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

in favour of a more temperate balance between unity and separation which he labels
‘friendship’.
There are three fundamental reasons Kant prefers friendship to love. First, friendship,
unlike love, is necessarily reciprocal: ‘There can be amor unilateralis; but strictly such
well-wishing changes into friendship (amicitia) through a reciprocal love, or amor
bilateralis.’ (1997, 27:676) Second, friendship, unlike love, requires equality between
the parties: ‘inter superiors et inferiors no friendship occurs’ (ibid, 27:676), for
friendship demands ‘reciprocal esteem… among equals’ (ibid, 27:680). Finally, and
here Kant is most insistent, friendship, unlike love, keeps the other at a distance. He
writes in the Lectures, we ‘cannot permit the other to come too close… In this lies the
mutual restriction of reciprocal love among friends.’ (ibid, 27:682) In consequence,
one of Kant’s ‘rules of prudence’ reads, ‘To keep sufficiently at a distance from our
friend’ so as to prevents ‘rash communication and… unrestrained love’, for ‘Too deep
an intimacy detracts from worth’ (ibid, 27:684-5). Kant returns to this topic in the
published version of the Metaphysik der Sitten. There he writes,
Love can be regarded as attraction and respect as repulsion, and if the principle of
love bids friends draw closer, the principle of respect requires them to stay at a
proper distance from each other. This limitation on intimacy, which is expressed
in the rule that even the best of friends should not make themselves too familiar
with each other, contains a maxim that holds [in all cases]. (1996, 6:470)