Friendship

Ancient Greek (Peripatetic)

Aristotle distinguishes three kinds of friendship — based on utility, pleasure, and virtue. Only the last is complete: friends who love each other for their good character wish each other well for the other's own sake, and such a friend is 'another self.' Perfect friendship is rare, requires time and shared life, and is possible only among the good; it is among the greatest of external goods and no one would choose to live without friends.

Nicomachean Ethics, Books VIII–IX.

Epicureanism

Friendship is among the greatest means to a happy life: 'of all the things that wisdom provides for the blessedness of life as a whole, by far the greatest is the possession of friendship.' Though it may begin from need and mutual advantage, it grows into something valued for itself, and the wise person will sometimes even suffer for a friend. The Garden itself was a community bound by philosophical friendship.

Principal Doctrines; Vatican Sayings.

Roman Eclectic / Stoic-influenced

True friendship can exist only among the good and is 'nothing other than agreement on all things divine and human, with goodwill and affection.' It must be chosen for its own sake, not for advantage, though benefits follow; a friend is a second self before whom one may think aloud. Friendship should never be asked to sanction wrongdoing, and virtue is both its precondition and its bond.

Laelius de Amicitia (On Friendship).

Roman Stoicism

One should deliberate long before admitting someone to friendship, but once admitted, trust him wholly and 'speak as boldly with him as with yourself.' The wise man wants friends not because he is needy — he is self-sufficient — but in order to have someone for whom to exercise virtue and to whom to give. Friendship is desired for the sake of loving, not merely being loved.

Letters to Lucilius, esp. Letter 9.

Confucianism

Friends should be chosen for their virtue and should help one another become better: 'have no friends not equal to yourself.' Confucius names three beneficial friendships — with the upright, the trustworthy, and the well-informed — and three harmful ones. A good friend admonishes gently and, if unheeded, desists; friendship is bound up with honesty, loyalty, and mutual moral cultivation.

The Analects.

Christian monasticism

Adapting Cicero to the cloister, Aelred holds that spiritual friendship is a stage on the way to the love of God — 'God is friendship,' and to abide in friendship is to abide in God. Such friendship rests on virtue, is tested by loyalty and shared faith, and unites souls in Christ. It is not opposed to holiness but a school of it, provided it seeks the good and not mere pleasure.

Spiritual Friendship (De spirituali amicitia).

Renaissance humanism

The perfect friendship Montaigne shared with Étienne de La Boétie was a total fusion of souls that admits no explanation beyond 'because it was he, because it was I.' Such friendship, unlike ordinary bonds, is unique, exclusive, and unrepeatable; it dissolves the very language of debt and benefit, for in it wills mingle so completely that mine and thine no longer apply. He counts himself lucky to have known it once.

Essays, 'Of Friendship' (I.28).

German idealism / critical philosophy

Friendship is the union of two persons through equal, mutual love and respect — an ideal in which each cares for the other's happiness while respecting the distance that dignity requires. Perfect friendship is a duty-governed idea rarely fully realized, since love draws people together while respect keeps them properly apart. Moral friendship, the complete trust in which two share their private judgments, is its rarest and highest form.

The Metaphysics of Morals, 'Doctrine of Virtue'.

American Transcendentalism

A friend is 'a person with whom I may be sincere' and, ideally, 'a sort of paradox in nature' — another self who is nonetheless wholly independent. Emerson demands truth and tenderness but warns against clinging: friends must respect each other's solitude and self-reliance, meeting as sovereign natures rather than merging. The high office of friendship is to keep us honest and to elevate, not to console us in weakness.

Essays: First Series, 'Friendship' (1841).

Existential / genealogical critique

The best friend is not a soft comforter but a worthy adversary who spurs us to self-overcoming: 'in a friend one should have one's best enemy.' Nietzsche prizes the friendship of those who share a distant goal — 'star friendship' — over cozy pity, and holds that we should honor in a friend the higher self he might become. True friends practice a reverent distance rather than a possessive intimacy.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 'On the Friend'; The Gay Science.

Christian thought

Friendship (philia) is the least biological and most freely chosen of the loves, born when two people discover a shared truth or passion and say, 'What? You too?' Unlike lovers who gaze at each other, friends stand side by side looking at a common object. Modern culture undervalues it, yet it is the least jealous of loves, gladly widening the circle to admit another who sees the same vision.

The Four Loves (1960).

Deconstruction

Derrida rereads the whole canon of friendship around the puzzling apostrophe attributed to Aristotle: 'O my friends, there is no friend.' He shows how the classical ideal has been fraternal, male, and bound up with politics and the nation, and asks whether a friendship 'to come' could be open to the other beyond such symmetry and calculation. Friendship becomes the site where ethics, politics, and the promise of hospitality intersect.

Politics of Friendship (1994).