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A man is happy if he has merely encountered the shadow of a friend. —Menander
Plato and Aristotle both gave an important place to friendship in the good life: Plato devoted three books to friendship and to love (the Lysis, the Phædrus, and the Symposium), and in Book 8 of the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle lavishes extravagant praise upon the Greek concept of friendship, or philia. Friendship, says Aristotle, is a virtue which is ‘most necessary with a view to living … for without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods.’
So what exactly is friendship? According to Aristotle, for a person to be friends with another ‘it is necessary that [they] bear good will to each other, without this escaping their notice.’
A person may bear goodwill to another for one of three reasons: that he is useful; that he is pleasant; or that he is good (that is, rational and virtuous). Although Aristotle leaves room for friendships based on advantage alone or pleasure alone, he is quite clear that such relationships have a lesser claim to the name of friendship than those based partly or wholly on goodness:
Perfect friendship is the friendship of men who are good, and alike in virtue; for these wish well alike to each other qua good, and they are good themselves. Now those who wish well to their friends for their sake are most truly friends; for they do this by reason of their nature and not incidentally; therefore their friendship lasts as long as they are good—and goodness is an enduring thing … And such a friendship is as might be expected permanent, since there meet in it all the qualities that friends should have.
Compared to other forms of association, perfect friendship leads to a high degree of mutual benefit, including such rare and precious commodities as companionship, dependability, and trust. More important still, to seek out the good of one’s friend is to exercise reason and virtue, which is the distinctive function of human beings, and amounts to happiness.
Must this mean that friendship is selfish? For Aristotle, an act of friendship is undertaken both for our own good and that of our friend, and there is no reason to suppose that the one precludes the other. In any case, a perfect friend is as ‘another self’, insofar as perfect friends make the same choices as each other, and each one’s happiness adds to that of the other.
Unfortunately, the number of people with whom we might sustain a perfect friendship is very limited, first, because reason and virtue are not to be found in everyone (never, for instance, in young people, who are not yet wise enough to be virtuous), and, second, because a perfect friendship can only flourish if a pair of friends spend a great deal of leisure time in each other’s exclusive company. Thus, even if entirely surrounded by good people, we would only have the capacity for at most a small handful of perfect friendships.
The ideal of perfect friendship may strike the modern reader as being somewhat elitist, but Aristotle is surely right in holding that the best kinds of friendship are both rare and demanding. If the best kinds of friendship are those that are based on virtue, then this is above all because such friendships call upon the exercise of reason and virtue, which is the distinctive function of human beings, and which amounts to happiness. However, it could be that the distinctive function of human beings is not the exercise of reason and virtue, but the capacity to form loving and meaningful relationships. If this is the case, then friendships that are based on virtue are even more important to the good life than Aristotle thinks.
Despite his extravagant praise of friendship, Aristotle is quite clear that the best and happiest life is not that spent in friendship, but that spent in the contemplation of those things that are most true and therefore most noble and dependable. Or as he puts it in the Nicomachean Ethics, ‘Plato is my friend, but truth is a greater friend still.’
There seems to be a contradiction in this: if the best life is the life of contemplation, then friendship is either superfluous or inimical to the best life, and therefore undeserving of Aristotle’s high praise.
It may be, as Aristotle tentatively suggests, that friendship is needed because it assists contemplation, or that contemplation is only possible some of the time and friendship is needed the rest of the time, or even that a life spent in friendship is just as good as a life spent in contemplation.
So much for Aristotle, one might say.
Now read: The Philosophy of Friendship, Part 2 of 3.
Neel Burton is author Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of the Emotions.
