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Why Friendship Is Essential to a Good Life

‘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.

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.

Continue Exploring

If you enjoyed this article on Aristotle’s philosophy of friendship, you’ll find much more in The Gang of Three: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, which examines the lives, ideas, and enduring influence of the three greatest philosophers of antiquity.

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Kant’s Philosophy of Friendship, and How it Differed from Aristotle’s.

In his youth and middle age, the sharply dressed Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) moved in Königsberg’s most refined circles and often stayed out into the small hours. In this period, his student Johann Gottfriend Herder described him as “the most urbane fellow in the world.” 

But when Kant turned forty, he underwent a midlife transformation. He quite literally sobered up, abandoning carefree carousing for the disciplined life of the mind. This profound change owed to the early death of a close friend, the dissolute Johann Daniel Funk, together with the making of a new friend, the English merchant Joseph Green, who lived by the clock. Kant essentially adopted Green’s modus vivendi.

Kant’s Daily Routine, and How It Helped Him

For the rest of his productive life, Kant employed a retired solder, Martin Lampe, to wake him up at precisely five-to-five every morning. Lampe would stride into his master’s bedroom and cry out, “Herr Professor, the time is come!” Or in German, Herr Professor, es ist Zeit!

Kant worked at his desk in his nightclothes until his lectures began at seven. At eleven, he would change back into nightclothes and return to his desk. The working day effectively ended at one, when he would take lunch in company in a public inn or restaurant. Lunch would end at three with a round of manufactured jokes—in the belief that laughter was good for digestion.

At three, after lunch, Kant would take his daily constitutional around Königsberg. He would walk alone, from fear that outdoor conversation would lead him to breathe through the mouth. He often wound up at Green’s, with whom he liked to discuss Hume and Rousseau. It is said that the housewives of Königsberg would set their timepieces by the time—seven sharp—at which he left Green’s house.

By automating trivial daily decisions, Kant’s rigid daily routine freed his mind to focus purely on philosophy. It’s because of Kant that I have six of the same shirt.

Kant’s Jokes and Philosophy of Laughter

What kind of jokes did Kant tell after lunch? Some of his jokes have come down to us in his writing. For instance: A man tried to arrange a solemn funeral for a rich relative, but failed in the task: “The more I paid my mourners, the merrier they looked.” A merchant sailed back from India with his fortune, but, in a violent storm, had to throw all his cargo overboard. This upset him so much that his wig turned grey overnight.

Laughter, Kant thought, “is an affect resulting from the sudden transformation of a heightened expectation into nothing.” The mind is deceived into tensing up, but with the deception revealed suddenly relaxes, leading to laughter, which mimics the motions of the mind and is extremely health-giving. Kant never laughed at his own jokes, but always kept a straight face.

In The Critique of Pure Judgement (1790), Kant quoted Voltaire in saying that Heaven had given us two comforts against life’s hardships, hope and sleep—before suggesting that Voltaire “could have added laughter.”

The Death of Joseph Green

In 1786, Joseph Green died, deeply affecting Kant, who, thereafter, became a lot more housebound.

After a suitable period of mourning, Kant recruited a female cook and began hosting protracted lunches aimed at stimulating the play of thoughts. To this end, he gathered guests from diverse backgrounds and perspectives, believing that the ideal number of guests lay somewhere in between that of the Graces and the Muses (three and nine). All topics great and small were on the table. Philosophy was allowed but not dogmatism, for fear that it would interrupt the convivial flow of ideas.

As well as wine, Kant had a taste for Königsberger Klopse (meatballs in a creamy white sauce with capers), Teltow turnips (an heirloom turnip from the Berlin-Brandenburg region), roast beef, cod, and, as a condiment for the above, English mustard, which he mixed himself.

Kant’s Philosophy of Friendship

Joseph Green was the closest friend that Kant ever had. Green had inspired Kant’s routine, and became his philosophical sounding board. Kant allegedly discussed every single sentence of the Critique of Pure Reason with Green before publishing it in 1781.

In the Metaphysics of Morals (1797), Kant ended his discussion of character traits just like, in the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle ended his discussion of the same: with an analysis of friendship.

In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle made much of the idea of “perfect friendship”, which, he thought, is only possible between men of reason and virtue. He famously described a perfect friend as “another self”—later paraphrased by Diogenes Laertius as “a single soul dwelling in two bodies.” 

Kant deemed “perfect friendship” an ideal that in practice cannot be attained. But in striving for it, we might nonetheless arrive at “moral friendship,” in which two persons feel able to disclose their secret thoughts and feelings to each other. Moral friendship requires a savant mélange of love and respect, love for bringing two people together, and respect for not driving them apart by infringing upon their dignity and autonomy.

From his own experience, Kant came to believe that most people cannot develop their true character until middle age, when they might undergo a “rebirth”. At twenty, we are no more than the product of our upbringing and environment. At thirty, we are still reliant on the judgement and approval of others. Only at forty are we confident enough (or perhaps tired enough) to become who we truly are.

Neel Burton is the author of the newly published The German Greeks: German Philosophy and the German Philosophers.

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It is striking that the great thinkers, from Aristotle to Augustine and Mencius to Montaigne, devoted so much of their time and thought to friendship, but almost none of either to marriage. Grayling’s timely treatise reacquaints us with a great but forgotten good that promises to fulfil so many of our practical, intellectual, emotional, and metaphysical needs. The book principally consists of a history of the philosophy of friendship capped by an account of canonical, often homosexual or homosocial friendships such as that of Achilles and Patroclus and Jonathan and David, who, in the Bible, describes the love of Jonathan as “better even than that of women”. Throughout, Grayling seeks to define friendship and, in so doing, explores its many forms, facets, charms, and consolations.

