Exploring Aristotle's Views on Friendship

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In Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, he devotes two whole books to discoursing the different types of friendships and the importance of friendship to the contribution of happy person. More so, the nature of the good of friendship for the good person is an important to the work as a whole. Friendship provides a bridge between the virtues of character and the virtues of intellect. Aristotle divides friendship into three segments, and the divisions are based on the kind of good each provides. As a whole, friendship consists of a mutual feeling of goodwill between two people and involves equal exchanges between one another. The first kind of friendship is known as utilitarian and is mostly associated with older people. In this form, both people …show more content…

For example, it is asserted that it is important that friendship be active because happiness, which plays a big part in friendship, is a certain activity, and an activity is clearly something that comes into being and not something that belongs to us like a sort of possession (NE1169b28-30). Back in book one, it is stated that happiness, or Eudaimonia, is the highest aims that a person has and happiness, according to Aristotle, is a public affair, not a private one, so who we share said happiness with is of great significance. There is debate as to whether or not a happy person needs friends. Aristotle disagrees that people who are blessed and self-sufficient have no need for friends since the good things are already theirs, but I feel that this assertion is somewhat true. A person that is happy and blessed can have friends, but it is not absolutely necessary that they would need friends. I believe that one needs friends more in bad fortunes because if it is a good, virtue-friendship, the friend will be there to uplift them and encourage them to do better and improve their fortune. This does not mean that when they come of good fortune that they stop being friends, but their friendship would be stronger because that friend was there for them through the tough times and there to help them grow, which is one of the best things one can do for another

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