De Amicitia

IT IS hard to define friendship, to delimit it to this or that sharply outlined class of things or feelings or activities. Aristotle, past master of logical technique, in defining it as a "moral virtue," placed it among the activities with the distinctive characteristic of being participated in by two or more persons in common. Persons who live together, who participate in the same life-activities, are friends. This is in accordance with common sense. But Aristotle goes further, and interprets the situation in the light of his own philosophical interests. He recognizes three typically distinct forms of activity in which men participate in common. There is pleasure, pursued by all who are young or unreflective. There is profit, pursued by older or cooler heads, as in business. And there is philosophy, pursued by the reflective, the rational, and the wise. Associations based upon pleasure, partnerships based upon profit, are not entirely genuine forms of friendship. Each partner is out for all he can get, and such associations are essentially competitive, grasping, selfish. If either can get more out of the association than his partner, he will; and if either thinks he can get more out of a different association, he will dissolve his former partnership. Youth and the glamor of simple illusions may conceal, for a time, the essential disunion. But in the end the principle of individualism, "each for self, and none for all," works itself out; and it becomes recognized that such associations contain within themselves the seeds of their own dissolution. Such pseudo-friendships are essentially accidental. True friendship is based upon reason-the highest of human faculties. Truth is inexhaustible, and its pursuit brings value to all who care for the things of the mind. The discovery and contemplation of the secrets of nature are essentially co-operative, non-competitive. Thought alone is pure, and a society of human beings, devoted to the pursuit of truth, rests upon a basis which can never be contaminated by envy, hatred, malice, and a narrow selfishness. With the growth of years such associations grow stronger, more intimate, more divine, more nearly like the life of God, "pure thought thinking itself." Such a society was the Pythagorean brotherhood, wherein lovers of wisdom were first called "philoso-