This document summarizes and engages with Michael H. Mitias' book "Friendship: A Central Moral Value". It questions Mitias' distinction between friendship as a moral/theoretical concern versus a practical one. It argues Mitias fails to distinguish Aristotle's narrow and wide meanings of "philia". While later theorists of friendship echoed ancient insights, they also innovated. The document suggests Mitias overstates the universality and hegemony of classical moral paradigms of friendship. It concludes Mitias contributes more to moral philosophy than friendship studies specifically.

1. Continuing Questions about Friendship as a Central Moral Value
Ruth Abbey
Published in Dialogue and Universalism
Vol. XXVIII, No. 2/2018
pp. 65-80
Abstract
This article engages Friendship: A Central Moral Value by Michael H. Mitias. It
questions Mitias’ distinction between friendship as a moral and theoretical concern as
opposed to a practical one. It distinguishes the narrow from the wide meanings of philia
in Aristotle’s approach. It looks at the resonances of classical approaches in later theories
of friendship, while also attending to the innovations of later thinkers. It suggests that the
moral paradigms Mitias delineates might not be as hegemonic nor as hermetically sealed
as he suggests. Mitias’ contribution is better understood as an addition to moral
philosophy than to friendship studies.
Key Words: friendship, philia, agape, Mitias, Aristotle, Emerson

2. 1
Continuing Questions about Friendship as a Central Moral Value
Introduction
In 2013 I published a short review1
of Michael H. Mitias’ book, Friendship: A
Central Moral Value.2
I take the opportunity provided by the larger space afforded here
to engage Mitias’ work in more detail than was either possible or appropriate in that short
overview. This greater space enables me to bring Mitias’ contribution into dialogue with
other writings about friendship and thus to shine a light on what is truly distinctive about
his. I come to this task as a political theorist with an interest in friendship, not as a moral
philosopher. For that reason, my focus will be the theories of friendship he engages and
the ways in which he engages them. I begin by questioning the distinction Mitias draws
between friendship as a moral and theoretical concern as opposed to a practical one. I
contend that Mitias fails to distinguish the narrow from the wide meanings of philia in
Aristotle’s approach, despite its relevance for his thinking. I bring out some of the
resonances of the classical approaches to friendship in later theories of friendship, while
also attending to the ways its legatees innovate in thinking about friendship. I pose
questions about the universality of the classical approach. I suggest that perhaps the
moral paradigms Mitias delineates are not as hegemonic nor as hermetically sealed as he
suggests. I ask about Plato’s status as a philosopher of friendship and show how some of
the modern theorists of friendship strove for a synthesis between the classical and
Christian approaches. I conclude that Mitias’ contribution is better understood as an
addition to the wider field of moral philosophy than to the narrower one of friendship
studies.

3. 2
Moral and Theoretical or Practical?
Mitias begins his book with a lament: “from the fourth to the twentieth century
… we encounter a conspicuous absence, in fact a dismissal, of serious theorizing on the
concept of friendship.” (1) Yet with the dawn of the twenty first century, the lament
sounds less plangent as more and more scholars turn their attention to the question of
friendship. Indeed, the English translation of Jacques Derrida’s Politics of Friendship
appeared in 1997.3
That was followed by monographs on friendship by Sybil
Schwarzenbach (2009),4
Mark Vernon (2010),5
Ethan Lieb (2011),6
A.C. Grayling
(2013)7
and Gregory Jusdanis (2014).8
An online journal of friendship studies, Amity,
was created in 2013, and there have been edited volumes on friendship too.9
Most
recently, 2016 saw the appearance of four scholarly books devoted to friendship, works
by Alexander Nehamas,10
P.E. Digeser,11
Ann Ward,12
and John von Heyking.13
This
evidence certainly suggests that “serious theorizing on the concept of friendship” is back
in vogue.
But Mitias soon qualifies his opening complaint to clarify that while much has
been written about friendship over the centuries, friendship has not been understood in
the correct way. Thus he accepts that “philosophers, theologians, and essayists have left a
large number of discussions, articles, essays and even books on friendship.” (2) So as we
quickly see, Mitias’ real complaint is not directed at the number of works about
friendship so much as how it has been conceptualized. Insisting that friendship be
recognized as “a central moral value or … an essential ingredient of the good life” (1, 2,
5, cf. 197), and as an essential human need (14, 65, 84-85), his actual concern rests with
the way that moral theory has been carried out. He recognizes, for example, that Francis

