Friendship Beyond Reason

ABSTRACT

The ancient philosophers aimed to turn us away from thinking about particularizing affection to thinking about justifiable human relations. The aim of their protreptic discourses was to get their readers, who were citizens, sons, and fathers, to think about their lives by putting these relations into question. I show how this conversion works and explore its political consequences by reading the accounts of friendship in Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero, and then comparing those accounts with the views on the causes and justifications of human relations of Rousseau, of Christians and post-Christian Kantians, and of the Hebrew Bible and its Rabbinic commentators.

KEYWORDS:

• Plato
• Aristotle
• Cicero
• Martha Nussbaum
• love
• friendship

Acknowledgment

I would like to thank my fellow WPSA panelists for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper—Todd Breyfogle, the late Corey Abel, Richard Avramenko, and John von Heyking. I would also like to thank Arlene Saxonhouse, Richard Velkley, Leora Basnitsky, George Kateb, Rachel Adelman, Nathalie Moise, and Anna Kochin.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

^1. Konstan, “Greek Friendship,” 75; see also Konstan, Friendship in the Classical World, 53–56, 67–72. In the Eudemian Ethics 7.1.5, 1235a, Aristotle contrasts aphilia or friendlessness with living “with family, or with kin, or with age-mates, or children or parents or wife.” In this article it is the wider term, philia, which will be my main concern. Nussbaum’s objections to the traditional translation of philia as friendship, should, however be noted, most seriously as she states in The Fragility of Goodness, “Philia includes the very strongest and most intimate of our affective ties. We can say that two people are ‘just friends’; no such thing could be said with philia” (328 n, cf. 354).

^2. Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, 4.6.1–5, 1126b, with the Ross translation modified. Hereafter references are to Rackham’s translation and are cited in the text.

^3. On Aristotle, see, e.g., Cooper, “Aristotle on the Forms of Friendship,” 320 n. 11.

^4. Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, 6. Derrida returns to the question “who is the friend” in the last chapter of the book where, by no coincidence, he touches for the only time on a view of love that is distinctively Jewish rather than Christian or philosophic.

^5. Cicero, On Friendship, 5.18. Hereafter references are cited in the text.

^6. Cf. Cicero, De Officiis, 3.10.43–5, 3.23.90.

^7. Stern-Gillet, Aristotle’s Philosophy of Friendship, 8.

^8. Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire, 90.

^9. Elsewhere in The Fragility of Goodness Nussbaum writes that “The best philos does seek repeatable traits of character in the object. … He seeks and attends to those repeatable traits … not as pieces of something homogeneous that turns up in many places in the universe, but as forming the essential core of what that concrete person is. He attends to virtues and aspirations because those are the deepest things that go to make another individual the individual he is. He searches not for isolable bits of a form, but for the combination of traits and aspirations that make up the wholeness of a person’s character” (357). Nussbaum’s argument depends on eliding the distinction between character as a type and the individual person as an instantiation of that type. Such an elision may be tenable ethically and so defensible as protreptic rhetoric, but it is false ontologically (see Kochin, “Individual Narrative and Political Character”). The trouble is that Nussbaum treats Aristotle’s “account of the value of love” (369) as if it were also an account of the etiology of love. Nussbaum addresses this difficulty, albeit with revealing obliqueness, in “Love and the Individual”; cf. also Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire, 67–68.

^10. Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics, 7.4.8, 1239a33–4; Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, 9. Cf. Stern-Gillet’s admission in Aristotle’s Philosophy of Friendship, 71–72.

^11. Kahn, “Aristotle and Altruism,” 23.

^12. Sparshott, Taking Life Seriously, 22 (italics omitted).

^13. See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 8.3.2, 1156a6–24; Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness, 357.

^14. Plato, Symposium, 209b–212b; See also Vlastos, “The Individual as Object of Love in Plato.”

^15. Cf. Aristotle, Magna Moralia, 2.12.8, 1212a.

^16. Frankfurt, The Reasons of Love, 38.

^17. Mendus, “Marital Faithfulness,” 240.

^18. Cooper, “Aristotle on the Forms of Friendship,” 332.

^19. Brentlinger, “The Nature of Love,” 137.

^20. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 8.3.9, 8.5.5, 1156b, 1157b; Telfer, “Friendship,” 225; Stern-Gillet Aristotle’s Philosophy of Friendship, 63; Montaigne, “Of Friendship,” in The Complete Essays, 212; Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, 392.

^21. Rousseau, Emile, 391; Bloom, Love and Friendship, 112–13.

^22. Rousseau, Emile, 105.

^23. See McTaggart’s demonstration in The Nature of Existence that “neither pleasure … nor approbation, nor benevolence, nor sympathy, is always found with love” (vol. 2, 148–51).

^24. De Rougement, Love in the Western World, 226. The only serious effort I have found so far to explain rather than justify the personalizing element of love is in Stendhal’s “physiological” treatise On Love (1822): one admires someone for their genuinely admirable qualities, or at least “the course of beauty must not be interrupted by ugliness.” One then anticipates the pleasures of the relation, and then, as soon as one (justifiably or otherwise) sees some hope of reaping those pleasures with this person, “love is born.” One then proceeds to add all sorts of imagined perfections to the love, a process for which Stendhal coins the term “crystallization,” comparing it to the crystallization of glittering salt-crystals on an old dry twig in an abandoned salt mine (5–9, 14–15, 29, 359–71).

