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How the Sophists Forced Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle to Rethink Truth

A sophist addresses a crowd in Ancient Athens
Protagoras’ dictum: Anthrōpos metron pantōn—’Man is the measure of all things.’

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

For centuries, Greek philosophy had looked outwards. The first philosophers sought to understand the nature of the universe, inquiring into the substance, origin, and hidden principles of all things. Thales is remembered for upholding water as the fundamental substance, Heraclitus for his principle of perpetual change, Parmenides for his diametrically opposed principle of unchanging being, and Democritus for his atoms.

But by the middle of the fifth century BCE, philosophy faced an altogether different challenge. The question was no longer what the universe is made of, but whether we can know anything with certainty. Philosophy’s first great crisis arose not in a school or temple, but in the bustling streets and public squares of democratic Athens.

The Need for Sophists

By naturalising the world, the pre-Socratics had been responding and contributing to a waning of the old myths. As the world became demythologised, attention shifted from the gods to man, from the temples to the law courts, from questions about the cosmos to questions about logic, language, politics, morality, and society.

This intellectual revolution was matched by a political one. By the middle of the fifth century BCE, Athens had emerged triumphant from the Persian Wars. Enriched by empire and transformed into a radical democracy, it became a city in which political influence depended less upon noble birth than on the ability to persuade an assembly, sway a jury, or carry a crowd. In this new world, rhetoric became power.

The Sophists travelled from city to city offering public lectures and private instruction, especially to ambitious young aristocrats hoping for careers in public life. They taught rhetoric, argument, memory, and the art of persuasion. They were also handsomely rewarded. Some charged fees so enormous that Plato and Aristophanes never tired of mocking them.

Although itinerant, the Sophists naturally converged upon Athens, where they often resided at the houses of wealthy patrons such as the magnate Callias or the politician Callicles. According to Plato, Callias owned ‘the greatest and most glorious house’ in Athens and ‘spent a world of money on the sophists’. In Plato’s Greater Hippias, the Sophist Hippias tells Socrates, ‘If you were to know how much money I have made, you would be amazed…’

What the Sophists Taught

The Sophists were not a school in the usual sense. They had no common doctrine or shared founder, and often disagreed with one another. Some, such as Protagoras and Prodicus, were serious thinkers who won the respect even of Plato. Others became famous as intellectual entertainers, dazzling audiences with verbal tricks and paradoxes. Yet all shared a new concern with language, argument, rhetoric, politics, and practical life.

This marked a profound shift from the pre-Socratics. Rather than asking, ‘What is the universe made of?’, the Sophists asked, ‘How do we persuade others?’, ‘What is justice?’, and even, ‘Can there be any objective truth at all?’

No Sophist embodied this new outlook more fully than Protagoras. His most famous dictum, Anthrōpos metron pantōn—’Man is the measure of all things’—came to epitomise the movement. In the Theaetetus, Plato argues that if each and every man truly were the measure of all things, then nothing could be inherently true or false, or right or wrong—not even the dictum itself.

Protagoras is also remembered for the remarkable opening line of his lost work, About the Gods: ‘About the gods, I cannot be sure whether they exist or not, or what they are like to see; for many things stand in the way of the knowledge of them, both the opacity of the subject and the shortness of human life.’ Such agnosticism was startling in a deeply religious society, and only reinforced the suspicion that the Sophists were undermining traditional beliefs.

Gorgias, who lived for 108 years, pushed scepticism further still. Whether or not he believed his own arguments, he delighted in demonstrating the astonishing power of rhetoric. He boasted that he could speak on any subject at a moment’s notice and likened the effects of speech upon the soul to those of drugs upon the body. Words, like drugs, could heal, intoxicate, or poison.

Other Sophists explored different aspects of the same revolution. Prodicus became famous for distinguishing between near synonyms with pedantic precision, and for suggesting, not unlike Wittgenstein twenty-four centuries later, that philosophical progress begins with linguistic clarity. Antiphon contrasted nature (physis) with convention (nomos), raising the unsettling possibility that many of the laws and moral codes by which we live are no more than a matter of convention. The dichotomy surfaces in the Antigone of Sophocles (c. 441 BCE), when Antigone seeks to justify her attempt to bury her brother Polynices by claiming the superiority of divine over man-made law. Hippias claimed to be an authority on everything and wrote many books. He held that the purpose of life is autarkeia (self-sufficiency), and boasted of presenting himself at Olympia wearing nothing that he had not himself made, down to his girdle, sandals, seal-ring, strigil, and oil-flask.