4. 3
Bacon, Michel de Montaigne, Baruch Spinoza, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Immanuel Kant,
and Friedrich Nietzsche are all thinkers of the early modern or modern periods who
examine friendship. But Mitias objects that “their aim was not to analyze it as a central
moral value but to emphasize its importance for the practical life. Their interest in this
value was practical, not theoretical.” (3)
I confess to being confounded by this claim, or at least by the separation between
the theoretical and the moral on the one hand, and the practical on the other,
underpinning it. Most of the theorists of friendship Mitias lists follow Aristotle in Chapter
3, Book VIII of the Nicomachean Ethics by presenting friendship, or its highest form at
least, as a very rare occurrence.14
Montaigne, for example, knows just how remote his
friendship with Etienne de La Boétie was “from the common practice, and how rarely it
is to be found”. He explains that “amongst the men of this age, there is no sign nor trace
of any such thing in use; so much concurrence is required to the building of such a one,
that 'tis much, if fortune bring it but once to pass in three ages.”15
This same point about
friendship’s rarity is echoed in Emerson’s utterance that “Friendship may be said to
require natures so rare and costly, each so well tempered and so happily adapted … that
its satisfaction can very seldom be assured.”16
And we hear the same theme of its rarity in
Nietzsche’s scattered reflections on friendship.17
Yet this insistence on the rarity of
higher friendship immediately casts Mitias’ claim about its relevance for the practical life
only into doubt. This uncommon a phenomenon is likely to carry greater salience for the
theoretical ideals of moral life than practical application. But again, I might have failed to
grasp the nature of the separation undergirding Mitias’ critique of modern theories of
friendship, for as far as I can see, he nowhere delineates the separation.

5. 4
In Mitias’ estimation, Aristotle and Cicero provide models for proper thinking
about friendship (65-66, 86). But this makes the separation between the moral and the
practical that he sets up even more confusing. As I read them, Aristotle’s writings on
ethics in general and friendship in particular are both moral and practical. Indeed, his
reflections on friendships in Books XVIII and IX of the Nicomachean Ethics often read
like an advice manual: avoid this sort of friend; don’t expect too much from that sort of
friend; treat a former friend in this way; strive to be attentive to your friends’ motives for
befriending you – scrutinize whether they are based in utility, pleasure, or your moral
characters. Mitias is, moreover, admirably attentive to this quality in Cicero’s dialogue on
friendship, De Amicitia. He describes, for example, Cicero’s counsel that “we should not
judge the character of the other person before we open up to him” (80).18
That very
paragraph even includes the claim that knowing another person’s character” is a practical
issue.” (80) So again, the boundaries between the moral / theoretical and the practical,
and thus between ancient and later thinking about friendship, remain blurred. Mitias
observes, moreover, that friendship is an activity for Aristotle (68, 74), as it is for Cicero
(79) and himself depicts friendship as “a slice of one’s life, … real in the sphere of
action.” (203) But how can such an activity be placed in the category of the purely moral
and theoretical and detached from the practical? Once again, Mitias’ underdeveloped
distinction between the moral and the practical generates confusion in his assessment of
theories of friendship across the centuries.
Mitias also finds that excepting Spinoza and Nietzsche, the treatment of
friendship by the modern and early modern thinkers listed above “revolved within the
insight accomplished by the ancient Greek and Roman philosophers.” (3) I agree with

6. 5
what I take to be his fundamental claim here about the many ways in which ancient
accounts of friendship echo down through later ones within the western tradition. And
unlike Mitias, I would say this of Nietzsche too, at least in part.19
But if the later analyses
of friendship revolve within the ancient insights, why are the newer ones practical and the
older moral / theoretical? I also fail to see why containing powerful and recurrent
allusions to ancient philosophy is a shortcoming in the later views. If one holds, as Mitias
does, that friendship is a constant and universal human good, and an essential human
need, we could expect to discern echoes of ancient views of friendship in later ones. As
he asserts, “The fundamental arguments these philosophers advanced in support of the
importance of friendship remain valid to this day” (14, cf. 198). And if one looks back, as
Mitias does, to the Hellenic and Hellenistic periods as a time when friendship was
accorded its due in moral theory (32, 61), when it was acknowledged as “an essential
demand of human nature” (6, cf. 13), should it not be a cause of admiration that these
thinkers kept that heritage alive? By keeping ancient insights alight, aren’t they resisting
the modern moral paradigm that attempts to marginalize friendship? If so, this suggests
that these paradigms might not be as hegemonic or hermetically sealed as Mitias typically
suggests they are.
Philia and Philia
One very important issue that does not receive due attention in Mitias’ work yet
which has important implications for his insistence that friendship is universal, natural
and a human need is the distinction between the wide and the narrow meanings of philia
at play in Aristotle’s thought. Sometimes philia just means something like sociability, as
in the opening section of Book VIII of the Nicomachean Ethics which outlines the

7. 6
reasons why everyone needs friendship. The rich and powerful, the poor and unfortunate,
the young, the old, and those in the prime of life all need it, albeit for different reasons.
Aristotle goes on to say that
Again, parent seems by nature to feel it [philia] for offspring and offspring for
parent, not only among men but among birds and among most animals; it is felt
mutually by members of the same race, and especially by men, whence we praise
lovers of their fellowmen. We may see even in our travels how near and dear
every man is to every other. Friendship seems too to hold states together …
Indeed, Aristotle’s view of philia here is capacious enough to embrace animals. But the
philia that Aristotle lauds and whose image echoes down the centuries in other works on
friendship in the western tradition is the much narrower and more restrictive version that
is higher friendship.
As far as I can tell, it is this narrower, more restrictive, higher form of friendship
Mitias is talking about as a central moral value and not the more generic version of philia
as sociability. When Mitias contrasts, for example, “true friendship” with friendships
based on utility or pleasure, and says that only true friendship “is an ingredient of the
good life” (72), he seems to be affirming as well as explicating Aristotle’s view. He
likewise refers to Cicero’s distinction between true and untrue friendship, with the former
being based on virtue and the latter on advantage (78). The book’s final chapter contains
a discussion of the different calibers of friendship with Mitias preferring the highest form
(203-204). He writes, for example, of “the emergence of philia between two initiates …
[which] gives birth to an intimate, warm feeling of fondness, of enjoying and delighting
in the presence of the friend … [the] inherent desire to reach out, to open up, to

