Aristotle on Friendship: What Does It Take to Be a Good Friend?

Author: G. M. Trujillo, Jr.
Category: Ethics, Historical Philosophy
Wordcount: 992

Imagine that you could choose between living two lives. Option 1 promises amazing beauty, wealth, power, fame, and health. But you would have zero friends. Option 2 offers only average beauty, wealth, reputation, and health. But you would have profound friendships.

Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle (384–322 BC) bet that no one would choose the first option.^[1] He argued that we need friends to live a good life. After all, when life is bad, they help us. And when life is good, they celebrate with us.^[2]

Aristotle’s claims about friendship began debates that continue today.^[3] This essay presents his views on friendship and a contemporary debate he inspired.

1. Friendship, Useful Friends, and Pleasurable Friends

For Aristotle, all friendships are relationships where people mutually like each other, do good for one another, and share goals for the time they spend together.^[4] But the friendship changes depending on the reasons that friends value each other and the ways that they do good for each other.

Consequently, Aristotle split friendship into three types. The first two types—useful and pleasurable friendships—are similar to each other.

Useful friendships are those between people whose foremost goal is to work together to accomplish some practical goal. Think coworkers or teammates.

Pleasurable friendships are those between people who routinely enjoy themselves together. Think friends who you invite to meals or nights out, or those you play games with.^[5]

Useful and pleasurable friendships have upsides. They are casual and easy to form, as they are defined by their small-scale goals. Useful friends focus on getting things done, and pleasurable friends focus on enjoying each other’s company. The basis for these friendships, and the reason behind the mutual affection and planning, is simple use or pleasure.

But these friendships also have downsides. As soon as the task or fun disappears, so do these friendships. Consider what often happens to friendships with your coworkers when you leave your job, or what usually happens with most of your teammates when you quit playing a sport. Useful and pleasurable friendships are mostly motivated by what people can get out of them. This is why Aristotle deemed them as imperfect compared to the last type.

2. Virtuous Friends, the Best Friends

For Aristotle, the best friendships have a deeper meaning than utility or pleasure: becoming better people together. They are rare and hard to form. But they are the most important for living a good life.^[6] Aristotle called these virtuous friendships.

Virtuous friends not only focus on getting things done or having a good time together. Rather, they primarily focus on each other as persons, attending to character and flourishing. They want their friends to be good people and live good lives for their own sake. And they work together to accomplish this.^[7]

Virtuous friends become a part of each other’s lives by spending time together and having deep conversations. They share the same core ideas about what it means to be a good person and live a good life.^[8] Aristotle argued that this deep bond makes virtuous friends “other selves,” or, “One soul dwelling in two bodies.”^[9] Together, virtuous friends live, learn, struggle, and improve.

Living a full life is difficult. Not only do we need to become good as individuals, but also as family members, citizens, and contributors to our communities. And we need to avoid the common dangers of pursuing money above all things, caring too much about what strangers think, and losing ourselves in hobbies or addictions. Virtuous friends help with this. In success, friends celebrate. In failure, friends offer comfort and counsel, and sometimes they speak hard truths that only people who know and love you can.^[10]

3. Do Good Friends Have to Be Good People?

When philosophers discuss friendship, they usually have Aristotle’s virtuous friendship in mind. Implicitly, it is taken as the most important type of friendship to scrutinize. Specifically, some philosophers debate whether immoral actions or bad people corrupt the quality of friendships.^[11]

Imagine that your phone wakes you up late at night. It’s your best friend. She says it’s an emergency, and she needs your help. So you rush to the address she gave you. Then she reveals that she’s murdered someone. She asks you to help hide the body. But now you wonder: would a good friend help to hide the corpse, or would she encourage her friend to explain the situation to the authorities?^[12]

This case raises some related questions: is being a good friend compatible with doing immoral things together? Can bad people really be good friends? And generally, are the good things about friendship also things that we should judge by moral standards?

Aristotle and Aristotelians argue that good friends must be ethically good people. Virtuous friends largely share the same values and help each other become excellent—and they hold each other accountable. Such explicitly ethical goals make immorality incompatible with deep friendship. So, in this scenario, Aristotelians would say that your friend who calls you to ask for help hiding a corpse is no longer a good friend. This request changes the friendship fundamentally for the worse.^[13]

Non-Aristotelians disagree. They argue that the qualities that we appreciate in friendship are separate from complying with moral principles. Good friends share interests and are loyal to each other. And this is compatible with sometimes doing immoral things. A moral failure does not mean a failure in friendship. In fact, helping your friend in morally dubious circumstances might indicate that you are a real friend.^[14]

4. Conclusion

Philosophers might disagree with Aristotle about how to define friendship or who can be a good friend. However, most agree that we must analyze our own ideas about what it means to be a good friend and whether we live up to them. Friendships reveal important things about who we are and how we love. And if, as Aristotle argued, good friends make us better and bad friends make us worse, our friendships could make or break us.^[15]

Notes

^[1] Aristotle wrote, “For no one would choose to live without friends, even if he had all other good things” (2020, NE 1155a5-6). Aristotle’s greatest work, Nicomachean Ethics, dedicated two of its ten books to friendship, Books VIII and IX. And they have largely set the philosophical agenda for discussing friendship. Often, even philosophers who disagree with Aristotle start by summarizing his views. As far as philosophers and poets who came before Aristotle, none produced a definitive theory of friendship. For example, Plato’s Lysis discusses friendship. But as with many Socratic dialogues, there is no conclusive definition or view. However, for an argument that Greek philosophers before Aristotle had a theory of friendship, see: El Murr 2020.

Throughout, this essay will translate Aristotle’s Greek word philos as “friend” and philia as “friendship.” This is the most accessible way to render the Greek in English, and it captures the idea of being committed to someone in a specific context. The hope is that this broadens the terms outside of excessively specified roles in Greek society but doesn’t make friendship into a contemporary notion of abstract regard for others without context. However, a few things need clarification. First, the Greek philia refers to more types of relationships than the English “friendship.” Philia refers to friendship, but also the relationship between family members, spouses, lovers, members of a political community, or patrons and clients. Second, philia describes relationships with widely varying qualities. Some are deep with knowledge, emotion, and well-wishing; some are shallow and casual. Philia can be long-term and durable or transitory and quick to vanish. Philia encompasses voluntary associations replete with choice, as in choosing your friends or confidants, but it can also include unchosen associations, such as family. Philia can be sexual and desirous, or it can be friendly and cool. Third, philia can be translated as “love.” But in the context of relationships with others, many Greek words might also be translated as “love.” Storgē means love, often within familial contexts or within the context of affection. Eros means love, often with romantic implications. And not as much a concern for ancient Greece, but important to mention because Christian philosophers make use of the term, agapē gets rendered as love, usually within the context of God loving creation, or selfless love. These complex associations lead some philosophers to leave terms untranslated and merely transliterate them into the English alphabet, e.g., change φιλία to philia (see: Nussbaum 2009). This essay, however, opts for translation, hoping that the context of this discussion about friendship removes ambiguities. But serious scholarship about Aristotle’s theory of friendship attends to the details of the original Greek. For more discussion on translation, see: Annas 1993, pp. 223-4; Nussbaum 2009, p. 354; Cooper 1999a, p. 313, no. 5.

^[2] Aristotle, NE, 1171b28. Aristotle himself had powerful friends. His teacher was Plato, and his student was Alexander the Great. He also had powerful enemies who drove him into exile, where he died. There is a famous saying regarding Aristotle’s death. Aristotle was living in Athens and running his school, The Lyceum. But politics in Athens shifted against Aristotle’s home city-state of Macedonia and against the rulers who Aristotle associated with, Phillip II and Alexander the Great. Aristotle feared that Athens would try to do the same thing to him that they did to Socrates, hold a mockery of a trial and sentence him to death. Aristotle apocryphally said, “I will not let Athens sin twice against philosophy,” and he took exile in Chalcis, where he died. See: Diogenes Laertius, 2018, V.5-6, 10; Shields 2020, sec. 1, esp. n. 3; Nussbaum 2009, p. 345, n. 8.

^[3] For many historical examples of philosophers celebrating and analyzing friendship, see: Pakaluk 1991. For the rare exceptions of historical philosophers who criticize friendship, see: Trujillo 2020.

It is also important to note that this small article cannot go into all the issues Aristotle covered when discussing friendship. For example, there is arguably a fourth type of friendship, civic friendship, that describes people living in a political community together. (See: Cooper 1999b for an overview of Aristotle’s theory of civic friendship. See: Cherry 2021 for a debate between her and Robert Talisse about civic friendship and whether it can solve political polarization in the USA.) Additionally, Aristotle discusses matters of equality in money and power, arguing that good friends must be as equal as possible. Also, because Aristotle usually focuses on the best people possible, his work leaves open questions about what friendships look like for the rest of us, those morally imperfect and without all the wealth and power that Aristotle (or the people he had in mind) had. All these questions have become invaluable in the philosophy of technology, where people now use these distinctions to talk about social media, online friendships, robots, and friendships involving far-future technology. Aristotelians shape many conversations about the past, present, and future of friendship. (See: Elder 2018.)

^[4] This essay takes a general stance with respect to the common features of useful, pleasurable, and virtuous friendships, especially as characterized by Aristotle in Rhetoric II.4: “We may describe friendly feeling towards anyone as wishing for him what you believe to be good things, not for your own sake but for his, and being inclined, so far as you can, to bring these things about. A friend is one who feels thus and excites these feelings in return. Those who think they feel thus towards each other think themselves friends.”

It is clear that, for Aristotle, some amount of reciprocity and recognition is necessary from each friend, as far as feelings about one another and what the friendship involves. This is why Aristotle says we cannot be friends with wine, no matter how much we like it. Wine just doesn’t love us back. (NE 1155b27-31). But beyond these generalities, philosophers disagree.

Julia Annas, for example, offers her own interpretation of qualities Aristotle seems to endorse as belonging to all forms of friendship: (1) friends wish and do good for each other, (2) friends want their friends to stay alive for their own sake, (3) friends spend time with each other, (4) friends make similar choices, and (5) friends find similar things painful and pleasant. 1993, p. 254. Martha Nussbaum proposes that all friendships involve mutual affection, mutual separateness and respect for that independence, mutual well-wishing for the friend and for that friend’s own sake, and mutual awareness of the good feelings and wishes. 2009, p. 355.

In addition to deciding what is common in all forms of friendships, philosophers argue over what distinguishes the different types. For example, philosophers argue over the kind of affection and interest that friends take in each other in useful, pleasurable, and virtuous friendships. There is no doubt that virtuous friends are interested in their friends being good and doing well for their own sake. But philosophers disagree about whether such disinterested or non-self-interested motivation exists in useful or pleasurable friendships. John Cooper (1999a), for example, takes the position that all friendships involve a not-completely-self-interested motivation. But Kenneth Alpern (1983) thinks that useful and pleasurable friendships are not disinterested, even if they exhibit dependence, cooperation, trust, communion, and sharing. Aristotle is borderline incoherent on this point, sometimes writing that useful and pleasurable friends are self-centered, sometimes implying that all friendships share disinterested other-regarding concern. See: Cooper 1999a, p. 317.

^[5] Aristotle, NE, VIII.3.

^[6] Julia Annas summarizes Aristotle’s arguments for why virtuous friendships are necessary for living a good life. She identifies two reasons that are important to highlight. First, friends help you to learn about yourself. Virtuous friends share values, so their perspectives on each others’ lives are important. And because friends are outside of your life, they have an outside perspective that allows for accurate assessment. (Sometimes your friends know you better than you know yourself.) Second, friends can do more together than separately. When friends work together, they can sustain activities for a longer time, make activities much more pleasant, and make activities much more effective. 1993, p. 251.

^[7] Aristotle, NE, 1170b11-14. In this passage, Aristotle emphasizes that friends share conversation and thought while living together. Sharing a human life together means more than “feeding in the same location as with grazing animals.” So, the quality of the shared time and the content of the actions matter, not just the hours logged. On the point of sharing the same values, see also: Rhet. II.4. Thanks go to Alexis Elder for emphasizing this point in her work.

^[8] Aristotle, NE, VIII.3, 13; IX.5–6. See also: Diogenes Laertius (2018), V.31.

^[9] For the “other selves” claim, see: Aristotle, NE, 1166a31. For the “One soul dwelling in two bodies,” see: Diogenes Laertius (2018), V.20. Aristotle argues that the deepest friendships are those between equals, in almost all respects. This is part of what makes virtuous friends “other selves.” For the most part, virtuous friends have the same values, the same strategies in approaching life, and maybe a lot of other similarities, such as economic class and political status. This means that when virtuous friends see each other living life, they understand what they’re doing and why, and they can counsel each other well. Additionally, because friends would do basically the same things as each other, they get to live somewhat vicariously. Aristotle’s works are rarely beautiful or poetic. But the phrasing of friends being “other selves” has inspired admiration of the phrase, leading to much philosophical reflection.

^[10] See: Aristotle, NE, IX.11. On bitter times in friendship, Aristotle wrote, “[F]or as the proverb has it, people cannot have got to know each other before they have savored all that salt together, nor indeed can they have accepted each other to be friends before each party is seen to be lovable, and is trusted, by the other. Those who are quick to behave like friends towards each other wish to be friends, but are not friends unless they are also lovable, and the other party knows it; for what is quick to arise is wish for friendship, not friendship” (2002, NE, 1156b27-33). In other words, friends need to spend a lot of time together to get to know each other, which would include difficult times. This reveals how good a person is (so how loveable they are) and how deep the friendship is. Good people and good friendships endure the bad times; they go beyond mere well wishes.

It is also worth noting that Aristotle thought you could not be good friends with many people at once (NE, 1158a11-2). Diogenes Laertius took this claim to an extreme when he reported that Aristotle said, “He who has friends has no true friend” (2018, V.21). In other words, having more than one serious friend means you are not serious friends with any one person. Diogenes Laertius, however, reports this hundreds of years after Aristotle died.

^[11] For an overview of recent scholarship on friendship, see: Helm 2021 and Jeske 2023.

^[12] This case is based on the film Death in Brunswick (1990), which is the primary example for Dean Cocking and Jeanette Kennett in their influential article “Friendship and Moral Danger” (2000).

^[13] See: Aristotle, NE, IX.9-10; Elder 2013.

There is an added complication here that many philosophers do not address. Aristotle seems OK with friends being vulnerable around each other and doing things around each other that might not be proper in public. Friends feel comfortable around each other and trust one another, and sometimes they confide their own weaknesses in friends. So, the requirement that virtuous friends be good has small exceptions and doesn’t require moral perfection. See: Rhet. II.4.

Aristotle’s theory of friendship has political implications too. For Aristotle, humans are fundamentally political, in that they live in communities. And he argues that a community of good people who are friends with one another wouldn’t need justice or rules. People would inherently share things with one another and treat each other fairly. Inversely, Aristotle also argues that friendship is impossible under conditions of severe injustice. NE, VIII.1, 9, 11. See also: Cooper 1999b, p. 356. It is important to qualify this claim, however. Aristotle’s work on friendship seems only to extend to actual, day-to-day relationships, and not to people we don’t have relationships with, as in people living in distant communities. See: Annas 1993, p. 253. It is not really until the Cynics and Stoics that philosophers develop a sense of cosmopolitanism. For a discussion of cosmopolitanism, see: Moles 1996.

^[14] See: Cocking and Kennett 2000.

^[15] Aristotle, NE, IX.12. Thanks go out to Nathan Nobis, Dan Lowe, Chelsea Haramia, Kristin Seemuth Whaley, Spencer Case, and Felipe Pereira for their feedback. They improved the paper significantly.

References

Annas, Julia. (1993) The Morality of Happiness. New York: Oxford.

Alpern, Kenneth D. (1983) “Aristotle on the Friendships of Utility and Pleasure,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, vol. 21, no. 3: pp. 303-15.

Aristotle. (1991) Rhetoric [Rhet.]. Trans. W. Rhys. Roberts. In: The Complete Works of Aristotle, Vol. 2, ed. Jonathan Barnes. Princeton: Princeton.

Aristotle. (2002) Nicomachean Ethics [NE]. Trans. Christopher Rowe. Oxford: Oxford.

Cherry, Myisha. (2021). “On the Cultivation of Civic Friendship,” Journal of Philosophical Research, vol. 46: pp. 193-207.

Cocking, Dean and Jeanette Kennett. (2000) “Friendship and Moral Danger,” The Journal of Philosophy, vol. 97, no. 5: 278-96.

Cooper, John M. (1999a) “Aristotle on the Forms of Friendship.” In: Reason and Emotion: Essays on Ancient Moral Psychology and Ethical Theory. Princeton: Princeton, ch. 14.

Cooper, John M. (1999b) “Political Animals and Civic Friendship.” In: Reason and Emotion: Essays on Ancient Moral Psychology and Ethical Theory. Princeton: Princeton, ch. 16.

Diogenes Laertius. (2018) Lives of the Eminent Philosophers. Trans. Pamela Mensch. Oxford: Oxford.

Death in Brunswick. (1990) Dir. John Ruane.

El Murr, Dimitri. (2020) “Friendship in Early Greek Ethics.” In: Early Greek Ethics, ed. David Conan Wolfsdorf. Oxford: Oxford. Ch. 24.

Elder, Alexis. (2013) “Why Bad People Can’t Be Good Friends,” Ratio, vol. 27, iss. 1: 84-99.

Elder, Alexis. (2018) Friendship, Robots, and Social Media: False Friends and Second Selves. New York: Routledge.

Helm, Bennett. (2021) “Friendship,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: plato.stanford.edu.

Jeske, Diane. (2023) The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Friendship. New York: Routledge.

Moles, John L. (1996) “Cynic Cosmopolitanism.” In: The Cynics: The Cynic Movement in Antiquity and Its Legacy, eds. R. Bracht Branham and Marie-Odile Goulet-Cazé. Berkeley: California.

Nussbaum, Martha C. (2009) The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy. Updated Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge.

Pakaluk, Michael. (1991) Other Selves: Philosophers on Friendship. Indianapolis: Hackett.

Shields, Christopher. (2020) “Aristotle,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: plato.stanford.edu.

Trujillo, G.M. (2020) “Friendship for the Flawed: A Cynical and Pessimistic Theory of Friendship,” Southwest Philosophy Review, vol. 36, iss. 1: 199-209.

For Further Reading

Katz, Emily. (2023) “Three lessons from Aristotle on Friendship,” The Conversation.

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About the Author

G.M. Trujillo, Jr. is Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Texas at El Paso. He specializes in ethics, especially virtue ethics and bioethics. www.Boomert.info

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