The Sophists transformed Greek education, but they also raised an unsettling question: if every position can be defended by a sufficiently skilful speaker, what becomes of truth?

Why Socrates Objected

Socrates accepted many of the Sophists’ starting points. Like them, he turned away from cosmology to focus on ethics, politics, and the human condition. Like them, he engaged his fellow citizens in conversation. Yet there was one crucial difference.

The Sophists taught their pupils how to argue. Socrates sought to discover what was true—and never charged for it.

For Socrates, words were not instruments of persuasion but tools of inquiry. His famous method of questioning—the elenchus—served not to win debates but to expose contradictions, undermine false confidence, and inch towards genuine knowledge. He believed that careful questioning could reveal objective truths about justice, courage, friendship, and the good life.

Whereas the Sophists taught the art of persuasion, Socrates insisted that persuasion and truth were not the same thing.

This was the question at the heart of philosophy’s first great crisis: is philosophy a search for truth, or merely the art of persuasion?

Why Was Socrates Mistaken for a Sophist?

Ironically, many Athenians mistook Socrates for one of the Sophists. Like them, he challenged traditional beliefs and exposed the ignorance of prominent citizens through relentless questioning. In Aristophanes’ Clouds, he is portrayed as the head of a ‘Thinking Shop’, where students learn ingenious arguments and how to make the weaker case appear the stronger.

The caricature was unfair, but revealing. Socrates charged no fees, claimed no expertise, and repeatedly insisted that he knew nothing. Yet to many Athenians these distinctions seemed trivial. They saw only another unsettling intellectual who questioned convention and undermined established authority.

If Socrates was put on trial and, ultimately, to death, this was in part because many Athenians mistook him for a Sophist.

Plato’s Response

If Socrates sought truth through dialogue, Plato sought to explain why truth is possible in the first place.

The Sophists had shown how easily opinions differ. Plato agreed. But he refused to conclude that all opinions are therefore equally valid.

Instead, he argued that behind the changing world perceived by the senses lies a higher reality of eternal Forms: perfect Justice, Beauty, Equality, and Goodness. Our arguments may be confused and our perceptions unreliable, but these realities remain unchanged. Philosophy is therefore not merely the art of persuasion, but the search for objective truth.

Many of Plato’s greatest dialogues are shaped by this confrontation. In the Protagoras, Gorgias, Hippias Major, Hippias Minor, and other dialogues, the Sophists become Plato’s principal interlocutors. Sometimes they are treated with respect, sometimes with devastating irony, but always they represent the challenge that philosophy must overcome.

Whether Plato portrayed them fairly remains an open question. Much of what we know about the Sophists comes through his writings, and he had every reason to emphasise their weaknesses while strengthening his own case. It was, perhaps, one of history’s most resounding philosophical victories—so complete that the word ‘sophist’ still carries negative connotations.

Aristotle’s Response

Aristotle inherited the same problem but answered it differently. Whereas Plato had looked beyond the visible world, Aristotle looked more closely at it.

Instead of grounding knowledge in transcendent Forms, he sought reliable methods for investigating the world itself. His answer to the Sophists lay not in another metaphysical theory, but in the careful disciplines of logic, observation, and demonstration.

Aristotle analysed arguments with a new precision, distinguishing valid reasoning from fallacy and demonstration from mere persuasion.

The Sophists had shown how arguments can mislead. Aristotle sought to show how, properly constructed, they can also lead us to truth.

Rehabilitating the Sophists

After Plato, the Sophists became the villains of Greek philosophy: eloquent teachers more interested in winning arguments and enriching themselves than discovering the truth.

Yet this judgement is probably too harsh. The Sophists helped lay the foundations of higher education. They recognised the importance of language, communication, critical thinking, and cultural difference. They questioned inherited assumptions and forced philosophy to justify itself rather than merely assert its conclusions.

Many of their questions remain alive today. Are moral values objective or culturally relative? Does language shape thought? Is law grounded in nature or merely in convention? Can rhetoric obscure truth as easily as reveal it? To these questions there are still no universally accepted answers.

The Sophists did not destroy philosophy. They transformed it—albeit, sometimes, despite themselves. By questioning truth, morality, justice, and knowledge itself, they created the first great crisis in Western philosophy. Socrates responded by seeking definitions, Plato by defending objective reality, and Aristotle by developing the tools of logic. Much of subsequent philosophy can be understood as an attempt to answer questions that the Sophists were among the first to ask.

They may have lost the argument in the eyes of Plato. But they changed philosophy forever.

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If Aspasia taught Socrates, Western philosophy begins with a woman.

