Benjamin Lesbios on the Forms of Friendship: Ancient, Modern, and Contemporary Approaches Benjamin Lesbios (1759-1824) was a leading figure of the Neohellenic Enlightenment, scholar and revolutionary, natural scientist and... more
Benjamin Lesbios on the Forms of Friendship:
Ancient, Modern, and Contemporary Approaches
Benjamin Lesbios (1759-1824) was a leading figure of the Neohellenic Enlightenment, scholar and revolutionary, natural scientist and philosopher, a man of both theory and action. He was also a systematic student of both ancient and modern scholarship combining in his work the ancient tradition with modernity, recognizing in his Elements of Metaphysics that “all the theories of the contemporaries are ancient” (IA, §249). Benjamin’s respect to the ancients is apparent in the whole of his work as well as his attempt to project the ideas of ancient Greek civilization, combined with an excellent knowledge of the ancient texts. Despite his admiration for the Greek civilization, Benjamin made critical use of the Greek philosophical tradition, not taking sides in the debate between ‘Ancients and Moderns’, arguing instead that the ideas of the Ancients correspond to those of the Moderns.
More specifically, my aim in this paper is to present and analyse Benjamin Lesbios’s account of the different forms of friendship as found mainly in his Elements of Ethics but also in passim in his Elements of Metaphysics. Based on textual evidence, I argue that Benjamin’s notion of friendship owes very much to that of Aristotle’s. It is clear that Benjamin’s text is full of Aristotelian implicit or explicit references mainly from the Rhetoric and the Nicomachean Ethics. Benjamin’s philosophy achieves into successfully combining Aristotelianism with natural rights theory, being thus more closely affiliated with contemporary Aristotelian theories that attempt to combine virtue ethics with deontology in an endeavour to overcome the dead ends of both modern and contemporary normative theory and to put forward a viable social theory. Therefore, according to my opinion, it is possible to argue that Benjamin’s theory is not only relevant today but also – within the context of the study of the history of philosophy – useful to contemporary Aristotelian moral and political theory.
