The kantian concept of friendship has been recently but yet scarcely studied. However, it has its place as the conclusion of the Doctrine of virtue, which gives it some prominence. This article argues that the kantian approach to friendship, as it emerges from the analysis of the texts of the Metaphysics of Morals and the Lectures on Ethics, involves elements that connect with our contemporary sensibility and, far from being a marginal concept in his ethical philosophy, represents one of its crucial moments.

The thesis that I intend to address in this article can be summarized with the idea that positive bonds(1) engender not only dependence, but also freedom and autonomy. Accordingly, it is worth asking what positive human bonds are based on. Or, to phrase the question another way, how can dependence and autonomy be blended when we talk about relationships in terms of bonds, that is, relationships with a special quality of union? I will try to answer these questions through a selection of texts that pay special attention to these issues from Kant's Metaphysics of Morals, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, and his Lectures on Ethics(2). I will thus briefly address the Kantian concept of freedom and introduce the idea of bonds that, as we will see below, is not as alien to Kantian ethics as it may at first seem.