Socrates holding his cheek
According to Plato, Socrates’ education may have included the occasional slap.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Few figures in ancient Greece are as intriguing—or as neglected—as Aspasia of Miletus, the companion of Pericles, the friend of Socrates, and the greatest female intellectual of classical Athens. Although she has been erased from the traditional history of philosophy, there is substantial evidence that she did far more than beguile great men. If that evidence is to be believed, Socrates is rooted not only in Anaxagoras and Pythagoras, but also in Aspasia.

The first piece of evidence comes from no less than Plato’s Menexenus, in which Socrates claims to have learnt the art of rhetoric from Aspasia of Miletus, ‘an excellent mistress… who has made so many good speakers [including] the best among the Hellenes—Pericles, the son of Xanthippus.’

To prove it, Socrates recites a funeral oration that Aspasia recently composed and taught to him. He tells Menexenus that he still ought to remember the speech because, whenever he forgot the words in rehearsal, Aspasia threatened to slap him.

The speech closely resembles—and gently satirises—the famous funeral oration delivered by Pericles and recorded by Thucydides. When Socrates is done reciting, Menexenus marvels that such an oration could have been written by a woman.

The Menexenus is not the Gorgias or the Republic. Even those who do read it tend to skim over this passage or dismiss it as mere fiction or comedy.

But should they? Fortunately, Plato is not our only witness.

The Most Remarkable Woman in Athens

Aspasia emigrated from Miletus to Athens, where she lived as a metic, or resident alien. After his amicable divorce from Deinomache, she became the companion of Pericles, the leading statesman and general of Athens. According to Plutarch, Pericles kissed her every morning before leaving and every evening upon returning.

Owing to her foreign birth, unmarried status, and influence over Pericles, Aspasia became one of the most controversial figures in Athens. Comic poets branded her a prostitute, and in the Acharnians Aristophanes goes so far as to blame her for starting the Peloponnesian War.

This raises an obvious question. Why would Plato have chosen such an infamous woman for the Menexenus? Plato is no Aristophanes, and even his comic touches are generally in the service of his philosophy. Had his intention been merely to parody funeral oratory, he could easily have done so without invoking Aspasia. The more interesting question is not why Plato jokes about Aspasia, but why he mentions her at all.

Socrates’ Teacher

The Menexenus is not the only Platonic dialogue in which Socrates claims to have been taught by a remarkable woman.

In the Symposium, he relates a conversation that he once had with a mysterious priestess, Diotima of Mantinea, who, he says, taught him the true nature of love. This is Plato’s famous ‘Ladder of Love’, by which aching lust can be sublimed into wisdom and virtue.

Armand d’Angour, among others, has argued that Diotima is in fact Aspasia under another name—with Plato, this time, having taken the precaution to disguise her identity.

If so, Plato has presented Aspasia not only as Socrates’ teacher of rhetoric, but also as the source of philosophy’s most influential account of love.

Plato Was Not Alone

Plato was not alone in portraying Aspasia as an intellectual authority.

Besides the two famous ones, Plato and Xenophon, at least another nine of Socrates’ followers wrote Socratic dialogues. Among these dialogues we know of two with the title Aspasia, one by Aeschines and another by Antisthenes.

In the Aspasia of Aeschines, Socrates urges the millionaire Callias to send his son Hipponicus to Aspasia for instruction. Socrates presses his recommendation by citing Aspasia’s credentials in rhetoric and in marriage guidance—precisely the same combination of talents that we find independently confirmed in Plato (rhetoric) and Xenophon (marriage guidance).

A pattern is beginning to emerge. Aspasia is not some isolated anecdote. She is repeatedly presented by various Socratics as someone from whom others—including Socrates himself—could learn.

Aspasia Speaks

A substantial fragment of the Aspasia of Aeschines has come down to us, preserved in Cicero. In it, we can finally hear Aspasia in her own voice.

Aspasia asks a husband named Xenophon whether he would prefer his own horse or a better horse belonging to his neighbour.

“The better horse,” he replies.

Would he prefer his own farm or a better one?

“The better one.”

Would he prefer his own wife—or a better wife?

At this Xenophon falls silent.

Aspasia then asks his wife a parallel series of questions. She too admits that she would prefer finer possessions—and then blushes into silence when asked whether she would prefer a better husband.

Aspasia concludes:

Since each of you avoids answering me that question alone which was the only one which I wished to have answered, I will tell you what each of you are thinking of; for both you, O woman, wish to have the best husband, and you, O Xenophon, most exceedingly desire to have the most excellent wife. Wherefore, unless you both so contrive matters that there shall not be on the whole earth a more excellent man or a more admirable woman, then in truth you will at all times desire above all things that which you think to be the best thing in the world, namely, that you, O Xenophon, may be the husband of the best possible wife; and you, O woman, that you may be married to the most excellent husband possible.

