Friendship

Friendship offers a feeling context in which the shameful awareness of inferior feeling can be bared. The re-enactments of the past and the revelations of one’s wounds can be ruminated upon. Even analysis does not offer pathology such a warm home as does friendship.

Hillman argues that friendship, unlike analysis, provides an unconditional affective shelter for inferior feeling and psychological woundedness, making it irreplaceable within the individuation process.

Marie-Louise von Franz, James Hillman, Lectures on Jung’s Typology, 2013thesis

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According to the idea of mutuality, each loves the other as being the man he is (8.3.1156a18–19). This is precisely not the case in a friendship based on utility, where one loves the other for the sake of some expected advantage.

Ricoeur, reading Aristotle, identifies mutuality as the distinguishing mark of virtuous friendship, arguing that genuine reciprocity constitutes selfhood itself rather than merely describing a social arrangement.

Ricoeur, Paul, Oneself as Another, 1992thesis

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genuine friendship, the sort worthy of the name, is found among the wise and nowhere else. They [the Stoics] also say that friendship is only among the righteous, because of the likeness among them.

Graver documents the Stoic position that authentic friendship is an exclusive achievement of wisdom, constituted by shared virtue rather than need or pleasure.

Margaret Graver, Stoicism and Emotion, 2007thesis

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The greatest good of friendship is not daily intercourse, for circumstances rarely admit of this; but on the great occasions of life, when the advice of a friend is needed, then the word spoken in season about conduct, about health, about marriage, about business.

Plato’s introductory commentary to the Lysis presents friendship’s highest value as residing not in habitual proximity but in the quality of counsel offered at critical existential junctures.

Plato, Lysis, -390thesis

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Epicurus’ emphasis on the absolute necessity of friendship for happiness is in line with popular Greek morality; but his conception of its nature is determined by the general principles of his ethics. Like justice, friendship is a means to absence of pain, or tranquillity, by the protection and confidence it provides.

Long and Sedley clarify that Epicurus grounds friendship’s indispensability in its function as a hedge against pain and a source of tranquillity, integrating it into the broader ethical architecture of ataraxia.

A.A. Long and D.N. Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 1987thesis

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‘Of all the things wisdom prepares for the blessedness of life as a whole’, he asserted, ‘much the greatest is the possession of friendship’ (KD 27). Controversially, and in some contrast with other ancient philosophical discourses surrounding friendship, Epicurus’s principal claim to the value of friendship is instrumental, at least initially.

Sharpe and Ure highlight the productive tension in Epicurus between friendship as the supreme gift of wisdom and its contested instrumental origins in mutual benefit.

Matthew Sharpe and Michael Ure, Philosophy as a Way of Life: History, Dimensions, Directions, 2021thesis

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‘Friendship dances around the world announcing to all of us that we must wake up to blessedness’ (VS 52). ‘All friendship is choice-worthy for its own sake, but it takes its origin from benefit,’ he claims (VS 23).

This parallel passage reinforces the Epicurean paradox that friendship is intrinsically choice-worthy yet causally rooted in the utility of mutual protection.

Sharpe, Matthew and Ure, Michael, Philosophy as a Way of Life: History, Dimensions, Directions, 2021supporting

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Your friend’s face is something else beside. It is your own face, in a rough and imperfect mirror. Are you a slave? If so, you cannot be a friend. Are you a tyrant? If so, you cannot have friends.

Nietzsche’s Zarathustra reframes friendship as a demanding confrontation with the self’s reflection, conditioning its possibility on inner freedom rather than affection or need.

Nietzsche, Friedrich, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 1883thesis

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When friendship goes deeper than mere comradeship and the sexual element is frankly accepted, a more fundamental rapport becomes possible, and a relationship of greater depth and stability can be achieved.

Harding argues from a Jungian perspective that the frank acknowledgment of erotic undercurrents within women’s friendship, rather than its suppression, enables deeper psychological rapport and individuation.

Harding, Esther, the way of all women, 1970thesis

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in wise friendship each person ‘values his friend’s reason equally with his own.’ Not every Stoic author would go so far.

Graver records the most radical Stoic claim about friendship—the equation of the friend’s rationality with one’s own—while noting its contested status within the school itself.

Margaret Graver, Stoicism and Emotion, 2007supporting

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The friend, inasmuch as he is that other self, has the role of providing what one is incapable of procuring by oneself. ‘Friends,’ we are surprised to read, ‘are thought the greatest of external.

