Ancient and Medieval Concepts of Friendship

Description

Focusing on Plato and Aristotle, the Stoics and Epicureans, and early Christian and Medieval sources, Ancient and Medieval Concepts of Friendship brings together assessments of different philosophical accounts of friendship. This volume sketches the evolution of the concept from ancient ideals of friendship applying strictly to relationships between men of high social position to Christian concepts that treat friendship as applicable to all but are concerned chiefly with the soul's relation to God—and that ascribe a secondary status to human relationships. The book concludes with two essays examining how this complex heritage was received during the Enlightenment, looking in particular to Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Hölderlin.
Preface

Part 1. Plato and Aristotle

1. Philia in Plato
Dimitri El Murr

2. Aristotle on Friendship: Insight from the Four Causes
Gary M. Gurtler, SJ

3. Souls Great and Small: Aristotle on Self-Knowledge, Friendship, and Civic Engagement
Suzanne Stern-Gillet

Part 2. Hellenistic Philosophers

4. Making Friends: The Stoic Conception of Love and Its Platonic Background
Bernard Collette-Dučić

5. Erōs and Philia in Epicurean Philosophy
Harry Lesser

6. Cicero’s Stoic Friend as Resolution to the Paradoxes of Platonic Love: The Amicitia alongside the Symposium
Robin Weiss

Part 3. Patristic and Medieval Philosophers

7. Friendship in Late Antiquity: The Case of Gregory Nazianzen and Basil the Great
John Panteleimon Manoussakis

8. Adiutrix Virtutum?: Augustine on Friendship and Virtue
Tamer Nawar

9. Aelred of Rievaulx on Friendship
John R. Sommerfeldt

10. Thomas Aquinas: Charity as Friendship
Fergus Kerr, OP

Part 4. Enlightenment Thinkers

11. Aristotle and Kant on Self-Disclosure in Friendship
Andrea Veltman

12. The Platonic Roots of Hölderlin’s Concept of Friendship in Hyperion
Sandra Dučić-Collette

Contributors
Name Index
Subject Index

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Philosophie de la psychologie
• Philosophie antique
• Philosophie médiévale, scolastique
• Scolastique
• Philosophie médiévale
• Philosophie médiévale
• Philosophie médiévale
• Ancient philosophy
• Philosophy
• Medieval philosophy

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 13 novembre 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438453668
• Langue: English

Extrait

A NCIENT AND M EDIEVAL
C ONCEPTS OF F RIENDSHIP
SUNY series in Ancient Greek Philosophy