The conclusion is striking enough. More striking still is the method. Aspasia proceeds much as Socrates would: by asking apparently innocent questions, drawing analogies, exposing contradictions, and gently leading her listeners towards a conclusion they reach for themselves. Her conclusion, moreover, echoes that of Diotima. Love’s highest purpose is not pleasure but virtue.

Did Aspasia Teach Socrates the Socratic Method?

According to Plato, Socrates developed his method of questioning, the method of elenchus, after his friend Chaerephon asked the oracle of Delphi whether there was anyone wiser than Socrates. Astonishingly, the oracle replied that there was no one wiser—leaving Socrates, who knew only that he knew nothing, perplexed.

To discover the meaning of the oracle, Socrates questioned several supposedly wise people, and in each case concluded: “I am likely to be wiser than he to this small extent, that I do not think I know what I do not know.” From then on, he dedicated himself to the service of the god of the oracle by seeking out anyone who might be wise and, “if he is not, showing him that he is not.” 

Plato presents the oracle story as the turning point of Socrates’ career. By validating his skeptical stance, it gave him the impetus to develop his own distinctive method of doing philosophy. 

The method of elenchus consists in questioning one or more people about a concept, exposing contradictions in their initial assumptions, and provoking a reappraisal of the concept. As the process is iterative, it leads to an increasingly refined definition of the concept, and, in due course, to a shared recognition that it eludes our understanding—and hence that we know far less than we thought we did.

With our initial dogmatism transmuted into a state of puzzlement and suspended judgement, we are ready to become much more open and subtle thinkers—assuming, of course, that we have not first become angry and resentful. 

But although Socrates may have perfected the method of elenchus, it is unlikely that he originated a mode of conversation that seems so naturally and fundamentally human. Diogenes Laertius, the ancient biographer of philosophers, claims that it was the sophist Protagoras who ‘first introduced the method of discussion which is called Socratic’. In Plato’s Parmenides, the pre-Socratic philosopher Parmenides, who was a generation older than Protagoras, himself uses the method of elenchus on Socrates to undermine Plato’s Theory of the Forms.

It remains that while other thinkers tried to make a show of their knowledge, Socrates tried to make a show of his and everyone else’s ignorance. In contrast to the pre-Socratics and especially to the sophists, he seldom claimed to possess any positive knowledge; whenever he did, it was because he had learnt it from somebody else, or because he had been ‘divinely inspired’. In Plato’s Phaedrus, he compares himself to an empty jar, filled through the ears by the words of others.

Against this background, Aspasia begins to look less like a literary curiosity and more like a plausible influence. In Plato, she teaches Socrates rhetoric. Perhaps she teaches him love. In Aeschines, she employs the very methods later associated with Socrates himself.

Did Aspasia invent the Socratic method? Almost certainly not. Did she influence the man who perfected it? The surviving evidence suggests that the possibility deserves to be taken far more seriously than it usually is.

A Different Beginning

None of this proves that Aspasia was Diotima, or even that she taught Socrates. Ancient history rarely affords such certainty. 

But the evidence does point in that direction. Plato presents Aspasia as Socrates’ teacher—and has her threatening to slap the man he most admired. Other members of the Socratic circle independently portray her as a teacher. The surviving fragments show her employing the same methods, and pursuing the same moral aims, for which Socrates became renowned.

For centuries, the story of Western philosophy has begun with Socrates. It may be that it ought to begin not with Socrates alone, but with the remarkable woman from Miletus who taught him rhetoric, perhaps taught him love, and may even have helped shape the philosophical method that transformed the Western world.

If Aspasia taught Socrates—and perhaps even slapped him—Western philosophy begins with a woman.

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How Logical Fallacies Exploit Human Nature

The Death of Socrates, by Jacques-Louis David (1787).
The Death of Socrates, by Jacques-Louis David (1787). Plato believed that bad arguments had condemned his teacher to death, inspiring Aristotle’s search for the principles of sound reasoning.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

History is full of brilliant minds who believed false things and defended absurd ideas. Isaac Newton spent decades trying to create the philosopher’s stone. Thomas Edison championed radioactive products as remedies for various ailments. Steve Jobs skipped bathing in the conviction that his vegan diet could cleanse his body of mucus and toxins.

The problem is not that intelligent people cannot think. It is that they are human.