8. 7
communicate, and to exist in intimate closeness with a kindred soul …” (209. See also
210-13). Mitias’ working conception of friendship thus seems to be a version of higher,
or what he calls “true”, friendship (209, 212). Yet he also repeatedly says that friendship
is natural to human beings, by which he sees to mean the more generic sociability (198).
These are quite different claims and deserve to be distinguished and defended separately.
In elevating classical views of friendship, especially those of Aristotle and Cicero,
to preferred status because they recognize it as a universal human good, Mitias fails to
thoroughly examine how universal those old accounts of higher (as opposed to generic)
friendship really are. It is a commonplace to observe that the highest form of friendship in
Aristotle’s account is attainable only by certain strata of men, thus excluding women and
men of lower socio-economic status from this attainment. As with the gender and class
limitations on Aristotle’s views on friendship, so with Cicero: the only people to speak or
hear about friendship in De Amicita are upper class adult men.
Ann Ward’s recent work takes up this issue of gender and higher friendship in
Aristotle. She proposes that when Aristotle casts women as mothers, rather than as
spouses, we see evidence of their capacity for higher friendship. Inspired by Derrida, she
takes seriously Aristotle’s comparison of perfect friendship to maternal love.20
Indeed,
maternal love surpasses even perfect friendship because the mother continues to want the
best for her child even if the child does not recognize her and so cannot reciprocate her
affection.21
Because of this transcendence of the self that maternal love can manifest,
women should be recognized as capable of higher friendship. Ward thus pieces together
some of Aristotle’s claims to reach conclusions that he does not, and in so doing moves
his concept of higher friendship in a more inclusive and more potentially universal

9. 8
direction. Of course Ward’s book was published three years after Mitias’ but the charge
that Aristotle’s view of higher friendship can be realized by only a male elite has been
around for some decades.22
An early version of Ward’s argument about women’s
potential for higher friendship has, moreover, been easily available from 2008 onward.23
Had Mitias engaged some of these concerns, he could have pondered with greater depth
how genuinely universal the ancient understandings of higher friendship were.
In the absence of any such account, and from the limited evidence available, it
seems that Mitias himself does not share the ancients’ restrictive view about who is
capable of higher friendship. Instead, in his concluding chapter, we read that “Regardless
of whether it exists between men and women, colleagues, family members, partners,
neighbors or in any social contexts, philia is a human relation.” (206. Emphasis Original)
But this is not Aristotle’s position, nor Cicero’s, when it comes to the highest or truest
form of friendship. Mitias’ position about who is capable of this seems to be more
permissive than the classical view. It would have been instructive for Mitias to draw
attention to the gap between the ancient understanding and his on this important matter.
Appropriation and Innovation
While I agree with Mitias that more modern accounts of friendship reproduce
many of the features of ancient ones, it is an exaggeration to suggest that this is all they
do. A number of new insights into friendship have been generated by Montaigne,
Emerson, and Nietzsche. In keeping with his emphasis on exploring individuality,
Montaigne offers an additional explanation for his attraction to his friend La Boétie.
While, in Aristotelian fashion, he greatly admires his friend’s many sterling moral
qualities, there was also something about the irreducible uniqueness of both men that

10. 9
drew them together and bonded them as friends. As Montaigne puts it, “If a man should
importune me to give a reason why I loved him, I find it could no otherwise be expressed,
than by making the answer: because it was he, because it was I.”24
Emerson and Nietzsche also appropriate many aspects of the classical account of
friendship while simultaneously innovating in other regards. Classical thinking about
higher friendship had been overwhelmingly homophilic: friends were friends with
individuals like themselves. Emerson and Nietzsche introduce the value of diversity, and
the agonism it makes possible, into the ideal of higher friendship. Emerson suggests that
friendship doesn’t have to be based on similarity but that this bond can itself break down
the barriers of difference that usually separate people from one another: “the Deity in me
and in them derides and cancels the thick walls of individual character, relation, age, sex,
circumstance, at which he usually connives, and now makes many one.”25
Emerson both
echoes and amends the classical ideal: for him, higher friendship is based on a similarity
of virtue, which is the motivational basis of higher friendship, but the attraction of virtue
can overcome differences of personality, age, gender, and social location.
Emerson also shares the classical belief that higher friendships have a pedagogical
function, with the friends teaching one another to become better people. Yet he
introduces a distinctively agonistic tone to this education. For Emerson, one of the
friend’s crucial roles is to spur the other friend to greater heights, even when it hurts.
Friendship is, in part, a contest – friends struggle and compete with one another, but it is
all to the good of self-improvement. As he declares, “I hate, where I looked for a manly
furtherance, or at least a manly resistance, to find a mush of concession. Better be a nettle
in the side of your friend than his echo.”26
This is, of course, connected to Emerson’s

