Sandra Lynch

n this book Sandra Lynch considers how and if philosophical conceptions of friendship are compatible with our modern understanding of the concept, which she argues is predicated on a dialectic of sameness and difference. She believes friendship defies definition and for that reason is better understood as a Wittgensteinian "family resemblance" concept. In the final analysis, she believes that the paradigmatic model of friendship is one that grants priority to difference and the separateness of the friend. She condemns overidealizing approaches to friendship on the grounds that they whitewash the agonistic (and at times antagonistic) aspects of friendship, which are equally crucial for identity formation. Friends participate in each other's identity formation through mirroring (a concept borrowed from Lacan and Ricoeur) and through autobiographical narratives. Narratives both make us intelligible to others and to ourselves, and are open to interpretation as well as revision.

The conclusions of this book are bang on, IMO. Lynch favors a nonideal approach to friendship, criticizing perfect friendship as an unhelpful model, and this puts her in a better position than most to recognize the significance of unequal and "lesser" forms of friendship such as those based on pleasure and utility. She provides lucid discussion of the paradox of Aristotle's civic friendship, which has been primarily understood as a friendship of utility. She wonders how a friendship of utility can serve as a foundation for Aristotle's ethics and politics, and argues that civic friendship, insofar as it is produced largely through legislation provides the structure in which personal friendships can be developed.

While I agree with most of Lynch's analysis, I have qualms about the intellectual honesty of her presentation. Roughly the first third of the book comprises a critique of Aristotle's concept of primary friendship (which, granted, is the friendship most focused on by scholars). She finds it too concerned with/reliant on sameness, incapable of accounting for difference, and she finds Aristotle's "loving the friend for the friend's own sake" problematic as it suggests that we only love the friend on account of their virtues, and this seems to subordinate friendship to virtue.

What I take to be dishonest is that throughout her critique of "ideal" or perfect friendship, Lynch chooses not to introduce any counter-evidence, plenty of which is available in the Nicomachean text itself. She repeatedly suggests that Aristotle has little or nothing to say about lesser or unequal friendships or how to handle recriminations between such friends, since they are more liable to fraught with disagreement. For these reasons she is led to conclude that Aristotle has little to say to a modern audience about friendship, and she introduces Derrida, Lacan, and Ricouer to ‘augment’ Aristotle by providing us with the language of difference. But to present him in this way is to present a strawman Aristotle. Aristotle doesn’t restrict his discussion to perfect friendship, in fact, he explicitly states that the friendship which is the glue of civil society (civic friendship) is best understood as a form of utility (lesser) friendship. EVENTUALLY, Lynch gets around to presenting a fuller (less strawman/more accurate picture) of Aristotle’s nonprimary friendships, and once she produces this information, she sings a different tune about Aristotle’s relevance to modern audiences.

This strategy led me to wonder why Lynch didn’t start with Aristotle’s full picture of friendship to begin with, while acknowledging some of the difficulties that ideal friendship poses for both Aristotle and modern friends? Why not break from the traditional idealized treatment of Aristotle, and forge a nonideal interpretation of his ethics? As her treatment of Aristotle stands, it comes across schizophrenic. She seems to make two mutually exclusive claims about his concept of friendship, i.e. that Aristotle’s concept of friendship is inapplicable to modern friendship AND that Aristotle’s concept of friendship is amenable to modern conceptions of friendship. I actually think she ends up doing a fine job showing how Aristotle’s friendship remains relevant, but I believe there is a much clearer and more honest way of presenting that position than what Lynch offers.… (mais)