We all have hopes, fears, loyalties, ambitions, prejudices, and desires. We are naturally drawn to arguments that flatter our opinions, excuse our behaviour, or confirm our suspicions.

More than two thousand years ago, the ancient Greeks began studying arguments that were unsound and yet persuasive, calling them fallacies. Learning to recognise them remains one of philosophy’s most practical lessons. But more interesting than what they are is how they work.

Why Bad Arguments Persuade Us

Most fallacies succeed not because they overwhelm our intelligence, but because they appeal to our human nature and frailties.

We are more receptive to arguments that confirm what we already believe than to those that ask us to change our minds. We welcome arguments that flatter our side, condemn our opponents, simplify a complicated world, or promise certainty where none exists. Reason is less often an impartial judge than a disingenuous lawyer, excelling at defending conclusions that we reached for wholly other reasons. And, sadly, the brighter the mind, the more elaborate—and persuasive—its rationalisations.

From Rhetoric to Logic

The study of fallacies emerged in ancient Greece as a branch of rhetoric, the art and science of persuasive speaking.

Following the reforms of Cleisthenes in 508 BCE, Athens became a radically participatory democracy. Citizens served as jurors, debated laws, and competed for influence not with swords but with words.

Sophists such as Gorgias, Protagoras, and Hippias enriched themselves by teaching this new art of persuasion. Gorgias was not merely a teacher of rhetoric, but a performer, master of verbal display, and intellectual celebrity. According to tradition, when he appeared in the theatre at Athens, he would invite the audience: ‘Come, propose me a theme.’ He took pride in his ability to speak on any subject and defend even the most improbable of positions.

For Plato, this represented a profound problem. It had been by bad arguments that his teacher, Socrates, had been put to death. If persuasive speech could triumph over truth, what hope could there be for philosophy?

Plato’s pupil Aristotle sought to address these concerns by laying the foundations of logic. If rhetoric explains how people are persuaded, logic asks when they ought to be.

Formal and Informal Fallacies

Logic distinguishes two broad kinds of fallacy: formal and informal. A fallacy is a defect in an argument, whether accidental or deliberate.

Formal fallacies arise from the structure of an argument.

If I have the flu, then I have a fever.
I have a fever.
Therefore, I have the flu.

The conclusion, of course, does not follow, since I may have any number of other pyrogenic (fever-inducing) illnesses. This formal fallacy is known as affirming the consequent.

Far more common are informal fallacies, whose weakness lies not in their logical form but in their content. These are the fallacies that fill newspaper columns, political debates, boardrooms, dinner tables, and social media.

We Prefer People to Arguments

The easiest way to answer an argument is often not to answer it at all. Instead, attack the person making it.

This is the ad hominem fallacy. Closely related are the genetic fallacy, which judges an argument by its source, and the appeal to hypocrisy (tu quoque), which dismisses an argument because its author fails to live by it.

None addresses the argument itself. They succeed because judging people is easier than judging ideas.

A striking example of the genetic fallacy came during the 2016 Brexit referendum. On 3 June 2016, the then Lord Chancellor, Michael Gove, declared: ‘The people in this country have had enough of experts…’

We Prefer Easy Victories

Some arguments are difficult to refute. It is then much easier to invent a weaker one.

A straw man caricatures an opponent’s position before knocking it down. Closely related is the red herring, which changes the subject altogether. Neither brings us closer to the truth, but both bring us closer to victory.

Some regard straw man as a form of red herring, since both serve to deflect. ‘Red herring’ takes its name from the custom of using stinky smoked herring to throw dogs off a trail. Think of it as a form of pre-Internet trolling.

For example:

—Critical appraisal of the new Bordeaux vintage would be more objective and meaningful if the wines could be tasted blind.

—Just Bordeaux?

We Prefer Agreement

Human beings are social animals. This makes us especially vulnerable to social arguments.

An appeal to popularity asks us to believe something because many other people believe it. An argument to moderationassures us that the middle position must be right. A false dilemma presents only two options when reality usually offers many more.

These fallacies appeal to our desire for belonging, certainty, and simplicity.

False dilemma is often a veiled attempt to force a Hobson’s choice of ‘take it or leave it’. For example, Theresa May insisted: ‘It’s my deal or no deal.’ At times, she expanded this into a false trilemma: ‘It’s my deal, no deal, or no Brexit at all.’

We Prefer Simple Stories

The human mind delights in finding patterns—so much so that it finds them where none exist.

Cum hoc ergo propter hoc (‘with this, therefore because of this’) mistakes correlation for causation. The gambler’s fallacy imagines that independent events, like a throw of dice, somehow remember what came before. Both satisfy our hunger for neat explanations in a messy world.