11. 10
heterophily. Were friends too alike, it would be harder for them to push one another to be
better, truer, stronger, braver, more self-reliant. A friend who is different from me can
stimulate me in ways that I cannot myself and inject new ideas, new possibilities, and
new experiences. This idea that friends must be different from one another in order to
spur each other to greater heights is evident when Emerson says, “There must be very
two, before there can be very one. Let it be an alliance of two large, formidable natures,
mutually beheld, mutually feared, before yet they recognize the deep identity which
beneath these disparities unites them.”27
A bit later on in the essay he urges, “Let him be
to thee for ever a sort of beautiful enemy, untamable, devoutly revered”.28
Emerson’s admiration for friendships that not just accommodate but embrace
diversity is also evident in Nietzsche’s approach. Although he nowhere enunciates a fully
developed theory of friendship, Nietzsche’s views can be reconstructed from his disparate
remarks on this topic. Nietzsche often suggests that acknowledging, tolerating, and even
relishing difference is a vital characteristic of robust friendship. His passage “Of friends”
invites its readers to reflect on how much variety and potential for division there is
among even the closest friends. “[E]ven the same opinions have a wholly different place
or intensity in the heads of your friends than in your own.”29
He encourages readers to
recognize and then welcome these differences and distances both between friends but
also within the self. “By getting to know ourselves and seeing our own nature as a
changing sphere of opinions and moods and thus learning a little self-deprecation, we
bring ourselves once again into equilibrium with other people.”30

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Nietzsche’s belief that when one partner chooses a different, and perhaps even
opposite, path from the friend's, this can nourish, rather than undermine, their relationship
is evident in the passage “Humanity of friendship and mastership”:
“You go toward the morning: and so I will head toward the evening” – to feel this
way is the high mark of humanity in closer relationship with others: without this
feeling every friendship, every discipleship and studentship sooner or later
becomes hypocrisy.31
The importance of balancing connection and individuation is elegantly expressed in the
aphorism 'In parting', where Nietzsche records that “Not in how one soul draws near to
another, but in how it distances itself from the other, do I recognize its relation to and
affinity with the other.”32
The Hellenic Moral Paradigm
In order to advance his claim about the failure of philosophers in the western
tradition over the last sixteen hundred years to appreciate the centrality of friendship to
moral life, Mitias turns to the idea of a moral paradigm (4). A moral paradigm embodies
a culture’s “understanding of the moral as such: what does it mean for an action, a
person, a law, or a community to be moral?” (87) His explanation for the failure to accord
friendship its due status in moral life is a shift in the moral paradigm (4). This shift is, in
turn, rooted in a change in the cultural paradigm, “since the concept of moral paradigm is
implicit in the concept of cultural paradigm.” (5). In this way, changes in moral and
cultural paradigms over time become Mitias’ dominant focus throughout the book as a
whole. He identifies five such paradigms in the western tradition: Hellenic, Hellenistic,
Mediaeval, Modern, and Contemporary. This erudite tour across moral paradigms makes

13. 12
his work extremely ambitious and wide –ranging. But his reflections on culture make his
forementioned distinction between the theoretical and the moral on the one hand and the
practical on the other even more elusive because he associates culture very closely with
behavior. “[T]he beliefs and values which function in their lives as principles of action at
the individual and social levels flow from the cultural paradigm” (12-13, cf. 15-16). To
further complicate matters, Mitias also says that friendship “made a quiet exit from the
whole cultural atmosphere of the past fourteen hundred years.” (4) How this claim can be
reconciled with the one discussed above, that there were many writings on friendship
across those centuries after the Hellenistic moral paradigm declined, is far from evident.
If we start, as Mitias does, with the Hellenic moral paradigm, one question to
arise is the place of Plato with regard to friendship. Plato belongs to this moral paradigm
(35-37) and Mitias pairs him with Aristotle in this regard (59, 121). He even claims that
Plato was one of the thinkers from this time who saw friendship as a basic moral value
(4), as “an ingredient of the happy life … a fact of human life” (160) and as “a need
inherent in human nature” (196). Yet Aristotle is credited as “the first philosopher who
articulated, elucidated, and made a serious attempt to establish the truth of this belief”
(198). And it is Aristotle’s influence that resonates down the centuries on later theories of
friendship (77). Plato’s status as a philosopher of friendship is indeed much more
ambiguous than his student’s. Although Mitias mentions three Platonic dialogues – the
Timaeus (36), the Republic and the Laws (64), I see no reference to Plato’s dialogue
dedicated to friendship, the Lysis. The very fact that Plato devotes a dialogue to the topic
could support Mitias’ claim that he deems friendship to be a central moral value. But as
one of Plato’s aporetic dialogues, the stance of the Lysis toward friendship is, as

