On Friendship

ON FRIENDSHIP is a book about the origins of consciousness and the place that friendship possesses in that process.  As early human beings advanced out of Africa and slowly populated our earth they did so in terms of walking.  Friendship, more than any other emotional experience-rather than kinship-was central in that development of incipient awareness.  The practice of walking was a condition that was profoundly inherent in the early composition of psyche and this book presents four Walks-in Greece, the Windward Isles, western India, and New England-as representative of such apprehension.  Walking is here portrayed as a transcendental and philosophical activity and as a constitutive source-through the work of apperception-of human understanding.  It is the development of friendship that transformed the experience of the pedestrian from one of the most intrinsic sources of the human psyche into a situation of moral sentience.