Abstract
In the spirit of exploring fresh perspectives, I offer this investigation into the aesthetic aspects of personal relationships with a focus on friendship.1 Glossing the aesthetic aspects of friendship, as we too often do, impoverishes our understanding of the value and meaning of friendships, relationships which give shape and content to our lives, which animate our lives or, as Nancy Sherman (1993) puts it, relationships which structure the good life. The friendships we forge and those we forgo, the loves we cultivate and those we lose, these varying and variable relations broaden (or impoverish) our experiences, intensify (or diminish) our feelings, and help (or hinder) our self understanding and self creation. I wish to explore here how friendships are aesthetic expressions and impressions in and of our lives, as form and color are aesthetic expressions and impressions in and of paintings. I do so by pursuing an analogy between art and friendship as well as by investigating some of the aesthetic aspects of friendship: how cultivating and enjoying friendship invites creative and relatively free expressions of self, the ways aesthetic taste factors into with whom we are friends, and the manner in which friendships can help to harmoniously round out a life.
What is so pleasant as these jets of affection which make a young world for me again? What so delicious as a just and firm encounter of two, in thought and feeling? How beautiful, on their approach to this beating heart, the steps and forms of the gifted and the true?
Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Friendship’
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© 2013 Sheila Lintott
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Lintott, S. (2013). Aesthetics and the Art of Friendship. In: Caluori, D. (eds) Thinking about Friendship. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137003997_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137003997_14
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