Anthony Preus, editor
A NCIENT AND M EDIEVAL
C ONCEPTS OF F RIENDSHIP
Edited by
Suzanne Stern-Gillet
and
Gary M. Gurtler, SJ
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2014 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ancient and medieval concepts of friendship / edited by Suzanne Stern-Gillet and Gary M. Gurtler, SJ
pages cm. — (SUNY series in ancient Greek philosophy)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-5365-1 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4384-5366-8 (e book)
1. Friendship. 2. Philosophy, Ancient. 3. Philosophy, Medieval. I. Stern-Gillet, Suzanne, 1943– editor of compilation. II. Gurtler, Gary M., 1947– editor of compilation.
B187.F75A53 2014 177'.6209—dc23
2013049696
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To Ranjan, with love —Suzanne
In Memoriam John Cleary —Gary
C ONTENTS
Preface
P ART 1 P LATO AND A RISTOTLE
1 Philia in Plato
D IMITRI E L M URR
2 Aristotle on Friendship: Insight from the Four Causes
G ARY M. G URTLER , SJ
3 Souls Great and Small: Aristotle on Self-Knowledge, Friendship, and Civic Engagement
S UZANNE S TERN -G ILLET
P ART 2 H ELLENISTIC P HILOSOPHERS
4 Making Friends: The Stoic Conception of Love and Its Platonic Background
B ERNARD C OLLETTE -D UČIĆ
5 Erōs and Philia in Epicurean Philosophy
H ARRY L ESSER
6 Cicero’s Stoic Friend as Resolution to the Paradoxes of Platonic Love: The Amicitia alongside the Symposium
R OBIN W EISS
P ART 3 P ATRISTIC AND M EDIEVAL P HILOSOPHERS
7 Friendship in Late Antiquity: The Case of Gregory Nazianzen and Basil the Great
J OHN P ANTELEIMON M ANOUSSAKIS
8 Adiutrix Virtutum ?: Augustine on Friendship and Virtue
T AMER N AWAR
9 Aelred of Rievaulx on Friendship
J OHN R. S OMMERFELDT
10 Thomas Aquinas: Charity as Friendship
F ERGUS K ERR , OP
P ART 4 E NLIGHTENMENT T HINKERS
11 Aristotle and Kant on Self-Disclosure in Friendship
A NDREA V ELTMAN
12 The Platonic Roots of Hölderlin’s Concept of Friendship in Hyperion
S ANDRA D UČIĆ -C OLLETTE
Contributors
Name Index
Subject Index
P REFACE
The concept of friendship ( philia ) looms large in the philosophical reflections of the ancients and their medieval successors. For all their differences, the definitions of friendship put forward by Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Augustine, and Aquinas are the background against which subsequent Western treatments of friendship are to be understood. Our aim in the present volume is twofold: to give an account of friendship as it emerged as a topic in those philosophies which proved to be the most significant of all time, and to sketch the evolution that the concept itself underwent after Plato first gave it ethical currency. Philosophical exegesis and history, although our main concerns in this volume, are not, however, the only ones; while highlighting discrepancies between ancient, medieval, and modern intuitions, the contributors also draw attention to what we, moderns, stand to learn from the study of ancient and medieval texts.
This anthology has no ambition to provide a comprehensive history of the concept of friendship in the Western tradition; our more modest aim is to direct a spotlight on the most salient points in what proved to be an enduring theme in philosophical literature. The volume falls into three parts. The first part treats of the moral and political values with which the philosophers of pagan antiquity invested the bond of friendship; the second part deals with the profound changes brought about by Christianity in the conception of the nature and moral value of interpersonal relationships; the third part indicates how more recent philosophers have retrieved and synthesized this rich and complex heritage. While ancient pagan thinkers regarded friendship as secular and selective by definition, the Christian philosophers of late antiquity and the Middle Ages, having stripped the concept of virtue ( aretē ) of its aristocratic connotations, grounded friendship and its associated excellences in the creaturely status of human beings. Teaching that the love of God ought to precede and supersede individual choice and inclination, these authors understood friendship and its obligations in relation to the virtue of charity ( caritas ). Since the soul’s relation to Christ was the only friendship worthy to be called perfect, human friendship took on a more complex character. While Christian philosophers such as Augustine regarded friendship as a possible obstacle to the development of moral reasoning, others such as Aquinas sought to integrate the love of individual friends into the ideal of neighborly love.
The reception of ancient and medieval texts on friendship by later authors brought further assumptions to the fore. After an eclipse of a few centuries, Enlightenment figures such as Kant and Hölderlin turned for inspiration to the ancients and sought to combine their insights with their own, different, assumptions concerning the value and autonomy of the individual. Again, some two centuries after the Enlightenment, the revival of virtue ethics and the rise of ethical particularism, defined as the theory that moral reasons, far from being universalizable by definition, are to be responsive to the particularities of agents and circumstances, combined to make interpersonal relations, once again, a topic of lively philosophical debate. Recently published studies on the subject, by philosophers working in both the Anglo-American analytic tradition and various Continental European schools, testify to the vitality and continuing relevance of the classical and medieval heritage.
It is generally assumed that Aristotle’s treatment of friendship in the three versions of the Ethics that have come down to us represents the peak of ancient thinking on the subject. This is the assumption that Dimitri El Murr undertakes to challenge. Without seeking in any way to diminish the importance of Aristotle’s views on the matter, El Murr argues that Plato’s contribution to the philosophy of friendship is greater than has so far been recognized. Through a close analysis of a short passage in book eight of the Laws , El Murr argues that in his last pronouncement on friendship Plato introduced a distinction between three forms of philia . In friendship from opposites, which aims at sensual repletion, each party is but a means to the satisfaction of the needs of the other. In friendship from resemblance, by contrast, which bonds those who are similarly driven by a desire for virtue, each party seeks the good of the other, and the resulting relationship, therefore, constitutes the paradigm of friendship. In a third form of friendship, composed of elements of the other two, the parties seek sensual gratification while also having a genuine desire for the good of the other. Such a threefold distinction, so El Murr contends, sheds retrospective light, not only on the aporetic argument on friendship and resemblance in the Lysis , but also on the distinction between kinds of love drawn in the Phaedrus . Returning to the Laws , El Murr goes on to show how the legislator of Magnesia is to rely on shared activities of a social and political nature to encourage the formation of virtuous interpersonal relations among all the citizens. As conceived in the Laws , therefore, civic friendship, El Murr concludes, represents a welcome enlargement of the corresponding notion in the Republic , where the majority of the population is excluded from political life.
Aristotle formalized the distinction, largely left implicit by Plato until the Laws , between various kinds of friendship—pleasure, utility, and virtue—alongside which he also listed civic virtue. How the three kinds of friendship are related to each other has been an object of debate since the time of the earliest Aristotelian commentators. Although it is generally agreed that the friendship of virtue, being friendship in its most complete form, provides the standard of reference for the other two, there is no consensus as to the precise nature of its classificatory preeminence. In his contribution to the present volume, Gary M. Gurtler offers a new model, derived from Aristotle’s own explanation of the four kinds of cause ( aitia ), for describing the interrelation between the friendships of pleasure and utility and the friendship of virtue. In all three kinds of friendship, Gurtler argues, the formal cause is the wishing of the good of the other, the material cause is the character of the two friends, the moving cause is good will, while the final cause is the good, whether real or apparent. Thus pleasure, utility, and virtue, rather than being the motives for entering into a friendship, describe how character qualifies the kind of friendship possible for the individuals concerned.
Although Aristotle held civic friendship to be a powerfully cohesive force in the state, he wrote surprisingly little about it, never explaining in detail what it entailed, who is capable of it, or how it might most efficiently be cultivated. Suzanne Stern-Gillet brings elements of answer to these questions. A close reading of the passages devoted to megalopsychia (literally, greatness of soul) in the corpus leads her to argue that Aristotle’s great-souled man is parad