Cum hoc ergo propter hoc is also known as the Chanticleer fallacy after the fictional rooster who believed that his crowing made the sun rise. I prefer to think of it as the scientist’s fallacy.

We Prefer Being Right

Perhaps the most bone-headed fallacy of all is begging the question. Instead of proving a conclusion, it quietly assumes it.

For example, the argument that opposes same-sex marriage on the grounds that marriage is the union between a man and a woman is no more substantial than ‘I’m right because I’m right.’

Circular arguments persuade because they begin where we already stand.

The Discipline of Thinking Clearly

This article may have seemed to be about reasoning. It has really been about self-deception.

Logical fallacies endure because they satisfy our desires more readily than they satisfy the demands of reason. We rarely believe bad arguments because we cannot think. More often, we believe them because they tell us what we wanted to hear.

Learning to recognise fallacies in others is useful. Learning to recognise them in ourselves is the beginning of self-knowledge.

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If you enjoyed this introduction to logical fallacies, you’ll find many more practical lessons on reasoning and rhetoric in How to Think Like Plato and Speak Like Cicero.

To explore the forces that so often lead us astray, see Hide and Seek: The Psychology of Self-Deception.

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Why Friendship Is Essential to a Good Life

Plato and Aristotle, detail from The School of Athens by Raphael
‘Plato is dear, but dearer still is truth’—a saying that captures Aristotle’s willingness to disagree with his teacher in the pursuit of truth, and his conviction that genuine friendship need never fear honest disagreement.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

We have never had so many ways of connecting with other people, and yet so few close friends.

Many of us have hundreds or even thousands of online contacts, but no one we could call in the middle of the night. We move cities, change jobs, change partners, and change phones without thinking twice, and our friendships often prove just as disposable.

Aristotle would have regarded this not merely as a social problem, but as a human tragedy.

‘Without friends,’ he writes in the Nicomachean Ethics, ‘no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods.’

It is a remarkable claim.

Most of us think that, given enough money, success, health, freedom, and comfort, we could muddle along well enough on our own. Aristotle thought otherwise. Friendship is not simply one of life’s pleasures. It is one of its necessities.

Why We Need Friends

The ancient Greeks had several words for love, including eros for passionate or romantic love, and philia (the root of ‘bibliophile’ and ‘anglophile’) for friendship.

For Aristotle, philia 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.’ 

Philia underpins not only personal happiness but the very health of the state. Friendship fosters trust, cooperation, generosity, forbearance, and even justice—for when friendship exists, justice is scarcely needed.

But friendship is not simply for enjoying and getting along. In its highest form, it is a vehicle of virtue, helping us to become better people.

The Three Forms of Friendship

Aristotle begins with a broad or minimal concept of philia. For one person to be friends with another, it is necessary, simply, ‘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 they are useful; that they are pleasant; or that they are good—that is, rational and virtuous.

Friendships of utility are based on mutual advantage. We enjoy one another’s company because each has something to offer the other. Such friendships are common in business, politics, and everyday life, and there is nothing wrong with them. But remove the advantage, and they usually disappear.

Friendships of pleasure are based on enjoyment. We like another person’s wit, humour, charm, or shared interests. These friendships are especially common among the young, whose lives are often governed more by feeling than by settled character. They, too, tend to fade as tastes and circumstances change.

The highest form of friendship is based not on usefulness or pleasure, but on virtue. ‘Perfect friendship’, says Aristotle, is ‘the friendship of men who are good, and alike in virtue.’

Perfect friends are drawn to each other not because they expect anything in return, but because they genuinely admire and value one another’s character. They love their friend not for what he has or provides, but for who he is. 

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 in all the qualities that friends should have.

Another Self

A perfect friend, says Aristotle, is ‘another self’.

This does not mean someone who merely resembles us or always agrees with us. It means someone who cares enough, or is noble enough, to disagree with us and challenge us.

A true friend shares our deepest values, but also helps us to live up to them. We become better not by admiring virtue from afar, but by practising it together. Friendship is not merely the reward of virtue; it is one of the principal ways in which virtue is cultivated.

Every act of friendship is also an exercise in virtue. In being patient with our friend, we become more patient ourselves. In speaking honestly, we become more honest. In encouraging what is best in another person, we strengthen what is best in ourselves. Our good and their good are no longer competing like fishmongers: each one’s happiness adds to that of the other. We become, in the deepest sense, another self.

