07 March 2010

Friendship and ethics...

Aristotle begins his ethical search by the observation that everything we do is ultimately seeking happiness, though we differ so much as to where happiness is to be found. He observes that happiness seems to be that thing that isn't sought for the sake of something else, but that lies behind all the seeking that we do. Then he embarks on a number of chapters that explore the essence of certain key virtues. For this reason some have concluded that his ethical philosophy is a 'virtues philosophy'. But then at the end, there are two chapters on friendship and a final one on the contemplation of God. He mentions that no one is happy without a friend - no matter what else he has acquired. Aristotle in fact does not propose virtue as an end. The moral life is not one of seeking to acquire the perfections that belong to a 'good man'. The virtues are rather the means by which one can live more fully and authentically of the end, which is precisely the friend, the 'other' loved and accepted in love, and ultimately that 'Other' who is perfectly happy contemplating Himself. The experience of friendship - and the true friendship where the other is sought for himself, for his own flourishing in his 'best self' - is the privileged experience that demands the development of virtue in our lives. We need to become 'intelligent' in love, so that love is not impeded in its demands by our blindness or stupidity. Thus, the virtue of prudence becomes the primary virtue in safe-guarding love. I speak of that virtue that regards the finality of the friend and seeks in the complex 'here and now' to discern the best course of action so that love can go all the way. Similarly, the virtue of justice comes to the fore, for we would never want to treat the friend with less than the dignity that is theirs. The virtue of fortitude allows us to be true to our love for the friend in the face of obstacles and difficulties and the threat of suffering. It allows love to be true when it costs. The virtue of temperance guards against that tendency to let sensible pleasures become the finality for us, so that we might relativise the friend to our own self-indulgence. It lets love breathe in the expansiveness and breadth of chaste pure air. The moral life does not develop in a vacuum. Its natural place of flourishing is in the discovery of another who attacts us to orient our lives toward them, to go out of ourselves, to seek their flourising, to seek union with them and to receive them in our inmost heart. Then we are suddenly capable of going much further, of becoming heroic in love - but not for the sake of being heroic, not for the sake of developing virtue; but for the sake of the other whom we only want to be our best for, whom we only want to be their best self and to flourish in who they really are.

2 comments:

John Thayer Jensen said...

Thank you, Robbie!

To any readers - I asked Robbie if he might have time to post the odd thing on this blog - and he said he might, so I made him an author.

This is what he did! I am delighted!

jj

John Thayer Jensen said...

I am so glad of this. This is what Robbie was trying to tell me and Susan at the picnic today. Thank you again. I will be pondering this for some time.

jj