Whoever we are, we want friends.  So
Aristotle argues in the chapters on friendship in his Nicomachean Ethics,
although ‘friendship’ for him broadly includes all kinds of loving human
relationships including those of parents and children, business associates,
lovers, and even philosophers (friends of wisdom).  Aristotle’s discusses, not
any love of his own, but friendship in general–what it is, how love for
another is possible, how it relates to other virtues.  Sometimes Aristotle
shows a novelist’s insight into human types, but sometimes embarrassingly seems
to universalize Greek prejudices.  Still, the argument for the nobility and the
necessity of friendship to a good life, even if it fails to convince, at least
corrects the unwarranted stereotype of Aristotle as the model of unfeeling
rationalism.

In Aristotle and the Philosophy of
Friendship, Lorraine Smith Pangle sorts through the puzzles about
friendship Aristotle’s discussion raises as well as tries to unravel the
resulting puzzles about Aristotle on friendship.  These two tasks form two
dimensions of the book.

The first task adds welcome breadth not
indicated by the title.  Pangle supplements Aristotle with other ancient and
early modern authors including Plato, Cicero, Montaigne, and Bacon, with whom
she sees a continuous conversation on friendship, a conversation first hushed
by Christians talking of love of family and God, then eventually halted by modern
philosophers like Hobbes thinking of man as essentially solitary.

The second task adds needed depth on
Aristotle’s often partially-made and cryptic arguments.  Pangle has thought
deeply about the text, and her discussions bear close reading.  Even her
implausible main thesis that Aristotle’s account can be made consistent by
attending to its original, purportedly exoteric (public) audience need not
detract from her thoughtful discussion of many textual problems.  Yet her
argument remains sketchy on how the account of friendship assumes Aristotle’s
teleological ethics and metaphysical biology.  According to Aristotle, we have
the ends we do because we are the kind of being we are; our human nature
determines the naturalness of friendship.  Modern philosophy rejects nature in
this sense as the basis for ethics.

One can defend Aristotle on friendship by
defending his metaphysical assumptions or by showing how his ethics does not
need them.  But one cannot defend Aristotle as if modern philosophy did not
happen.  Yet Pangle, if she intends to defend Aristotle on friendship, does
just this by cutting short the conversation at Bacon and by neglecting the
difficult metaphysics behind the Ethics.

Pangle writes for someone already
familiar with the conversation and inclined to do the hard work of listening to
what Aristotle and others have to say through their thick foreign accents. 
This book repays the attention of such a reader.  A general reader, however,
interested in reflecting the nature and value of friendship should begin with a
book like Allan Bloom’s Love and Friendship (Simon and Schuster), or
better, with Plato’s dialogues Lysis and Symposium and with Aristotle’s
Ethics in a student edition like Terence Irwin’s (Hackett).

© 2003 G. T. Smith

G.
T. Smith, Ph.D., teaches philosophy and Greek at Patrick
Henry College in Purcellville, Virginia.  He has given papers on the metaphysics
of Plato, Aristotle, and Thomas Aquinas.  Currently, he is working on a book on
the commonality of Plato and Aristotle.

Categories: Philosophical