We may find an illustration of this ideal in Plato’s Phaedrus. Socrates and Phaedrus spend an afternoon walking in the Attic countryside while reflecting on the soul, love, and the art of persuasion. Their friendship is grounded not merely in pleasure, but in a shared pursuit of truth. At the end of their conversation, Phaedrus responds to Socrates’ prayer with the simple request: ‘Ask the same for me, for friends should have all things in common.’ Whether or not Aristotle had this dialogue in mind, it beautifully embodies his conception of perfect friendship.

Why Friendship Is Rare

Unfortunately, perfect friendship is uncommon.

First, it requires good character, and good character is itself uncommon. Second, it demands something that has always been scarce and may never have been scarcer than today: time.

Friendship cannot be hurried.

People only come to know one another by sharing experiences, surviving disappointments, forgiving offences, and gradually learning that they can be trusted. Like character itself, friendship grows slowly.

We live in a culture that prizes speed, convenience, novelty, and consumer choice. Relationships, like everything else, are expected to fit around our schedules and satisfy our needs. Friendship asks something very different of us. It requires attention, loyalty, respect, forbearance, and sometimes considerable sacrifice.

The Courage to Be Known

There is another difficulty.

Many of us have become so unaccustomed to genuine friendship that, when we encounter its possibility, we instinctively retreat from it.

A true friend is not simply someone who makes us feel better. He knows us. He sees through our pretences. He notices when we deceive ourselves. He quietly expects us to become better than we are.

That can be deeply unsettling.

We often say that we want people to accept us exactly as we are. Aristotle might have replied that a friend accepts us as we are while refusing to leave us there.

Perhaps that is why perfect friendship is so rare. It demands not only affection, but humility; not only loyalty, but the willingness to be changed.

Nowadays, it is all too easy to retreat into comfortable mediocrity.

Friendship and Happiness

Throughout the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle argues that happiness lies not in pleasure or success, but in living according to reason and virtue.

Friendship is one of the principal ways in which this becomes possible.

A good friend encourages what is best in us, restrains what is worst, and accompanies us in the long and difficult work of becoming the person we are capable of being. If we abandon a true friend, really, it is our own self that we are abandoning.

We tend to think of friendship as one of life’s pleasures.

Aristotle thought of it as one of life’s disciplines.

A good friend does not simply make us happier.

He helps us become better and bigger.

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How Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle Reimagined Happiness

The Death of Socrates, by David
The Death of Socrates, by David

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

We all say we want to be happy, but the pursuit of happiness often seems like a wild goose chase.

Maybe the problem is not so much with us, or the world we live in, but with the very concept of happiness.

The ancient Greeks had a much better concept. They called it eudaimonia, literally ‘good soul’, ‘good spirit’, or ‘good god’.

Although Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle understood eudaimonia in somewhat different ways, they all regarded it as the highest good, often even the very aim and purpose of philosophy.

What Is Eudaimonia?

Eudaimonia is often translated from Greek simply as ‘happiness’—but that is very misleading. The word ‘happy’, which is related to ‘happen’ and ‘perhaps’, derives from the Norse happ for ‘chance’, ‘fortune’, or ‘luck’. From Irish to Greek, most European words for ‘happy’ originally meant something like ‘lucky’—one exception being Welsh, in which it originally meant ‘wise’.

Another word for ‘happy’ or ‘fortunate’ in Old English is gesælig, which, over the centuries, morphed into our ‘silly’.

Eudaimonia, in contrast, is anything but silly. It has nothing to do with luck and everything to do with hard work. It is a much deeper, fuller, and richer concept than happiness, sometimes articulated in terms of flourishing or living a life that is worthwhile or fulfilling.

Many philosophical schools in antiquity thought of eudaimonia as the highest good, although schools such as Epicureanism and Stoicism conceived of it in somewhat different terms.

What can be said is that, unlike happiness, eudaimonia is not an emotion but a state of being—or even, especially for Aristotle, a state of doing. As such, it is more stable and reliable, and cannot so easily be taken away from us. Although it leads to pleasure or satisfaction of the deepest kind, it does not come from pleasure, but is according to higher values and principles that transcend the here and now.

The idea of eudaimonia evolved over time, especially across the three generations that separated Socrates, via Plato, from Aristotle—the three greatest philosophers of antiquity.

Socrates on Eudaimonia

Socrates, from what we can tell (mainly from his student Plato), equated eudaimonia with wisdom and virtue. In the Greater Alcibiades, he says that he who is not wise cannot be happy; in the Gorgias, that nothing truly bad can ever happen to a good man; and in the Meno, that everything the soul endeavours or endures under the guidance of wisdom ends in happiness.

