Approaching Others: Aristotle on Friendship’s Possibility

Author:

Bryan Bradley1

Affiliation:

1. Department of Political Science, University of Victoria, PO Box 3060 STN CSC, Victoria, BC, Canada V8W 3R4,

Abstract

The essay sheds light on Aristotle’s understanding of friendship and its relation to political life.The author challenges the usual view that Aristotle postulates three distinct kinds of friendship. Instead the author argues that Aristotle understood there to be only one kind of friendship, and that other “friendships” were to Aristotle “unfinished” and thus not friendship at all. Aristotle shows that the relation between friendship and politics is grounded in friendship’s possibility for human beings, and not as something cherished for its actuality. By looking at proper friendship as possibility and not actuality, we could only ever interpret the infamous statement attributed to Aristotle—“my friends, there are no friends”—not as illuminating of what friendship is but rather as a nostalgic diagnosis of the decay of the possibility of friendship, and hence of politics. By extension, and more poignantly, interpreting Aristotle’s work on friendship in this light, we stand ready to reinterpret the mobilization of Aristotelian friendship for contemporary understandings of democratic practice.

Publisher

SAGE Publications

Subject

Sociology and Political Science,History

Reference11 articles.

1. Cf.MarshallMacGregor, "Greek in its Anecdotage," Studies and Diversions in Greek Literature (London: Kennikat Press, 1937), 235.

2. On this distinction, see Walter Otto, The Homeric Gods, trans. M. Hadas ( London: Thames & Hudson , 1955 ), 43-60.

3. See MacIntyre, After Virtue, 155.

4. Frank, Democracy of Distinction , 24.

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