<b>Friendship as Sacred Knowing: Overcoming Isolation</b>, Samuel Kimbriel, Oxford University Press, 2014 (ISBN 978‐0‐19‐936398‐8), xvi + 224 pp., hb £35.99

In this book, Samuel Kimbriel wagers that the phenomenon of friendship may be conceived as a site for the most radical metaphysical reflection. He argues that for friendship to be understood in its depths, it must be thought in a way foreign (but, in the end, not wholly foreign) to our modern way of thinking about happiness, relationality, and our active human place in the cosmos. Classical philosophy rightly conceived of friendship as an irreducible riddle that resists our understanding: on the one hand, friendship is affirmed as the highest form of human relation possible, most fitting therefore for the philosophical life (contemplation of the Good); on the other hand, this ultimate object of love seems impossible to attune with the practical duties friendly love demands of us. The contemplation of the Good (theoria) seems extrinsic to the accomplishment of the good in the world (phronesis). The ambivalence in Aristotle's division of wisdom into two sealed domains comes to full, bitter fruition in modern thought and experience, ultimately bringing the Socratic–Platonic pathway of wisdom as self-understanding through knowledge of the divine manifest in a justly ordered society to a stop. The major merit of this book is that it helps us imagine a way to backtrack out of the present standstill and restart along the path that such a promising vision opens. French philosopher Michel Henry said that the modern era is characterized by a highly problematic puzzle, even an illogicality: science's primary enactment of cleaving between calculative rationality and the sensible embodied experience that is its invisible condition has expanded into the paradigm of knowledge and norm for experience, thus turning life, the primordial reality at the basis of our being, against itself. Life manifests this self-negation in ‘barbarisme’, the destructive forms that pervade human culture. Kimbriel's remarkable treatise on friendship rests on an analogous analysis of the modern condition found in the work of Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor. According to Taylor, the modern comprehension of the self in its world involves a disposition of ‘disengagement’ wherein the world is considered as an ordered passive reality that may be laid bare by the mind that stands powerfully over against it. By virtue of its success, this primary disposition is possessed by the illusion of the neutrality and apparentness of its way of seeing and its manners of being. The self in this account comes to be seen in light of the technological virtues that have given it such success such as certainty and control. Hence, the modern self is ‘buffered’: the self-sufficient individual shielded in its immanent integrity against the influence of powers that transcend it, which are refigured as objects set over against itself, the subject, and meaningful only insofar as they benefit its own self-interested ends. (In the several places Kimbriel offers deepening correctives to Taylor's account. See his summary comments on pp. 162 and 163, 167–170.) It is near miraculous that friendship persists in an age such as this. In response, Kimbriel offers a patiently constructed account of friendship as the cornerstone of a total renovation of metaphysics now rejoined to religious practice. Astutely, Kimbriel proposes that the ancient aporetic acknowledgment regarding friendship lies in continuity with our modern inability to comprehend the significance of friendship that we still tend intensely to feel. If Part I of his book (chapters 1 and 2) is concerned with articulating this troubled sense of friendship still haunted by transcendence and its implicit connection with classical philosophical accounts, Part II (chapters 3–7) elaborates ‘a kind of metaphysical and theological revolution’ (p. 52) that at once breaks through the dead end of modern understanding and brings to a new completion the philosophical tradition itself. Friendship ‘is a movement to plunge ever deeper into (the real)’ (p. 172). Kimbriel elaborates a Christian account of wisdom as the fusion of love and knowledge through liturgical participation that eschatologically inscribes human community into the life of God thereby reinstituting friendship as condition for the contemplation of the highest Good and as font of justice refigured as charity and hence, finally, as primary political institution (cf. pp. 64–68). The conclusion (pp. 161–172) recapitulates the intellectual course of the book and lays bare the intellectual upshot of this new understanding of friendship as ‘path of charity’: it is the site wherein contemplation (the highest intellectual act) and liturgy (the highest realization of community) are brought into unity, because the Ultimate Reality that is the goal of intellect and bodily action in concert is itself Interpersonal Love. Where knowledge and love are fused in worship of the Living God, human community is realized, for human community is founded on sharing together the Good. The Good is truly known by being shared. And the higher the Good that is known, the greater the sharing it accomplishes. The highest form of this sharing is friendship. Kimbriel's book is probably best understood as a post-modern Augustinian gloss on the words of Jesus in the Gospel of John: ‘Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends’ (15:13). This reading depends on a return to the classical metaphysical understand of the Good as ‘self-diffusive’. Life is replete; it always spills out of itself yet its repleteness paradoxically manifests (in its fragility for example) the radical insufficiency or vulnerability of love that is its source. For infinite reality, the Good itself, this weakness is identical with inexhaustible strength that never ceases giving itself away; for finite reality, participation in the self-overflow of the Good is a temporal movement that has its most immanent ground beyond itself. Free intellectual beings that can know the Good harbor the possibility of refusing the movement of the good within themselves and others. Yet, as Kimbriel relentlessly points out, what is contained or locked up in itself is, precisely, nothing; what is handed over, gifted, is real. As a good, therefore, human life requires the conscious completion of the good through joyful external return of the gift, a continuation of its movement, which is historically manifest in the traditional forms of culture, namely, art, ethics, and, above all, religion. (Of these forms of the good science may be a part as long as it understands its essential dependence on the embodied world of human meaning as participation in the Good and therefore allows the circumscription of technology by the Good's existential objectivity.) One may flee oneself or embrace oneself; the former involves ‘isolation’, whereas the latter involves community, of which friendship is a basic form. In Kimbriel's vision, friendship is to embrace one's life in another, and another's life in oneself. This identity through difference and difference through identity is the essence of the Christian vision of God, and the share it fundamentally proposes in this divine love in and through ecclesial practices, which, finally, coincide with the destiny of the entire cosmos. Kimbriel's account of the modern self depends almost solely on Charles Taylor's masterful explications in A Secular Age and Sources of the Self. Taylor's account is profound, far-reaching, and influential. But one could probably identify places where Taylor's account needs supplementation in light of Kimbriel's constructive project in the second part of the book. As I have implied earlier, these may be the very places where Kimbriel finds Taylor's reading insufficient. Turning to other readings of the modern predicament, particularly, the philosophy of technology of Martin Heidegger or Ivan Illich, and perhaps especially Michel Henry, may have deepened Kimbriel's analysis of the modern self and thus strengthened his proposal. Regardless, Samuel Kimbriel has written a profound piece of philosophy that develops a classic intellectual theme long neglected, but which also brings back into focus after a grim hiatus what is perhaps the most archetypal aim of Western philosophy (and beyond): the completion of the human through likeness to the divine.

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