Philosophy of friendship with a place as interpretive support for cultural psychology

Everyday experience, networks of connections and cultural detail encountered in Japan

Why is it important for cultural psychology to look attentively and inspirationally into the depths of the problem of friendship, taking for analysis the following sequence of experiences: a travel souvenir – friendship with a place in transcultural practices – discovery of a man as a being capable of friendship? Living in friendship with a place is living in friendship with others, with oneself, with the world of values. Friendship with a place consists of companionship of old friends. It exists among books, slippers, cups and chalices, suitcases, windows, doors, etc.

Our friendship with a place stems from the following area of values and experiences: there must be something which transcends human location, which is a spiritual face of the place and openness to what is incomprehensible. So let us focus on the idea of friendship found in the Japanese advertisement, but also to the Japanese cultural context through which we can get to the ‘everyday work’ of friendship with a place. Philosophy of friendship anchored in a transcultural context helps to bring out the multi-dimensionality of the experience of self and the Other, which complements psychological research. Focussing on the cultural empowerment of a man, the search for meaning in life, but also in the art of life which binds ars bene vivendi with ars bene moriendi, cultural psychology should not lose sight of the art of friendship, but also of its connection with mobile practices of the contemporary world, for in this space of encounters friendship constitutes a philosophical recommendation and a cultural challenge. It also becomes a rediscovered value that connects the imagined and culturally experienced East with the West, placing a man in the flow of values, ideas and cultural traditions – in the ‘in-between’ zone.

Psychologists examine practices designed to improve life satisfaction and perhaps even ensure happiness, but they also turn to cultural practices which enable considering life as valuable and which give depth to life. Richard Schweder writes, ‘Cultural psychology is the study of the way cultural traditions and social practices regulate, express, and transform the human psyche, resulting less in psychic unity for humankind than in ethnic divergences in mind, self, and emotion’ (1990, p. 1). He also notes that ‘the focus in cultural psychology is on the way of life. What makes this way of life work and seem so meaningful? How do the practices and the mental states of a people reinforce each other and keep each other going? Cultural psychology does not want to give up the focus on the way of life’ (Shweder, 1999, p. 65). Interrogating the phenomenon of friendship, psychologists analyse cultural variations of created models of friendship, behavioural mechanisms, psychological and social benefits of relationships or tensions between an individual and a group, particularly in cross-cultural interactions (cf. Baumgarte, 2013, 2016). When one adds a communicative perspective (Gareis, 1995) or a search for the operational use of the term ‘friends’ (Goodwin, 1999), psychology gains a description of the psychological consequences of inter-individual relationships.

Cultural psychology, however, can gain even more by opening itself up to other ideological neighbours: philosophy and cultural studies. In order to avoid exhausting ourselves in stating different ways of reacting at the level of common social practices, when explaining and interpreting the empirical content it is worth reaching deep into the foundations of culture where we can find not only patterns of behaviour or personal patterns, but also patterns of thinking about subjectivity, freedom, space, meeting the Other, and finally patterns of imagining time, necessity/fate. The space indicated by anthropology as well as by the philosophy of friendship – with its universal perspective, albeit formulated within a specific cultural tradition – provides interpretive support for psychologists studying tensions in friendship relationships. It is worth pointing out this proximity of thought in order to draw from it, which becomes all the more important in the transcultural space where the meeting of cultural ideas and confrontation of ‘life philosophies’ take place in the difficult reconciliation of different images of the world, man and values.

Let us then reach into this area by intentionally moving from the cultural detail, through the encounter as a value, to the discovery of friendship with a place leading to the recognition of a man as a being capable of friendship. Showing the foundation on which culture builds behavioural practices and develops life attitudes at the same time sets a specific interpretation from which cultural psychology can draw in order to discover philosophy of friendship beneath the surface of observed behaviour, attitudes and interpersonal relationships. To discuss transcultural friendship, one needs imagination that combines the perspectives of philosophy, anthropology and psychology. In this research approach, everyday experiences, sensations and thoughts are situated in the dimension of a universal reflection on the problem of what is human and what is at the same time rooted in cultural orders.

To establish a starting point of consideration, let us identify a cultural detail which will make it possible for us to balance between the realms of praxis and theory in order to connect seemingly distant contexts of reflection. By means of a separated detail an experiencing subject, an observer or an interpreter tangibly penetrates – in a ‘here and now’ – into the work of located friendship. Even if a place is incorporated into the movement of exchanges and permeations, and, as Wolfgang Welsch wrote, the world today is not composed of Herder’s independent separate cultures but of hybrid new forms of culture and life forms (Welsch, 1999, pp. 194–213), this place is still an indicative tangle, an important point among flows, something which requires a stop and triggers the adoption of a demanding mindfulness of life. A detail, on the other hand, is something which does not conform to a systemic interpretation, which cannot be ‘lined up’, as Herta Müller noted (2008, p. 69). In this way, a detail protects the fragile, the individual, the incomplete. It is simultaneously immersed in cultural contexts, in the rhythms of everyday life. Let’s separate such a detail so that we can further translate what is a point in terms of experience into the philosophy of life.

