Self-Love, Likeness, Time and Rootedness in Friendship: Shakespeare, Johnson and Irving

Orientation #

He opens by saying “next time maybe we’ll finish up these kind of topics and just get our mind all greased and oiled for Aristotle’s treatise” on friendship. The class works through his handout pages (Causes of Love, Effects of Love, Nothing Too Much) as a set of literary passages “to loosen up your head” on self-love, likeness and time in friendship. The previous class treated envy and flattery as opposed to friendship; the next begins Aristotle’s definition and three kinds of friendship.

The class, in order #

1. Opening aside: magi by a star, shepherds by angels (“led to the birth by a star”) #

Before the handout he reports something he read in Thomas: it is fitting that the magi (pagans) be led by a star, something sensible and natural, while the shepherds (Jews, who received the law “through the hands of the angels”) are led by angels; he adds that in the Apocalypse Christ is called the star, so the star is a symbol of Christ leading to himself. Illustrates nothing later; an opening remark only.

2. Polonius vs. Proteus: can being true to yourself require betraying a friend? (“to thy own self be true”) #

Point: he sets Polonius’s advice to Laertes against Proteus’s soliloquy in The Two Gentlemen of Verona to force a decision about what “self” means.

• Polonius: be true to yourself, and it follows “as the night the day” that you cannot be false to any man.
• Proteus, betrothed to Julia “with twenty thousand soul-confirming oaths,” sees Sylvia (whom his friend Valentine plans to elope with) and reasons: “Love bade me swear, and love bids me forswear”; he must lose Julia and Valentine or lose himself; “I to myself am dearer than a friend”; he “cannot now prove constant to myself without some treachery used to Valentine.”
• Dilemma he puts: either Polonius is false, or Proteus is not really being true to himself.
• He asks whether Proteus’s reasoning is a good reason or rationalizing: is reason here “simply the slave of desire, and not the master”?
• Observation on the way: love of self is more stable and stronger than love of another, because “I am I.”
• A student answers: Proteus is true to himself, but “to what’s not stable in himself.” He takes this up in the next segment.
• He locates the play as one of Shakespeare’s first three “love and friendship romances” (more serious than comedy), whose theme is the conflict between romantic or passionate love and friendship.
• Julia’s line when she serves Proteus in disguise: she cannot be a true servant to her master without being “false traitor to myself” — the same knot from her side.

3. Which is more me: reason and will, or emotion and body? (“which is more me”) #

Point: Polonius is right and Proteus wrong, because reason and will are more “me” than the passions.

1. Students in class usually say their emotions are more themselves; he offers hints that show they believe the opposite:
   • premeditated murder is judged worse than a murder of passion, other things being equal — so we hold a man more responsible when reason is in charge, i.e., we take him to be more his reason;
   • “I wasn’t myself yesterday” after speaking in anger — yet something was in control: the anger;
   • “Joe, get control of yourself” in the bar — when anger rules, Joe is not in control of himself; when reason and will rule, he is.
2. So when I stay constant to reason and will against a feeling, I am more true to myself.

• Examples of the same: the drinker who chooses to give up drink (an act of will) and then is tempted — he is true to himself in following the choice, not the impulse; the married man who meets someone attractive — the minister asked whether he chose this spouse, not whether he had wonderful feelings, so fidelity to the choice is fidelity to self.
• Complication he flags: man is “on the horizon between the material world and the immaterial world,” so there is “a kind of duplicity in man.”
• Ordinary speech as a sign: even a nurse says “he’s gone” at death though the body is still there — as if the soul is not the entire he but “much more he or she.” Proportionally, emotions are bodily; reason and will are in the soul, not the body; so being true to the soul is being true to yourself more.

4. Antonio and Bassanio: which is more one, two souls or soul and body? (“Bassanio had not once a love”) #

Point: the friendship of Antonio and Bassanio raises the question in what sense two souls are more one than my soul and my body.

• The scene: Antonio, about to die under the Jew’s bond, softens the blow by saying fortune is kinder than usual in cutting him off before poverty; he asks Bassanio to tell his wife “how I loved you” and let her judge whether Bassanio “had not once a love.” He glosses: the love of friendship; “greater love than this hath no man” than to lay down his life for his friend. Bassanio replies that wife, life and all the world are not esteemed above Antonio’s life — with Portia, disguised as the lawyer, overhearing.
• Question to class: is Bassanio more one with Antonio or with his wife? Answer given: Antonio. He then distinguishes:
  • by likeness: your soul is more like my soul than my body is; if likeness causes love, my soul has more reason to love your soul than my body;
  • by existence: my soul and body are more one, since the body shares the one existence of the soul, while your soul and mine exist separately.
• So the union of the friends is a union of two souls (“the marriage of true minds”), while husband and wife are like soul and body — in one way body and soul are more one, in another way two souls are more alike.
• Student: this is part of the rationale of martyrdom — losing the life of my body for the life of your soul. He agrees and adds it belongs to the order of charity: love your own soul before another’s soul, but another’s soul before your own body.

