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What’s your opinion on friendship?

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What’s your opinion on friendship?
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What’s your opinion on friendship?
Decline of friendship
The number and quality of friendships for the average American has been declining since at least 1985,according to a 2006 study.[1] The study states that 25% of Americans have no close confidants,and that the total number of confidants per person has dropped to 2.
In recent times,some thinkers have postulated that modern friendships have lost the force and importance that they had in antiquity.C.S.Lewis for example,in his The Four Loves,writes:
"To the Ancients,Friendship seemed the happiest and most fully human of all loves; the crown of life and the school of virtue.The modern world,in comparison,ignores it.We admit of course that besides a wife and family a man needs a few 'friends'.But the very tone of the admission,and the sort of acquaintanceships which those who make it would describe as 'friendships',show clearly that what they are talking about has very little to do with that Philia which Aristotle classified among the virtues or that Amicitia on which Cicero wrote a book."
Likewise,Paul Halsall claims that:
"The intense emotional and affective relationships described in the past as "non-sexual" cannot be said to exist today:modern heterosexual men can be buddies,but unless drunk they cannot touch each other,or regularly sleep together.They cannot affirm that an emotional affective relationship with another man is the centrally important relationship in their lives.It is not going too far,is it,to claim that friendship – if used to translate Greek philia or Latin amicitia – hardly exists among heterosexual men in modern Western society."
Mark McLelland,writing in the Western Buddhist Review under his Buddhist name of Dharmachari Jñanavira (Article),more directly points to homophobia being at the root of a modern decline in the western tradition of friendship:
"Hence,in our cultural context where homosexual desire has for centuries been considered sinful,unnatural and a great evil,the experience of homoerotic desire can be very traumatic for some individuals and severely limit the potential for same-sex friendship.The Danish sociologist Henning Bech,for instance,writes of the anxiety which often accompanies developing intimacy between male friends:
"'The more one has to assure oneself that one's relationship with another man is not homosexual,the more conscious one becomes that it might be,and the more necessary it becomes to protect oneself against it.The result is that friendship gradually becomes impossible.'"
Their opinion that fear of being,or being seen as,homosexual has killed off western man's ability to form close friendships with other men is shared by Japanese psychologist Doi Takeo,who claims that male friendships in American society are fraught with homosexual anxiety and thus homophobia is a limiting factor stopping men from establishing deep friendships with other men.
The suggestion that friendship contains an ineluctable element of erotic desire is not new,but has been advanced by students of friendship ever since the time of the ancient Greeks,where it comes up in the writings of Plato.More recently,the Austrian philosopher Otto Weininger claimed that:
"There is no friendship between men that has not an element of sexuality in it,however little accentuated it may be in the nature of the friendship,and however painful the idea of the sexual element would be.But it is enough to remember that there can be no friendship unless there has been some attraction to draw the men together.Much of the affection,protection,and nepotism between men is due to the presence of unsuspected sexual compatibility."