The contemporary Tokyo district of Ginza – created according to Western fashion, famous for its elegance and shopping, for its breath of Europe and America – attracts us not only by advertising. Ginza, in the past and perhaps in the present as well, has aroused admiration as a breath of modernity and openness to the West. According to Louis Frédéric, as early as in 1877 Tokutomi Kenjirō wrote about Ginza as follows: ‘I shook the dust off my feet, crossed the Shinbashi Bridge and headed towards Ginza Avenue. Although less impressive than I had imagined, it undoubtedly fully deserved the reputation of the greatest street of the greatest city, with its rows of swarming shops and a huge and busy crowd that was filling it from early morning’ (1988, p. 219). In July 2014, in already modern Ginza, passers-by come across a detail, an advertisement, or a commercial incentive aimed at a tourist and written in English: newcomers are encouraged to buy a porcelain plate, a bowl, a dessert cup, a cup or a mug from Noritake, a famous porcelain factory founded after Japan’s opening to the West in 1876. The fame of the Nagoya factory dates back to the beginning of the sale of Japanese porcelain in New York in 1878, which was supposed to strengthen the ‘material’ space of Japanese-American relations.

‘Cultural centres, discrete regions and territories, do not exist prior to contacts, but are sustained through them, appropriating and disciplining the restless movements of people and things’ – as James Clifford wrote (1997, p. 3). The West paved the way, and myths, for things imported from the Far East. The cultural construct of „Japan” evoked in the correspondence with ’Europe’ binds history, identities, encounters, exchange and imagination (cf. Ivy, 1995). Today, gifts from a ‘Far East’ trip, already conjoined with transcultural practices, are also intended to promote Japanese design. It is worth indicating that it is a particular kind of design which combines urban design and the presence of ethnos, the burden of the past and the explosion of the ‘now’, permanency and praise of change, opening and closing, the movement of repetition and admiration for the experiment. Paradoxical nature of things is reflected in culture. Temporality, binding duration and disintegration, becomes inscribed in nature, the concept of beauty, and culture. We know that since the 19th century both industrial and cultural quality have been guaranteed by reputation and persistence. By selling products, ancestral companies (still an unbroken Japanese tradition) have created a world of values, triggering thinking about beauty as a category which belongs to the man and nature, and which must be strengthened in everyday life. Titles indicate that we should purchase a single vessel for a friend. The commercial incentive – but not only commercial as it turns out – adds that a porcelain cup or plate serves the purpose of ‘an undying friendship’. They become a symbol of immortal/unquenchable/eternal friendship. The gifted valuables bind together a purchase, friendship, a travel, a thing and persistence. In Europe it is a relatively rare link because we do not so easily build bridges between things and friendship. We prefer the strength of memory which handheld things and friends are burdened with – we give for the sake of memory: ‘so that you remember me / in memory / to commemorate’. Even when friendship appears in the background, it turns out that it is quickly combined with an evidence, a kind of testimony: we attest and give ‘as a proof of friendship’. Yet, what can be done about the eternity and immortality of friendship referred to in the Japanese advertisement addressed to tourists from Europe or America?

Is friendship, and more often love, something which exists only to the ‘grave’, or maybe it is immortal, ever-lasting as the English word ‘undying’ suggests? What in cultural imaginations is persistence until ‘death’ simultaneously implies a reducing border – at most ‘to the grave’. Persistence retains a precisely marked end, nothing is more tangible than death. Lifelong things are lifelong only. ‘Love is strong as death’ (Song of Solomon 8:6). The concept of undying friendship does not quite fit into utilitarian times, even if it is heard linguistically. It may even seem a bit idealistic, especially when we enter the ground of empirically perceived practice of friendship, when we see its short life, distortion, deformation, entanglement with social benefits and mental dependencies. Psychology or sociology could easily name types of friendship degenerations. The problem, however, is not to record the pathology of friendship, including noting its short duration, but to discover why culture has seen in it a kind of human nobility that is associated with freedom and the value of goodness, and philosophy has indicated the potency of friendship as it provides a man with a chance for spiritual growth. So let us return to the idea of friendship found in the Japanese advertisement, but also to the Japanese cultural context through which we can get to the ‘everyday work’ of friendship with a place.

Ideas which bear connections between things and friendships are fundamental. In Japan they seem easier because everyday things express emotions of the silent world. Things bear emotions, references, they co-create human environment. Things, human actions, and nature are not separated. Maria Korusiewicz, whilst writing about nature in the Japanese concept, noted that ‘rough wood of the bridge, paths sprinkled with sand, the sound of water droplets, or bird’s cry in the thickets – that is both the natural surroundings and the one made by a human hand – can constitute places of intimate contact with the whole world’ (2014, p. 87). Seeing it yet from another perspective, the tangle of the shintō world (the world of gods and spirits) along with the Buddhist concept of ephemeralness, reinforced by the affirmation of one’s own culture and ‘good’ attachment to it, at the same time directed by a futuristic tale about the world of technology, difficult to be tamed by a European – combine the material and the spiritual. The transition from the finite to the infinite, the connection between a part and a whole, a dignified form and the absence of a ‘hidden agenda’ (empty signs freed from signifié – how necessary are those findings of Barthes! (1983)) allow us to carefully reflect upon everyday life in which a small gesture and a small object retain their due form, participate in sustaining the world, but are also harmonised with its transience. Decline of nature coincides with decline of a man. The everyday in its practices is part of a movement of sustaining the world and accepting its fragility. Oppositions interact in the rhythms of everyday life, no longer necessarily inscribed in the construct of monoculture (cf. with the description of the aesthetics of pancultural everyday life, or rather the one drawing from multiple traditions – Saito, 2007).

