The two imperfect forms of friendship are based on either utility or pleasure. Imperfect friends love the benefits they derive from their relationship: they find each other pleasant, or useful, or both, and their goodwill stems from that. The relationship I have with a golf buddy who makes me laugh, for instance, might be a friendship of pleasure. If he plays with me because I have a membership in an exclusive golf club, then his friendship for me is one of utility.
Aristotle\'s View Of Love
The discussion of philia (\u201Clove\u201D or \u201Cfriendship\u201D) occupies a central place in Aristotle\u2019s ethical works. And yet it is hard to see how philia could play a correspondingly significant role, on Aristotle\u2019s view, in the best possible human life \u2013 a life devoted to the fullest expression of our nature as rational animals. In the activities of contemplation and understanding, Aristotle tells us, we are maximally self-sufficient, least susceptible to the incursions of ill-fortune and least dependent on the help of others. The value of such rational self-sufficiency seems to be in tension with the value of philia; our nature as rational animals, on the one hand, and our nature as social or political animals, on the other, appear to place conflicting demands upon us.
\tIn the first chapter, I explore Aristotle\u2019s moral psychology of love in general. To love something in itself, as opposed to loving it because it pleases you or is useful to you, is to love it on the basis of one\u2019s rational recognition that it is kalon (\u201Cfine\u201D or morally \u201Cbeautiful\u201D) and good in itself. To love something in itself, in other words, is a manifestation of our love for what is good as such. It is to love something with our rational soul.
\tThe next two chapters consider Aristotle\u2019s account of self-love, for in genuine philia, one loves another as one loves oneself. Self-love, Aristotle tells us, is derived from one\u2019s love of the good; it is only insofar as one sees one\u2019s activity and one\u2019s life as a whole as something kalon and good in itself that one can exhibit self-love. In its fullest form, it is available only to the truly virtuous or excellent (spoudaios) individual, and to others only derivatively, insofar as they can see themselves as such.
\tThe goodness of the excellent person\u2019s life is the result of its order and intelligibility \u2013 it is, so to speak, a life that she can make sense of. But such intelligible order comes about not by pursuing intelligible order as such; it is the result of guiding one\u2019s life by a conception of the good. In this, there emerges an important theme that runs through what follows: Part of what it is to be a rational being, on Aristotle\u2019s view, is to act with practical self-awareness and to desire understanding of what one is up to \u2013 to be able to see the activities that constitute one\u2019s life as intrinsically good and kalon. Aristotle is famous for his claim, at the beginning of the Metaphysics, that the human being, as a rational being, desires by nature to know. I might describe my suggestion by saying that he also thought that the human being, as a practically rational being, desires by nature to understand themselves. But the intelligibility of one\u2019s life is not merely a matter of learning certain facts about it; it is the result of pursuing the good in action. Thus, the desire for self-understanding affects not just how you view your life, but how you live it. Since this understanding is, necessarily, framed in terms of the agent\u2019s own conception of the human good \u2013 her own conception of what it is to live a truly human life \u2013 according to which she both guides and judges her life, one might also say that, for Aristotle, to be rational is to be autonomous.
\tIn the final chapter, I turn to Aristotle\u2019s account of genuine friendship, and, in particular, to the interpretation of a difficult and complicated argument in which Aristotle seeks to explain, on the basis of his account of self-love, why friendship is good and choiceworthy in itself. (In genuine friendship, Aristotle says, one is related to one\u2019s friend as one is related to oneself.) I argue that we should understand Aristotle\u2019s argument as appealing to the way in which, through genuine friendship, we deepen our perceptual and cognitive engagement with the world \u2013 by being confronted with a distinct perspective on our shared objects of experience, we enrich that experience itself. In this way, rather than standing in tension with the exercise of reason and understanding, friendship makes possible a fuller realization of our nature as rational beings.
Philia (/ˈfɪliÉ/; from Ancient Greek ÏÎÎÎÎ (philÃa)), is one of the four ancient Greek words for love: philia, storge, agape and eros. In Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, philia is usually translated as "friendship" or affection.[1] The complete opposite is called a phobia.