In the Apology, at his trial, Socrates gives a defiant defence, telling the jurors that they ought to be ashamed of their eagerness to possess as much wealth, reputation, and honour as possible, while not caring for or giving thought to wisdom or truth, or the best possible state of their soul. ‘Wealth,’ he says, ‘does not bring about excellence, but excellence makes wealth and everything else good for men, both individually and collectively.’

Socrates provided the ultimate proof of his principle that ‘nothing truly bad can ever happen to a good man’. When the jurors condemned him to death, they only made him and his ideas immortal—and he did all he could not to prevent that from happening. 

Plato on Eudaimonia

Plato was inspired by the example of Socrates. In the Republic, Plato’s brother Glaucon argues that most people are fundamentally selfish, but maintain a reputation for virtue and justice to evade the social costs of being or appearing unjust. But if a man could get hold of the mythical Ring of Gyges and make himself invisible, he would most surely behave as it suited him:

No man would keep his hands off what was not his own when he could safely take what he liked out of the market, or go into houses and lie with any one at his pleasure, or kill or release from prison whom he would, and in all respects be like a god among men.

We behave justly not because we value justice, but because we are weak and fearful; while the unjust man who is cunning enough to seem just will get the better of everyone and everything.

As part of his lengthy reply to Glaucon, Plato famously conjures up an idealised Republic to help him ‘locate’ (define) justice, first in the state and then in the individual. Plato argues that justice and injustice are to the soul as health and disease are to the body: If health in the body is intrinsically desirable, then so too is justice in the soul. For Plato, an unjust man cannot be happy because he is not in rational and ordered control of himself.

Aristotle embraced much of Plato’s account, but gave eudaimonia a broader and more practical meaning.

Aristotle on Eudaimonia

It is with Plato’s one-time student Aristotle and his Nicomachean Ethics that the concept of eudaimonia is most closely associated.

For Aristotle, a thing is best understood by looking at its end, purpose, or goal. For example, the purpose of a knife is to cut, and it is by seeing this that one best understands what a knife is; the goal of medicine is good health, and it is by seeing this that one best understands what medicine is, or ought to be.

Now, if one does this for some time, it soon becomes apparent that some goals are subordinate to other goals, which are themselves subordinate to yet other goals. For example, a medical student’s goal may be to qualify as a doctor, but this goal is subordinate to her goal to heal the sick, which is itself subordinate to her goal to make a living by doing something useful. This could go on and on, but unless the medical student has a goal that is an end in itself, nothing that she does is actually worth doing.

What, asks Aristotle, is this goal that is an end in itself? This ‘supreme good’, he replies, is eudaimonia, and eudaimonia only.

But what exactly does Aristotle mean by eudaimonia?

For Aristotle, it is by understanding the distinctive function of a thing that one can understand its essence. Thus, one cannot understand what it is to be a gardener unless one can understand that the distinctive function of a gardener is ‘to tend to a garden with a certain degree of skill’.

Whereas human beings need nourishment like plants, and have sentience like animals, their distinctive function, says Aristotle, is their unique and god-like capacity to reason. Thus, our supreme good is to lead a life that enables us to use and develop our reason, and that is in accordance with reason.

By living our life to the full according to our essential nature as rational beings, we are bound to flourish, that is, to develop and express our full human potential, regardless of the ebb and flow of our good or bad fortune.

To put this in modern terms, if we develop our thinking skills, if we guard against lies and self-deception, if we train and master our emotions, we will, over the years, make better and better choices, do more and more meaningful things, and derive ever-increasing satisfaction from all that we have become and all that we have done, and are yet able to do.

Although Aristotle’s account proved the most influential, his was not the last word on the matter. The Cynics, Stoics, Epicureans, and Skeptics all regarded eudaimonia as the highest good, although they conceived of it in somewhat different terms. For the Cynics and Stoics, happiness depended less on flourishing than on living in accordance with nature and reason, and on cultivating an inner freedom that no amount of bad fortune could destroy. The Epicureans sought tranquillity through moderation, friendship, and freedom from unnecessary desires, while the Skeptics argued that peace of mind arises from suspending judgement about matters that cannot be known with certainty.

In recent decades, philosophers and psychologists have rediscovered eudaimonia as an alternative to the modern pursuit of pleasure or subjective happiness. Increasingly, they recognise that a good life depends not only on how we feel, but also on how we live.

‘Happiness’ is something that comes and goes. It is at the mercy of fortune and circumstance. A life well lived, however, is a treasure that no one and nothing can ever take away from you, and that will shine in the eyes of others long after you are dead.

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If this article spoke to you, you might look into The Gang of Three: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle.

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