Class Reflections: Aristotle On Friendship
introducing my students to a few important ideas in Nicomachean Ethics books 8-9
Last week I started coming down with some sort of bug that I imagine most likely one or more of my students brought to class. Walking the bit over a mile from our office to Marquette University is usually a nice stroll for me, but given my overall fatigue, headache, and other symptoms, was quite a slog. Even the sun felt hotter than it should have! I told my students, as I started class that if we were covering a different text that day, I likely would have cancelled classes and had them use the course resources I provide them in our course site.
But to my mind, that wasn’t really an option. Why? The class centers on love, friendship, sex, and relationships, and that particular class session, we were set to explore one of the most influential treatments of friendship (and other relationships) in Western literature, that articulated (at least in part) in books 8 and 9 of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Since so many of the other thinkers and texts we would be studying this semester would reference Aristotle’s views, I thought we’d better hold that class session.
When I’m teaching, unless I’m really doing poorly, I’m “on”, with plenty of energy and presence of mind. After the class session, I was simply wiped out, slowly made my way the mile and a half back home, and then crashed out for a while. Usually I’d like to get these class reflections out closer to the day that I taught the matters I’m writing about, but I’ve not yet shaken that bug, and today I’m actually staying home sick, which finally lets me get to writing this post.
Friendship As A “Success Term”
Before we actually got started looking at Aristotle’s views, we engaged in a little exercise. I made two columns on the blackboard, writing “genuine friend” at the head of one, and “fake friend” at the top of the other. Then I asked them what sort of characteristics people had who they would consider genuine friends, and by contrast what people who get called “friends” but aren’t really such are like.
The genuine friendship listing went more or less as you might expect. They named off characteristics like loyalty, showing up, understanding or empathy, honesty, generosity, and the like, which allowed me to remind them that we’d discussed some of these sorts of matters the previous class session, when we looked at Aristotle’s views on happiness and the virtues.
When we filled in the other column, I asked them to think not just about characteristics, but also types of people or relationships where we might use the terms “friend” or “friendship”, but where it’s not really such. Each of these afforded opportunities to dig a bit deeper and to consider examples. They came up with social media connections we’re not really close to, frenemies who are really rivals to us, users and exploiters (who we’ll look at later under the ancient term of “flatterers”, and parasocial relationships. We also discussed whether family members are necessarily “friends”, invoking the old proverb “you can pick your friends, but you can’t pick your family”.
So far so good. We’ve got the real or true on the one side, and the facsimile on the other side. I ask them: Why do we use the same terms, “friend” or “friendship”, for both of them? Are we just generally ignorant, confused, or mistaken about these important matters in our contemporary culture? Here’s where I bring up the fact that Aristotle distinguishes between several different types of relationships for which he nonetheless uses the blanket term “friendship” (philia in Greek). He’s also quite clear that they’re not equally “friendship”. In fact the fullest, most paradigmatic sense of friendship is not only uncommon, but some people simply won’t be able to experience it. So is only that fairly rare type of “friendship” rightly called by that term?
We often run into similar issues when people say that someone is not a “philosopher” at all, when what the case really amounts to is that they’re not a very good philosopher. We can use the term “philosopher” in a rather neutral descriptive, classificatory way, which will name people across a broad spectrum, some of whom will do philosophy very well, others perhaps less so. People also do this with the term “philosophy” itself. Is what Ayn Rand offers to us in her works “philosophy”, for instance? Sure, just not particularly good philosophy. We can also use those terms “philosopher” and “philosophy” as “success terms”. In that case, they will have a narrower application, referring to what one considers to be a good philosopher or well-developed philosophy.
This distinction applies quite well to Aristotle’s treatment of friendship. He uses that term most often just to classify a wide range of relationships that in our contemporary parlance we might call by other names, like family members, acquaintances, coworkers, business contacts, and the like. Those are all “friends” and the relationships “friendship”, but not in the paradigmatic way, to which all of the criteria for being “friends” in the full sense, using that word as a success term, would apply.
So What Does Friendship Really Involve?
In its fuller concept, Aristotle thinks that “friendship” includes a number of components and characteristics. I provide my students with a handout that brings together eight general features of friendship he discusses in Nicomachean Ethics books 8 and 9 (note that if you only read book 8, you won’t actually see all of these). We discussed each of these in turn, but bundled a few of them together.
The first one might be a bit of a no-brainer to many. Friendship is personal, that is, it is a relationship that cannot exist between things that do not have a soul (apsyukhon). To use an example Aristotle provides, you can’t be friends with salt. We considered whether you can be “friends” with an institution or group, which at least to some degree is composed of people, and often represented by some (my students, I would say rightly, concluded that you can’t). Now Aristotle gives a justification for his stance that leads us into the other features. People (and perhaps other animals) are capable of reciprocating affection (antiphilesis), and this is essential to friendship.
