The Multiple Statuses of Friendship and Their Evolution under the Phenomenological Perspective

Compared with medieval philosophy which focused on determining the way of human life and its fate in the vertical relationship between man and God, and modern Western philosophy which had obvious characteristics of metaphysics of consciousness subjectivism, Aristotle paid much attention to friendship mainly involving the transverse relationship among human beings and placed it in a prominent position. While three phenomenologists, including Heidegger, Gadamer and Derrida, oppose metaphysics of subjectivity consciousness and corresponding formalism, prescriptivism and nihilism in political-ethical life, they gradually reintroduced friendship into philosophical vision, even to the heart of philosophical thinking largely based on appropriating, reconstructing, criticizing or transforming Aristotelian philosophy of friendship as well as his general practical philosophy. In a relative sense, the specific gravity of thought of friendship and its corresponding orientation are a little different among three phenomenologists. In each philosopher’s own thought as a whole, however, the question of friendship is not just limited to a particular field, but is correlated with various issues of being, existence, language, truth, meaning, time, ethics and politics. Such widely transitivity and deep penetration of the question of friendship also reflect one prominent characteristics or one trend of thoughts of phenomenological movement, that is, to rethink on one more primitive and profound level the possibility and necessity of original connection and communication among theory and practice, being and ethics, subject and object, self and the other etc.