Portals of Perception

Philia entails a fondness and appreciation of the other. For the Greeks, the term philia incorporated not just friendship, but also loyalties to family and polis-one's political community, job, or discipline.

Aristotle elaborates on the kinds of things we seek in proper friendship, suggesting that the proper
basis for philia is objective: those who share our dispositions, who bear no grudges, who seek
what we do, who are temperate, and just, who admire us appropriately as we admire them, and
so on. Philia could not emanate from those who are quarrelsome, gossips, aggressive in manner
and personality, who are unjust, and so on. The best characters, it follows, may produce the best
kind of friendship and hence love: indeed, how to be a good character worthy of philia is the
theme of the Nicomachaen Ethics. The most rational man is he who would be the happiest, and
he, therefore, who is capable of the best form of friendship, which between two "who are good,
and alike in virtue" is rare (NE, VIII.4 trans. Ross). We can surmise that love between such
equals-Aristotle's rational and happy men-would be perfect, with circles of diminishing quality for
those who are morally removed from the best. He characterizes such love as "a sort of excess of
feeling". (NE, VIII.6)