In the commercial offer in Ginza, ultimately aimed at friendship, a Westerner receives an indication that community is as important as singularity: one plate – one friend. What is crucial is the beauty that permeates and binds together daily encounters of people and things. Single means unique, special, only. But also tiny, and chosen. After all, a friend is the only one. Even if everything dissipates in the wind, including the very subject of cognition and experience, and the emptiness lifts ephemeral existences and encounters, friendship is the binder of ephemeralness. Chinaware is simultaneously unique, durable, and fragile, it is intricate. Not only does friendship in the transcultural space between Japan and the West, between Buddhism and Christianity, represent value, but it also becomes an interesting concept, an extremely exquisite construction which links persistency and a place, represents the infinite and the immortal, creates a philosophy of life where time for friendship is regained.

Transcultural celebration of everyday life – celebration of friendship

Celebration of friendship, celebration of everyday life has a long tradition, as the tea ceremony in which, according to Rosella Memegazzo, a codified rite takes on a sacred dimension, it is a focus and silence, it becomes an aesthetic experience (2008, pp. 291–295). Okakura Kakuzō in The Book of Tea indicates that teaism is a kind of ‘a cult founded on the adoration of the beautiful among the sordid facts of everyday existence’, he adds that the tea ceremony is also related to hygiene and economics, because it takes place in simplicity, not in splendour (1989, p. 11). Moreover – what is important for thinking about friendship – it is related to ‘self-humiliation’ which was dictated by an inscription welcoming an adept of the art at the entrance to the tea pavilion, as Antoni Szoska writes (1989, p. 33). Meditation during the ceremony is expressed in acceptance, in a radical ’yes’ to what takes place, and at the same time in a radical ‘no’ to what destroys harmony (Szoska, 1989, p. 4–5). Zen philosophy, painting, calligraphy, the art of flower arranging, tea-drinking ceremony, and poetry seem to express the same inner peace, flow and elegance which Memegazzo describes as follows: ‘the body becomes a direct expression of soul and inner peace, and a daily gesture acquires an abstract character, expressing consciousness of oneself’ (2008, p. 291).

Celebration of everyday life – no longer limited to Japanese rites, combined with transcultural practices developing new networks of connections – every time touches on the importance of time and place. In order to celebrate, I need to ‘have’ time and simultaneously to open up to time, that is, to create a community time that already at the start is opened to what exceeds familiarity of my ‘self’, what becomes an invitation to the ‘different’. I have to humbly inscribe myself into the rhythm of time as such, which is the course of things. I need to have carefully selected (again time is needed) items around me, even if they are integrated into modern networks of exchange. I need to have and to know ‘my’ (but not my familiar) place, which becomes all the more important the more I experience transcultural permeation. I have to ethically rework what it means to be a ‘man in a place’.

An anthropologist would ask what I actually give by bringing a cup, a dessert cup, or a mug to a loved one? A collector, ‘gatherer of things’, Manfred Sommer locates travel souvenirs in a gesture of ‘I cannot come back empty-handed’, indicating that a souvenir is ‘a relic and a symbol of what is brought, and bringing a souvenir is a ritualisation of the justification for leaving’ (2003, p. 282). Leaving loved ones and separation prefigure souvenirs. However, there is more to focus on in here, because more important is the added value: time. It is the gifted time – the time spent on drinking tea. Alone or with a friend, the experience of timelessness is actuated. A porcelain vessel is a subtle thread that connects, and when the object is broken, the bond continues. The memory of an absent thing is a memory which strengthens friendship. We use dishes, touch them, clean, store, and expose them, and simultaneously we find time for friendship with an absent person. Donating a single cup already brings loneliness and remoteness into the centre of the temporal. We are friends with the living, the dead, the absent in ‘here and now’, the distant and the close ones, with those who have never been. By giving a gift, a friend donates time of celebration – the time for friendship and experiencing it. Friendship is transition and persistence.

Chinaware warms time, it is one of the ‘heartwarming gifts’ as the advertisement spotted in Ginza defines it, but at the same time it introduces coolness to the centre of a community. Inherited chinaware becomes cool. It penetrates the experience which is increasingly distant from communal joy, namely the experience of solitary drinking tea in the company of the Absent – distant, separated, deceased. Abandoned jewellery which ‘lost’ its owner is sad, but even sadder is incomplete, orphaned or chipped chinaware. Chinaware needs a stable place because it is not as nomadic as jewellery. Abandoned chinaware, which, for example, was inherited, lacks an inherent network of sensations. Like the increasing distances between loose gas molecules, human distances become more and more ephemeral. The lack, which is indicated by orphaned chinaware, overwrites the merely ‘lifelong’ marked by an end on the ‘immortal’. Friendship is in splinters.

