Lecture by Steven Nadler: Spinoza on Friendship

The Department of History of Philosophy organises a lecture by Professor Steven Nadler on Thursday, 20 October 2022.

Spinoza on Friendship

Spinoza nowhere lays out in rigorous fashion what precisely friendship is and the forms it may take: what constitutes a true friendship and how it differs from more deficient varieties. However, Spinoza’s discussion in the Ethics of the other-directed activity of a person living virtuously under the guidance of reason is, in fact, essentialy an account of the cultivation of true friendship relations and the place of friendship in the life of the paragon of virtue and rationality that he calls "the free person [homo liber]." As in Aristotle’s famous account, Spinoza’s free person in a friendship relation acts to benefit another. However, and this is the essential difference with Aristotle, the free person does so not from purely altruistic motives but from a deep and metaphysically-grounded egoism. In this lecture, we will examine what exactly friendship involves for Spinoza and address some concerns as to whether the rationally benevolent behavior of the virtuous person does, intuitively, meet our expectations of friendship.