Essay On Enduring Friendship

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How can enduring happiness arise from friendship? Different people seek for different things and everyone has various goals in their life. For instance, wealth, pleasure, health, friendship, you name it. Every little action in our life is linked with our will to pursuit some goods. One may ask, is there any highest common good that we all seek for? As Aristotle said “happiness is apparently something complete and self-sufficient, since it is the end of the things achievable in action.” (Aristotle, p.8). He believes that happiness is the best good of life and we all ultimately seek for it. Aristotle also mentioned that happiness is not something that we can obtain on our own. In order to feel true and lasting happiness and live a complete life, …show more content…

It is most necessary for our life. For no one would choose to live without friends even if he had all the other goods (Aristotle, p.119). It is with no doubt that friendship is essential in our lives and we can hardly live a happy life without friends. One may say that developing friendship is an easy task. However, developing an enduring friendship that brings you long-lasting happiness is not that simple. One must know that only perfect friendships that are based on wishing goods to each other for each other’s own sake could bring us lasting happiness, not for friendship based on utility nor pleasure. According to Aristotle’s classification, friendship can be divided into three levels. Friendship based on utility, based on pleasure and based on wishing good for each other. Friendship based on utility is a type of superficial friendship that people become friends solely due to the benefits …show more content…

This means two people become friends solely because they feel pleasant to each other through interaction. According to Aristotle, this type of friendship is more common in young people as young people as their lives are guided by feelings and they pursue what is pleasant for themselves (Aristotle, p.122). For example, teenagers could easily become friends because they have common interests and feel pleasant to stick with each other. They wish to make each other pleasant by engaging in activities that suits each other’s interest, such as attending a party, doing community services or go to the gym together. However, this type of friendship is also short-lived, since subjects or objects that make one feels pleasant are ever-changing. After your teen years, you may no longer think that attending a party or going to the gym is pleasant. Instead, you may feel more pleasant on other things such as discovering the countryside. “Hence, they are quick to become friends, and quick to stop; for their friendship shifts with what they find pleasant, and the change in such pleasure is quick” (Aristotle, p.122). Thus, friendship based on pleasure is short-lived and could only bring one happiness for a

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