Practicing of loss as practicing of friendship with a place

And yet friendship corresponds with persistence. By giving a cup of fragile porcelain, we give a story about a tangle of persistence and loss of things and people. It is a kind of thinking that we easily encounter through transcultural practices, because they are familiarised with the movement of flows and the disappearance of features, but this tale further on becomes more than that, it becomes a philosophy of life. We give the experience of friendship which wrestles with death, seeing in it both an end (‘to the grave’, ‘lifelong’) and the possibility of overcoming finiteness (‘stronger than death’, ‘immortal’, ‘undying’, ‘unquenchable’, ‘eternal’). A cup ‘for a friend’ is a hint to stick to life and established activities, to attach to near and distant places, even when they lose their distinctness and individuality, but also in a simple way this detail opens up to a sense of fleeing and fading of what is so carefully undertaken.

With every touch of handheld things, childhood as well as the experience of simplicity and intimacy are being lost. Children’s friendship – strong and violent, unpredictable, running out in a short-distance run – disappears in a similar way. With every gaze, gesture, deed – a place drifts away. The world of bonds withers, no longer imprisoning us in relationships. A place, together with people and things, turns into a ruin or a museum, showing emptiness. A single cup and a chipped dessert cup is an accusatory proof of this. A home and bonds disappear, friends die. Surroundings, including surroundings of friendship, lose their clarity. What remains is the experience of loyal enduring in a place as the only possible ‘being in a place’. The palpability of a place strikes us despite the loss of things, places, deeds, words, plants, animals, or people. Living in friendship means opening up to a place with its disappearing things, and living with an everyday loss.

Friendship, which can be supported by a ‘separate’ porcelain cup extracted from a banal transcultural everyday life, can be compared to practicing a specific meditation on the loss of people and things. For a Westerner it takes on a form of medieval scary sigh from Villon’s ballads over those who once filled the world with splendour and luxury (1982, verses 329–356; 367–384). A man in a place is surrounded by a recurring story of transience and futility. Words of the Ecclesiastes are coined: ‘all was vanity and a striving after wind’ (Ecc 2:11); ‘There is no remembrance of former things, nor will there be any remembrance of later things yet to be among those who come after’ (Ecc, 1:11). Duty towards (in) a place occurs in the spirit of the sense of vanity of things, but also the praise of life – we come and go for the friendship of a place.

This experience – armed with melancholy, a sense of ephemerality of achievements and fragility of existence, with the somewhat weakened power of reason disappearing in the history of the world – is not so incomprehensible when confronted/encountered with the transience and uniqueness of experiences derived from Japanese aesthetics. For thinkers such as Arthur Schopenhauer Buddhism constituted a bridge between the East and the West, and was certainly an inspiration for his pessimistic tale (no matter how distant his thought actually was from Buddhism) (1966). However, we are interested in transcultural experience in which we find bridges between distant spaces, between feelings, thinking, understanding, behaviour, signs, expressions, spatio-temporal points, things, encounters. In the context of Japanese culture, we will not search for the European depth or nature that are hidden, the logos, the bottom of meanings, or the importance of cognition or the power of the subject, but we will encounter a similar attention to the passing of time, we will find the gravity given to the incidental being. The Western withdrawal into a melancholy sigh over time and futility of things does not lie very far from the Japanese notion of amae (cf. Lebra, 1976, pp. 165–166; Doi, 1973, pp. 180–185) – passive dependence, the sweetness of subordination and being taken care of; or from ichi-go-ichi-e (cf. Miralles, Hector, 2020) – appreciation and preservation of the unparalleled nature of the ‘now’, the uniqueness of the moment of making tea and the concreteness of the encounter in the ‘here and now’; or from mono no aware (Motoori, 2007) – sensitivity to the ‘pathos of things’, to the melancholy of passing which brings sorrow and grief (Saito, 2007, p. 4). When this ‘travel set’ (after all, we deal here with the cultural order of things encountered whilst travelling) is complemented by sabi – the notion associated with a state of isolation, sadness or loneliness; mujō understood as impermanence; yūgen – secret beauty arising from contemplation; wabi – austere beauty, beauty in seriousness; omote/ura referring to the non-dualistic structure of the social self, that which is directed outward and inward (cf. Japanese Aesthetics, 2005-2018; Korusiewicz, 2014, pp. 156–230) – we gain an environment in which the Westerner finds a space to renew experience. All the more so because the capacity of these concepts, as Korusiewicz pointed out, makes the positive face and the negative aspects be condensed into one, so that they can lead to transformation into their opposites (2014, pp. 411–425). In transcultural space, in a ‘here and now’, feelings become adjusted to each other. In our luggage brought to Europe or America they are already transformed and tailored to us.

A Western man practices passing. A man, practicing the philosophy of friendship as friendship with a place, takes care about close things by preventing them from dying. It can be said that s/he makes them keen observers and judges of his/her own words, gestures, deeds. When s/he ceases to collect, gather or arrange things, and finally decides to get rid of them, s/he experiences the fleetingness of the tangible world which s/he has filled so meticulously with themselves. As Tadeusz Sławek writes, ‘The world becomes deserted when I realise the fact of being; the reality of meticulously collected objects falls from me. What remains is the limitless horizon. Everything drifts away’ (2009, p. 161). Familiarisation with permanency and loss of things is at the same time a way of practicing friendship. Ultimately, we accept losing possession, including possession of ourselves and a friend. What emerges is a place and time for limitless friendship that transcends individual existences and material references.

