Fascinating …
But is it not too easy to define friendship on the basis of the good and virtue, when your slaves are doing all the work?
I mean it is all fine and well to want to define friendship on the basis of the good and virtue, while making secondary pleasure and utility, but this needs to be put into context. When the person, Aristotle, is a philo born into a rich family of masters who have never done a days work, it is all too easy to bypass utility and pleasure/unpleasure. It is a dream about dreamers.
Let’s put Aristotle’s platitudes on friendship into the context of his life and see how he practices what he preaches about the virtue and the good in reality. First, he thinks slaves are like tame animals:
“And indeed the use made of slaves and of tame animals is not very different; for both with their bodies minister to the needs of life. (Aristotle, Politics)
Then in the name of the virtue and the good, he counsels Alexandre to invade the east and treat them like non-friends, barbarians, beasts, and plants:
“a leader to the Greeks and a despot to the barbarians, to look after the former as after friends and relatives, and to deal with the latter as with beasts or plants” (Green Peter, Alexander of Macedon, p.58–59)
In the end,there needs to be just a bit of reality added to Aristotle’s platitudes on friendship. Before defining what friendship is one must get clear on what the neighbor and the non-friend are qua Other, the slave, the beast, etc. Since without determining what the non-friend is, we are left with an ethnocentric world view trying to pass itself off as friendly advice on the good and virtue. It should be noted that if the truly virtuous friendship can occur outside pleasure and utility, this will only be a friendship between men since women will have been excluded from the community of philia in the sense of philo-sophy. In sum, Aristotle’s notion of friendship is strongly connected to violence, privilege, and self-interest that are disavowed under the guise of an ideal of good and virtue.
If “life is too short for shallow friendships”, it is certainly too short for shallow advice on friendship. If Aristotle’s advice on friendship today still matters, it is a perfect negative didactic of what not to do with regard to the Other.
Cheers,
S
