Can There Be Friendship Without Self-Interest?

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If something broke down at midnight, how many numbers in your phone could you call without embarrassment? Your contact list holds a thousand people, but you stop when the list narrows to five names. Aristotle said why two thousand years ago: some friendships exist not because we want them, but because they are useful to us.

You do someone a kindness. You find them a job, you help them move house, you pick up the phone on a hard day and listen for hours. They thank you, and it is a sincere thank-you at that. And right at that moment, a question you never invited crosses a corner of your mind: if I had nothing left to give, would this person still call?

The question feels shameful. As though you were smuggling an accounting ledger into a friendship. And yet the most serious thinkers in human history did not flinch from asking exactly this. The oldest and most systematic answer we have comes to us from 2400 years ago.

Aristotle divided his work the Nicomachean Ethics into ten books. Two of those ten, the eighth and the ninth, he gave over from beginning to end to a single subject: friendship. In the densest text of moral philosophy, the fact that he grants friendship more room than he grants justice is no accident. He puts it this way: even if a person had everything else, without friends he would not choose to live. And he adds something still more striking. Lawgivers, he says, seem to care more about friendship than about justice; because if people are friends to one another, they have no further need of justice.

Aristotle begins by drawing a distinction. Friendship is not one thing, he says; we give the same name to three things that resemble one another without being the same.

The first is the friendship of utility. You love the other person for the benefit they bring you. The neighbour you discuss the parking problem with because you live on the same street. The colleague who leaks you information before a meeting, and to whom you leak information in return. The acquaintance who gives you a reference when you are job-hunting and then asks you for one. These are real relationships, not counterfeit ones. But what holds them upright is the exchange running between the two of you.

The second is the friendship of pleasure. You love the other person because you have a good time when they are near. Their jokes are funny, you support the same team, you listen to the same music, at three in the morning you can still find something to talk about. This too is a real bond. But what holds it upright is the enjoyment running between the two of you.

There is no contempt in the way Aristotle looks at these two kinds. Most human relationships are like this, and they have to be; this is how life runs. But he makes a diagnosis: in these two friendships, the person is not loved for being who they are. They are loved for a property that happens to attach to them. When the usefulness is cut off, when the pleasure runs out, the ground the affection stood on disappears. That is why such bonds are easily formed and easily dissolved.

You do not need to read philosophy to test this. Look at what happens when you change jobs. The group chat you set up with people you had lunch with every day for years, whose birthdays you knew, whose homes you visited, falls silent within three weeks. Nobody is angry with anybody. Nobody has betrayed anybody. It is only that the ground holding the bond upright has been pulled away: being in the same building, sharing the same troubles, complaining about the same person. When the ground goes, the structure goes with it.

Aristotle also separates the young from the old here. The old form friendships of utility more often, he says, because they are looking not for what is pleasant but for what is useful. The young form friendships of pleasure; they live by feeling and chase whatever gives them delight in the moment. That is why the friendships of the young flare up quickly and burn out quickly; they begin in a day and end in a day.

And the third? The third is what Aristotle calls friendship in the full sense of the word. Here you love the other person not for some property attached to them, but for what they are. You want what is good for them not because it touches your own interest, but because it is good for them. When they are promoted, not one bitter vein stirs inside you. When they move far away, you grieve even though you know perfectly well that you will never receive anything from them again.

Aristotle says openly that this is rare. And the reason it is rare is not human wickedness but the price this friendship exacts: time. He reminds the reader of a proverb; two people cannot know one another until they have consumed together enough salt to establish a claim between them. In Turkish there is a phrase for this too, the claim of salt and bread, and it says exactly the same thing. Meeting someone happens in an evening; knowing them takes years.

Now let us return to the question we began with, because in answering it Aristotle ties a knot. Friendship in the full sense is not a friendship without benefit. On the contrary, it is the most beneficial of all; it is also the most pleasant. A good friend is useful to you, and you have a good time in their company. The difference lies not in whether benefit is present, but in where the benefit stands. In a friendship of utility, advantage is the foundation; pull it out and the building collapses. In a friendship of character, advantage is a fruit hanging from a branch; pick it and the tree stays where it is.

So the question changes shape. The real issue is not whether friendship without self-interest can exist. The real issue is this: do I love this person independently of what they give me? And how am I supposed to know?

