3 types of friendships, 3,000 years ago

Aristotle's taxonomy of relationships for utility, pleasure, and goodness alone still resonates today

by Luca Picardi

Who

Aristotle

What it says

It is all about relationships.

Aristotle understood this, about 3,000 years ago. So that is where I will begin. With his, Nicomachean Ethics, to be precise.¹ I might have started with the Bible, or the Koran or Buddhist teachings, but as well as being secular, Aristotle gave a particular focus to relationships, what he calls philia or friendships, a term he uses to describe all relationships that individuals develop with others. He defines friendship as a sort of flawless love that leads to a better life. How does he arrive at this point?

For Aristotle, friendships are ubiquitous.

No one would choose to live without friends, not even when there is sufficient wealth to have the means to do whatever one chooses. He gives four reasons to explain why friendships are imperative to a happy life. First, being with others is inherent to being human. Second, Aristotle believes that individuals have a need to help others that is stronger than the need to be helped. Being a good friend meets this need. Third, from a social perspective, friendships are both the mark of a good person, a virtuous person and they provide the means to train the virtues, to be prudent, just, courageous and more. And, lastly, individuals become aware of who they are, of their self by being with friends, by being with people who offer them a representation of who they are, who hold up a mirror to them.

So, for Aristotle relationships are functional. They make us.

He posits that we are drawn to others based on what we find useful or, pleasant, or for the good of the relationship itself. He uses these criteria as the basis for classifying friendships into three types. The first two are based on utility and pleasure and are seen by Aristotle as imperfect. By definition, relationships based on utility or pleasure are transient. When either party no longer perceives any personal gain the relationship dissolves. As if to further downgrade these types of relationships, Aristotle notes they are not based on the whole person, just on the bits that bring utility and pleasure.

The third type of relationship is for the sake of goodness alone. This is Aristotle’s idea of a perfect friendship and it is based on the whole person.

Here, friends are equal. They share activities and cherish each other even when it conflicts with the self-interest of one or both. Being together in such a relationship is an end in itself. Time, contact, and context are, for Aristotle, the necessary ingredients to forming a perfect relationship. Strong virtues and virtue building connections take time and proximity to form, and a conducive space. Good people are able to live together, share pain and joy, whereas sour individuals, which is Aristotle’s way of describing non-virtuous people, find it difficult to be by themselves let alone with somebody else.

Aristotle noted that these perfect relationships are more stable and less easily broken as they are based on and therefore reflect an individual’s good character. When they dissolve, it is generally due to a change of context, say when friends are separated physically for a long time; or when childhood friends develop at a different pace and consequently lose their common ground.

According to Aristotle, people have limited capacity to form deep, meaningful relationships. The human species can only manage a few perfect relationships but it can cope with, in fact, it demands a greater number of friendships rooted in utility and pleasure.

Although perfect friendships are in one sense essentially altruistic meaning that they are not rooted in utility or pleasure, they bring, from Aristotle’s perspective, deep benefits to both parties. The formation of a perfect relationship is akin to the construction of meaning in life. It is making something much more important than we ever make in our working life.

We find out, says Aristotle, who we are through perfect relationships.

Our friends become our “other selves”, they show us, with words, without words, who we are. They validate our strengths, expose our weaknesses and reward our attempts to address those weaknesses. As such, perfect relationships bring into one the disparate parts of the self, they make us into one, they help us to be whole. And as a complete human being we are in a position to make meaning out of life.

Reflections

Aristotle’s thinking about relationships leads me to three sets of reflections.

One is about the importance of expanding the learning outside the immediate area of work. I found that it is impossible to understand relationships without a, and arguably his, Aristotle’s philosophy. I have only scratched the surface of what Aristotle has said, and I am not a philosopher. But this brief encounter with his work, as well as bringing me back to the fact that human life and relating are inseparable, makes me think differently about science and relational social policy.

Two is about the different kinds of relationships in our lives, and what they bring to us. We use relationships to get ahead, to have fun, to make sense of ourselves, and of the world around us. So intrinsic is a relationship to the human condition we become unused to asking ‘what is this relationship doing for me?’ or ‘why am I drawn into this relationship?’.

Three concerns the idea of people who are very close to us act as a mirror into which we look to find out who we are. This helps me a lot because it makes redundant the idea of a helper – say a mentor or a support worker- telling someone in need of help what to do. In its place are a series of encounters and conversations over extended periods of time that may say nothing directly about who we are but nonetheless lead us to reflect, and so form and evolve the self, that make us who we are. We look into an other, we see ourselves, and we adapt and develop in light of what we see.

1. Bartlett, R. C., & Collins, S. D. (2011). Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. University of Chicago Press.