Japanese valuables in correspondence with the course of things

A Japanese dessert cup brought from a trip with the intention of donating in the name of ‘immortal friendship’ is more than that. Buddhist experience creeps in here, introducing what is ‘empty’ into thinking about a man (Siderits, 2007, pp. 32–68), but it is strangely mixed with the European concept of transition and persistence. We are and we are not, we experience the stream of life, we absorb the multiplicity of beings – we abandon thinking about ourselves. We transgress attachment to ourselves just as we transgress thinking about permanency of things. A friend, humbly working to uphold the idea of permanency, at the same time becomes an admirer of a moment and thoughts about transition and ephemeralness. It is the anthropology of friendship.

We exist in correspondence with the course of things – there is sky, wind, mountains, water, soil, trees, transient bonds of culture. It is like walking along the path of Kenneth White’s geopoetics which discovers intricate connections between nature and culture, which reflects upon inhabitation on the earth (1994). It must be remembered, however, that this path of universalising and environmentalist geopoetics dangerously invalidated a place, diluting even the fluidity of transcultural permeations of things, people and values. It is therefore more important, in view of the extraction of a peculiar bond of friendship with a place, to focus on something described by Sławek as ‘the world “does not have us in its hand”; the world lends us a hand’ (2009, p. 259). We experience this correspondence by growing into a place that is for us but which does not constitute our property. In this clearance to the inconceivable we see a friendly philosophy of life.

Thinking about a cup from Noritake, integrated into the network of transcultural connections, and – by means of the cup – about experiencing time and place, we open ourselves to the philosophy of friendship which becomes a human task. Living in friendship does not mean escaping the infinite and the dark. It does not involve an instrumental story about a useful and systemic world or a story about universal social happiness. We remember that the ‘immortality of friendship’ finds a linguistic correction in the formula ‘to the grave’. Therefore, the story of a place, time and friendship is not a happy island. To have a friend, a home, a place, means to have what matters, what one will have to lose. We touch on the friendship which we will lose in order to regain it in a space of the incomprehensible. There are not many things more fragile than a porcelain cup, and this is the reason why chinaware corresponds well with the power and ephemeralness of friendship, with what is eternal and, at the same time, only ‘to the grave’. According to Józef Tischner, every home a man meticulously creates finally teaches us about a loss, and the death of homes around us becomes a lesson that rooting takes place not in ‘here’, not on the earth (1990, pp. 187–189). The promise comes from ‘there’. What is truly Unusual finds its substitute in the everyday surroundings of home, when the unimaginable lurks on the doorstep, in the attic, in the basement, behind the window, behind the closet, behind the door and even in a rococo cabinet filled with porcelain trinkets from trips – in the vicinity of what is known and close.

The incomprehensible near a porcelain cup

The incomprehensible surrounded by friendship is a great theme of Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy. Storms, caves, sea during the storm, mountain peaks, clear streams and fresh air co-create the vicinity of friendship. The Master protects himself from ‘poisonous flies’, seeks solitude in caves, on mountain peaks, avoids musty and crowded urban clusters and markets, steps ‘where a rough, strong breeze bloweth’ (Nietzsche, 1899, p. 68). Friendship needs fresh air. The Master creates a place for himself in the midst of an immense nature, he actually finds space in a place, but he does it through a gesture of uprooting. Renewal and growth comes as we move away from the crowd and abandon familiarity. Developing a tale about friendship, this supreme nobility of spirit, or about an enemy as a demanding friend, he creates an extremely lonely tale about friendship. ‘Higher’, ‘further’, ‘deeper’ – friends support each other in the pursuit of spirit nobility. They walk along a route different from the one of slaves or tyrants. For a friend ‘thou shalt be an arrow and a longing towards beyond-man’ (Nietzsche, 1899, p. 74).

Nietzschean thought affirming friendship is a successor of the Greek and Roman tale about a subject, in which reason, independence, freedom are prerequisites for liberated friendship based on partnership. This friendship which is the culmination of a free man’s life. However, there is no friendship with a place as home here, and certainly no understanding for fragile chinaware. Yet, there is understanding for a wanderer who leaves home, for a friend who looks at the sky. It must be remembered, whilst making a certain correction of the Nietzschean thought, that after loosing home the notorious wanderer travels the world wrestling with the idea of home.

