On Friday, we celebrated the completion of the program around a good meal and a campfire. It was clear that our philosophical discussions of friendship had taken on real substance in the relations between participants and with the wider community that welcomed us. The following day, we packed up and, after bittersweet goodbyes, began the journey home. Below, you’ll find a recap of our final week as well as some thoughts that have emerged from the program overall.

Week 3

Readings: Achille Mbembe, Carl Schmitt, Saidiya Hartman, Michel Foucault, Ivan Illich, Simone Weil

Work: Milling and staining lumber, pruning apple trees, felling dead trees, still more weeding, making a giant scarecrow

Reflections from participants:

Lee: "Returning back home after the program, I have been deeply rethinking what is important to me. The program helped me expand my sense of what I am capable of. I'm filled with a restlessness that I am hopeful will lead me to my next chapter. I now feel sense of purpose and direction that I have been seeking for a long time."

Friendship in an Age of Crisis: some unconcluding thoughts

Many acknowledge that we are facing several crises today, from climate change and geopolitical recalibrations, to social problems caused by new technologies, addictions, and affordability. For the past three weeks, we've been interrogating these problems through the lens of friendship--as a resource, a challenge, a response. Here are a few of the many discoveries we made through deep conversation:

Equality is not symmetry. While friendship implies a certain equality, it is not a zero-sum game. There is an element of excess involved, a mutual over-contribution, that implies that each person is elevated by the other. It can go too far, as it did for Gilgamesh and Enkidu in their quest to slay the forest guardian Humbaba, which resulted in cutting down the whole forest. But in its higher form, friends are a spur to one another, an invitation to see oneself through the mirror of the other, two hands holding each other up (though neither one rests on sure ground). GLIPH is founded on a friendship spanning 15 years, but when we met, we had no idea that friendship would lead us to working together on this project, something we would not have dared alone.

Friendship involves loss. To have a friend is also, potentially, to lose that friend and, in that mirror, to notice our own mortality. Just as Montaigne wrote his treatise on friendship in memory of his lost friend Étienne de la Boétie, Derrida reminds us that a friend is among other things someone who will give our eulogy. Friendship, he says, is "the grieved art of loving." As I (Philippe) write this, I am thinking of my friend who died last year and the obligation I now sense to live more fully, to work as hard as he did toward a more just future.

To be friends is to respect distance. The desire to merge with the beloved is out of place in friendship. Rather, as Weil shows, it is crucial for friendship to leave the autonomy of each person intact. What is so powerful in this idea is that, unlike more utilitarian relationships, this means that our freedom is bolstered by our friendships--and this constitutes a political force, under the right conditions. As Foucault argued, friendship can be subversive to conformist societies. And likewise, the principle of treaties, we learned, is more akin to friendship than to justice in that it seeks to maintain the separation and autonomy of entering parties, rather than to subsume the one in the other. But to do so, these treaties have to be continuously maintained, just as personal friendship does. Finally, following Karl Steel, this is valuable for thinking about relations with non-human beings, whose rights have to be respected on the basis of their difference from us, rather than their similarity.

Thanks for keeping up with this year’s Cassiciacum on Manitoulin. In a few weeks, we’ll be in touch with announcements about our exciting plans for the upcoming year.