14. 13
Alexander Nehamas reports, “quite inconclusive”.33
It could be argued that by casting the
children Lysis and Menexenus as Socrates’ principal interlocutors, Plato is depicting
friendship as a relationship best suited to the young. Note that Miccus, described at the
start as Socrates’ “old friend and admirer”, never makes an appearance.34 David Bolotin
takes the point of the Lysis to be that friendship is difficult and illusory and that
philosophy is higher than friendship.35
What matters more than being a friend to other
humans is being a friend to wisdom which is, etymologically, what the philosopher is.
Mary Nichols, by contrast, finds a more positive appreciation of friendship in the Lysis.
For her the choice is not between philosophy and friendship but rather philosophy is
grounded in the same things as friendship. She concludes that for Plato, “… philosophy
must find its model in the experience of friends—an experience of one’s own as another
who cannot be assimilated or subordinated … The experience of friends offers us access
to a world that must be known rather than mastered, and one that is not so radically
different from ourselves that it must remain unknown.”36
What can be said with confidence, as I have suggested elsewhere, is that Plato’s
Lysis sets the agenda for Aristotle’s thinking about friendship, posing as it does a series
of questions about whether friends should be similar or dissimilar; whether friendship is
the prerogative of good people or can be experienced by evil ones; whether friendship
must be mutual; whether good people even need friends; and whether friendship is an end
in itself. Aristotle engages these questions in Books VIII and IX of the Nicomachean
Ethics, making the Lysis very influential in shaping classical western discourse about
friendship.37
But as the above cursory survey of some of the secondary literature
indicates,38
is not clear that Plato advocates friendship as a central moral value in the way

15. 14
Aristotle does. Offering no commentary on Plato’s specific teachings on friendship,
Mitias cannot support his claims about its centrality for Plato. It could be that what a
closer inquiry into Plato’s views on friendship reveals is that it is possible to participate
in the Hellenic moral paradigm without being an enthusiastic proponent of friendship,
just as it is possible to enthusiastically propose friendship from within other moral
paradigms.
The Medieval Moral Paradigm
The Medieval moral paradigm, discussed in Chapter Four, was marked, in Mitias’
view, by three key features - otherworldliness, a finally created world, and hierarchical
institutionalism (89). As per his wider argument, these features shaped medieval
approaches to friendship. Or rather they explain the dearth of attention to friendship in
medieval moral theory – sections 4 and 5 of this chapter both include “absence” in their
subtitles. Friendship’s role in the good life is downgraded by this paradigm’s focus on
God and eternal happiness. Friendship might be a highly satisfying human experience but
it cannot guarantee eternal happiness (114). This chapter concludes with a discussion of
Gilbert Meilaender’s argument about the displacement of philia by agape in Christian
ethics. The Christian commitment to universal love (agape) aroused discomfort with
friendship’s particular and preferential nature (118). This meant that “medieval moral
philosophers failed to take into account the fact that friendship is an essential human need
and that, consequently, it is a necessary condition of the good life.” (119)
Meilaender actually identifies three points at which philia and agape collide. In
addition to philia’s unabashedly particularistic and preferential nature that Mitias
mentions, there is the fact that classical friendship required mutuality and reciprocity,39

16. 15
whereas Christian love should be extended to all, irrespective of their ability or
inclination to acknowledge and reciprocate. Thirdly, philia is subject to change, as both
Aristotle and Cicero make clear, with each writing about the forces that corrode, as well
as those that sustain, friendship. It has always fascinated me that the when we first hear
Scipio’s voice from the grave, ventriloquized by his surviving friend Gaius, what we
learn about are the threats to friendship. Gaius concludes this litany by observing that
“These numerous causes, fatalities, so to speak, were ever threatening friendships, so that
he [Scipio] used to say, that it seemed to him to require not only wisdom, but good
fortune as well, to escape them all.”40
(35) Agape, by contrast, should demonstrate the
same constancy as God’s love for his creatures.41
David Konstan supplies two additional items to this list of incompatibilities
between classical friendship and Christian love. The fourth is that whereas philia
celebrates the friend’s exemplary moral character, as is clear in Gaius’ praise for Scipio
(and Montaigne’s for La Boétie), the Christian tradition, because of its emphasis on
human fallibility, frailty, and original sin, demonstrates far greater humility when it
comes to evaluating any human’s moral character. Fifthly, the insistence upon equality
and similarity between the friends which is a hallmark of the ancient view is replaced in
Christianity by the model of God’s relationship with his creatures, which is marked by
inequality and dissimilarity (even though all are made in his image and likeness).
Konstan concludes that “Taken together, the professions of humility toward peers and
friendship with God exactly reverse the classical paradigm.”42
He further observes that
the Christian image for unity and connection among persons tends to be kinship or
fraternity rather than friendship.43

