Nowadays it is not uncommon for many people to throw around the term ‘friendship’ hastily. A brief conversation with an acquaintance or an encounter with a person you just met can trigger a so-called “friendship” to arise almost immediately. However Aristotle, an early Greek philosopher whose principles are outlined in his book The Nicomachean Ethics and have lingered until the present, had much narrower conditions regarding how legitimate friendships develop. Aristotle was a firm believer that not just anyone can be a genuine friend and that not every relationship qualified to be a friendship. He categorized the types of friendships that people would have according to their various traits (even down to their age), created a hierarchy to explain those different types, and emphasized that friendship is arguably the most
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This motto may have derived from Aristotle who claimed in The Nicomachean Ethics, “Friendly relations with one’s neighbors, and the marks by which friendships are defined, seem to have proceeded from a man’s relations with himself.” (Aristotle, 168) Aristotle argues that the way a man views and treats himself will be an accurate portrayal of how he treats those whom he calls his friends. Self-love only occurs in ‘good’ men who devote their lives to pursuing virtue; after self-love is achieved the good man can wish well for himself, such as living a long life and maintaining his knowledge, and can proceed to do the same for other good men who are similar to him. ‘Bad’ men would be incapable of this since even they can’t perceive anything decent within themselves, let alone in others. A good man’s actions will benefit himself as well as everyone around him, whereas a bad man’s deeds will yield nothing but damage. Thus the first step of achieving a true friendship is to become a virtuous man who he himself can value and
This motto may have derived from Aristotle who claimed in The Nicomachean Ethics, “Friendly relations with one’s neighbors, and the marks by which friendships are defined, seem to have proceeded from a man’s relations with himself.” (Aristotle, 168) Aristotle argues that the way a man views and treats himself will be an accurate portrayal of how he treats those whom he calls his friends. Self-love only occurs in ‘good’ men who devote their lives to pursuing virtue; after self-love is achieved the good man can wish well for himself, such as living a long life and maintaining his knowledge, and can proceed to do the same for other good men who are similar to him. ‘Bad’ men would be incapable of this since even they can’t perceive anything decent within themselves, let alone in others. A good man’s actions will benefit himself as well as everyone around him, whereas a bad man’s deeds will yield nothing but damage. Thus the first step of achieving a true friendship is to become a virtuous man who he himself can value and