This should be mentioned in the context of a donated cup or plate, because a radical philosophy of friendship built on uprooting and wandering, calling for the abandonment of what is so frivolous in a bourgeois way as a cup, is not very far from what is fragile. Chinaware is a representation of the same remoteness and loss. It is a differently actualised spirit of lightness. Qualities of chinaware include its hardness, strength, indelibility, smooth surface (it is difficult to get dirty due to low porosity) and light transmittance. However, it does not mean that chinaware is difficult to destroy. A wanderer-friend must be sturdy and hard, but at the same time ‘smooth’, lovable. Friendship does not get dirty and it ‘transmits light’ – things which are important are visible through friendship. It is not as pronounced as Nietzsche would like it to be, but it is equally experienced by the power of flame, because porcelain is created from this element of fire and earth. By combining fire and earth (firing process; mixture of kaolin clay, feldspar and quartz), it binds home and loss, metamorphosis, circle of life and death. At this point, we have a slightly better understanding of what is incomprehensible: the link between immortality and death, the return of things and of the ‘here and now’. The ‘immortality of friendship’ and its mortal end ‘here and now’ expressed in what is only/as far as ‘to the grave’ – find a link in the gift of a porcelain thing. A cup, the essence of a subtle form, without the fierceness of a nomadic thought, still (or perhaps even more effectively) stores the experience of distance and a touch of the incomprehensible. Even chipped, ‘separate’, or desolate, it in a way is an appalling renewal of the face of friendship in a place.

It can be said, with some deliberate metaphysical emphasis, that the ancillary porcelain detail followed by the donated time and place raises incomprehensible questions, including the most appalling ones – what is beyond a place, will we really meet? The seemingly trivial porcelain cup, along with the transculturally processed experience of repeating everyday life, takes humans beyond themselves, towards appalling questions about repeated life in the network of connections and flows. The philosophy of friendship, which is created on a probably trivial ground, constitutes a scaffolding for essential questions which a man encounters whilst experiencing ephemeralness of things, which lead to the place of encounter with another person, which incorporate what is ‘alien’ into ‘our’ space, and which reveal our location among fragile donated valuables. A place, even impaired in its independence, is salvation because in its fluid mobility it teaches how to become familiarised with the loss of things and people.

Philosophy of friendship – time and place

A porcelain gift radically introduces openness to a place and time. It raises doubts and hope in the face of the immortal and the mundane. The infinite, the immortal, the eternal extend cultural ideas – realised in time – of our being beyond time. They exacerbate anxiety. Friendship appreciates time. A friend is a long-distance runner, friendship is long-term. It survives times of storm and pressure, remembers a lot, binds old age and youth, is persistence and taming of transition of things. By transgressing the arrangement of the moment, it becomes a kind of faith in timelessness. The neighbourhood of the notions ‘always’, ‘forever’, ‘constantly’ does not lead to indifference to ‘now’. Along with the ‘now’ comes the discovery of ‘here’, the discovery of a place which goes together with other people and things. Contrary to appearances, only in pronunciation friendship seems to be more gracious for time. Location is revealed to us by experience. Friendship does not manage easily without a place – it does not cross borders so easily, although it builds bridges and participates in exchanges; even when it goes on a journey, it does not quickly invalidate home and is slow in demolishing protective walls; it considers territories even when it is based on an encounter and openness to ‘the other’; whilst penetrating through separate homes and liquidating the meaning of home, it reluctantly familiarises with the things which may destroy serenity of a place.

Living in friendship with a place is living in friendship with others, with oneself, with the world of values. It presents us with an equally important problem of a community. ‘Friendship implies community’, as Aristotle writes in Nicomachean Ethics (1893, VIII. 9, 2). We live well owing to it. Friends makes themselves equal. ‘[T]he perfect kind of friendship is that of good men who resemble one another in virtue’ (Aristotle, 1893, VIII. 3, 6). Philia (φιλíα) is based on partnership. The most perfect form of friendship is based on virtue; it does not grow out of pleasure or utility. The true friend is thus not the one who gives us pleasure or the one who brings us benefits, but the one who is chosen by us because of oneself, who is valuable in oneself.

In the reflection upon friendship it is difficult to eliminate the concern about what is interpersonal and what creates a world of bonds, and finally, what constitutes beauty, truth and good. Plato in The Third Letter wrote, ‘Dion was a tried comrade of mine and a guest-friend of old standing, and he was a man of staid middle age,—qualities that are specially required by men who possess even a particle of sense when they intend to advise concerning affairs so important as yours then were’ (1966, p. 316c).

We can find beauty in a friend (philos, φíλος) and then appreciate beauty as such. Friendship directs us towards the truth. In friendship we come across the good. This corresponds to Plato’s idea expressed in Lysis – friendship grows out of an orientation towards the good, towards what constitutes proton philon (πρnτον φíλον) (1955, p. 219c–219d) and what Giovanni Reale defines as ‘first friend’ (2001, p. 259). Plato in Lysis wrote, ‘Then will that something be, on its part also, a friend for the sake of a friend? Yes. Now are we not bound to weary ourselves with going on in this way, unless we can arrive at some first principle which will not keep leading us on from one friend to another, but will reach the one original friend, for whose sake all the other things can be said to be friends?’ (1955, p. 219c–219d). And further, the philosopher explained, ‘In speaking of all the things that are friends to us for the sake of some other friend, we find ourselves uttering a mere phrase; whereas in reality “friend” appears to be simply and solely the thing in which all these so-called friendships terminate. So it appears, he said. Then the real friend is a friend for the sake of nothing else that is a friend? True. So we have got rid of this, and it is not for the sake of some friendly thing that the friend is friendly. But now, is the good a friend? I should say so. And further, it is because of the bad that the good is loved’ (Plato, 1955, p. 220a–220b). It is only this orientation towards what is radically different which can become a foundation of human friendship.

