Syllojism is a bi-monthly science, culture, and philosophy challenge podcast on the edge of chaos.
Challenge: Read Friendship by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Natasha and Brett read sweet, sweet prose to each other and argue about what it means to be Emersonian buddies.
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Show Notes:
Episode 4: Fwendship
Brett and Natasha discuss two essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson: Self-Reliance and Friendship. (Part 2)
2:55 Let your friend be himself:
”We seek our friend not sacredly, but with an adulterate passion which would appropriate him to ourselves. In vain. We are armed all over with subtle antagonisms, which, as soon as we meet, begin to play, and translate all poetry into stale prose. “
4:30 Sneak Peak to a future episode where Brett and Natasha talk about Tribes by Sebastian Junger
7:27 Strangers:
“But as soon as the stranger begins to intrude his partialities, his definitions, his defects,into the conversation, it is all over. He has heard the first, the last and best
he will ever hear from us. He is no stranger now. Vulgarity, ignorance, misapprehension
are old acquaintances. Now, when he comes, he may get the order, the dress, and the dinner,— but the throbbing of the heart, and the communications of the soul, no more.”
13:20 Natasha and Brett argue (AGAIN) over Meatspace vs. Cyberspace. Natasha wins.
16:00 Friend groups
“Friendship may be said to require natures so rare and costly, each so well tempered and so happily adapted, and withal so circumstanced, (for even in that particular, a poet says, love demands that the parties be altogether paired,) that its satisfaction can very seldom be assured. It cannot subsist in its perfection, say some of those who are learned in this warm lore of the heart, betwixt more than two. I am not quite so strict in my terms, perhaps because I have never known so high a fellowship as others. I please my imagination more with a circle of godlike men and women variously related to each other, and between whom subsists a lofty intelligence. “
19:22 Truth as one of two requirements for Friendship
“There are two elements that go to the composition of friendship, each so sovereign that I can detect no superiority in either, no reason why either should be first named. One is Truth. A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud. I am arrived at last in the presence of a man so real and equal, that I may drop even those undermost garments of dissimulation, courtesy, and second thought, which men never put off, and may deal with him with the simplicity and wholeness with which one chemical atom meets another. Sincerity is the luxury allowed, like diadems and authority, only to the highest rank, that being permitted to speak truth, as having none above it to court or conform unto. Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins.”
23:41 Words that lit a fire in Brett and transcended Natasha to a spiritual realm
“We can seldom go erect. Almost every man we meet requires some civility, — requires to be humored; he has some fame, some talent, some whim of religion or philanthropy in his head that is not to be questioned, and which spoils all conversation with him. But a friend is a sane man who exercises not my ingenuity, but me. My friend gives me entertainment without requiring any stipulation on my part. A friend, therefore, is a sort of paradox in nature. I who alone am, I who see nothing in nature whose existence I can affirm with equal evidence to my own, behold now the semblance of my being, in all its height, variety, and curiosity, reiterated in a foreign form; so that a friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.”
29:45 Can a human phoenix arise from the comment section pit of despair?
39:25 The Devil You Know
41:16 Clive Barker Books of Blood
42:30 Psychos and Extreme Self-Reliance
43:30 The difference between hoes and bros: Poking and Jousting.
“I am equally balked by antagonism and by compliance. Let him not cease an instant to be himself. The only joy I have in his being mine, is that the not mine is mine. I hate, where I looked for a manly furtherance, or at least a manly resistance, to find a mush of concession. Better be a nettle in the side of your friend than his echo. The condition which high friendship demands is ability to do without it. That high office requires great and sublime parts. There must be very two, before there can be very one.“
49:13 Join the Discord and take the Test on disgust/openness
Episode 4 - Fwenship