Comprehensivist Wednesdays: Privacy, Friendship, and the Self

In this meetup, we will explore two connected ideas: James Rachels' argument that privacy is essential to human relationships, and Aristotle's account of what genuine friendship requires. Together, these readings reveal something surprising: privacy is not about secrecy or hiding, but about the conditions that make authentic human connection possible.
Rachels begins by setting aside the obvious reasons we value privacy,
such as avoiding embarrassment or protecting sensitive information.

His deeper claim is that privacy matters because we naturally behave differently with
different people, and this is not dishonesty. It is how relationships actually work.
We share things with close friends that we would not share with colleagues, and things with a spouse that we would not share with strangers. Without the ability to control who has access to us, that relational structure collapses.

Aristotle helps explain why these distinctions matter. He argues that friendships fall into three types: those based on usefulness, those based on pleasure, and those based on virtue. The first two are real but fragile. Virtue friendship is different. Here each person values the other for who they genuinely are, not for what they provide. Aristotle calls the true friend "another self," someone who knows your character deeply and wishes you well for your own sake.

Why Privacy is Important
https://people.brandeis.edu/~teuber/Rachels_on_Privacy.pdf?utm_source
Nicomachean Ethics - Book VIII
https://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/nicomachaen.8.viii.html
Aristotle on Friendship: What Does It Take to Be a Good Friend?
https://1000wordphilosophy.com/2023/05/30/aristotle-on-friendship/
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Welcome to the series "Comprehensivist Wednesdays". Transdisciplinarity, Renaissance humanism, homo universalis, and Polymathy are some of the ways of describing this approach which Buckminster Fuller called Comprehensivity and described as “macro-comprehensive and micro-incisive.”

See the calendar at https://www.meetup.com/52LivingIdeas/events/calendar/
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