5. Self-love: the bad sense and the good (“sick of self-love”) #

Point: self-love is usually named as a vice, but there is a good self-love that is the beginning of friendship.

• Malvolio in Twelfth Night (Shakespeare’s last love-and-friendship play; the opposite of Benvolio in Romeo and Juliet) is told he is “sick of self-love.”
• Argument that some self-love is good: the second commandment, “love your neighbor as yourself,” implies a good love of oneself.
• Why the word usually has a bad sense: the parallel of anger in the Baltimore catechism’s seven capital vices. Anger can be good (Christ in the temple; Christ angry at the leaders’ infidelity); it is good if felt when, about what, and as much as one should (“if you’re using my children for target practice, I should get angry”). That anger is nevertheless named as a vice is a sign that people usually get angry more than they should. Likewise “he loves himself” as criticism means he loves his body, his ease, or something disordered.
• Aristotle in the later books of the Nicomachean Ethics will distinguish the usual bad self-love from the good and necessary self-love, which is the beginning of loving another as a friend; the Greek proverb “a friend is another self” (Shakespeare: “second self,” “next self”) is a sign of this — I carry over to another the love I have for myself. Perhaps true of God too: by loving himself he loves others.
• Beatrice (description read from the handout): pride, the excessive self-love, as an impediment to loving another — disdain and scorn in her eyes, her wit valuing itself so highly she “cannot love, nor take no shape nor project of affection.” He recalls: love is a metamorphosis, taking on the shape of the thing loved (prev. class on love); she is “so self-endeared.”
• Sonnet 62: “sin of self-love” possessing eye, soul and every part — the language of loving God with whole heart and soul now applied to pride; “no remedy” because “so grounded inward in my heart” (aside on “stubborn,” from the stub of a tree, the hardest part to get out). Its root is lack of self-knowledge — the seven wise men’s gnōthi seauton at Delphi: know yourself and you find you are not so lovable; the glass shows him “beated and chopped with tanned antiquity.”
• Return to the grenade: Thomas on the man who lays down his life for another. Does he love his fellows more than himself? A materialist must say yes (he destroys his body for their bodies). But if he has chosen the most glorious and noble deed — “the better part,” as even Christ on the cross chose the nobler thing — then in dying to save you I am loving myself well, more than I love you. Main Street thinks otherwise because it takes “myself” to be the body — which is also why self-love usually names something bad.

6. Likeness as a cause of love: Portia’s inference and the potters’ quarrel (“the semblance of my soul”) #

Point: likeness, the third cause of love from the earlier study, explains friendship, with a refinement about what kind of likeness.

• Portia, newly married, urges Bassanio to go rescue Antonio; Lorenzo praises her “true conceit of godlike amity” (friendship is something godlike; “God is love”). Aside: he phoned a colleague and asked the wife for “your lord and master” — “he’s doing the dishes.”
• Lorenzo calls Antonio “how dear a lover of my lord.” Today “lover” would be misunderstood; Greek has many words for love, English few, so “love” serves for erōs/amor, for charity, and for the philosopher’s love of wisdom. Philein is connected with philos (friend); Latin amor/amicitia likewise; Anglo-Saxon frēogan once linked “friend” to a love-word, a connection now dropping out of English. Contemporary use of “love” shows how narrow our understanding of love has become.
• Portia’s reasoning, from effect to cause: she has never met Antonio; she sees how much Bassanio loves him; companions “whose souls do bear an equal yoke of love” must have “a like proportion of lineaments, of manners and of spirit”; so Antonio “must needs be like my lord,” “the semblance of my soul.” Her soul = her husband (husband and wife as soul and body); his friend = the likeness (semblance) of her soul.
• Objection recalled from Aristotle and Thomas: “potter fights with potter” — like in art, they compete. Thackeray and Dickens, rivals over Vanity Fair and Copperfield (Thackeray’s daughter asked why he didn’t write more like Dickens); reconciled on a staircase shortly before one died.
• Irving’s resolution: friendships between painters and poets are the most likely to be sincere, since they share qualities of mind and principles of taste but apply them to “different yet mutually illustrative arts,” “constantly in sympathy and never in collision.” Goldsmith and Sir Joshua Reynolds: “men of kindred genius, excelling in corresponding qualities of their several arts”; “style in writing is what color is in painting” — a likeness by proportion, as Thomas would say (aside: Irving’s Sketchbook is a writer painting in words).
• Boswell, friend of both Johnson and Wilkes, who attacked each other in print; Sir John Pringle: “It is not in friendship as in mathematics, where two things each equal to a third are equal between themselves” — you agree with each as a middle quality, but the two do not agree. Question: does this contradict likeness as cause of love? His answer: Joe is like me in one part of my interests, Tom in another (his own two friends, one in history and politics, the other in science and philosophy; he shared both, they rubbed each other the wrong way). Analyzed carefully, it confirms the principle.

