Abstract
This paper elaborates a neo-Wittgensteinian, philosophical-anthropological alternative to classically Aristotelian approaches in the philosophy of friendship. On the classic approach, the value of friendship, as a practice, and the value of particular friendships within the life of any given individual, are each subordinated to the ur-value of individual flourishing. That is, it starts with a value that it sees as frustrated or fulfilled by social practice. The alternative, meanwhile, moves from the articulation of social practice to the values these practices frame. I will argue that the alternative is descriptively and prescriptively superior when what’s at issue is the status of a social practice like friendship. By acknowledging the co-constitution of self, practice, and other, the alternative gives one the latitude to recognize and philosophize about relationships that tend to fall out of contemporary accounts of love and friendship as these are actually lived; produces descriptions and questions that are truer to lived experiences of friendship; and respects one of the most basic norms of friendship—that is, a friend’s irreducible particularity to oneself—without having to provide a self-defeatingly instrumentalist or reductionist argument for it.
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27 March 2021
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Notes
- 1.
See Bennett Helm’s introduction and discussion (“Nature of Friends”) in his article “Friendship” from The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2017a edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta.
- 2.
See John M. Cooper’s “Aristotle on Friendship” in Essays on Aristotle’s Friendship, ed. Amélie Oksenberg Rorty (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980) and Nancy Sherman’s “Aristotle on Friendship and the Shared Life” in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 47 (4; 1987), 589–613 for examples of this reading.
- 3.
See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book VIII, Part 3, trans. Sarah Broadie and Christopher Rowe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
- 4.
See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book VIII, Part 4, trans. Sarah Broadie and Christopher Rowe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). For elaboration, see the paper I cited by Cooper in Footnote 2 and Helm’s “Friendship” article, cited in Footnote 1.
- 5.
Compare Nussbaum’s “reading strategies” in Part D (“Form as Content: Diagnostic Questions”) of “Form and Content, Philosophy and Literature” in Love’s Knowledge, 30–35.
- 6.
This is a very rich area in its own right. For an example of how these discussions tend to proceed, see J. David Velleman’s “Love as a Moral Emotion” in Ethics 109 (2; 1999), 338–374, and Jeanette Kennett’s response, “True and Proper Selves: Velleman on Love” in Ethics 118 (2008), 213–227.
- 7.
See Diamond’s “Experimenting on Animals: A Problem in Ethics” in The Realistic Spirit (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1991) and Santos-Granero’s “Of Fear and Friendship: Amazonian Sociality Beyond Kinship and Affinity” in The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 13 (1; 2007), 1–18 (in particular, p. 7).
- 8.
For an overview and discussion, see Sect. 2 (“Value and Justification of Friendship”) in Helm’s “Friendship,” cited in Footnote 1, as well as his related discussion in Sect. 6 (“Value and Justification of Love”) of his article “Love” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2017b edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta.
- 9.
By “structures” I mean what we in the West would consider to be robust institutions, such as that of marriage, the family, school, and the workplace; more “informal” relationships without (or with much less of) a legal status, such as best friends, groups of friends, and roommates; the technologies by which we approach others, inclusive of social networking websites and platforms (ex., forums, blogs, Facebook, Instagram, Tinder); and the very layout of a city or town and what it offers.
- 10.
On this point, see David Cerbone’s (as yet unpublished) essays, “Ground, Background, and Rough Ground: Dreyfus, Wittgenstein, and Phenomenology” <https://cfs.ku.dk/summer-school-2017/background-readings/Cerbone-TEXT-FecklessPrisoners.pdf/> and “Feckless Prisoners of Their Times—Historicism and Moral Reflection” <https://cfs.ku.dk/summer-school-2017/background-readings/Cerbone_TEXT-Background_JuneDraft_.pdf>, part of the 2017 curriculum for the University of Copenhagen’s Summer School in Phenomenology.
- 11.
In particular, that articulation is itself a good. For elaboration of this point, please refer to Diamond’s “Losing Your Concepts” in Ethics 98 (January 1988), 255–277.
- 12.
See, in particular, “The Idea of Perfection” in her Sovereignty of Good (New York: Routledge Classics, 2001).
- 13.
See, in particular, Nussbaum’s “Finely Aware and Richly Responsible: Literature and the Moral Imagination” in Love’s Knowledge (Oxford, Oxford University Press: 1990b). Diamond makes a similar point from her own reading of Murdoch in “Losing Your Concepts,” 261.
- 14.
Nussbaum, “Form and Content, Philosophy and Literature,” 47. She is quoting Proust. Earlier in the paper, she writes: “Life is never simply presented by a text; it is always represented as something. This ‘as’ can, and must, be seen not only in the paraphrasable content, but also in the style, which itself expresses choices and selections, and sets up, in the reader, certain activities and transactions rather than others.” Provocatively, Nussbaum likens the reader-text relationship to that of a friendship in “The Discernment of Perception: An Aristotelian Conception of Public and Private Rationality,” 88.
- 15.
Please note I take the anthropological terminology, and his framing of this paradigm, for granted for the purposes of this paper.
- 16.
