Perfect Friendship in Aristotle

Abstract

A central question for any philosophical theory of friendship is what it is to love an individual for himself and this rapidly yields a dilemma. While this dilemma may be deep or dispensable, an easy solution is to retain the notion of loving an individual while rejecting that of loving him for himself as familiar but unintelligible. Another is to accept the qualification for himself as multiply ambiguous, serving in one context to exclude self-interest, in another deference for rank, and so on. For Aristotle, he schematically divides the grounds of friendship into three: utility, pleasure, and goodness. However, in this concept, it is quite unexplained and unclear what is going on as there is a shift from the familiar ‘loving someone for his sake’ to a newly infected ‘loving someone for his sake’.