Perhaps in a desire to be modern, relevant, or politic, Grayling seems to reject the classical notion that, at its best and most meaningful, friendship is a highly elitist good. For the greats, only virtuous men can be ideal friends. Aristotle famously says that, while there are many ways for men to be bad, there is only one way for them to be good, and it is precisely in this sense that an ideal friend is ‘another self’—a historically important notion that Grayling severally dismisses. Because they are all one and the same, virtuous men are predictable, reliable, and therefore worthy of one another’s friendship. In contrast, bad people are in some way unlike themselves, and just as likely to hate other bad people as anyone else.

In my opinion, Plato, whom Grayling underrates, advances by far the most subtle and sophisticated of all theories of friendship, one far superior even to that of Aristotle. Despite the extravagant praise that he lavishes upon friendship, Aristotle is quite clear that the best and happiest life is not that spent in friendship, but in the contemplation of those things that are most true and therefore most beautiful and most dependable. There is a contradiction here: if the best life is a life of contemplation, then friendship is either superfluous or inimical to the best life, and therefore undeserving of the high praise that Aristotle lavishes upon it. It may be, as Aristotle tentatively suggests, that friendship is needed because it promotes 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 of friendship is just as good as a life of contemplation. So much for Aristotle, one might say.

Plato’s Lysis may seem to fail in its task of defining friendship, but one should never take Plato or his mouthpiece Socrates at face value. There is far more to the Lysis than a couple of interesting but misguided thoughts on friendship. By discussing friendship with Lysis and Menexenus as he does, Socrates is not only discussing friendship, but also demonstrating to the youths that, even though they count each other as close friends, they do not really know what friendship is, and that, whatever friendship is, it is something far deeper and far more meaningful than the puerile ‘friendship’ that they share. In contrast to the youths, Socrates knows perfectly well what friendship is, and is only feigning ignorance so as to teach the youths: ‘…and I, an old boy, who would fain be one of you…’ More than that, by discussing friendship with Lysis and Menexenus as he does, Socrates is himself in the process of befriending them. He befriends them not with pleasant banter or gossipy chitchat, as most people ‘befriend’ one another, but with the kind of philosophical conversation that is the hallmark of the deepest and most meaningful of friendships. In the course of this philosophical conversation, he tells the youths that he should ‘greatly prefer a real friend to all the gold of Darius’, thereby signifying not only that he places friendship on the same high pedestal as philosophy, to which he has devoted (and will sacrifice) his life, but also that the kind of friendship that he has in mind is so rare and uncommon that even he does not possess it. If friendship ultimately escapes definition, then this is because, like philosophy, friendship is not so much a thing-in-itself as it is a process for becoming. True friends seek together to live truer, fuller lives by relating to each other authentically and by teaching each other about the limitations of their beliefs and the defects in their character, which are a far greater source of error than mere rational confusion. For Plato, friendship and philosophy are aspects of one and the same impulse, one and the same love: the love that seeks to know.

Just as philosophy leads to friendship, so friendship leads to philosophy. In the Phaedrus, Plato’s most important work on friendship (although not generally recognized as such—Grayling fails to mention it), Socrates and Phaedrus go out into the idyllic countryside just outside Athens and have a long conversation about the anatomy of the soul, the nature of true love, the art of persuasion, and the merits of the spoken over the written word. At the end of this conversation, Socrates offers a prayer to the local deities. This is the famous Socratic Prayer, which is notable both in itself and for the response that it elicits from Phaedrus.

Socrates: Beloved Pan, and all ye other gods who haunt this place, give me beauty in the inward soul; and may the outward and inward man be at one. May I reckon the wise to be the wealthy, and may I have such a quantity of gold as a temperate man and he only can bear and carry. —Anything more? The prayer, I think, is enough for me.

Phaedrus: Ask the same for me, for friends should have all things in common.

Plato may fail to define friendship in the Lysis, but in the Phaedrus he gives us its living embodiment. Socrates and Phaedrus spend their time together enjoying the beautiful Attic countryside while engaging in honest and open philosophical conversation. By exercising and building upon reason, they are not only furthering each other’s understanding, but also transforming a life of friendship into a life of joint contemplation of those things that are most true and hence most beautiful and most dependable. If only on the basis of his response to the Socratic Prayer, it is obvious that Phaedrus is another self to Socrates, since he makes the same choices as Socrates and even justifies making those choices on the grounds that their friendship requires it. Whereas Aristotle and Grayling try to tell us what friendship is, Plato lets us feel it in all its allure and transformative power.

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Yesterday, I prepared a dinner for some friends, and we recited the Socratic Prayer from the Phaedrus in lieu of grace, with someone reading the lines of Socrates and someone else that of Phaedrus.

I think I will be sticking with the Socratic Prayer, it is absolutely perfect for a dinner amongst friends.

Socrates: Beloved Pan, and all ye other gods who haunt this place, give me beauty in the inward soul; and may the outward and inward man be at one. May I reckon the wise to be the wealthy, and may I have such a quantity of gold as a temperate man and he only can bear and carry. – Anything more? The prayer, I think, is enough for me.
Phaedrus: Ask the same for me, for friends should have all things in common.
Socrates: Let us go [eat].