Three Forms of Friendship | Nicomachean Ethics, Book VIII

Friendship, for Aristotle, is one of the necessary components of a good life; it is what makes life worth living.

Today, we continue our read-along of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. If you’re just now joining and want to catch up, here is the schedule we are following (with links to previous posts):

• July 1: Introducing the work, Aristotle’s life, etc.

• July 8: Book I

• July 15: Book II

• July 22: Book III

• July 29: Book IV

• August 5: Book V

• August 12: Book VI

• August 19: Book VII

• August 26: Book VIII

• September 2: Book IX

• September 9: Book X

• September 16: Retrospective

This read-along of Nicomachean Ethics is free. But if you want to support my work – which really means helping me support my family – and you want access to the monthly Zoom calls, become a paying subscriber. For the rest of August, a yearly subscription to Walking Away is 20% off. To subscribe and support my work on Substack and YouTube, just go to this link.

Scene of Foxfire

As I write this, I’m sitting at the Columbus airport. I’ve arrived at the terminal early enough that my gate isn’t even displaying my flight number yet, and I’m tired. I was out most of the night celebrating the marriage of two college friends.

It was a grand occasion. I saw so many friends – friends I hadn’t seen in years – and got to hear the stories of their lives over the past decade. Even friends I consider quite close had to tell me quite a bit, as I am notoriously bad about keeping in touch. (The bride had one friend assigned as a ‘Jared wrangler’, out of fear I would forget crucial details like venue, time, or the fact that there was a wedding.)

It’s a fitting context for our discussion of Book VIII, Aristotle’s initial treatment of friendship. This book, along with Book IX, is arguably the most insightful and one of the most beautiful discussions of friendship in the history of Western thought.

Friend “is most necessary with a view to life,” Aristotle says. He even goes on to claim that “no one would choose to live” if they were without friends, and that even those with other goods (wealth, power, and so on) need friends (perhaps even more than the rest of us). Friendship, for Aristotle, is one of the necessary components of a good life; it is what makes life worth living. We are better off for having friends, even if we are contemplatives, as friends enable us to be better. Young people show this natural inclination for friendship by forming quick friendships — though, for reasons we will see, these friendships tend not to last. “A human being is by nature more a coupling being than a political one,” Aristotle writes in his discussion of friendships between husband and wife.

The key distinction one needs to remember from this book is three-fold (with one layer of complication). Friendship comes in three varieties: friendship of utility, friendship of pleasure, and complete friendship. This mirrors a distinction in things that are lovable: things that are useful, things that are pleasurable, and things that are noble.

(The complication comes when Aristotle discusses ‘friendships of superiority,’ which for him includes the caring relations between children and parents, husband and wife, and so on. These seem to be – for Aristotle! – very different than the other forms of friendship, more concerned with proportion than with similarity.)

I have written about friendship in Aristotle a number of times. Here’s how I previously broke down the distinction between the three varieties of friendship, with some light edits.

First, we have friends of utility. A friend of utility is a friend that one has because they provide something for you: social connections, material wealth, opportunities for career advancement. These friendships are brittle and often asymmetric. One friend typically provides more value than the other, at some point it becomes pointless for one friend to continue the friendship. When circumstances change, the friendship rarely adapts. Instead, it ends.

Second, friends of pleasure. These are friends who provide you with pleasure, broadly construed. Aristotle believes that these are especially prevalent among the young, who tend to pursue pleasure more zealously than the old. Like friendships of utility, friendships of pleasure are unstable. What provides pleasure for me now may not later — beauty fades, my interests shift, and the craving for more intense and concentrated pleasures grow.

Third, we have complete friendships. These are friendships in the fullest sense of the term. Friends, in this scenario, are perfectly alike in virtue. This kind of friendship is highly restricted. Those who are not sufficiently virtuous, whom Aristotle calls ‘base’, are unable to form these kinds of friendship. Only the virtuous can have full and complete friendships, friendships which go beyond utility and pleasure.

Note that last clause: go beyond. A virtuous friendship will almost certainly bring the friends pleasure of some sort, and very often there will be opportunities for utility, but that is not the core of the friendship. A virtuous friendship may include pleasure and utility, but it consists in something greater.

Young people tend to form friendships of the first kind, while those who are older and have had a chance to develop in virtue can form the third kind of friendship. These are the friendships which truly make life worth living.

It would follow from what Aristotle said that the vicious cannot have complete friendships. If you are not virtuous, then you cannot be perfectly alike in virtue. It seems odd to say it, but there is a compelling self-interested reason for being virtuous, as you cannot have friendships without virtue, and these make life worth living.

I’m going to risk breaking my own rule for this reading group (Aristotle is Always Right) and suggest that he is perhaps too stringent, however, when he discusses complete friendships. I think back to the wedding I was just attending — neither I nor any of my friends have attained the level of virtue Aristotle described. Yet our friendships are deeper than pleasure or utility. A key indicator of this is that our friendships involve a level of self-sacrifice accompanied by no thought. This can be minor – buying a few rounds at the bar and not keeping tabs on who has spent more – or they can be major. I have those sorts of friendships. Yet all of us are still works in progress, becoming better as we become older.

The virtuous man in Aristotle’s writing is akin to the Stoic sage or the Christian saint. I am certainly none of the above. Yet, it seems, I have something approximating these complete friendships. How and why this is so is worth thinking about as we continue to read Aristotle.