7. Time and friendship: formed by choice, matured by time (“matured by time”) #

Point: friendship differs from romantic love and from emotion generally in needing time.

• Romantic love can be sudden: Romeo and Juliet; Marlowe’s line on Leander quoted by Shakespeare, “Whoever loved that loved not at first sight.” Can friendship be all at once? No: Aristotle in the treatise will say the desire to be friends can arise at once, but that is not yet friendship.
• Johnson to Bennet Langton: our friendship “not only formed by choice but matured by time.” Both points are Aristotle’s: friend by choice not emotion (true of the highest friendship; Hamlet on Horatio, whom his soul’s “election” sealed for herself), and matured by habit over time. The friends “have many images in common” — a source of conversation “neither the learning nor the wit of a new companion can supply” (his wife’s high-school reunion).
• Jane Austen on brother and sister: early years gone over again, “a strengthener of love in which even the conjugal tie is beneath the fraternal”; fraternal love “sometimes almost everything, at other times worse than nothing.” He observes that the first apostles called were brothers, Peter and Andrew, James and John, in the same occupation — charity building on, not opposed to, natural love; a result of the time spent together from the beginning of life (his own brothers’ conversation full of allusions outsiders cannot follow).
• A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Helena to Hermia, brought up together though not sisters — “all the counsel we two have shared,” school days, one flower on one sampler, “two lovely berries molded in one stem” (the double cherry), two bodies but one heart, like two coats in one heraldry; “will you rent our ancient love asunder?” — ancient love, i.e., grown by time.
• Johnson to Langton again: to let friendship “die away by negligence and silence” is not wise. His gloss: friendship resembles a virtue — moral virtue is acquired by repeated acts and wears away when they cease; so friendship, developed by repeated acts, drifts apart in separation without contact. “Of whose benevolence there is little doubt”: benevolence is goodwill, and Aristotle will require not only mutual goodwill but that each know the other’s goodwill — I could wish you well without your knowing, or both of us unknowing; friendship requires the knowledge.

8. Rooted love vs. the love of passion and fortune (“an eternal plant”) #

Point: a love founded on virtue is stable and forever; a love founded on passion, beauty or usefulness dies with them.

• “The amity that wisdom knits not, folly may easily untie” — recalls the earlier passage on Johnson’s irritation with friends; Hamlet chose Horatio as not “passion’s slave,” a negative way of saying virtuous.
• “Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments”: the marriage of two minds is friendship (and even the soul and God — “I betrothed you in faith”). Love that “alters when it alteration finds” is not love; true love is “an ever-fixed mark,” “not time’s fool” though rosy lips and cheeks fall to the sickle (against men who leave their wives when looks go), bearing out “to the edge of doom.” “Not sure I fully understand all that,” he admits of the star and the wandering bark. Shakespeare says it so well “they can’t improve upon” it.
• Sonnet 74: the earth has but earth; “my spirit is thine, the better part of me”; the body is “the dregs of life, the prey of worms” — again friendship is between soul and soul more than body and body.
• His definition of a Shakespearean sonnet: fundamentally “a likeness of thought and feeling,” in fourteen lines of iambic pentameter, three quatrains with alternate rhyme, completed by a rhyming couplet.
• The play within the play in Hamlet: “What to ourselves in passion we propose, the passion ending doth the purpose lose” — true of engaged couples whose attachment is only passion, and of other passions like anger (the purpose vanishes when the anger dies down). “Our love should with our fortunes change”; “the poor advanced makes friends of enemies” — a skeptical view, true only of friends of use or passion; contrast with the love that is forever.
• Rooted love: divorce now because “the love has no roots,” like the seed in the parable that sprang up and withered for lack of root (“a different point, but somewhat similar”). The countess who could not have owed the dead gentlewoman “a more rooted love” had she been her own daughter; the lover whose love “was an eternal plant, whereof the root was fixed in virtue’s ground, the leaves and fruit maintained by beauty’s sun” — virtue is stable, bodily beauty is not, so love tied to the unstable is unrooted; “be bold; you do so grow in my requital, as nothing can unroot you.” Duncan to Macbeth and Banquo: “I have begun to plant thee, and will labor to make thee full of growing.” The class ends on these planting images.

