Solitude vs. Society Theme Analysis

In “Friendship,” Emerson argues—somewhat paradoxically—that friendship both requires and promotes the productive solitude of each friend. Friendship is based on spontaneous “affection,” a human feeling of connection that occurs when two appropriately matched individuals encounter one another. Yet each individual must remain essentially separate from the other, an independent person who regards his or her friend as equally independent and autonomous. Emerson suggests that the ideal interaction between two friends is therefore conversation, in person or through writing, since this allows souls to commune without compromising their autonomy.

Emerson suggests that there is an unspoken human sympathy that unites the “whole human family.” This affection has major effects on a person and the way he or she perceives the world. People are bound together through “kindness,” which Emerson calls an “element of love” that pervades human society like “a fine ether.” Even though people do not perceive this element, it becomes visible in the brief encounters in which people feel a sudden sympathy with those whom they encounter. The product of these encounters is a “cordial exhilaration,” which, whether it be intense, as in love, or mild, as in “the lowest degree of good-will,” provides the “sweetness” of life. The result of affection is not simply pleasure. “Our intellectual and active powers” are improved through the feeling. This is exemplified by the fact that a scholar often composes a letter to a friend when trying to think through an intellectual problem: the solitary activity of writing is made easier through imagined dialogue. Emerson argues throughout his work that each individual has a subjective experience of the world. This subjective version of reality is altered through friendship. The “jets of affection” Emerson feels for others “make a young world” again, making life feel exciting. “The earth is metamorphosed” by the presence of a stranger for whom one feels mutual “affection.” Through the pleasure of affection, and through the philosophical insights derived from conversation, friends change the way an individual experiences the world.     

Despite the affection that undergirds friendships, Emerson suggests that friendship also contains a certain level of distance. For Emerson, this distance plays out in two ways: first, unless there is this fundamental connection, two people will not become friends. And second, even if two people do share such a connection and manage to become friends, they must remain fundamentally estranged from another in order to have a true friendship. “No arrangements, no introductions, no consuetudes or habits of society” could make a friendship when there is no spontaneous connection between two people. When two people feel affection for one another, and when there is an “uprise in nature” in each of them, they meet, Emerson writes, “as water with water.”  Yet even though their souls may mix in these encounters, they do not develop the kind of intimacy many people confuse for friendship. Instead, the two friends are “two large, formidable natures, mutually beheld, mutually feared.” Each person must be possessed of Emerson’s trademark self-reliance. Although, according to Emerson’s philosophy, it is impossible for one person to truly understand that another person is a self just as complex and independent as himself or herself, a true friendship allows one to get as close as possible to comprehending this notion. The effect is that each friend “treats its object as a god, that it may dignify both” through recognizing and appreciating itself in the other.

Friendship, therefore, is a kind of collective solitude, a community between two strangers that is that is most truly realized in conversation or letter-writing, when the fundamental divide between each friend is overcome in an exchange of ideas and sympathy. This is why the exchange of thoughts through written or spoken conversation is the signal event of a true friendship. It is possible only between two people, and requires “an absolute running of two souls into one.” Each person has “mutual respect” for the other because “each stands for the whole world.” That is, each person sees a version of him or herself in the other: an autonomous self. A friend, then, is “a sort of paradox in nature.” A person who can only ever be certain of his or her own existence “behold[s] now the semblance of my being” in the “foreign form” or a friend. Seeing one’s friend as a true equal to oneself is the challenge of friendship, but also the source of the insight and unique kind of community it provides.

Emerson’s ideal of friendship depends upon the dynamic tension between “affection,” which brings people together in moments of deep and pleasurable community, and mutual respect and admiration of the people it unites, which depends upon a fundamental separation between each person. People alternate between solitude and society in order to more fully appreciate each state, but a kind of bridge between the two is achieved in conversation in person, or through letters. For in conversation, two friends can freely speak their minds, thinking and acting with the other as they would think and act with themselves, but improved, strengthened, and dignified by the regard of the other. It’s no wonder, then, that Emerson himself writes in the essay form, in which the reader is always held in mind, and the solitary act of writing becomes an implicit dialogue.