|
Sign In to gain access to subscriptions and/or personal tools.
|
Approaching Others: Aristotle on Friendship’s Possibility
Bradley Bryan, PhD*
University of Victoria
* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: bwb{at}uvic.ca.
 |
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.
First published on September 25, 2009, doi:10.1177/0090591709345463
Political Theory 2009;37:754.
A more recent version of this article appeared on December 1, 2009
 CiteULike  Complore  Connotea  Del.icio.us  Digg  Reddit  Technorati  Twitter What's this?
|
|
