Friendship and concepts
We have already posted and explored the concepts of friendship in Aristotle for pleasure, for interest and true friendships, we also highlight the difference between the partner and the neighbor (Paul Ricoeur’s text) where in the first case there is only interest and once the friendship is over closes or diminishes.
What we want to explore a little bit now is what it means in an individualistic world and where interest reigns, what is the concepts of friendship and friend.
In another perspective, in which Deleuze and Guattari go so far as to say that the friend and friendship are “absent” concerns in philosophical thought, and the book “A friendship de Maurice Blachot” is mentioned as a rare exception, but there is already at the base of this discourse a clear distinction between friend and friendship.
So the philosopher is a “friend” of wisdom (philos-friend and sophia-wisdom), but there is a compulsory obligation due to “friendship” being the object of this relationship, and thus only these friends could participate in the friendship, that is, there is a requirement of wisdom.
The basis of this concept is in the “gaze” of a so-called “sage”, so they are concepts within each one, they are the eyes or look of each one on another person, but this look is a sensation that does not come from the eyes of the senses or of personal feelings, so they are a nobody’s gaze, a demand for observation, a selfie that must be seen by another.
But how can you be a friend while being nobody? This question makes more sense when it comes to a dimension in a highly differentiable plane, and thus it can be seen in certain historical, political and even religious contexts, where each thinker is taken individually as having a “look” of sage, or of pretended wisdom.
One can illustrate with Guattari and Deleuze himself, and thus we can divide friendship into concepts of different contexts: the Greek, the Nietzschean, the Heideggerian and the Focaultian.
Such an inquiry aims to explore the territory of friendship as a concept, because if, as we said, it is a highly differentiable dimension or plane, then it can be detected in certain historical periods or even in each thinker taken individually. We will then try to define and illustrate, from the elements that we have just lent to Deleuze and Guattari, in a way appropriate to the extension of this article, four types of friendship of the concept, the Greek, the Nietzschean, the Heideggerian and the Foucaultian, but it’s just a rhetorical exercise.
It can be worthwhile as an exercise in thought, friendship is simple and there can be, and there are, among simple people with little book culture, and there may not be among “cults”.
I venture to say that there is more true friendship between simple people, than Heidegger says in his Forest Path in which he lives with very simple people.