The next three features have to do with wishing-good for the other person. Friendship in its full sense requires that we wish what we think is good for the other person for the sake of that person. This is where the lesser, but more common forms of friendship fall short. In friendships that are based on usefulness or pleasure, that’s what the people in the friendship really are after. They can wish good for the other, but it is because they want something from that other person. Aristotle notes as well that in a real friendship, both members have to wish good to the other person. It doesn’t suffice merely for one to do so, if the other doesn’t.
He also clarifies that in order to be friends they need to know that they are friends, that is, they need to know that the other person wishes well to them. This rules out classifying people as friends who are indeed well-disposed to each other, but don’t realize that this is the case. They need to share something in common, namely knowing about, and presumably valuing, their relationship.
What friends have in common leads us to three more features of Aristotle’s conception of friendship. Here’s where we might need to depart to some extent from Aristotle’s theory in order to make it work for us. Aristotle maintains that a full friendship requires sharing a life together, generally in terms of the friends being present with each other in the same places, and for a significant amount of time. Are we not friends then with those who we don’t share physical space with, but perhaps interact with only virtually?
Even back in ancient times, it was common for people to interact with each other, and presumably enjoy friendships, through the medium of letter writing. In fact, authors like Seneca will develop that idea in considerable detail, and provide a model for later authors to interpret yet further. I mention that I have close friends who I interact with online, some of whom I’ve only shared physical proximity with once or twice. Are they not friends? Do my students cease being friends with the people they were friends with but now no longer share space with, or is a common life possible virtually? They certainly think the latter is the case.
There are two other things Aristotle says friends share. One of these is such a common feature that we often see friendship being distinguished from other kinds of relationships on that very basis. Friends are friends because they share something in common, perhaps an interest or an activity, perhaps values and commitments, perhaps having gone through situations and experiences together. You’ll often see this referenced as friendship involving something in common between the friends.
The other is that, as Aristotle tells us later on in book 9, friends share their joys and sorrows with each other. We talk about this quite a bit, and the students bring up a number of examples from their own (at this point) relatively short lives of situations where something went well for them, and their friends felt happy for them, or cases where something bad happens that gets one down, and one’s friends are there to commiserate. If you do well or something good happens to you, and your friends don’t care, or even view that as a bad thing, then they’re not really friends are they? And if they don’t show up for you in tough times, maybe what you thought was a friendship really wasn’t so.
The last feature we talk about is one that I think often doesn’t get discussed enough in general in our contemporary discourses about relationships, except when things have gone wrong in specific situations, and one lands in a perceived moral dilemma about what an existing friendship requires of its members. Aristotle uses the Greek term prohairesis, which we often translate as “moral choice” or “deliberate choice”. I like to use other terms that capture the depth this notion possesses like “commitment” or “priorities”.
In order not just to become, or to be, but to remain friends with another person, there doesn’t have to be complete identity of prohairesis between them. There can be some differences, which might lead to discussions or even disputes and disagreements. But to sustain a friendship long term, there has to be some basic agreement between the members on what they value, and how they value what they do, on the commitments they have, on the kinds of character they observe and value in each other and display in their own actions, emotional responses, and words.
Implications Of Prohairesis For Friendship
We did, of course, discuss the famous distinction between the three main types of friendship that Aristotle distinguishes early on in Nicomachean Ethics book 8, an account he then makes more complex later on in book 8 and in book 9. If you’d like, you can read a bit more about that distinction in this piece. I’ll keep it relatively simple here. There are:
friendships of virtue or in terms of the good, where the friends wish well to each other for their own sakes
friendships of pleasure, where the friends either give each other pleasure or share in some pleasure together, wishing good to each other for the sake of that pleasure
friendships of usefulness, where the friends are precisely that, useful to each other in some way(s), wishing good to each other for the sake of that usefulness
I point out to my students that the best and fullest form of friendship is technically only going to be a possibility for people who are themselves genuinely good, those who have cultivated at least some measure of virtue. So not only will bad people be precluded from enjoying the highest realization of friendship, even people who are seemingly neither good nor bad but just middling or mixed would seem to be as well.
Does that seem right to you, I ask them? And they’re not happy with that idea. Frankly, neither am I, and if we adopt a very strict interpretation of Aristotle on this point, this is a place where I admittedly have to differ from him. I suggest to them that instead of expecting or demanding that people who would have the possibility of enjoying the highest form of friendship must be already virtuous, that perhaps what’s needed is that they at least be on the way to virtue and working towards it.
To me that seems more realistic, and in our course we will be reading several other thinkers who articulate similar views, including Cicero, Plutarch, and Montaigne. And that would make it less a matter of a person’s prohairesis that is already entirely shaped along the lines of each virtue, and more of a prohairesis that is at least oriented in the right direction, and working upon itself. From experience, I can say it’s possible, though more challenging, to develop and maintain a friendship between two people who are at best partly virtuous, occasionally going astray, but actively working to be good or better persons.
Gregory Sadler is the president of ReasonIO, a speaker, writer, and producer of popular YouTube videos on philosophy. He is co-host of the radio show Wisdom for Life, and producer of the Sadler’s Lectures podcast. You can request short personalized videos at his Cameo page. If you’d like to take online classes with him, check out the Study With Sadler Academy.