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Although he cites neither Meilaender nor Mitias, Nehamas has recently made this
first point about the clash between Greek philia, which was necessarily partial and
preferential, and Christian agape which aspired to emulate the universality of divine
love.44
But Nehamas notes that there were some exceptions to this – viz. committed
Christians who extolled the ancient ideal of friendship. Most notable among them was
Aelred de Rievaulx, a twelfth century Cistercian Abbot who was later canonized. Deeply
influenced by Cicero, and thus by inheritance Aristotle, Aelred construed friendship as a
foretaste of heavenly bliss.45
It would be informative to learn Mitias’ views on exceptions
like this; writers who somehow evade the moral paradigm of their time and adapt beliefs
from the earlier moral paradigm to their world. Once again, perhaps the moral paradigm
is not as hegemonic as Mitias paints it to be. But however it is to be explained, what we
see here is the mediaeval equivalent to what we observed above with the early modern
and modern thinkers on friendship – viz. the lingering influence of classical friendship on
later philosophies. This evidence is hard to reconcile with Mitias’ account of sequential
moral paradigms that fail to recognize friendship as a central moral value.
The second difference between philia and agape that Meilaender draws our
attention to – viz. that philia requires reciprocity whereas agape does not – takes us back
(or forward) to Emerson’s distinctive modern view of friendship. Not only does he
advance an ideal of heterophily with a powerful agonistic element but Emerson ends his
essay by clearly rejecting the classical ideal of reciprocity between friends.
It has seemed to me lately more possible than I knew, to carry a friendship
greatly, on one side, without due correspondence on the other. Why should I
cumber myself with regrets that the receiver is not capacious? It never troubles

18. 17
the sun that some of his rays fall wide and vain into ungrateful space, and only a
small part on the reflecting planet. Let your greatness educate the crude and cold
companion. If he is unequal, he will presently pass away; but thou art enlarged by
thy own shining … It is thought a disgrace to love unrequited. But the great will
see that true love cannot be unrequited. True love transcends the unworthy object,
and dwells and broods on the eternal … 46
In this arresting final paragraph of his essay, Emerson thus tries to include a human-sized
version of agape in friendship. This passage also challenges Meilaender’s third point of
contrast between philia and agape, for true friendship does not change according to
Emerson. This reveals, once again, that Mitias’ contention that Emerson, like most other
post-classical theorists of friendship, “revolved within the insight accomplished by the
ancient Greek and Roman philosophers” (3) fails to do justice to the striking originality
of his thought. Instead, what we see throughout Emerson’s essay are restatements as well
as rejections of the classical view – he endorses some of its elements while abandoning
others. Emerson’s view of friendship attempts to synthesize classical and Christian
features in a highly original way, and to fuse positions that most commentators, including
Mitias, see only as contradictory.
The Modern Moral Paradigm
Chapter Five, “Friendship in Modern Moral Theory”, delineates the features of
the modern moral paradigm which are humanism, diversity, rationalism, and reform-
mindedness (160). These features collaborated to marginalize friendship’s importance in
human life, but the only modern philosopher of friendship to receive any coverage in this

19. 18
chapter is Kant. This choice to focus exclusively on Kant is hard to understand given that
by Mitias’ own admission Bacon, Montaigne, Spinoza, Emerson, and Nietzsche are all
theorists of friendship writing after the medieval period (3). But even then, Kant’s views
on friendship are accorded only two pages of a forty page chapter. Mitias recognizes that
Kant “left for us several insightful, penetrating and instructive discussions of the nature
and importance of friendship for human life” (164) without saying what they are.
Turning to what Kant actually wrote about friendship reveals him to continue the
long-standing insistence on friendship as the relationship of equals par excellence.47
For
that reason he shares Aristotle’s anxieties about one friend burdening another with her
suffering. Reaching out to a friend when I am suffering could introduce inequality and
dependency into the relationship and thus corrode the friends’ parity. Aristotle does a
very subtle dance on this topic in Chapter 11 of Book IX of the Nicomachean Ethics as
he asks and answers the question “Do we need friends more in good fortune or bad?” He
replies that in bad times, a good friend would not want to burden the friend with their
misfortunes. As he writes, once again in a passage that is meant as much to prescribe as
to describe, “people of a manly nature guard against making their friends grieve with
them, and, unless he be exceptionally insensible to pain, such a man cannot stand the pain
that ensues for his friends, and in general does not admit fellow-mourners because he is
not himself given to mourning”. In times of good fortune, the opposite holds: one should
seek out one’s friend so as to share the bounty with them.
However, if I am a friend to someone who is undergoing good or bad times, I
should act in complementary ways. If a friend is suffering, “it is fitting to go unasked and
readily to the aid of those in adversity (for it is characteristic of a friend to render

20. 19
services, and especially to those who are in need and have not demanded them; such
action is nobler and pleasanter for both persons).” But if my friend has enjoyed a
windfall, I should not rush to her side with any expectation of sharing in that good
fortune.
We find this same dance re-coreographed by Kant, at least when it comes to
misfortune. According to Kant
He is a true friend, of whom I know and can presume, that he will really help me
in need; but because I am also a true friend of his, I must not appear to him in that
light, or impose such dilemmas upon him; I … will sooner suffer myself than
burden him with my troubles … Because my friend is so generous as to be well-
disposed towards me, wishing me well, and being ready to aid me in any
difficulty, I must be equally generous in my turn and not demand it of him.
Kant also follows Aristotle’s lead in Chapter 3, Book IX of the Nicomachean Ethics by
ruminating on the question of how to treat former friends. Aristotle advises that they
cannot just slide into the category of strangers; instead we “should keep a remembrance
of … former intimacy.” Kant agrees and recommends that out of respect for the very idea
of friendship, we should not cast former friends as enemies either. But because
friendships can fall apart, we should exercise due caution in what we tell our friends lest
one day they turn against us.48
In this Kant is also engaging the debate within De Amicitia
about how to handle the risk of friends becoming foes.49
So once again, although Kant’s
views on friendship are supposed to operate squarely within the modern moral paradigm
which allows no space for the recognition of friendship as a central moral value, we see
him addressing some of the same concerns as Aristotle and Cicero.

