Love and friendship: views across world philosophy

Philosophers have asked what love is, whom we ought to love, and what friends are for. In Plato’s Symposium Socrates describes a love that starts as desire for a beautiful body and can be raised into love of a beautiful soul and, in the end, of Beauty itself. Aristotle sorted friendships by what they rest on, pleasure, usefulness or virtue, and in the best kind found a friend to be “another self”. Epicurus valued friendship above almost everything in a happy life.

In China the dispute was over whom to care for. Mozi taught “inclusive care”: concern for other people’s families and communities as for one’s own. Mencius answered that care rightly starts with one’s own family and is extended outward, and that caring for everyone alike amounts to having no father.

Kierkegaard set the preferential loves of lovers and friends against love of the neighbour, which takes in everyone, enemies included, and for that reason has to be commanded. Iris Murdoch joined love to vision: to love someone is to see them truly, with just and loving attention. Philosophers still ask whether we love people for their qualities, which others could share, or for who they are.

Through time

5th century BCE

Mozi

fl. 440–420 BCE · Chinese

People should practise inclusive care (jian ai), caring about other people’s lives, families and communities as much as their own. In practice this means doing others no harm, fulfilling one’s role in family and state, helping friends and neighbours in need, and looking after the old, the lonely and orphans.

4th century BCE

Plato

c. 429 – 347 BCE · Western

In the Symposium Socrates treats sexual desire as an inadequate response to a beautiful body, one that should be developed into love of the beauty of a person’s soul, and finally into love of the Form of Beauty itself.

Aristotle

384–322 BCE · Western

Friendships rest on pleasure, usefulness or virtue, the reasons we have for loving the friend. In the best kind, between people of good character, each wishes the other well for the other’s own sake, they share a life of conversation and thought, and the friend becomes “another self”.

Studied with and argued against Plato

Mencius

c. 372 – c. 289 BCE · Chinese

Care has proper degrees: we owe more concern to relatives, teachers and friends than to strangers or animals. Goodness is rooted in love for parents and respect for elders, and grows as we extend these feelings outward. Mozi’s impartial caring, he said, amounts to having no father.

Argued against Mozi

Epicurus

341–270 BCE · Western

Friendship is essential to the happy life: in one saying it goes dancing round the world, telling us all to wake up to happiness. A wise person feels a friend’s torture as keenly as their own, and would sooner die for a friend than betray them. Friendships first grew up because they made people safer.

About 1800 years later

16th century

Judah Abrabanel

c. 1465 – after 1521 · Jewish

Love runs through the whole of reality, from God’s love of his own beauty to the desire of creatures. Sensual love is not to be despised: it is the doorway to spiritual and cosmic love.

17th century

Madame de Sablé

1598–1678 · Western

Most apparent virtue is pride in disguise, but true friendship, where each sacrifices for the other, is where genuine virtue can still be found.

Ninon de Lenclos

1620–1705 · Western

Love is not a spiritual ascent but the highest of natural pleasures, one that women may pursue as freely as men.

19th century

Søren Kierkegaard

1813–1855 · Western

Erotic love and friendship are preferential loves that arise naturally, and they risk becoming selfish forms of self-love. Love of the neighbour takes in everyone, enemies included; because it runs against our nature it must be commanded, and only God’s authority can ground that command.

20th century

Martin Buber

1878–1965 · Jewish

We can treat what we meet as an ‘it’ or encounter it as a ‘Thou’. Real relation between people is mutual without erasing their difference, and it reaches beyond the human, as far as the divine.

Iris Murdoch

1919–1999 · Western

Love and knowledge belong together: “to love, that is, to see”. Moral life depends on attention to reality inspired by love, directed at particular people and things, and through loving what is good in them we come to understand the Good itself.

Drew on Plato

Love and friendship