Alias Arts

“Most men agree that a true friend is a precious treasure,” Socrates’ student and amanuensis Xenophon records the philosopher observing, “and nevertheless there is nothing about which we give ourselves so little trouble as to make men our friends.” Such tensions—between the utter centrality of friendship to the development of both the individual and society at large and the casual, almost thoughtless way in which so many friendships are made and lost—have animated philosophical discourse since the very beginnings of the western intellectual tradition. The elusive, nuanced nature of philia and its relationship to community (both earthly and otherwise) remained an essential theme for theologians such as Augustine and Aquinas and secular thinkers like Montaigne and Mill, and such questions continue to tantalize contemporary thinkers and politicians today. Angie Hobbs—Senior Fellow in the Public Understanding of Philosophy at the University of Warwick, England—has written widely on the philosophical history of friendship. She spoke with Jeffrey Kastner and Sina Najafi by phone in December 2009.


A little while back, when I was working on one of
my many doomed projects, I went into a cave. Not just a little cave,
either, but an enormous emptiness in the ground, the trace of a
watercourse that gnawed its way across half the state of Kentucky a few
thousand years ago. We—this was my friend Wayne and I—went a long way
in, then we sat down and turned off our lights. The darkness was like
nothing I’d ever seen. I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face; after
a while I could barely believe that my hand was there, in front of my
face, 
waving. 


That darkness is what I think about when I think
of black. I was going to write, the color black, but as every
child knows black isn’t a color. Black is a lack, a void of light. When
you think about it, it’s surprising that we can see black at all: our
eyes are engineered to receive light; in its absence, you’d think we
simply wouldn’t see, any more than we taste when our mouths are empty.
Black velvet, charcoal black, Ad Reinhart’s black paintings, black-clad
Goth kids with black fingernails: how do we see them?