Whilst reflecting upon friendship with a place, we need to expand the Greek field of meaning. What is needed is a dynamic field of meaning comprised of not only philía (φιλíα), that is friendship based on respect, which is a virtue, but also storgē (στοργή) as attachment, xenia (ηενíα) as friendship shown to the guest, érōs (ἔρως) as love which – even based on senses and intimate desire (although it is not a prerequisite) – aspires to spiritual connection, and finally agápē (ἀγάπη) as the love of God for man and of man for God. Our friendship with a place stems from the following area of values and experiences: there must be something which transcends human location, which is a spiritual face of the place and openness to what is incomprehensible, the world of bonds and loyalty to others and to home must be emphasised, equality and humbleness of friends as well as spiritual connection are crucial, so is the experienced intimacy in the place, there is a need to find alienation, loneliness and hospitality in the world in order to highlight the value of home and location, and, finally, it becomes important to appreciate a gift which connects distant spaces of the host and the wanderer in a hospitable gesture.

At this point, a reservation must be made which is revealed in our struggle with a community in friendship. Friendship, as practiced knowledge (like a spiritual exercise), is a distanced narrative in the face of forces that are too communal, glorify a herd, invalidate the separate and the subjective. However, it is equally distanced from the extreme anti-communal interpretations overly praising an uprooted and selected individual. Distance has always been a prerequisite of friendship. Without these spatial ideas, it is difficult to undertake friendship with a community in the background.

It is worth mentioning here a master of friendship and distance, Henry David Thoreau, according to whom it is best to be friends with somebody across the pond (1854, p. 153). Then conversation is at its best because the beneficial expanse of the lake introduces a healing distance from what is excessively worn out, adjacent or connate. The interpersonal needs loosening of the place. Whilst living on the sidelines, in a nomadic way, being tired of traversing trails, Thoreau simultaneously lives in a place – together with soil, rock, water, air, sky, wildlife. He lives in a cosmic way. He observes nature with meticulous discipline and due attention that only a friend can afford. The master renews the community from a distance.

Together with the porcelain dessert cup brought from Japan, further inscribed in our European practices, we give space-time for spiritual exercise repeated every day, preparing and drinking tea, repeating distance from the community and approaching the feeling of servitude towards the area. We find friendship in the stretch between the East and the West, in what is a new network of connections and permeations, between beauty as a subtle noble value and a community of people – such friendship flourishes in a place that we rediscover with transcultural breath. Friendship draws us out of a limited and material place, and directs us towards a full place and its spiritual dimension. The gift from a friend, by means of which we are to rediscover the place and time (in order to ‘have time’ to undertake our location), opens us up to the world, whilst placing our prideful ‘self’ on the sidelines. As if we were unnecessary, being able to lose our location at any time. Familiarised with a future withdrawal.

It is on the periphery of the social world preoccupied with production of noise surrounding it that we find a way to higher things, more perfect than ourselves. We transcend the turmoil of ‘unceasing cascades of the human voice’, as Clive Staples Lewis wrote (1960, p. 109). And such a thing, which is above other things, is friendship. On the sidelines, in a good location, we can accept it with gratitude or reject it. A place is a good ground of friendship. What is needed here is free will and humble acceptance of grace which flows to us in a place when we accept the gift of a dessert cup, a cup, a plate. By giving in to friendship, we want to reaffirm the value of persistence in a liquid world. After all, friendship is a virtue through which we show respect for beauty, truth and good. Whilst enjoying tea, we celebrate everyday beauty, but we also worship beauty as such. Discovering the beauty of a cup from Noritake or the incredibleness of a place, we express admiration for the nature of the world, but not in the sense of admiration of the views (we learn neither from nature nor from history), but the nature of the thing that manifests itself in a place. Friendship leads to the spirit of a place, to the human value of being in a place, to immersion in the idea of home, no matter how much our being at home has been blurred today in the movement of borrowings and displacements.

Distance is fundamental in order to address the anthropology of friendship in a place. Distance tearing territories, separating people and things, is what unites – to cite Thoreau’s words once again. Nothing brings friends closer than a distance practiced in a journey, which also has another reference – it becomes a cognitive distance to itself and the world as an arena of events, it is also an earned distance to delight in the journey, because ‘landscapes are repetitions’, as Fernando Pessoa writes (2013, p. 129), and the idea of a journey can make you sick according to this master of contemplation of a place: ‘I've already seen everything I've never seen. I've already seen everything I haven't yet seen’ (2013, p. 128). Being presented with a porcelain cup ‘to an undying friendship’, and not just a useless porcelain knickknack, we are presented with the experience of distance, slowness of life and mindfulness of being in a place. Side by side, like friends, we walk and endure. The gift of addressing the philosophy of friendship requires us to become humble observers of the course of things. Therefore, a person friendly to a place still learns friendship understood as becoming familiar with time and opening up to timelessness seen as consent to a spiritual and material place. The person does not destroy their faith, serves a place, takes life with seriousness, invites a friend with devotion. At the same time, a friend does not close the place and the interpersonal relationship too much, does not define anything so as not to destroy the experience of ‘here and now’ or close the vastness of what can perhaps be eternal. A friend fears an excess of words and desperate gestures, avoids hysterical actions, escapes from a revolution in a place. Friendship can be an apology of a tangle between a man, a place, and freedom. And at this point, cultural psychology that affirms a good life due to the cultural context should find its anchorage.

