The idealistic concepts of friendship
We post that it is an exercise in rhetoric, but like any philosophy there is a seminal origin of a certain thought, Nietzsche starts from Platonic metaphysics stating that the game between friends of philosophy had a vice of conception that would be the will of truth, sometimes it was precisely she that there is a critique of the sophists relativizes it.
Based on this principle, Nietzsche will state that the philosopher must practice a certain “art of mistrust”, his main instrument being the hammer (Niettzsche in “Beyond Good and Evil”).
Deleuze states that Foucault would have declared that “Heidegger always fascinated him, but that he could only understand him through Nietzsche, with Nietzsche (and not the other way around)” (Deleuze, 1986, p. 120-121) and even though “surely , alongside Heidegger, but in a totally different way, the one who most profoundly renewed the image of thought” (Deleuze, 1990, p. 130-131).
Returning to the initial question, which is true friendship, after all if it is it and nothing else that allows for a broad relationship between the various concepts of friends in philosophy, being itself by definition (philo-friend) sophia (wisdom).
This is how Deleuze and Guattari develop the question of friendship, considering the different thinkers, the friend is for him, being more textual, it is a “trait of conceptual character” that has to do with “psychosocial characters” (Deleuze, Guattari, 1991, p. .68)
As we said, it is an emptying of the concept of friend, transformed into an object of subjective reflection, for this reason we say that they are idealist concepts, even when approaching clearly non-idealist authors such as Heidegger and Nietzsche.
We return to the Aristotelian concept that differentiates friendship for pleasure or for utility from true friendship and therefore the question of truth is essential, and even Plato considered it, although it divides the world of ideas (eidos for the Greeks) and the sensible world.
Also the concept of neighbor (one who is within a broad affection of friendship) and the partner (one to whom we associate ourselves for a certain happiness), concepts of Paul Ricoeur are essential points in our view for the reflection on friendship.
DELEUZE, Gilles. Pourparlers Paris: Minuit, 1990.
DELEUZE, Gilles; GUATTARI, Félix. Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? Paris: Minuit, 1991.