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New topic:
2009-11-01 17:33:12 Ambitious start, Perig! Be interested to see how it evolves... —docmartin
2009-11-08 05:57:20 thanks. the topic of friendship appeared as a daring but useful move. Does it look promising to you too? —PerigGouanvic
2009-11-08 13:36:12 Looks like a separate topic to me - but could be another good investigation. Lot of new research involved, I'd guess!
Off hand, I rather think friendship was crucial to Darwin's development...
BTW, the pronoun', 'he' is not linked to anyone in the discussion of friendship - should it be 'it' for the Guardian - or should the article be credited to an author straightaway... —docmartin
2009-11-09 01:38:28 The case of Darwin is interesting. From The Sunday Times January 18, 2009
Charles Darwin's formative friendship - The friendship between Darwin and a black neighbour was central to his groundbreaking work, by Richard Wilson ![[WWW]](http://wikispot.org/wiki/eggheadbeta/img/sycamore-www.png){kind=small}
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/scotland/article5536195.ece
Here we see that this friendship has been downplayed :
His exasperated father sent him to Cambridge after two years, and his time in Edinburgh receives scant consideration in most studies of his work. Yet as the 200th anniversary of his birth approaches next month, a new analysis of his life and influences casts a different light on his experiences in the city. In fact his Edinburgh years shaped Darwin’s thinking and his path to the theory of evolution.
While living there, he befriended a neighbour, a black man called John Edmonstone, who taught him taxidermy. The relationship between a man of Darwin’s class and status and a former slave was unconventional. In their forthcoming book, Darwin’s Sacred Cause, Adrian Desmond, an honorary research fellow at University College London, and James Moore, Professor of the History of Science at the Open University, say Darwin’s theories on natural selection, published in On the Origin of Species in 1859, owe much to his friendship with Edmonstone. His consideration of white and black men as being equal was a starting point for his theories on evolution.
“Most biographers don’t spend long discussing Edinburgh, but it’s absolutely crucial,” says Desmond. “Many tend to dismiss it and focus on the Cambridge education he had after it, but I’ve always been of the persuasion that Edinburgh is more important. He met an evolutionist there, called Robert Edmond Grant, who took him under his wing, but even that wasn’t the really critical story. It was his sitting with John, and finding nothing demeaning in this, that is astonishing. You wouldn’t have expected a wealthy gentleman to sit down with a former slave on an equal footing.” —PerigGouanvic
2009-11-09 18:33:44 yeah, verra interesting! We should definitely follow this thread up - sometime! —86.220.23.204
2010-02-10 22:22:15 Removed from the article — for a future friendship page.
At least conspirators know a thing or two about friendship - a digression
The concept of friendship is of the smallest importance when it comes to describing the greatest achievers, the models of our civilization. Can one name one of our usual celebrities (viz. Einstein, Darwin, Goethe, Gandhi, whatever!) and name one or two of their friends as essential parts of their achievements?
Friendship, that we may define as the complicity of two (or more!) individuals in achieving their own and each other's good, is barely thinkable because it destroys our very foundational myth, that is being taught everywhere, that of the individual.
Conspiring, or breathing (in) the same spirit (con- means with or togetherness; spire- means breath and think in the same spirit), requires exactly those qualities that can be attributed to friends, such as those that we may see on the playground, before kids become co-opted by the individualist myth. Friendship requires silence, discretion, a complex mix of reason and passion.
One of the reasons why the majority gives little credence to the phenomenon of conspiration is that it goes against their belief of a society made up of social atoms creating short-lived bonds to each other. It would be too difficult to think that hundreds of, say, Freemasons or Opus Dei folks could infiltrate spheres of influence without letting drop some clues about the intents of their fraternity. It's so, oh, old-fashioned.
But friendhsip is a basic social need, no matter what — and the horrors of radical sects should remind us of this fact.