Not all bonds of philia involves reciprocity Aristotle notes. Some examples of these might include love of father to son, elder to younger or ruler to subject. Generally though, the bonds of philia are symmetrical.[4]
If philia is a type of love, Thomas Jay Oord has argued that it must be defined so as not to contradict love. Oord defines philia as an intentional response to promote well-being when cooperating with or befriending others. And his philia is not only that meaning. The philia also gives humans authentic friendship.[5]
The philosophical treatment of love transcends a variety of sub-disciplines including epistemology, metaphysics, religion, human nature, politics and ethics. Often statements or arguments concerning love, its nature and role in human life for example connect to one or all the central theories of philosophy, and is often compared with, or examined in the context of, the philosophies of sex and gender as well as body and intentionality. The task of a philosophy of love is to present the appropriate issues in a cogent manner, drawing on relevant theories of human nature, desire, ethics, and so on.
Some may hold that love is physical, i.e., that love is nothing but a physical response to another whom the agent feels physically attracted to. Accordingly, the action of loving encompasses a broad range of behavior including caring, listening, attending to, preferring to others, and so on. (This would be proposed by behaviorists). Others (physicalists, geneticists) reduce all examinations of love to the physical motivation of the sexual impulse-the simple sexual instinct that is shared with all complex living entities, which may, in humans, be directed consciously, sub-consciously or pre-rationally toward a potential mate or object of sexual gratification.
Those who consider love to be an aesthetic response would hold that love is knowable through the emotional and conscious feeling it provokes yet which cannot perhaps be captured in rational or descriptive language: it is instead to be captured, as far as that is possible, by metaphor or by music.
The ethical aspects in love involve the moral appropriateness of loving, and the forms it should or should not take. The subject area raises such questions as: is it ethically acceptable to love an object, or to love oneself? Is love to oneself or to another a duty? Should the ethically minded person aim to love all people equally? Is partial love morally acceptable or permissible (that is, not right, but excusable)? Should love only involve those with whom the agent can have a meaningful relationship? Should love aim to transcend sexual desire or physical appearances? May notions of romantic, sexual love apply to same sex couples? Some of the subject area naturally spills into the ethics of sex, which deals with the appropriateness of sexual activity, reproduction, hetero and homosexual activity, and so on.
This article has touched on some of the main elements of the philosophy of love. It reaches into many philosophical fields, notably theories of human nature, the self, and of the mind. The language of love, as it is found in other languages as well as in English, is similarly broad and deserves more attention.
Hedonism is, to put it simply, the pursuit of pleasure as the only intrinsic good (Waterman, 1993). This was the Cyrenaic view of happiness. It was thought that a good life was denoted by seeking pleasure, and satisfying physical, intellectual/social needs (Kashdan, Biswas-Diener & King, 2008).
Many of us spend a lot of time with our families. However, as much we love our partners, children, siblings, and extended families, at times family relationships can be fraught with challenges and problems. Nonetheless, it is possible for us to find happiness in family life by doing some simple, yet effective things suggested by Mann (2007):
This article can provide a helpful resource for understanding more about the nature of happiness, so feel free to look back at it down the track. I would love to hear your thoughts on this fascinating topic!
In philosophical discussions of friendship, it is common to followAristotle (Nicomachean Ethics, Book VIII) in distinguishingthree kinds of friendship: friendships of pleasure, of utility, and ofvirtue. Although it is a bit unclear how to understand thesedistinctions, the basic idea seems to be that pleasure, utility, andvirtue are the reasons we have in these various kinds of relationshipsfor loving our friend. That is, I may love my friend because of thepleasure I get out of her, or because of the ways in which she isuseful to me, or because I find her to have a virtuous character.Given the involvement of love in each case, all three kinds offriendship seem to involve a concern for your friend for his sake andnot for your own.
In philosophical accounts of friendship, several themes recurconsistently, although various accounts differ in precisely how theyspell these out. These themes are: mutual caring (or love), intimacy,and shared activity; these will be considered in turn.
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