In a text belonging to the Aristotelian tradition, there is a strange and unforgettable comparison. When we want to see our own face, we look into a mirror; when we want to know ourselves, we look at a friend.

The first time you hear it, the comparison sounds like a pleasant saying. But when you dwell on it, a serious claim emerges from underneath. The claim is this: a person cannot see themselves directly.

Everyone has experienced the most concrete version of this. When you hear your own voice on a recording, you do not recognise it. The voice seems not to belong to you, and it is faintly disturbing. This is because while you speak you hear your voice through the bones of your skull; other people hear it through the air. The voice you have been hearing for years is a voice nobody but you has ever heard.

Character works the same way. You hear yourself from the inside. You know your intentions, you know your reasons, you know how tired you were that day. That is why you always read your own behaviour in the best light. If someone else did the same thing, you would call it selfishness; when you do it, you say it was a difficult day. We are not impartial when we judge ourselves, because we are both the judge and the defendant in the case.

This is where the friend's mirror function comes in. A friend is the only eye that sees you from the outside without being hostile to you. Your enemy also sees you from the outside, and in fact sees some of your faults more clearly than anyone; but when they say so, you do not believe them, because there is an intent to wound in the way they say it. A stranger sees but does not speak, because it is no concern of theirs. Only a friend both sees and speaks, and in speaking wants not to demolish you but to correct you.

This is precisely why Aristotle calls a friend another self. That is not a romantic phrase but a technical definition. A friend is the place from which I am able to look at myself from outside.

But right here comes the sharpest objection the idea faces, and it is an objection people still make constantly today. If a friend is another self, then loving them is still loving myself, isn't it? In that case there is no such thing as friendship without self-interest; there is only a more refined, more polite form of self-interest. I do good things for them because doing good makes me feel good. I rejoice in their happiness because rejoicing pleases me. In the end it is always me.

Aristotle saw this objection, and he answered it by dividing self-love in two. There is one kind of self-love that pushes a person toward money, rank and bodily pleasure; it always wants to reserve more for itself, and in doing so takes from someone else. This is the selfishness everybody condemns. But there is another kind of self-love: a person assigning to themselves what is best and most noble; wanting to be someone they will not be ashamed of. According to Aristotle, the good person loves themselves in this second sense, and it is exactly for this reason that they can sacrifice for a friend. Because for them the real gain is not the thing held onto, but the person they become.

So the sentence "I am doing it for myself" is not as devastating as the objector supposes. The question is how far that "myself" extends. In a friendship of utility, I end where my skin ends, and the other person is a resource. In a friendship of character, my boundary has shifted; what happens to them has happened to me. This is not the settling of the account, but the disappearance of the ledger.

The French thinker Montaigne is perhaps the person who described this experience most plainly. His friendship with Étienne de La Boétie, whom he placed at the centre of his life, lasted only a few years; La Boétie died in 1563, at the age of 32. In his Essays, Montaigne tries to explain why he loved this bond so much, searches for a reason, cannot find one, and in the end gives up. The only thing he can say is this: because it was him, because it was me. There is no reason. If there were a reason, the friendship would end when the reason ended.

And once you set the bar this high, how many people are left?

Here Aristotle is mercilessly realistic. Friendship in the full sense cannot be formed with many people, he says; just as a person cannot be passionately in love with many people at once. A bond of this kind demands time, demands attention, demands a life lived together; and all of these are limited resources.

And there is a saying attributed to him in his old age. Reported by the ancient biographer Diogenes Laertius, and still argued over today as to how the text should even be read, the sentence runs: "O my friends, there is no friend." Said to have come from the mouth of a man who wrote two whole books on friendship, this is perhaps not a denial; it is the confession of someone who set the standard so high that he struggled to find a person who met it.

A version of that same confession would step onto the stage some 1400 years after Aristotle, in an entirely different part of the world, in the life of an entirely different man.

The year is 1095. Baghdad. The head teacher of the most prestigious educational institution of the age, the Nizamiyya madrasa, is a man not yet forty: Abu Hamid al-Ghazali. He stands at the summit of the scholarly world of his time. He has hundreds of students, a relationship with the court, and a name known for being unbeatable in debate.

