Philosophy and friendship. Towards a phenomenology of forms of life
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3989/isegoria.2026.74.1939Keywords:
Friendship, Philosophy, Forms of Life, Common World, Comradeship, SororityAbstract
This text is an enlarged version of the talk presented at the 30th edition of the Conferencias Aranguren, organized by the Instituto de Filosofía, CSIC, at the Residencia de Estudiantes, Madrid, on October 28, 2025. In it, Marina Garcés presents friendship as a form of life, as a set of practices which translate our constituent estrangement into bonds, rather than into threats, allowing a “common world” beyond dualisms like private and public, personal and institutional, human and non-human. This article presents a phenomenology of friendship, considering the latter as an approach to the alien, to the stranger, in order to make it a part of oneself combining utility and unconditionality, particularity and generality. Such a phenomenology is a required starting point to save friendship from those who reduce it to a private affection between individuals or to a sheer protective sphere in a society of enemies. At the same time, it allows an ethics of reciprocity independent from voluntarist concepts such as benevolence or altruism. The fundamental practice of friendship is making a common world with the alien.
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