Ricoeur’s reading of Aristotle’s heteros autos establishes that the friend’s alterity is constitutive of the self’s completion, making friendship an ontological rather than merely social relationship.

Ricoeur, Paul, Oneself as Another, 1992supporting

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Two notions appear to be struggling or balancing in the mind of Socrates:—First, the sense that friendship arises out of human needs and wants; Secondly, that the higher form or ideal of friendship exists only for the sake of the good.

The editorial introduction to the Lysis identifies the foundational tension in Platonic friendship theory between a need-based and a teleological-ethical account, a tension the corpus never fully resolves.

Plato, Lysis, -390supporting

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Loyalty to her friend and the greater consciousness which in certain instances is promised in the relationship call her to devote her life to her friendship. On the other hand, the biological urge and conventional opinion combine to persuade her to marriage.

Harding presents women’s friendship as a genuine rival to heterosexual partnership in terms of psychological development, framing the conflict between them as a collision of biological and individuation imperatives.

Harding, Esther, the way of all women, 1970supporting

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affection and friendship reside in a selfless concern to provide goods for the other to the best of one’s ability; failure to assist in time of need, whether on the part of friends or relatives, proves the absence of the wish and hence the love itself.

Konstan’s philological analysis of philia identifies active benevolent solicitude—not sentiment alone—as the criterion distinguishing genuine friendship from its simulacra in Aristotle and forensic oratory.

David Konstan, The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks: Studies in Aristotle and Classical Literature, 2006supporting

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Aristotle is, I think, carefully taking into account three possible situations: first, he mentions those who have the same friends or enemies (in these cases, the feelings are mutual), and then he adds those who either like or are liked by the same people.

Konstan unpacks Aristotle’s taxonomy of the conditions for philia, showing that reciprocity is a graduated rather than binary feature across the different forms of friendship.

David Konstan, The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks: Studies in Aristotle and Classical Literature, 2006supporting

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Aristotle states that friends on account of the useful are philoi not of one another but rather of what is advantageous, but strictly speaking there can be no philia for an object.

Konstan clarifies Aristotle’s position that utility-based friendship dissolves into a relation with a thing rather than a person, thereby failing the criterion of genuine philia.

David Konstan, The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks: Studies in Aristotle and Classical Literature, 2006supporting

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the real meaning of the saying, as I imagine, is, that the good are like one another, and friends to one another; and that the bad, as is often said of them, are never at unity with one another or with themselves.

Plato’s Socrates reformulates the ‘like to like’ maxim by restricting genuine friendship to the good, making inner self-coherence a precondition for authentic relational bond.

Plato, Lysis, -390supporting

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no one who loves or desires another would ever have loved or desired or affected him, if he had not been in some way congenial to him, either in his soul, or in his character, or in his manners, or in his form.

In the Lysis’s concluding movement, Socrates proposes congeniality of soul as the necessary ground of friendship, anticipating later virtue-based accounts.

Plato, Lysis, -390supporting

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the body which is in health requires neither medical nor any other aid, but is well enough; and the healthy man has no love of the physician, because he is in health. But the sick loves him, because he is sick.

Plato uses the physician-patient analogy to explore the hypothesis that friendship arises from lack and deficiency rather than from likeness or goodness.

Plato, Lysis, -390aside

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classical Greek lacked an ordinary noun corresponding to the English ‘friendship’ (or to the Latin amicitia, for that matter), which uniquely designates mutual affection as opposed to the individual sentiment.

Konstan’s lexical observation that Greek philia conflates individual love and mutual friendship into a single term has significant implications for interpreting all ancient discussions of the topic.

David Konstan, The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks: Studies in Aristotle and Classical Literature, 2006aside

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friendship in Aristotle is built upon this self-interest, perfectly compatible with disinterest in the moral sense of the term. The other, finally, is other than the self only because he or she is another self, that is, like us, a self.

Ricoeur, drawing on Brague’s reading, argues that Aristotelian friendship’s grounding in self-interest does not undermine its moral disinterestedness but rather constitutes the structure through which otherness is recognized.

Ricoeur, Paul, Oneself as Another, 1992aside

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proceeding in this way, shall we not arrive at some first principle of friendship or dearness which is not capable of being referred to any other, for the sake of which, as we maintain, all other things are dear.

Plato’s regressive argument in the Lysis seeks an ultimate proto-good underlying all derivative objects of affection, anticipating the later Platonic doctrine of the Form of the Good as friendship’s true telos.

Plato, Lysis, -390aside

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