It was Jean-Paul Sartre who wrote, “A quarrel does not matter.” He was writing about a friend with whom he had broken. I believe it was Maurice Merleau-Ponty of whose death he had just learned. And, in the same commemorative essay, he went to characterize that kind of quarrel as simply one of the ways in which friends who disagree can decide to coexist in the world they still share.

Well, in my experience, that’s not the whole story. Depending on the reason for the quarrel and how deep that reason goes, a quarrel can matter absolutely.

At an earlier phase of my life, I’d had a woman friend who was also a philosopher, with a significant reputation and attainments in her own philosophic milieu. I’ll call her Ingrid. Though we’d parted ways some time back, in the past week Ingrid had been on my mind. So I decided to look her up, to see how she’d been faring and even consider a belated reunion. Perhaps, in the reshufflings and shakeups of life, by now things might look different between us.

However, there’ll be no belated reunion. I learned that she died thirteen years ago.

Had we stayed friends, I would not have published Chapter Eight, “Spoiling One’s Story: The Case of Hannah Arendt,” in A Good Look at Evil. Arendt, a political theorist, had been a friend of Ingrid’s. On my scale of values, friendship trumps publications.

Of what was our friendship composed? We were women friends as well as philosophic friends. Both together. That’s a combination rare and precious. Also, we were what Ingrid called “twin opposites” – almost organically connected and, at the same time, at variance with each other. 

How at variance? She was an updated Viking – a lover of the outdoors, a skier, a swimmer, a thinker who could spend a solitary summer on an island off the coast of Sweden reflecting – taking in the austere landscape while shedding the old year to get into form for the year ahead.

Though I had my own affinities with nature, I sure couldn’t have spent a summer alone on a rocky arctic island. Though we sometimes went riding together, mostly we’d meet in the cafes of our neighborhood. There we could really talk – while subliminally sharing the company of compatible strangers – getting it all said and sorted out in that setting.

I was a Hegelian, for whom “the real is the rational.” Or at least reality is to be viewed as reasonably as one can manage to regard it, discerning its lessons as they pertained to the nonfictional, true and ongoing story of one’s life and times.

By contrast, Ingrid had written about thinkers like Martin Heidegger and Friedrich Nietzsche – thinkers for whom “the real is not the rational.”

Our differences were fruitful for our friendship. She could contribute the equipoise of a thinker who did not ask life to make sense. Whereas I could produce the highs and the lows, the tragic comedy, of someone who always hoped to pull the meaning out of life’s troubled tangle of situations.

Subliminally I was aware that our differences might someday bring us to a fork in the road where they could become consequential. But I hoped we could manage to step around that fork.

Until one day, there we were – standing in front of the fork in the road. There’d been someone in my life (not in my life by my choice) who’d hated me and wanted to do to me all the harm she could manage to do. For this destructive project, she’d been able to muster quite a lot of theatrical talent for telling lies. Her persuasiveness was such as to peel off from my life many of the people whose presence I had previously taken for granted and who had supplied my life with its protective layers of emotional familiarity, ease and comfort. 

But of all the losses, the one I regretted most was the loss of Ingrid. Ingrid – who eschewed moral judgment as a matter of philosophic principle – had lacked both the personal force and the conceptual equipment to resist such an ingeniously malign and mischievous influence.

Talking it over with Jerry, on the morning that I sadly learned of her death, he suggested one way I might have kept her in my life. Had I left aside the moral questions (like questions of defamation or loyalty) and just told Ingrid how highly I valued our relationship as friends, she might have responded to an appeal confining itself to that level.

So I thought about that suggestion, turning it over piece by piece, taking note of what would have been required on my side to bracket, to put out of play the rights and wrongs, and to focus solely on the affective ties – the feeling ties – between Ingrid and me. 

It looked to be a question of what I prized most, what I valued, in the shared space of friendship. Especially philosophic friendship. Until finally it became clear and definitive.

Without truth, 

such a friendship founders.

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