14 - Innocence

Summary

Alongside the involvement of friendship with spontaneity, unselfconsciousness, and humility, friendship also involves at least one other virtue that necessarily involves tacit knowledge. I shall call this virtue innocence. Innocence is an interesting and difficult concept. In rather the same way as humility, spontaneity, and unselfconsciousness, its difficulties have to do with the familiar idea of ‘thinking the unthinkable’. Innocence, in brief, is the virtue of not thinking the unthinkable – of having the tacit knowledge that enables you to avoid even thinking about what it is better not even to think about.