Indeed, anthropologists have found counter-evidence against, ex., “the particular model of friendship enshrined by nineteenth-century romantics” that we might find in Montaigne. “Relations of friendship can be found in almost all human societies [but] models of friendship”—from Montaigne’s, to Aristotle’s, to the one Santos-Granero gives here—“vary substantially.” See Santos-Granero, 8–11.
- 17.
Compare Cavell’s treatment of genre in his reading of King Lear in “The Avoidance of Love,” where the play’s success as just this tragedy depends on the degree to which readers/spectators give themselves to it fully as a tragedy. It is the genre, and the ways the characters are qualified by genre, that is authoritative here.
- 18.
A favorite dismissal, from these women’s contemporaries and current critics alike, is calling such romantic friendships preambles to heterosexual relationships. See Vicinus, 609, and her writing on the denials and distortions of female sexuality in general, 619 and 621.
- 19.
Most succinctly: “The switch from ‘imaginable’ to ‘logically possible’ or ‘conceptually possible’ … is almost a guarantee that we shall miss the point.” Diamond (1990, p. 21).
- 20.
I am grateful to supervisions with Kevin Cahill for the elaboration of this point.
- 21.
I take Crispin Wright’s “authoritarial” or decision-based reading of those sections to be one example. See McDowell’s “Wittgenstein on Following a Rule” in Synthese 58 (1984) 325–363 and David H. Finkelstein’s “Wittgenstein on Rules and Platonism” in The New Wittgenstein, eds. Alice Crary and Rupert Read (Oxford: Routledge, 2000) 53–73.
- 22.
Inclusive of hierarchical relationships set up by our sociocultural institutions, such as the teacher-student relationship. See McDowell and Finkelstein’s discussions of Wright for more.
- 23.
This summarizes his account of the unity of virtues, wherein the virtuous person is such because of the way in which she perceives what he calls situational “saliences”—i.e., what it is about any given circumstance that calls on her to act in the “right” way. If we want to understand her reasons for action, we must see as she does; her rationality is not discernible outside of the practice motivating it. See McDowell (1979, pp. 331–350). I take it that the whole of his work is in the service of this picture of virtue.
- 24.
Nussbaum, “Finely Aware and Richly Responsible: Literature and the Moral Imagination,” 164; my scarequotes. Compare Murdoch in “The Idea of Perfection:” “The idea of ‘objective reality’ … undergoes important modifications when it is to be understood, not in relation to ‘the world described by science,’ but in relation to the progressing life of a person. The active ‘reassessing’ and ‘redefining’ which is a main characteristic of live personality often suggests and demands a checking procedure which is a function of an individual history. Repentance may mean something different to an individual at different times in his life, and what it fully means is a part of this life and cannot be understood except in context.” (25).
- 25.
See, in particular, McDowell, “Wittgenstein on Following a Rule,” 342, where he refers to this as Wittgenstein’s program. Interestingly, he abandons this interpretation in Footnote 8 of his “Meaning and Intentionality in Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy” in Midwest Studies in Philosophy, XVII (1992) 52, and later becomes hostile to the idea of “constructive philosophy” centered on our practices—see especially John McDowell (1994, p. 95). Sabina Lovibond nonetheless finds encouragement for such a philosophy in McDowell’s work in her “Second Nature, Habitus, and the Ethical: Remarks on Wittgenstein and Bourdieu” in Ethical Perspectives 22 (1; 2015) 131–149.
- 26.
Where this means that “a state of information in which one is in possession of a ‘criterial’ warrant for a claim can always be expanded into a state of information in which the claim would not be warranted at all.” John McDowell (2008, pp. 876–890).
- 27.
Here, these are roughly equivalent to “practice” as I’ve used them throughout this essay.
- 28.
Emphasis mine.
- 29.
Compare McDowell’s treatment of “initiation” into a tradition in Mind and World. Note that this is not equivalent to one’s babyhood. While the learning curve is steeper when we are younger, learning is not something we stop doing—consider, ex., moving to another country and familiarizing yourself with your new home’s language and customs.
- 30.
“Value is anthropocentric, not fixed altogether independently of desires and needs of human beings.” Nussbaum, “The Discernment of Perception: An Aristotelian Conception of Public and Private Rationality,” 62.
- 31.
In particular, she implies that we should think of our “style of thought” as bearing on our “capacities as [moral agents]:” Diamond, “Losing Your Concepts,” 271.
- 32.
In particular, refer to Sect. 2 (“Value and Justification of Friendship”) in Helm’s “Friendship” article, cited in Footnote 1.
- 33.
The most incisive example of this is Nussbaum’s “Finely Aware and Richly Responsible: Literature and the Moral Imagination.” Consider this quote: “For it to become a solution it has to be offered in the right way at the right time in the right tone, in such a way that she can take it; offered without pressing any of the hidden springs of guilt and loyalty in her that he knows so clearly how to press; offered so that he gives her up with greatness, with beauty, in a way that she can love and find wonderful.” (150).
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Salvador Megias, C. (2021). The Good in Articulation: Describing the Co-constitution of Self, Practice, and Value. In: Hongladarom, S., Joaquin, J.J. (eds) Love and Friendship Across Cultures. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-4834-9_7
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