Aristotle Sorts Out Friendship

Books eight and nine of the Nicomachean Ethics contain the most careful treatment of friendship in the Western tradition, and one idea in them relieves more unnecessary guilt than anything else in this course.

Aristotle divides friendship into three kinds according to what it is based on.

The first is friendship of utility. You are friends because of what you do for each other: colleagues, neighbours, people who trade favours. The second is friendship of pleasure. You are friends because you enjoy each other's company: drinking companions, people who share a hobby, the group that was fun at twenty-two. The third is friendship of character, in which you love the person for who they are rather than for what they provide.

Here is the part that matters. Aristotle says the first two are genuine friendships, and that they end when the usefulness or the pleasure ends.

That is not a betrayal and not a failure of anybody's virtue. It is what those friendships were. You changed jobs and the friendship stopped, because the friendship was built on working together, and the foundation was removed. Most people carry guilt about exactly this, having applied the standard of the third kind to relationships that were honestly and respectably one of the first two.

The third kind is different because what is loved does not move when circumstances do. It also, on Aristotle's account, takes a long time. He says you cannot claim it until you have shared salt together, meaning eaten a great many meals, because you cannot know somebody's character quickly and the claim is empty until you do.

He adds a requirement that sounds sentimental and is structural: the highest friendship needs both people to be good.

His reasoning is not moralising. If you love somebody for their character, and the character is bad, then either you are loving something bad or you are loving something you have invented and attached to them. There is nothing solid for the friendship to be about. Whether that is right is a real question, and the novels in the third book of this course keep circling it: whether it is possible to see a person accurately and love them anyway.

There is one further requirement, and it is the strangest sentence in the discussion. Aristotle says you must first be a friend to yourself.

Somebody at war with themselves, whose wishes for themselves are unstable and contradictory, has no fixed position from which to wish well to another person. Friendship on this account is a relation extended outward from a relation you already have, which makes the virtue internal and relational at the same time, and quietly anticipates a great deal of what the last book of this course says about attachment.

Read this beside the Greek vocabulary chapter and a pattern appears that will hold for the rest of the course. Almost every useful thing anybody has said about love consists of separating something that was being treated as one thing into parts that behave differently. Four words instead of one. Three friendships instead of friendship. Later, three components instead of love, and three brain systems instead of desire.

Splitting is what progress looks like here, and it has looked like that since Athens.