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Friendship and Sincerity

In modern culture, friendship, unlike kinship, is constituted by voluntary will friends choose each other. Sincerity describes a relation between intention and action one's conduct accurately reflects one's inner purposes. Since these understandings are distinctive to modern culture it may seem naively presentist to suggest that voluntary choice is constitutive of friendship in general. But voluntary action, considered comparatively, is not confined to the highly individualized form of agency, ideally free of institutional and customary influences, that modern culture privileges. Obviously, the picture of custom and tradition offered in classical liberal thought for example, in Kant's "Was ist Aufklärung?" or John Stuart Mill's On Liberty is a teleological caricature. Cultures that from a liberal perspective lack personal autonomy do not thereby lack voluntary action, choice and agency, in their own terms. This is true of institutionalized friendships, fictive kinship, patronage and feudal bonds. For example, feudal ties are voluntaristic, compared to those of kinship, descent and corporate groups in the same societies (Ganshof 1961: 69105). Such bonds critically involve a voluntary component in the sense that particular persons select each other from a pool of potential friends who are not selected. No matter how strongly ageand gender-graded a bond, such as blood brotherhood, there is a sense in which partners choose each other. Such bonds are created, and indeed reaffirmed, through rituals that posit the possibility of not entering into, or ending them (Herman 1987: 69-72; Bloch 1912). Of course, voluntarism in this minimal sense is not sufficient to constitute friendship, or to distinguish friendship from other bonds. But some form of voluntarism is a condition of friendship in cultures without modern ideas of voluntary agency. The point is captured in a passage from Demosthenes: