Friendship and Philosophy

In the dialogue Lysis, Socrates puts forward a serious problem concerning the nature of friendship. The argument was later to become extremely famous in Ancient philosophy, as the Lysis was one of the most widely copied of all Platonic dialogues. According to this argument, good people do not need friends, as people only need friends in so far as they are benefited. I will present my own argument against this position, and also Aristotle's argument.

The character Socrates worries that happy people will not need friends. He uses a fairly concise argument. People only need friends in so far as they provide benefit or sumpheron to them. However, people only need to be benefited in so far as they are lacking good things. In so far as people lack good things, they lack happiness. The happier someone is, the less things he or she needs. Therefore, the happier a person is, the less he or she needs to be benefited and the less he or she needs friends. A perfectly happy person would have no need of benefit at all, and would therefore have no need of friends at all. Therefore, only unhappy people need friends, and only in so far as they are unhappy.

My first reaction was the normal reaction to this argument, and I ask you to resist it. The immediate reaction is the response of saying that I do not love my friends only because they benefit me; friendship is about self-giving, not use. This reaction for me comes from an aversion to selfishness that I have written about here. The problem with this reaction is that it is simply not true. We do act sometimes in a selfless manner with friends, but how would our friends feel if we said that we didn't enjoy their company at all and that all the time we spent on them was toil in the service of duty? Would we want our friends not to enjoy being with us or even liking us? Moreover, most of us believe we need friends, and that having friends fills what would otherwise be some important lack in our lives. We do need friends in a very real way, and this is the intuition that Socrates is working with.

The argument I usually use against Socrates' position is that he has failed to make a distinction between intrinsic and instrumental goods, and is treating friends merely as instrumental goods. An intrinsic good is something we desire for its own sake or for no further reason. An instrumental good is something we desire because it provides us with some other benefit. If friends are merely instrumental goods, then Socrates is right. A perfectly happy person will not need any of the potential benefits provided by friends. However, if friends are intrinsic goods, then they are one of the goods that, just by having, make a happy person happy. They are one of the constituent parts of happiness, and therefore even a happy person needs them, in the sense that he or she needs to continue to possess them. Therefore, happy people need friends.

Aristotle's argument is more robust than this. He is concerned about the relationship of dependence at all. In Nicomachean Ethics I, he defines self-sufficiency as a characteristic of happiness, as it makes us less susceptible to fortune. For someone to need friends, even in the way I have argued, would mean that the happy person was dependent on another person for his or her happiness, and not self-sufficient. Rather, Aristotle argues, the happy person should have enough goodness in himself or herself to make him or her happy. The happy person would have a constant model of virtue that he or she could contemplate. Instead, he argues, virtuous friends can actually contribute to this contemplation. By being an image of one's own virtue, a friend acts as a "second self" in whom one can see one's own virtue reflected. In this way, a happy person can be self-sufficient in himself or herself, while still benefitting from seeing that virtue reflected in other virtuous people.

The Lysis introduced an entire epoch in philosophy in which the nature of friendship was a philosophical genre akin to epistemology or biology. It raises serious questions as to what we are doing when we have friends, and the attempted solutions often raise even more questions.