grain of the concept. By this I mean that, while Jesus’ is a unique instance of friendship, he is still working within the implications and latencies of the term. Actually, this doesn’t do justice to who Jesus really is. I’d like to go even farther: as the Creative Word, the person through whom the Father brought the world into existence with all its patterns, orders, particulars, and concepts; and as the Creative Word, the original speaker and framer of language, Jesus Christ is the transcendental foundation of friendship. ‘Transcendental’ is a term (given its philosophical meaning by Immanuel Kant) to describe the foundational conditions upon which our experience of something depends, but which are not themselves capable of being directly experienced. For the purposes of our discussion, to claim that Jesus Christ is the ‘transcendental foundation of friendship’ amounts to saying this: we can never be Jesus, or have his relation to the world or his people, but God’s action toward the world in Christ, creating, loving, sustaining, redeeming, is the basis and frame for all our experience, including the experience of friendship. So we can’t rule out Jesus’ words and actions as irrelevant for our discussion of friendship, we also can’t simply make them paradigmatic in a way that ignores his uniqueness. We need to employ an ‘analogical’ method and pay careful attention to the lines of similarity Jesus draws between friendship with him and friendship with each other. We need to let Jesus speak and teach us. And we must also be careful to pay attention to the fact that he speaks throughout the whole biblical canon. Our analogical method is disciplined (analogies have a tendency to become feral) by attending to Jesus’ own usage of the concept, both in his incarnate words and actions, and as the Spirit interprets these words and actions to us through the rest of the Bible.

Before we move on, just to reassure you that I’m not plucking this concept of analogy out of the air, look back at Jesus’ words again:

This is My command: Love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, that someone would lay down his life for his friends. You are My friends if you do what I command you. (John 15:12–14 HCSB)

Do you notice the form of verse 13 (the middle sentence)? It’s very ‘general’ sounding, like a proverb or aphorism. In fact, as a proverbial-type saying, it doesn’t sound entirely unlike a passage in Aristotle. In the Nicomachean Ethics we read, “To a noble man there applies the true saying that he does all things for the sake of his friends… and, if need be, he gives his life for them.” (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1169a).

Jesus’ little proverb links together his action and attitude toward the disciples with their behaviour toward each other. The proverb crystallises the meaning of the ‘love’ command in verse 12 (‘love like the best kind of friend’). But in doing this, the proverb also extends the meaning of ‘friend-love’ by connecting it with Jesus’ own actions, saying in effect: No one has greater love than this, that someone would lay down his life for his friends, as I am doing for you. This is precisely the dramatic rhetorical effect of moving from the general proverb to the emphatic “You are my friends”. These three little verses are an analogical hinge, allowing us to connect Jesus’ friendship toward us with that which flows between us.

Jesus has more to say in this passage, and we must also look out at the wider biblical picture, but in principle, the path forward seems sound. We still need to puzzle out the relation between obedience and mutuality, but we can at least be confident that Jesus teaches us friendship.

Image by Pixelmaniac

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The Lord of his friends

Themes: Friends

Jesus turns to the men sharing his table, who have shared his life and been washed by his hands, and calls them ‘friends’. But what kind of friendship is it?

“You are My friends if you do what I command you.”

That sounds like a remarkably conditional form of friendship. The phrase is jarring, almost embarrassing, as though Jesus at this intimate moment reveals an ultimate egocentricity. Does he not actually understand friendship: that it cannot be commanded or conditioned like this?

Of course there a many different ways in which a condition can function. If we heard these words on the lips of a human political manipulator, they would sound like a threat. But when spoken by Jesus they are transformed by his story and his prior action. His command is that they love each other, as I have loved you, i.e., wrapped in a rough towel and not afraid to touch another’s toes; not afraid to travel into the jaws of danger for Lazarus; and as the disciples are beginning to dimly understand, soon to be seen naked against the grain of the Cross. The content of this command is certainly not incompatible with the love that friends bear.

Our problem then, seems to revolve around the intrusion of this notion of ‘commanding’ upon our concept of friendship. We must quickly despatch the idea, however, that the disciples become Jesus’ friends through obedience to his command. The context makes perfectly clear that this conditionality relates to a friendship already initiated and named by him. Rank, calculated disobedience to Jesus is unquestionably incompatible with claiming his friendship, but just because obedience is a necessary condition doesn’t mean it’s sufficient. It seems more likely that we should regard this as an ‘evidential’ condition, a way for us to verify someone’s claim to friendship with Jesus, rather than a ‘generative’ condition: one that makes the claim true.

And this is so because Jesus is always Lord of his friends, even while washing their feet, or laying down his life. Perhaps to our increasing embarrassment, he goes on in verse 16 to say, “You did not choose Me, but I chose you.” Friendship with Jesus does not come through the satisfaction of a condition, but only through his own initiation: his ‘electing’.

Image by LivingOS

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