John Stuart Mill (not) on Friendship

Jul 29, 2025

Continuing to think about (philosophical) friendship and debate in light of De Cruz's "Friendship with the Ancients" article... bear with me here, as this may be nonsense. If you are just joining me, you might read the following posts for context: De Cruz's *Friendship with the Ancients*, and At what point do we call something a friendship?.

I am doing a pretty quick read of The Supreme Court and the Philosopher: How John Stuart Mill Shaped U.S. Free Speech Protections by Eric T. Kasper and Troy A. Kozma, partially out of personal interest, partially out of a desire to connect my teaching of the US History survey to current events catastrophes -- of which concerns around free expression is certainly a significant part. It's been pretty good so far and, as it's been a while since I've read any Mill, it's a nice refresher on his thoughts in this area.

Mill's defense of free expression in On Liberty simultaneously presents an idealized understanding of debate as truth-seeking. In a line or two: Mill argues that free expression is important because it is the best way we can both learn the truth and be confident in its validity. By extension, it is foundational to a person's liberty to decide how to live. Although many reasons are given for this assertion, they mostly come back to the idea that an untested truth is not much of a truth to hold; we learn from assessing the validity of other opinions and comparing them with our own, even if the opinion of another is wrong.

Thus the famous passage:

But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.^[1]

Putting aside the question of free expression for a moment, I'm most interested in the way Mill characterizes this truth-seeking activity. He seems to give it two modes, two faces if you will: an antagonistic, competitive face, and a steady, even, almost administrative face.

The antagonistic, competitive side of the process is most apparent when Mill discusses one opinion facing off with another - i.e. truth against falsehood - or, even more vividly, truth against persecution. Consider some of the language of this passage:

The beliefs which we have most warrant for, have no safeguard to rest on, but a standing invitation to the whole world to prove them unfounded. If the challenge is not accepted, or is accepted and the attempt fails, we are far enough from certainty still; but we have done the best that the existing state of human reason admits of;

There's a scene taking shape here, debate as gladiator sport. You can almost see it, right? The setting: a coliseum. An opinion-holder stands at its center, the singular defender, taking on all opposing ideas one-by-one. That language of challenge, of victory and failure, is pretty common throughout this section of On Liberty.

But there's another side to truth-seeking, and it can be seeing in the sentences that immediately follow that passage:

we have neglected nothing that could give the truth a chance of reaching us: if the lists are kept open, we may hope that if there be a better truth, it will be found when the human mind is capable of receiving it; and in the meantime we may rely on having attained such approach to truth, as is possible in our own day.

Here, the process has a different tone, one that is open and receptive. We give truth a "chance of reaching us," we hold out with the possibility of "receiving" the best truth there is. This other version of the process - or is it another part of the process of truth-seeking being described here - is very much that of a learner: the person most deserving of confidence in their judgment has achieved that by being a listener, especially to criticism, one who not only seeks out diverse opinion but studies it. Mill literally says this is the key to wisdom: "No wise man ever acquired his wisdom in any mode but this; nor is it in the nature of human intellect to become wise in any other manner."

Immediately after that sentence, there is a fascinating passage that gives all of this an almost administrative quality:

The steady habit of correcting and completing his own opinion by collating it with those of others, so far from causing doubt and hesitation in carrying it into practice, is the only stable foundation for a just reliance on it:

"Correcting," "completing," "collating" (!) -- this aspect of truth-seeking seems less a gladiator sport and more the work of a PhD student or perhaps a paralegal, its venue not so much a coliseum as a library or an office.

Ok, let me try to connect this back to De Cruz, friendship, etc:

I said previously that a primary question I had re: De Cruz's "Friendship with the Ancients" concerned the distinguishing characteristic of this creative practice of imaginary friendship, in part because a lot of its characteristics sounded like the basics of healthy engagement with the past. Is De Cruz simply asking us to engage in well-intentioned debate with past figures, or is there something more here? What, if anything, is unique?

Putting De Cruz in conversation with Elizabeth Barnes did not necessarily help me answer this question, but it affirmed to me that it was a good question. Barnes's description of her relationship with Peter Singer seemed to tick many of the boxes of De Cruz's understanding of philosophical friendship, even though Barnes did not reach for that word. Yet one of the things that made me reach for the word friendship, as I was reading her article, was a sense of intimacy between Barnes and Singer, as she described it. The relationship went beyond a debate, or even beyond a mere ongoing conversation. There was something else connecting them between events, something subsisting enough and developing enough that that Barnes confided in Singer.

Contrast this with Mill. ⊕ This is not the same as saying that the truth-seeking process and its results don't matter to the people involved. Quite the opposite, as Mill sees the freedom to engage in this process, and to decide how one is to live from that process, as critical to the well-being of the individual. Mill articulates a very idealistic understanding of truth-seeking and debate, one in which truth can be fairly well separated from the people who hold it, and where the process to gaining truth seems almost isolated from the daily tumult of the world. Mill's imagined interlocutors in the work of truth-seeking are largely devoid of personality or anything that might make them more than an abstraction.

If we are speaking of truth-seeking as antagonistic debate, it seems the debaters are there for the event only, for the debate and only the debate. Not a relationship, not something ongoing, certainly not a friendship. Anything bigger than the debate jumps immediately to questions of truth (or perhaps Truth). ⊕ You might imagine that, in the bureaucratic-administrative office of truth-seeking, the forms bearing diverse opinions could be just well signed or unsigned -- the signatory does not matter, they'll be stamped and processed regardless. Nor does that change if we are speaking of the more receptive mode of truth-seeking - the learning mode - as there, we learn less from the opinion-holders themselves than from the receiving and collating of opinion.

To put it another way: for Mill, ideas are the grist of truth-seeking, and in the work of truth-seeking, the people who held those ideas are (mostly?) incidental.

Compare this to De Cruz:

[Friendship with the ancients] helps us to think of alternative conceptions of philosophy as more collaborative and as a series of ongoing conversations, rather than the singular ideas of exceptional minds. By befriending the ancients, the relational idea of philosophy becomes open to us, even as we recognize that they have enduring and important ideas to convey to us.^[2]

⊕ I am admittedly stretching Mill a bit here, to connect back to De Cruz, but I don't think I am stretching him to the point of tearing. I think there's a windowpane here, you can see a bit of light on the other side.

Some of the products of philosophical friendship that Cruz identifies might sound a lot like the benefits of Mill's idealized truth-seeking, as he describes them. De Cruz says, for instance, that friendship with the ancients encourages "honest evaluation of ideas and taking them at their full value," which sounds a lot like an end that Mill would ascribe to his understanding of truth-seeking debate. Even the idea of "epistemic humility" resonates with Mill's sense that no one has the full, infallible truth, but that we are always dealing instead with partial truths. (See, for example, Mill's depiction of Rousseau dropping bombs in the middle of the Enlightenment.)

⊕ FWIW, Mill only uses the word friend once On Liberty -- in the phrase 'friends of the proposition' which is not especially warm or intimate. But the path is radically different. Relational, collaborative, ongoing -- these ideas don't appear in Mill at all. I am guessing that De Cruz might argue that the endpoints are finally pretty different as well, even if the nature of that difference is not entirely clear.