However desirable it is to have neat definitions of important ideas, the fact is that most of them are too internally complex to be caught in a formula. “Friendship” is one such. There are many kinds of friendship, achieved by many different routes, and the most they have in common is that – somewhere in the ideal version of them – loyalty, sympathy and affection standardly figure.
Not everyone agrees that friendship is the summit of human relationship. Literature and the movies conspire to give this place to romantic love, while another convention yields the distinction to parent-child relationships. But each of these is successful only if it matures into friendship at last, which is why sages of quite different traditions extol friendship as the highest, the most central, the most necessary link in the social web. Given that humans are essentially social beings, friendship thus turns out to be a defining component of life worth living.
It is an interesting coincidence, and perhaps more, that both Mencius in ancient China and Aristotle in Greece taught that a friend is “another self”. If one cares fully about another person, they said, his good matters as much to oneself as one’s own: so a pair of true friends are “one mind in two bodies”.
more from AC Grayling at the Financial Times here.