And one day he stands up in the lecture hall and cannot speak. His tongue seizes. Physicians are called; they find nothing wrong with his body and say the illness comes from the heart. In the account of his own life that he wrote afterwards, usually rendered in English as Deliverance from Error, al-Ghazali describes this crisis in detail: he has reached the point where he can no longer be certain that he truly knows the things he has been teaching for years, nor even whether he has been teaching them for the sake of God or for the sake of fame.

In the end he leaves everything. He gives up his chair, his salary, his title; he goes to Damascus, to Jerusalem, from there on pilgrimage, and remains alone for years. His masterwork, the Revival of the Religious Sciences, is largely the product of these years of withdrawal.

Now here is the real question. When Baghdad's most powerful teacher left his chair, what remained of the crowd around him? Al-Ghazali does not ask this directly, but inside the Revival he places an entire book devoted to the etiquette of companionship and friendship. And there he gives an extremely practical, almost cool-headed list of who should be taken as a friend.

According to al-Ghazali, five qualities are sought in a person you would befriend. They must be intelligent, because friendship with a fool brings harm even when the fool means well. They must be of good character, because a person who is overcome by their anger burns the friendship down the moment they get angry. They must not be dissolute, that is, must not have made sin a habit. They must not be a person of religious innovation. And they must not be attached to the world.

This fifth one is the heart of the list. A person greedily bound to the world sees friendship as a kind of rank too; they keep it while it pays and drop it when it costs. Al-Ghazali describes attachment to the world as a lethal poison, because it is contagious. Stand near such a person long enough, and you too will begin to see what people are good for before you see anything else about them.

Against this, al-Ghazali says that friendship is not a dry act of selection but a chain of obligations. A friend has rights over a friend: a share of one's property, bodily help in a moment of need, a tongue that will defend them in their absence, an eye that sees their fault and covers it, prayer said for them behind their back, and a loyalty that continues toward their family even after their death. Notice that none of these rights is made conditional on reciprocation. Especially the last one: looking after the children of a person who can never give you anything again. This is the point where self-interest is impossible by definition.

This understanding had an institution in Anatolia, and that institution turned friendship from a feeling into a craft: the Akhi brotherhood.

In the thirteenth century, in the years when the Mongol invasion was turning Anatolia upside down, Shaykh Nasir al-Din Mahmud, known as Ahi Evran, gathered the tradesmen of Kayseri and then of Kırşehir, especially the tanners, the leather workers, into an organisation. The name of this organisation was futuwwa; the word comes from a root meaning youth and bravery, and rests on a moral tradition carried from Baghdad to Anatolia. As for the word "akhi", some researchers say it comes from the Arabic word meaning "my brother", others from an old Turkish word meaning "generous". Both describe the same thing.

In the futuwwa charters, the written statutes of the Akhi brotherhood, appears the rule everybody knows by heart: you shall keep three things bound, your hand, your tongue and your loins; and you shall keep three things open, your table, your door and your heart.

To understand what this rule actually amounted to, it is worth listening to an outside eye. The Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta wandered through Anatolia in the early fourteenth century and could not believe what he saw. In every city he entered, young men he had never met competed with one another for the right to host him and his companions. According to his account in his Travels, the competition reached such a pitch that the young men would argue over which lodge would receive the guest, and it nearly came to blows. These people worked during the day, laid out what they had earned in the evening, and passed the night in food, conversation and sema.

This has to be seen clearly: to them, Ibn Battuta was a completely useless human being. He was not their customer, not their neighbour, not their relative. He would leave tomorrow, never return, and owe nothing to anyone. The attention shown to him was pure precisely because any return was impossible.

But here one has to be honest, because the sorrow lies exactly there. The Akhi brotherhood was not a pure friendship club. It was at the same time a professional organisation; it set prices, inspected quality, bound the apprentice to the master, and turned the journeyman into a shop owner. In other words, there was self-interest in it, plenty of it. What they did was not to pretend self-interest away; it was to place self-interest underneath friendship. There was profit, but morality decided how the profit would be shared. The economy was built inside friendship, rather than friendship inside the economy, as it is today.