^25. Nygren, Agape and Eros, 76, 210.

^26. Schall, “Friendship and Political Philosophy,” 131.

^27. See, e.g., McCarthy, “On the Margins of Politics”; Dallmayr, “Derrida and Friendship,” 549. For a critique of the Kantian claim, albeit mixed with an excessive degree of voluntarism about human relations, see McWilliams, The Idea of Fraternity in America, esp. 48–49.

^28. Nygren, Agape and Eros, 63. Nygren passes over the commandment to love God (Deuteronomy 6:5), but of course the God of the Bible is “my God” and the “God of my father” (Exodus 15:2). On the comparison between the Christian and Hebrew Bibles, see also Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, 66–69; Pangle, Aristotle and the Philosophy of Friendship, 201 n. 5. Shaftesbury quotes the “learned and pious” Bishop Taylor, “the word friendship in the sense we commonly mean by it, is not so much as named in the New Testament, and our religion takes no note of it” (67 n. 1)

^29. The Rabbis as mythical interpreters of the Bible wish to rationalize God’s choices by retelling us myths about the sins and the vices of both Ishmael and Esau. Every beloved wants to believe that he or she is worthy of the love that he or she receives.

^30. Augustine, The City of God, 19.24.

^31. Powell and Wallis, House of Lords in the Middle Ages, xi; Kochin, Five Chapters on Rhetoric,

chap. 4.

^32. Mendus, “Marital Faithfulness,” 238.

^33. Ibid., 241. Cf. Brunner: “The formula for love is not: I love you because you are thus—and we might add: as long as you are thus”; Brunner, Eros und Liebe, 26, quoted in Pieper, On Love, 55.

^34. Cf. Nietzsche’s command to be silent about one’s friend lest one talk away the friendship in Human All Too Human, §252; discussed by Derrida in The Politics of Friendship, 53–54.

^35. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, §26, 62.

^36. Aristotle, The Politics, 1262b22–3. My understanding of this statement follows the “weaker reading” rejected by Sherman in The Fabric of Character, 146, though it is Sherman who drew my attention to this passage.

^37. Cooper, “Aristotle on the Forms of Friendship,” 313 n. 3.

^38. Contemporary treatments of love often work in the opposite direction, starting with individual feelings and cognitions, and attempt to build to justifications of committed relationships. See Jollimore, Love’s Vision. Such a “social contract” theory of love might be more promising if it started with more sophisticated theories of contract. See Coase, “The Nature of the Firm,” 386–405; and for an application of Coasian reasoning to political belonging, see Kochin, “The Constitution of Nations.”

^39. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 9.10.6, 1171a.

^40. Plato, Apology, 30a.

^41. Plato, Protagoras, 345e6–346b5 (my translation). This passage in the Protagoras should be compared with the passages in the Gorgias in which Socrates contends that rhetoric’s proper use is not to conceal the injustice of oneself and those to whom one is related, but to indict them when they do injustice (Gorgias, 480b–d, 508bc, 527c); Kastely, “In Defense of Plato’s Gorgias.” It is the same problematic of how to properly praise or blame those with whom one is thrown together, but described with opposite polarities.

^42. Cf. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 8.8.3, 1159a27–28.

^43. Benhabib, “The Generalized and Concrete Other.”

^44. Bloom, Love and Friendship, 261.

^45. Cicero, De re publica, 1.2.3.

^46. Montaigne, Apology for Raymond Sebond, in Collected Essays, 572.

^47. Bloom, Love and Friendship, 275.

^48. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 5:83; Kant, Grounding of the Metaphysics of Morals, 4:399; Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, 6:451, 471; Nussbaum, “Love and the Individual,” 337. Derrida asks, more than a little plaintively, at the end of The Politics of Friendship, “Is it possible to think and to implement democracy, that which would keep the old name ‘democracy,’ while uprooting from it all these figures of friendship (philosophical and religious) which prescribe fraternity: the family and the androcentric ethnic group?” (306). As Derrida indicates throughout that book, to give a positive answer to his question, to claim that democracy without imagined kinship is possible, requires that the very concept of possibility be explicated in ways incompatible with the understandings offered in the Western philosophical tradition. See, e.g., Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, 67; Derrida, “Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides,” 115, 134. Intellectually this is probably the weakest point in Derrida’s project or hope.

^49. See Hutter, Politics and Friendship, 182–83. Schwartzenbach emphasizes the displacement of the ethical by the productive, but she seems to think that identifying the decline of friendship as due to the influence of what she calls “the ideology of productivity” is sufficient to refute that ideology. As the greatest critic of the productive ideal, Karl Marx, well knew, the productive achievements of the bourgeoisie are so magnificent that mere name-calling will not be enough to convince us to revalue the ethical.

^50. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, part 4, “The Sign,” as translated by Nussbaum in

The Therapy of Desire, 308.

^51. Kochin, “What Political Science Needs to Learn,” 25–28.

Additional information

Funding

Research for this paper was supported by a Laurance S. Rockefeller Fellowship from Princeton University, and by a Dan David Scholarship from the Dan David Prize.