Are you useful, just for fun, or real?


types of friendship


I utility


help you.


relationship


You help me.


ends. Friends in this kind of relationship do not tend to spend much time together, as, deep down, they often do not actually like each other. Utility friendship is common at school and in the workplace, but this type of friendship rarely lasts long and is easily broken up. Aristotle suggested that this kind of friendship is also common in the elderly, who need more help from other people.


I pleasure


make you


laugh. You


make me


laugh. I real


accept you.


Figure 1: Aristotle’s friendship types


Aristotle was born in Greece in 384 bce. He was interested in all kinds of knowledge and all aspects of human behaviour. In 350 bce, he wrote about friendship.


Aristotle said that there are three kinds of friendship. He called them utility friendship, pleasure friendship and real friendship.


Utility in this case means ‘usefulness’. Utility friendship exists purely for what each person can get out of the other person. When one of the friends believes that the other person cannot be useful any more, the friendship


You


accept me.


Aristotle’s second kind of friendship, pleasure friendship, does not exist for what each person can gain from being friends. Instead, it arises out of the pleasure which the friends gain from each other’s company. Perhaps the most common kind of pleasure friendship is based on funny conversation. Aristotle said that this type of friendship is most common with young people. Pleasure friends tend to spend time together in groups. They laugh a lot, but the friendship is mostly superficial. The friends meet purely to have fun. Pleasure friendships rarely result in intimate conversations in which problems are shared and, in the process, solved.


According to Aristotle, the third kind of friendship, real friendship, is the perfect type. He said that in this kind of friendship, people like each other for what they are, not for their usefulness or for the pleasure they bring. In other words, they do not expect to gain directly from the friendship, and they do not necessarily expect every meeting to be pleasurable. However, utility and pleasure will result, in many cases, from this kind of friendship. He said this was the most stable kind of friendship relationship. However, he also said that this kind of friendship is very rare.


70 Theme 2: Portfolio


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