The Discipline of Pious Reason: Goethe, Herder, Kant Daniel ...

pleasure. Friendship circumvents the One in favour of the multiple. Friendship is
‘endless’—an infinite, ‘arduous’ task which never reaches completion.
Herder elucidates friendship through opposing ‘common purpose’ to union. What is
sought is not for two individuals to become the same, to meld into one another, but
rather collaboration—the mutual and reciprocal interchange of ideas that helps form
each individual in divergent ways. Herder writes, ‘The two flames on one altar play
into one another, they jubilantly lift and carry one another… In general a life in
common is the mark of true friendship: the disclosing and sharing of hearts’ (ibid,
4:412; p. 114). Perhaps we could gloss Herder’s comments anachronistically by
quoting Michèle Le Doeuff’s allusion to the collaborative relationship of John Stuart
Mill and Harriet Taylor. She writes in The Sex of Knowing,
However far we go back in the history of their relationship, Harriet Taylor never
was a disciple of John Stuart Mill. Still less was she his creation… Each stood up
to the other, neither was completely under the “influence” of, or “incorporated”
by, the other, but each had to defend her/himself against the other, each had a
slight tendency to want too much from the other. (Le Doeuff, 2003, p. 217)
Just as for Herder, so too for Le Doeuff it is not the ‘incorporation’ of one individual
into another which provides the ethical telos of life, but rather collaboration between
two distinct and competing individual thinkers—not discipleship but friendship. It is
the pleasure the individual as individual takes in another.