Relation to others· Bonds
Philia (friendship)
Axis: Nature of love — What lies at the heart of love: a lack, a gift, or something else?
The heart of love is neither a lack to fill nor a one-way gift: it is the reciprocal, chosen bond of friendship, in which each wills the other's good for the other's own sake. Fed by time, equality and shared virtue, it is love's most accomplished form: a good life led together.
Philosophers 5
Michel de Montaigneexplicit
Taking up 's but raising it to a white heat, Montaigne reserves, in the chapter "On friendship" of his , the name of friendship for a single, freely chosen bond that comes before love-as-passion: amorous ardour is but a fickle, shifting fire, whereas perfect friendship is a steady warmth in which two souls mingle and blend into one another. He holds it to have no ground but itself, irreducible to usefulness, to pleasure or to the duty of kinship; in it each gives themselves without reserve, a share of gift that exceeds any mere exchange of good offices. Of his communion with La Boétie he can give no reason other than the mutual self-evidence of the two beings.
Essays, I, 28 ("On friendship")
Aristotleexplicit
Against Platonic , which makes love the desire for a beauty one does not possess, Aristotle sets at the summit not lack but the bond: . In books VIII and IX of the , he distinguishes three friendships by their spring, the useful, the pleasant and the good; the first two are fragile, for they love the other for what he provides. Perfect friendship, that of good people who wish each other well for the other's own sake, is stable, rare and reciprocal, to the point that the friend counts as an extension of oneself; to will their good for their sake alone, expecting nothing in return, keeps a share of gift at the very heart of the reciprocity. Far from being a supplement to the good life, it is a constitutive part of it: no one, however well supplied with all other goods, would choose to live without friends.
Nicomachean Ethics, VIII-IX (the three friendships; the friend as another self) · Nicomachean Ethics, IX, 9 (happiness and the need for friends)
Epicurusexplicit
The Epicurean sage seeks neither passion nor the ecstasy of union, but : of all the things wisdom provides for the happiness of a whole life, he makes it the greatest (, ). Born at first from the need for security, it frees us from the fear of others and sustains ; yet Epicurus moves from calculation to bond, for the sage comes to cherish the friend for his own sake and would, if need be, risk his life for him. This is a friendship with neither heaven nor the instinct of the species, reciprocal and cultivated in the Garden; only the trace of its utilitarian origin leaves it a slight share of lack being filled.
Principal Doctrines, XXVII · Vatican Sayings, 23, 34 and 52
Show inferred positions (2)
Beauvoirinferable
Beauvoir criticizes the love in which woman alienates herself and makes herself the other's object: the woman in love who loses herself in the beloved, for want of a project of her own, is a figure of bad faith. To this love-as-lack that seeks to complete itself in another, she opposes authentic love, the reciprocal bond of two freedoms that recognize and choose one another without either dissolving into the other. It is an existential , made of mutual recognition, in which the share of gift lies in each willing the other's freedom as their own.
The Second Sex (1949), vol. II, "The Woman in Love"
Spinozainferable
At the heart of love Spinoza sees neither lack nor gift but a joy: to love is to pass to a greater perfection, a joy referred to the idea of its cause (, III). Love is therefore not the surge of a void toward what would fill it, but the striving (conatus) of power toward what increases it, which keeps a kinship with without its pathos of lack. Among human beings this striving culminates in the friendship of those guided by reason, who agree in nature, are mutually useful and want nothing for themselves that they do not also want for others: a rational , reciprocal and chosen. At the summit, the exceeds every interpersonal bond: a love without return, in which the sage does not require to be loved back, closer to disinterested gift than to possession.
Ethics, III (definition of love); IV, props. 35-37 and 70-71 (the friendship of reasonable people); V, props. 19 and 32-37 (the intellectual love of God)