Friendship is not only usefulness. Several times friendship is loyalty. Also, many times it is closeness. Moreover, we could properly associate the notion of friendship to the activities of supporting, helping, consoling and advicing. So, in our daily lives, it seems that we make many mistakes about friendship. Or it seems, at least, that there are many differing ways of interpreting friendship. Maybe, almost each one of us has a personal idea about friendship. Nonetheless, a philosophical attitude and a philosophical life require more precise ideas about issues like friendship, COURAGE, DIGNITY, RESPONSIBILITY, SCRUPULOUSNESS and many others.

Friendship is not only usefulness. Therefore, it could be seriously misleading  to mistake a FRIEND with a contributor, a partner, a co-worker, a collaborator. Of course, we cannot deny that many times friends do prove very helpful and very useful. However, we should never measure friendship by its possible utility. In fact, friends should be quite different from any useful entity. As a matter of fact, we want friends to be loyal, to be close to us, to be morally supportive, to be outspoken. And these qualities do differ from the notion of usefulness. In fact, the latter could belong to proper definitions of plumbers and carpenters. But friends are something else.