21. 20
Kant also grapples directly with the philia / agape tension mentioned above and
attempts his own reconciliation of the two. Upholding universal benevolence as the ideal,
he concedes that friendship, being preferential and particularist, can work as an
impediment to that: “that which diminishes the generality of good-will and closes the
heart toward others, impairs the soul’s true goodness, which aspires to a universal
benevolence.”50
But rather than casting philia and agape as competitors in a zero-sum
game, he recommends the practice of friendship as a preparation for a more general
benevolence. That benevolence is a heavenly ideal which is hard to realize on earth,
given how mutually mistrustful people are. Friendship reduces that mistrust and so
provides some training for universal benevolence.51
When understood in this light,
friendship can be laudable as “a special bond between particular persons; in this world
only, therefore, it is a recourse for opening one’s mind to the other and communing with
him, in that here there is a lack of trust among men.”52
I thus read Kant as attempting a
similar feat to Emerson’s – viz. trying to synthesize classical and Christian approaches to
friendship.
Conclusion
Mitias’ last historical chapter is about friendship in contemporary moral theory,
but it says even less about friendship specifically than did the previous chapters. This is
because “the three prominent philosophical approaches, pragmatism, philosophy of
existence, and analytic philosophy, dismissed friendship as a central moral value from
moral theory.” (191) Friendship is not seen as a moral demand, a human need, or a key
ingredient in the good life (191). The major theme in Mitias’ book then is that for
centuries, moral philosophy has occluded a central aspect of human nature. For the past

22. 21
sixteen hundred years, western philosophy has provided a poor mirror of human nature
because it has failed to reflect, and reflect upon, this enduring component of selfhood. As
this indicates, Mitias deems friendship to be an ontological need. Humans are social
creatures and from this he proclaims our need for friendship. It “is an indispensable
condition for human growth and development; and it is so basic that we cannot be truly
fulfilled without meeting its demands.” (198) Whatever the changes in self-
understandings and the moral and the spiritual conditions that give rise to them, the
“basic stuff – emotional, intellectual, and biological” of human identity “has practically
remained constant” (198). Part of this enduring stuff is the need for friendship (1, 14,
121).
So Mitias’ book is a declension narrative of a distinctive kind. Contrast the
declension narrative outlined by William Deresiewicz, according to which the value and
meaning of friendship has eviscerated over the centuries since the classical era. This has
occurred not just at the level of philosophy and literature but also people’s actual
experience of friendship.53
On Mitias’ account, although friendship has been
systematically decentred as a moral value within the western tradition of moral
philosophy, this has not affected its central place in human life and experience. If, as
Mitias suggests, humans continue to need and define friendship much as they ever did,
then post classical moral philosophies that undervalue or neglect friendship have had
little impact on human experience. These philosophical approaches, however limited and
deficient, appear to be fortuitously impotent when it comes to affecting our need for and
experience of friendship. From this vantage point, Friendship: A Central Moral Value

23. 22
serves primarily as a wake up call to moral philosophy to get back in touch with human
nature.
1
In AMITY: The Journal of Friendship Studies (2013) 1: 89-91.
2 Michael H. Mitias, Friendship: A Central Moral Value. Amsterdam - New York:
Rodopi 2012.
3
Translated by George Collins. London, New York: Verso.
4 On Civic Friendship: Including Women in the State. Columbia University Press, New
York.
5 The Meaning of Friendship. Palgrave Macmillan UK.
6 Friend v. Friend : The Transformation of Friendship – and What the Law Has to Do
With it. Oxford University Press, New York.
7 Friendship . Yale University Press, New York and London.
8 A Tremendous Thing: Friendship from the Illiad to the Internet, Cornell University
Press, Ithaca.
9 Friendship: A History, (ed.) Barbara Caine, Equinox, 2009.
The Challenge to Friendship in Modernity (eds.) Preston King and Heather Devere,
Frank Cass, Essex, 2000.
10 On Friendship. New York: Basic Books.
11 Friendship Reconsidered: What it Means and How it Matters to Politics. New York:
Columbia University Press.
12 Contemplating Friendship in Aristotle’s Ethics. Albany: State University of New York
Press. My review article of these three works appears in The Review of Politics, Vol. 79,
No. 4, Fall 2017, pp. 695-707.

