Seizure the Day by Brian Orend

Author:Brian Orend
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Freehand Books
Published: 2018-02-02T16:00:00+00:00

Aristotle on Love and Friendship

Let’s now turn to this book’s theoretical roots for inspiration. Aristotle helpfully adds new things to our reflections; he actually thought very highly of love and friendship. This may come as something of a surprise, given his stressing what might seem like the selfish pursuit of personal excellence (or eudaimonia) and his recommendation to pursue either a life of advancing knowledge or one of sociopolitical engagement: demanding careers often seen at odds with a robust personal life. But this should be no surprise at all. Aristotle is, after all, the man who declared that human beings are, by nature, social and political animals, and thus we can only find true fulfillment in ongoing association with others. He actually favoured a much tighter and more communal social structure than what any contemporary “egoist” or “individualist” 314 would feel comfortable with. Aristotle was keenly interested in love and friendship, and wrote several extended chapters specifically devoted to the subject. 315 This is rather unique among history’s top philosophers, who generally shy away from such “touchy-feely” subjects. Of course, Aristotle realized how important love and friendship are to most people. But his main theoretical interest in the subject was how he was convinced that, for a person to secure their fullest individual potential they need not only support from their parents while growing up, and not merely decent background social institutions to secure the ongoing context of their lives; they also require more intense and involved mature social relationships, like we see in the very best friendships and close, love-based relationships.

There are three basic kinds of friendship, according to Aristotle (he uses “friendship” in a very broad way). These correspond to what he saw as the three basic reasons why someone might like someone else, and view them as an associate or friend. First is pleasure, of the sort detailed in Chapter 3. If you provide someone with pleasure, you have a pleasure friendship. Or perhaps you like someone because they provide you with some benefit or other (seen by Aristotle as moving beyond sensory pleasure to include a useful good or service). Shared mutual benefits are the basis of utility friendship. Finally, you might like someone because you think they are a genuinely good person, and you admire that goodness and are attracted to it. Aristotle was especially interested in the kind of goodness associated with his own theory about human excellence—intellectual and moral goodness, in particular. This was Aristotle’s most preferred kind of friendship, where those involved help each other to become better and happier people. This is probably his most unique contribution to this subject, as it doesn’t appear straightforwardly in either of the previously discussed contemporary theories of benefit and attachment. Aristotle labelled this sort of friendship—wherein there is mutual support, and aid of each other’s development toward excellence—as “true friendship,” even “perfect friendship.” 316

Perfect friendship, for Aristotle, has a dozen elements, ordered hierarchically as in the diagram below. (He thought the best romantic love relationships are forms of true or perfect friendship.

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