Ten un‐Aristotelian reasons for the instability of Aristotelian character friendships

Abstract

Aristotle claims that friendship of the highest kind – ‘character friendship’ – is stable and enduring, once established. He is sensitive to one limitation placed upon such friendships: that, owing to their extreme closeness, devotion and intimacy, they can only be actualised with a small number of people. However, Aristotle is otherwise surprisingly cavalier about the formation and sustaining of character friendship, as if those are relatively unproblematic from psycho‐moral and psycho‐social perspectives. The main aim of this article is to repair the dearth of attention paid to these problematic areas. More specifically, after a brief rehearsal of some Aristotelian essentials in Section 2, I address five potential problems attached to character friendships between ‘equals’ in Section 3 (of substitutability, self‐verification, mismatched developmental levels, divergent developmental paths, initiation and trust) and five problems between ‘unequals’ in Section 4 (of proportionality, the disciple's and the guru's conflicting motivations, paternalism, role inertia), closing with some summarising remarks in Section 5. My conclusion is that despite the attractiveness and plausibility of much of what Aristotle says, his account of character friendships cannot be endorsed without various caveats and qualifications.

Aristotelian Character Friendship as a ‘Method’ of Moral Education

“…Those are people of (a) equal social status who are either (a1) equal in virtue or (a2) unequal in virtue, and (b) people of unequal social status who are unequal in virtue. Notably, Aristotle presupposes that inequality of social status implies inequality in virtue although equality of social status does not guarantee virtue equality: a highly contentious assumption (which must be understood against the background of Aristotle's own highly stratified society; see Kristjánsson 2019). Consider, for (a), two undergraduates who become friends as freshmen and help each other grow in virtue, either because, (a1) being equal in virtue at the outset, they share experiences on parallel tracks, or (a2) because the one who is more virtuous at the beginning helps the other catch up while also developing herself.…”

“…However, it also imports various liabilities that may lead to (often painful) friendship ruptures. In two previous articles I have put the spotlight on those liabilities: both the general shortcomings of Aristotle's fairly romanticised account of character friendship (Kristjánsson 2019) and how those shortcomings may play out in the educational arena: arresting rather than furthering moral development (Kristjánsson 2020a). Because of this previous ground-clearing work-which I refer to at various junctures but refrain from reproducing here-I allow myself to be somewhat upbeat in this article.…”

Amistad, hiperconexión y educación: un análisis conceptual a partir de Aristóteles

“…Cierto es, tal y como sostiene Kristjánsson (2019), que las relaciones de amistad siempre fueron inestables y bastante frágiles, de manera que pensar, tal como lo hizo Aristóteles, que el trabajo sobre uno mismo y el amor desinteresado por el otro darán lugar siempre y de manera automática a relaciones pacíficas y eternamente duraderas, es tener una visión demasiado positiva, idealizada y utópica del espíritu humano. Ahora bien, consideramos aquí, siguiendo a Ruyter (2006), que en educación es esencial perseguir ideales, a pesar de ser conscientes de que muy probablemente no serán plenamente alcanzables.…”

Online Aristotelian Character Friendship as an Augmented Form of Penpalship

“…I consider those assumptions questionable either in themselves or as interpretations of Aristotle. Aristotle himself is the culprit behind the 'inherently-stable' part of assumption (4) because he seems to have been singularly oblivious to the exigencies that can threaten and dissolve even the most mature of character friendships (Kristjánsson 2019; I return to this issue in Section 5). He is not guilty for assumption (3), however, because two of the main threads running through his long discussion of character friendship are about how such friendship is also possible between unequals (given certain conditions), and how it plays a significant role in not-yet-perfectlyvirtuous people helping each other make further progress on the road to full virtueas already noted above.…”

“…Nehamas 2016), there is something intuitively attractive about the idea that the most mature form of friendship has to do with the mutual development and sustaining of virtue. However, real life rarely measures up to philosophers' expectations, and I have argued elsewhere that Aristotelians, old and new, have been overly cavalier in accepting the claim that character friendships, once formed, have some sort of a unique enduring capacity that makes them immune to the wear and tear that often dissipates other forms of friendship (Kristjánsson 2019). So at the risk of losing some of the ground gained, I conclude by arguing, in Section 5, that despite being potentially categorisable as character friendships, mature epalships are vulnerable to the same problems and pitfalls as other examples of character friendships, and perhaps even more so.…”