His words #

• true to yourself; being true to reason and will rather than to passion; Polonius right, Proteus wrong
• rationalizing; reason as “slave of desire, not the master”
• “more me”; reason and will vs. emotions and bodily feelings
• horizon between the material and the immaterial world; “duplicity in man”
• “he’s gone”; the soul as “much more he or she” though not the entire person
• love and friendship romances; his name for six Shakespeare plays
• love of friendship; “greater love than this hath no man”
• likeness (third cause of love); semblance; proportion [ed.: likeness by proportion, analogy]
• order in charity; one’s own soul before another’s soul, another’s soul before one’s own body
• self-love; usually bad (disordered, excessive), but a good self-love is necessary and the beginning of friendship
• capital vices; anger as name of a vice though anger can be good
• a friend is another self / second self / next self
• metamorphosis; love as taking on the shape of the thing loved
• stubborn; from the stub of a tree
• gnōthi seauton; know thyself, of the seven wise men at Delphi
• “the better part”; the nobler choice, as in dying for another
• erōs, amor; philein/philos; amor/amicitia; Anglo-Saxon frēogan
• godlike amity; friendship as something godlike
• from effect to cause; Portia’s reasoning
• potter fights with potter; likeness that collides vs. likeness that illustrates
• formed by choice, matured by time; election = choice
• images in common
• friendship resembles a virtue; acquired by repeated acts, lost by their ceasing
• benevolence = goodwill; friendship needs known mutual goodwill
• marriage of true minds
• Shakespearean sonnet; a likeness of thought and feeling in fourteen lines
• rooted love; eternal plant with root in virtue’s ground

Texts #

Read in class

• Berquist handouts: “Causes of Love” pp. 19–21; “Effects of Love” pp. 8–10; “Nothing Too Much” p. 2 (the passages below are read from them)
• Shakespeare, Hamlet: Polonius to Laertes; Hamlet on Horatio (“mistress of her choice”); the player king’s speech in the play within the play
• Shakespeare, The Two Gentlemen of Verona: Proteus’s soliloquy; Julia in disguise
• Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice: Antonio’s farewell and Bassanio’s reply; Lorenzo and Portia on Antonio
• Shakespeare, Twelfth Night: “sick of self-love”
• Shakespeare, description of Beatrice (Much Ado About Nothing, inferred)
• Shakespeare, Sonnet 62; Sonnet 74; “Let me not to the marriage of true minds” (Sonnet 116, inferred)
• Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Helena to Hermia
• Shakespeare, “rooted love” / “eternal plant” / “nothing can unroot you” (All’s Well That Ends Well, inferred)
• Shakespeare, Macbeth: Duncan to Macbeth and Banquo
• Washington Irving, Life of Oliver Goldsmith: painters and poets; Goldsmith and Reynolds
• Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson: Johnson and Wilkes, Sir John Pringle’s remark; Johnson’s two letters to Bennet Langton
• Jane Austen, passage on brother and sister (novel not named)
• “The amity that wisdom knits not, folly may easily untie” (source not named)

Mentioned

• Thomas Aquinas on the magi and the star, the shepherds and angels (work not named); Thomas on the man who dies for another; Thomas’s objection quoting “potter fights with potter”
• Apocalypse: Christ called the star
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, treatise on friendship: good vs. bad self-love (later books); sudden desire to be friends vs. friendship; friendship as known mutual goodwill; friend by choice
• Gospel: Christ’s anger in the temple; Peter and Andrew, James and John; the parable of the seed without root; “I betrothed you in faith”
• Marlowe, line on Leander quoted by Shakespeare
• Thackeray, Vanity Fair; Dickens, David Copperfield; Irving, Sketchbook
• Baltimore catechism, seven capital vices
• Sonnet 116-type line on “marriage of true minds” recalled again with Sonnet 74

His questions #

• So is that true — if you’re true to yourself, you’ll be true to your friend? Who’s correct, Proteus or Polonius? Polonius: Proteus is true only to what is unstable in himself, so not really true to himself.
• Which is more me, my reason and will, or my emotions and bodily feelings? Reason and will; shown by our judging premeditated murder worse and by “I wasn’t myself,” “get control of yourself.”
• When am I true to myself: when I give in to the impulse to drink, or when I follow the choice I made? Following the choice; the choice is more me.
• Which is Bassanio more one with, Antonio or his wife? Antonio in likeness (soul to soul); but soul and body are more one by sharing one existence.
• Does the man who throws himself on the grenade love his fellow soldiers more than himself? Only on a materialist view; having chosen the noblest deed, he loves himself well, more than them.
• Why are painters and poets better friends than two painters or two poets? Alike in mind and taste, but in different, mutually illustrative arts — in sympathy, never in collision.
• Does being a friend of two men who cannot get along contradict likeness as cause of love? No; each is like me in a different part of my interests.
• Can friendship be all at once, like love at first sight? No; the desire to be friends can be sudden, but friendship takes time.
• Is that man who died for another loving that other more than himself (Thomas’s question)? Answered with the grenade case above.
• “Not sure I fully understand all that” — the star to every wandering bark in the sonnet. Left open.