24. 23
13
The Form of Politics: Aristotle and Plato on Friendship. McGill Queen’s University
Press, Montreal and Kingston.
14
On friendship’s rarity for Aristotle, see Mitias 70-71.
15
“Of friendship” at
http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/3/5/8/3586/3586.txt
16
“Friendship”
http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/transcendentalism/authors/emerson/essays/friendship.html
17
See my “Circles, Ladders and Stars: Nietzsche on Friendship” (64) in The Challenge to
Friendship in Modernity (eds.) Preston King and Heather Devere, Frank Cass, Essex,
2000, 50-73.
18
This must, however, be a typographical error with the “not” wrongly included for
Gaius sums up his view thus in Section 78: “against all these faults and disadvantages
there is one safeguard and precaution; it is that men should not begin to love too quickly,
and that they should not love the unworthy.”
19
See Abbey, 2000, op. cit.
20 Ward, 2016, op. cit. pp. 12-13.
21 Ward, 2016, op.cit. 17, 104.
22
See, for example, Tovey, Barbara and Tovey, George. “Women’s Philosophical
Friends and Enemies.” Social Science Quarterly 55/3 (1974-75): 586-604; Bradshaw,
Leah. “Political Rule, Prudence and the Woman Question in Aristotle.” Canadian
Journal of Political Science 24/3 (Sep 1991): 557-573; Saxonhouse, Arlene. “Aristotle:
Defective Males, Hierarchy, and the Limits of Politics.” In Mary Lyndon Shanley and
Carole Patemen, eds. Feminist Interpretations and Political Theory. University Park, PA:

25. 24
Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991. 32-52.
23
Ann Ward, “Mothering and the Sacrifice of Self: Women and Friendship in Aristotle’s
Nicomachean Ethics” thirdspace 7/2 (Winter 2008): 32-57.
[http://www.thirdspace.ca/journal/article/view/ward/102].
24
Montaigne, “Of Friendship” op. cit. Cf. Nehamas 2016, op. cit. pp. 119-121.
25
From his essay “Friendship”
http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/transcendentalism/authors/emerson/essays/friendship.html
26
Ibid.
27
Ibid.
28
Ibid. Grayling attaches what he calls a “contrarian view” to Nietzsche – viz. the view
“that a friend is one who opposes and thereby strengthens, who challenges, who does not
help by lifting part of the friend’s burden, but helps him by fighting him” (2013, 10).
Given Emerson’s early and enduring influence on Nietzsche, he could well be the
inspiration for this view but Emerson does not appear in Grayling’s study either as an
influence on Nietzsche nor as a modern theorist of friendship.
29 Section 376 of Human, All Too Human I, Translated with an Afterword by Gary
Handwerk. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA, 1995.
30
Ibid.
31 Section 231 of “Mixed Opinions and Maxims”, Human, All Too Human II, Translated
with an Afterword by Gary Handwerk. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA, 2013. I
modify Handwerk’s translation of the section title slightly: he calls it “friendship and
mastery”.
32
Section 251, “Mixed Opinions and Maxims”, Ibid.

26. 25
33 Nehamas, 2016, op. cit. p. 233, n 11. Cf. Digeser 2016, op. cit. p. 8.
34
http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/p/plato/p71ly/#lysis
35 David Bolotin, Plato’s Dialogue on Friendship: An Interpretation of the Lysis, with a
New Translation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977).
36
Page 11 in “Friendship and Community in Plato’s Lysis”, The Review of Politics, 68,
2006, pp. 1-19. Digeser, 2016, op. cit. p. 286 note 7 sees the act of philosophy as paving
the way for a friendship in this dialogue. Catherine H. Zuckert also extracts a more
positive view of friendship from the dialogue than does Bolotin. Plato’s Philosophers:
The Coherence of the Dialogues. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2009, pp. 509-
531.
37
Abbey, 2017, op. cit. p. 705.
38
Nichols, 2006, op. cit. p.2, note 1 lists some of the other commentaries on the Lysis.
39
Mitias discusses this aspect of friendship on page 211.
40
De Amicitia, # 35
http://www.uah.edu/student_life/organizations/SAL/texts/latin/classical/cicero/deamicitia
.html
41
Friendship: A Study in Theological Ethics by Gilbert Meilaender, University of Notre
Dame Press, Notre Dame. 1981. “Prologue”, p. 3.
42
Page 101 in “Problems in the History of Christian Friendship”, Journal of Early
Christian Studies, Vol. 4, No. 1, 1996, pp. 87-113.
43
Ibid. 97, 101-102.
44 Nehamas, 2016, op. cit. pp. 30-32.

27. 26
45
Ibid. pp. 34-35. Grayling also identifies Rievaulx as a figure who tries to reconcile the
classical praise and the Christian suspicion of friendship (2013, 8-9).
46
Emerson, “Friendship”, op. cit.
47
(27: 426), pp. 186-187, “Of Friendship” pp. 184- 190 in Lectures on Ethics, (eds.)
Peter Heath and J.B.Schneewind, Translated by Peter Heath, Cambridge University
Press, New York, 1997.
48 Ibid. 27: 430, p. 189.
49
Cicero, De Amicitia, op. cit. (#59-#60)
50
Kant, “Of Friendship”, op. cit. 27: 428, p. 188.
51 Ibid. 27: 428. p. 188.
52 Ibid. 27: 428. p. 188.
53
“Faux Friendship” The Chronicle of Higher Education, December 6, 2009.