Pragmata 2.0 (P2)

Second Part

Sorrow is man’s transition from a greater to a lesser perfection. (Spinoza, Ethics, Book Three)

A persistent tension in the nature of friendship runs through both of Aristotle’s ethical works, the Nicomachean Ethics and the Eudemian Ethics, and can be traced back as early as Plato’s Alcibiades. It is a tension rooted in gender asymmetry: how can genuine friendship arise between a man and a woman when, for example, the woman possesses knowledge, say, the art of spinning wool, and takes joy in the activity, while the man lacks both the knowledge and the appreciation for it? In Platonic terms, she loves what she loves, what she knows and does; he neither loves, knows it nor values it. Could this disparity in understanding, affection and practice signal a limit to the possibility of friendship? Might this difference be a reason for the impossibility of friendship between a man and a woman? More broadly, does this raise a deeper philosophical concern: that true friendship, in its fullest sense, requires a shared vision of the good and virtues, a unity of activity, and an alignment of social roles?

This concern becomes even more obvious when we consider how Aristotle relocates friendship from a private, intersubjective realm to a foundational element of the polis. In Aristotle’s political vision, perfect friendship is possible only between those who are “the same” and “equals,” a criterion that restricted such bonds to free, male citizens within the Greek cities. As a result, minorities, slaves, but especially women, all excluded from basic political life such as voting, were also excluded from the forms of friendship. Yet Aristotle’s reasoning here is not fully essentialist. He claims that these groups lack freedom not by nature, but due to external “circumstances,” such as legal or social impositions. This introduces an understated instability in his argument: children become adults, slaves may be emancipated, and women, too, do always participate in reason and virtue. The exclusions he draws appear less grounded in natural incapacity than in prevailing cultural prejudice and social control, especially with respect to gender. Although many ancient philosophers opposed cross-gender friendship on the basis of difference -biological, social, or moral- Aristotle does leave room for imperfect forms of friendship with men and women.

Apart from what, who or when kinds of questioning about friendship, (what can be friend? who can be friend? And when can we be friend?) another ancient concern, raised in Cicero’s On Friendship, complicates the question of who can be a friend, not only women or slaves, but also how “few” can truly be friends at all. Cicero asserts that the true friend is “rare”, an exceptional figure, and not everyone qualifies for this role. As Derrida later observes, in his book the Politics of Friendship, this scarcity should not be dismissed as merely moral or ideal; rather, rarity functions as an empirical condition in the economy of friendship (Derrida, 1997). What is so weird for me, later this argument on rarity of friendship becomes a structural feature that excludes the majority. Women, children, and slaves, already dismissed by thinkers like Aristotle, become part of that undifferentiated “majority,” disqualified not necessarily because of any essential lack, but because of the way quantity is used to delimit quality.

This logic of exclusion is not only based on age, likeness or shared virtues but is looks like that, also shaped by the dynamics of “number” and “time”, according to a numerical and a temporal distinction. In Aristotle’s Eudemian Ethics, friendship is said to require trust (an affect) but trust itself is bound by time and habit (temporal interaction and excellence in activity): “There is no lasting friendship without trust, but trust is subject to time.” (Eudemian Ethics 3#). Here, friendship becomes not only a moral ideal but a temporal and selective relation, one that unfolds slowly and is granted to very few. Accordingly, the taxonomy of friendships in Aristotle, of utility (khrēsis), pleasure (hēdonē), and goodness (aretē), maps a hierarchy, where only the last qualifies as true friendship: a bond valued for its own sake among “equals” or as a mirror for one’s moral perfection. Thus, argument on rarity and scarcity, both interactional and temporal, plays a decisive role in who may enter the privileged domain of friendship. And once again, women, and others marked as “other”, are positioned outside the circle, not only because of presumed differences in nature or virtue, but because the structure of friendship itself is defined by a philosophical exclusion.

But the scarce or the rare cannot be reduced to a simple binary or idealized logic. The Greeks were well aware of the social and political weight carried by friendship groups, brotherhoods, and philia- based alliances. Rarity, in itself, is not a virtue of friendship, nor is it necessarily a marker of depth or moral value. After all, the family is also a relationship among the few, yet its meaning is entirely different. In Greek culture, the emphasis on privacy and the internal economy of the oikos (household) transformed sensual and sexual relations, kinship roles into private, domestic concerns: the management of household and slaves. The family was not defined primarily by emotional or ethical bonds, but by strategies of lineages and alliances: a structure of belonging sustained through the circulation and exchange of women between households.

Here, privacy does not produce intimacy but rather enclosure a spatial and social logic that underwrites the language of rare and scarce and also boundaries of public life. Actually, what is so pathetic in this framework, women are “double excluded”: from the polis and its vision of public friendship, and from the philia that defines moral and civic reciprocity. The architecture of neighborhood, of family or of (ancient) friendship, then, operates as a philosophical system of inclusion and exclusion that is less about virtue, affect or practice than about power, access, and capital. What is rare is not just friendship, but the possibility of friendship that crosses lines of gender, status, structural asymmetries, and social classes. This unresolved tension, between friendship and desire, knowledge and love, inclusion and exclusion, difference and indifference will form the core of the final debate.

To be continued...