The sorrow is that this frame fell apart. The guilds were liquidated in the nineteenth century, the lodges were closed, the apprentice no longer grew up in the master's house. What remained was longing, but no structure left to carry the longing. Today the person who sighs that friendships used to be different usually thinks that people have changed. It is not people who changed; it is the order that used to bring them together in the same courtyard six days a week.

And what took the place of that order? This, at last, we can measure.

Today we can count how many friends a person has. The number is written at the top of the screen: followers, connections, friends. And that number is larger than it has ever been in human history.

In the 1990s, the British anthropologist Robin Dunbar made an estimate based on the relationship between the size of primate groups and brain structure. The number of relationships a human being can stably sustain is around 150. But the truly interesting part is the layers inside that 150. Furthest out, the crowd whose faces and names you know; inside that, the 50 people you see occasionally; further in, the 15 who would genuinely be upset by your troubles; and at the very centre, the 5 you could call at four in the morning.

Dunbar's warning is this: social networks expanded the outermost ring without limit, but did not enlarge that central ring of 5 by a single millimetre. Because what enlarges that ring is not information but time spent together, and time does not stretch. Your follower count can be in the tens of thousands while the number of people who know you is still in single digits.

The cost of this is not abstract. In 2023, Vivek Murthy, then the Surgeon General of the United States, issued an official advisory on loneliness and social disconnection. The report's most widely discussed finding was this: lacking sufficient social connection raises the risk of early death by an amount comparable to the harm of smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day. Loneliness is now discussed not merely as a mood but as a public health matter.

On the other hand, there is a study showing the positive side of the same equation, probably the longest-running research project in the world. The Study of Adult Development, begun at Harvard University in 1938, followed hundreds of young men across their entire lives; the research continues today, and now covers the participants' children as well. Out of decades of accumulated health records, income data and cholesterol readings, the study's director Robert Waldinger sums up the result this way: the best predictor of health and happiness at 80 was not the cholesterol level at 50, but satisfaction with one's relationships at 50.

So friendship without self-interest is not a luxury ornament. It is part of the infrastructure that lengthens a human life.

And what are we to do with this knowledge? Aristotle's standard is very high, al-Ghazali's list is very exacting, and the order of the Akhi brotherhood passed into history long ago. What do we actually have in hand?

In fact we have something quite clear: a direction.

First, friendship is not an adjective but a verb. The sentence "we are friends" states a condition and costs nothing. Friendship is what gets done. Aristotle's observation on this is still jolting: friendship lies in loving rather than in being loved; those who are praised are not the ones who are loved, but the ones who love their friends. In other words, the measure of the bond is not how much you are valued, but how much you give. This means the only real point of control in the relationship belongs to you.

Second, the only sound test is time, because time cannot be faked. Words can be imitated, gifts can be bought, interest can be performed; but three hours are three hours. Look at who gives you their time; and look at which time they give. Are they handing you the leftovers of their free evening, or are they coming by giving something else up?

Third, the real test of disinterestedness is not the crisis but the ordinary stretch. In a crisis people gather; coming to a funeral is easy, because it is defined and brief. What really distinguishes people is whose mind you cross on a Tuesday evening when nothing at all is happening. Self-interest is impatient; it likes events, not duration.

Fourth, and hardest of all: this has less to do with finding such a friendship than with becoming capable of it. For Aristotle, a friendship of character can only be formed between good people who resemble one another; which is to say that if you are looking for someone who will love without expecting a return, you first have to become someone who can love without expecting a return. Al-Ghazali's list, too, is as much a checklist for self-examination as it is a guide for searching. If you want a friend who is not attached to the world, pay attention to what is the first thing that comes to your mind when you look at people.

And finally, this has to be admitted. Friendship without self-interest is possible, but it is not free. On the contrary, it is paid for with the most expensive thing a person owns: time that never comes back. You cannot use again the evening you gave to someone. You can neither buy it, nor borrow it, nor make it up afterwards. This is why time is the currency of friendship least open to forgery; and this is why real friendship is disinterested not because you expect nothing while giving, but because what you gave has become too much a part of you to be asked back.

You may have a thousand followers. The question is whether there is, on that list, a number you could dial at two in the morning; and, more importantly, whether you are that number on somebody else's list.

Nöron Philosophy'de bugünkü bölümün sonuna geldik. Yeni bir hikâyede yeniden buluşmak üzere.