Friendship: The Future of an Ancient Gift by Claudia Baracchi (review)

Reviewed by: Friendship: The Future of an Ancient Gift by Claudia Baracchi Joseph Gamache BARACCHI, Claudia. Friendship: The Future of an Ancient Gift. Translated by Elena Bartolini and Catherine Fullarton. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2023. 146 pp. Paper, 30. 00 Friendship: The Future of an Ancient Gift offers a series of reflections on friendship that "outline thoughts, visions, stories. " It is well to bear this in mind. There is no sustained discussion of (and not many references to) other commentators or interpreters of the ancient Greeks. Nor is there, despite the title, a sustained philosophical treatment of friendship or its future. It is a series of reflections on ancient Greek texts. These reflections are unified by the theme of friendship, even when friendship seems to recede into the background. Each chapter is organized around a specific text, the reading of which is interspersed with the aforementioned thoughts, visions, and stories. The first chapter focuses on Plato's Timaeus. Friendship in its "most elementary sense" is "looking at the sky" and seeing not only myself, but "myself as us. " This sort of cosmic friendship is a look, a "unitive force, a capacity for seeing the bonds and holding together the elements that form every living organism. " The second chapter takes up the analogy of the soul and the city in the Republic. I am a friend to myself when the parts of my soul are in harmony. In the third and longest chapter, Baracchi takes up friendship between equals as discussed in the Nicomachean Ethics. The thematic focus is now friendship between persons, and we read that friendship is a "privileged place in which to be, " that it "corroborates, strengthens, amplifies, and emphasizes" the friends, that it is the "condition and context for the utmost explication of human dynamis. " Friends resemble each other like poetic images "that illuminate and elucidate one another. " The third chapter also takes a swipe at "us moderns, " whose notions of liberty undermine our ability to appreciate friendship. We moderns "struggle to contemplate seriousness, fidelity, and the depth they entail, without cynicism. " The critique is familiar, and trades, at times, on what seems to be a conflation of Hobbes with the entirety of early modern philosophical anthropology. End Page 535 Chapters 4 through 6 return to Plato, first with a reflection on the Apology and Symposium, and then with a discussion of Aristotle's friendship with Plato. The fifth chapter takes up the tension between the pursuit of truth and the love of one's friends, as that dilemma manifests in the life of a philosopher. Baracchi convincingly argues that Aristotle should be read as honoring the deeper teachings of Plato, and Socrates before him, that one should care about not who holds a belief but only whether the belief is true. Thus did Aristotle resolve the dilemma between truth and friendship. His pursuit of the truth, even when it caused disagreement with Plato, was an act of friendship. Chapter 6 focuses on the origin of the polis as described in the Republic. Baracchi shows how Socrates tries in the Republic to widen the circle of those who count as one's friends, from select others within the polis, to everyone within the polis, to the entire Greek world, as well as to push back against those who argue that enmity is the necessary foundation of the polis. The last three chapters of the book return to Aristotle's views about friendship: first, about the relationship between friendship and justice, second, about friendships between unequals, and lastly, about the embodied aspects of friendship, its sweetness, and pleasure. There are limits, however, to how helpful the work might be to philosophers interested in friendship. The language is often too abstract, as in the recommendation, "to learn to think human community in its entirety, without this entailing the elimination of differences, and without reducing the differences to identity-related and localistic velleities. " Or in the claim that the difference between complete and derivative friendship is the former's ability to "to grasp the broader reasons in the finite, and thus to place the contingent in an otherwise articulated context. " Too often there are exaggerations that obscure whatever point is. . .