Fellowship For Aristotle & Tolkien

Andy Owen explains what Aristotle was tolkien about.

- Andy Owen

In my early twenties a close friend committed suicide. He was a beautiful soul and I will always question myself as to what, as his friend, I should have done to help him. As Henry James advised; “Never say you know the last word about any human heart.” Maybe there was nothing, maybe there was something. At the time I had never really thought too much about what being a friend meant. I don’t think we reflect about the idea of friendship too much today. When we are young, we take the fact we have friends for granted without thinking too much about what type of friends they are. When we get older, we let work, distance and family get in the way. It is maybe only when we are much older and there is no work, family disperse, and our world gets smaller that we realise what we are missing.

One of Western philosophy’s greatest figures, Aristotle, spent a lot of time thinking about friendship. For him philosophy meant thinking about how we should live, and friends were central to the good life. He was not the first philosopher to value friendship so highly – Socrates is quoted as saying that friendship meant more to him “than all Darius’s gold” – but Aristotle was the first to dedicate sustained attention to the subject. In his Nicomachean Ethics, no less than two whole books are devoted to the topic. Even justice, in Aristotle’s view the highest virtue, only gets one book.