(I apologize pre-emptively for quoting no more than Wikipedia.)
I guess my main quibble here is with the extreme prescriptiveness regarding "friendship" - I'll regard "true" friendship as anything which a normal Anglophone would acknowledge as such, and claim anything more specific requires a proper qualifier instead of a claim that other types, including the nearly-universal one, are "false".
"I do believe True Friendships do occur, but they aren't all that common." - well, when to you even a friendship based on *shared intellectual interests* isn't true enough, I may want to ask you whether you ever had any experience of "true friendship" - I'm pretty sure I never did, including observing it among others; there have been times in which I had a friend, and we had clear mutual expectations regarding virtue, but I'm pretty sure even those were based on shared intellectual interests - and they did end at some point. If you define no Scotsman as being true, is it surprising you've never seen a true Scotsman?
"Being time-based there is a built-in expiration date on these common types of friendships." - largely yes, I guess, but do you really want to be so Platonic as to devalue them for that?
I will say, and have said to workmates, that you don't have a friendship with one *at all* if you don't interact with them outside work (and of course any interaction "outside work" which isn't a "fully" free choice isn't actually "outside work"; I dodged one such not-actually-outside-work interaction today, even!) - and I had some entirely voluntary interaction with some of those after I stopped working with them, so arguably *now* we have a "friendship of pleasure" (i.e. the only thing the overwhelming majority of people understands as "friendship").
I will say, too, that I don't believe that in current English there's such a thing as a "friendship of use"; in general English speakers would either just deny the concept or - if having the behavior in question - pretend to have the regard that would imply a "friendship of pleasure" (even if they knew they weren't interacting outside of the business environment - they'd claim if needed, possibly plausibly, to "lack the time" for anything else). A proper term for this openly done is "business transaction".
"Aristotle, in his great work on ethics, distinguished three types of friendship [...]" - quoting Wikipedia, if Aristotle used "philia" for even relationships between cities, I believe it obviously can't only mean a mutual virtue development.
"Pleasure friends wish each other pleasure." - I'm not convinced that for most people any other thing to wish *exists*; so the problem generally isn't any "untruth" to this friendship, it's that most people are hylic normies (coined at https://violetcabra.dreamwidth.org/381271.html ); not valuing another's virtue can only be a flaw in your relationship to them if you have a valued concept of virtue in the first place.
"Of course, the latter scenario could hardly be described in most cases as being a friendship of equals." - yes, and I *am* inclined to see that as a problem - but are we sure relationships (of whatever type) "of equals" are something that actually exists?
It might be harder for virtue-friends to split (I do believe on average it is), but don't they have a possibility to split *because of virtue* that other people lack? (See: Socrates' former students.)
Every relationship is in some sense "of circumstance" - one of my claims here is that the usual friendship "of pleasure" does feature mutual genuine regard and even virtue-based actions towards one another, though virtue isn't its reason.
(Lastly, from Wikipedia: "between obsequiousness or flattery on the one hand and surliness or quarrelsomeness on the other" - this could be a cold, polite, neutral attitude!)
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branchandroot
(no subject)
Date: 2023-04-17 02:37 am (UTC)I guess my main quibble here is with the extreme prescriptiveness regarding "friendship" - I'll regard "true" friendship as anything which a normal Anglophone would acknowledge as such, and claim anything more specific requires a proper qualifier instead of a claim that other types, including the nearly-universal one, are "false".
"I do believe True Friendships do occur, but they aren't all that common." - well, when to you even a friendship based on *shared intellectual interests* isn't true enough, I may want to ask you whether you ever had any experience of "true friendship" - I'm pretty sure I never did, including observing it among others; there have been times in which I had a friend, and we had clear mutual expectations regarding virtue, but I'm pretty sure even those were based on shared intellectual interests - and they did end at some point. If you define no Scotsman as being true, is it surprising you've never seen a true Scotsman?
"Being time-based there is a built-in expiration date on these common types of friendships." - largely yes, I guess, but do you really want to be so Platonic as to devalue them for that?
I will say, and have said to workmates, that you don't have a friendship with one *at all* if you don't interact with them outside work (and of course any interaction "outside work" which isn't a "fully" free choice isn't actually "outside work"; I dodged one such not-actually-outside-work interaction today, even!) - and I had some entirely voluntary interaction with some of those after I stopped working with them, so arguably *now* we have a "friendship of pleasure" (i.e. the only thing the overwhelming majority of people understands as "friendship").
I will say, too, that I don't believe that in current English there's such a thing as a "friendship of use"; in general English speakers would either just deny the concept or - if having the behavior in question - pretend to have the regard that would imply a "friendship of pleasure" (even if they knew they weren't interacting outside of the business environment - they'd claim if needed, possibly plausibly, to "lack the time" for anything else). A proper term for this openly done is "business transaction".
"Aristotle, in his great work on ethics, distinguished three types of friendship [...]" - quoting Wikipedia, if Aristotle used "philia" for even relationships between cities, I believe it obviously can't only mean a mutual virtue development.
"Pleasure friends wish each other pleasure." - I'm not convinced that for most people any other thing to wish *exists*; so the problem generally isn't any "untruth" to this friendship, it's that most people are hylic normies (coined at https://violetcabra.dreamwidth.org/381271.html ); not valuing another's virtue can only be a flaw in your relationship to them if you have a valued concept of virtue in the first place.
"Of course, the latter scenario could hardly be described in most cases as being a friendship of equals." - yes, and I *am* inclined to see that as a problem - but are we sure relationships (of whatever type) "of equals" are something that actually exists?
It might be harder for virtue-friends to split (I do believe on average it is), but don't they have a possibility to split *because of virtue* that other people lack? (See: Socrates' former students.)
Every relationship is in some sense "of circumstance" - one of my claims here is that the usual friendship "of pleasure" does feature mutual genuine regard and even virtue-based actions towards one another, though virtue isn't its reason.
(Lastly, from Wikipedia: "between obsequiousness or flattery on the one hand and surliness or quarrelsomeness on the other" - this could be a cold, polite, neutral attitude!)