Man as a being capable of friendship

The porcelain gift purchased in Ginza in the name of ‘immortal’ and ‘eternal’ friendship whilst opening up to the repetition of deeds and gestures, to what ‘eternally returns’, teaches us simplicity at the same time. People friendly to the world live moderately and simply. ‘They exist accurately’, in humbleness towards the nature of the world and a detail. Friendship in a place, discovered by means of a precious thing, creates the ground for thinking ‘without thinking’. People, discovering a precious connection with a place and finding in themselves a friend to another man, discover themselves – those are people understood as beings capable of friendship with the world and the incomprehensible.

Does it mean that the rhythm of repetition, the slowness of the day and the meticulous persistence hide only the peace and nobility of friendship? A circle of friends can turn into a circle of ‘sound men’, and then ‘Friendship has sunk back again into the mere practical Companionship’, and friends again are just a group like a horde of hunters, as Lewis pointed out (1960, p. 123). However, it may also be different, a friend can in an instant, in the name of a crazy idea, turn repetitive everyday life and stable bonds into a flame. This destructive fire is within the potency of the philosophy of friendship because it is in the potency of a place that we are bound to. However, a man located, befriended with people and the surrounding area, prefers to strengthen the world rather than destroy it. Friendship is devotion of free people. It ignores social and economic barriers. Friendship in a place makes us equal, creating humble and modest subjects. The correction of our rashness comes from the side of a place and makes the friendship with a place strengthen friendship with others. After all, like friends among themselves, friendship with a place consists of companionship of old friends. It exists among books, slippers, cups and chalices, suitcases, windows, doors, etc. In the midst of these things, friendship with a place reveals something else, a sphere of the ‘between’, the divine, the empty, the incomprehensible. Through these clearances we are able to see a noble face of a friend who, like us, develops a desire for what is above us and what does not come from us.

Does friendship enrich us, as the wisdom of proverbs suggests? We could answer that, owing to friendship in a place, a man is not so poor, however, we must remember that the domain of being human is not wealth or participation in the abundance of the world, but poverty. Friendship, by revealing our location, gives a unique identity to people, opens them up to a place and time, takes them out of shapelessness, and thus make them credible people. A man who conscientiously practices friendship maintains a good place which lasts even if it materially diminishes. A real place has a share of what is eternal, what constitutes a source, this ‘place of places’. In this sense, friendship remains ‘eternal’.

Before concluding it is worth going back to the porcelain cup, the purchase of which is encouraged by a Tokyo advertisement in the very centre of megalopolis. The purchase of the fragile vessel – handy in everyday life – to make it a gift to a friend in the name of ‘eternal’ and ‘immortal’ friendship, introduces us to thinking about friendship which does not need screaming, which is not a familiar or rococo ‘gimmick’. The cup, the mug and the plate mark the beginning of a tale about a place which we need to find for them and about the time for the daily ceremony. Along with the exercise in friendship and a specific object a tale about particular people and their local arrangement starts. Even when the topos/locus is discovered during a journey between the East and the West, already in displacement, our location is difficult to invalidate. Together with the invitation to experience a moment and friendship, the fiction of politics and the fiction of theory disappear. What becomes revealed is a place which is concrete and forever indeterminate, exceeding material and social ideas, a place that is above everyday hustle and collecting things, a place located spiritually.

To some extent, a gift from a cup will always mark friendship with the ability to distance and resign, to look ‘there’. Friendly people, found through a thing, a place and time, are a consent to humble existence, location near the truth stating that they will never become the ones they will never be, that they will never deny their ‘here’. But at the same time this location near the truth indicates that a mug might as well be a defile to what is incomprehensible, just like rigorous religious ceremonies. An everyday object is a strange gift: it situates friendship against rooting and loss of earthly arrangement of things, in openness to the circle of life and death, it is an invitation to commune with fragility of life and openness to (un)domestic space-time. Friendship, whilst revealing an indefinite place, however, brings out particular suffering, a particular man, a particular loss.

A view which binds friendship with a place – due to a detail that opens up to transcultural seriousness of everyday life – reveals an anthropological recommendation: remember that a porcelain gift conceals fragility and persistence. It is hard, indelible, durable, smooth, it does not get dirty easily, it transmits light. Individual valuables contain an added value of being a gift, that is separateness and distance. We look through them at both ‘here’ and ‘there’. A cup from Noritake, as a ‘heartwarming gift’, reveals the work of friendship – it is a gesture of restoring bonds in the world where friendly bonds have been broken. In a new form of permeation of the ‘alien’ and the ‘our’ an exhilarating tangle is found. And this tangle should be of use for cultural psychology when it searches for cultural space and values that strengthen a man in living a good life. Friendship is a gesture inviting us to mindfulness of life in a place that has not only already been displaced, but will soon disappear from the human topography. It is a fragile suggestion to rebuild (not build up) the interpersonal on everyday basis, and, along with this, to define the community of time and place anew.