On Friendship - by Kevin McGrath (Paperback)

About the Book

A book about consciousness and friendship.

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

On Friendship is an exquisitely beautiful meditation on love, landscape, and memory. I was transported to distant worlds and reminded of the astonishing meaning to be found in nature and human connection. I loved it ...

-Daniel P. Mason

Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry

at Stanford University and distinguished novelist

whose most recent publication is North Woods (2023).

On Friendship is that rare book which travels through centuries and across diverse worlds and histories. It speaks in profound ways to those journeys of the mind forged through deep reflection. Friendship is that central part of one's life which endures in present, past, and future selves. I believe this book will resonate in the hearts and minds of all those fortunate enough to encounter it, long after the last words are read.

-Jayasinhji Jhala

His Highness the Jhaleshvara of Dhrangadhra State in Gujarat;

he is also an active film-maker, anthropologist, and historian.