Aristotle identifies friendships in 3 different categories the first being Friendship of Pleasure, friendship of utility, and friendships in virtue. When you think of your friends you probably don’t generally use these categories but rather the closeness level you have with that person. Yet, after learning Aristotle’s categorization methods to dictate which spot your friendship falls in. It makes you see friends from a different perspective not based on how close you are but rather what benefits you provide for each other. 

The first friendship friend of pleasure Aristotle describes as someone who you have a connection with through a sensual pleasure, as well as other physical types of pleasure, are included in this group, so is general pleasure or delight. The second friendship friend of utility he identifies as people associated together for mutual usefulness. The last friendship friend of virtue he describes as people who share a set of values and principles of an irreducibly moral nature and do things to only do good for the other. 

After discovering Aristotle’s definitions it allowed me to look at some of my friends and try to find where they stand and which friendship they fall in. I believe I have these friendships but the friendship of pleasure is not one of them in regards to the friendship of utility and friendship of virtue are very identifiable in my life. A friend who I see falling under a friend of utility is a partner I recently had for a project whose name is Angel. Angel and I were both assigned to work on a program and I was excited as he knew I was great at finding mistakes and constructing code well and he was good at finding ways to reduce data usage of code allowing it to work efficiently in a professional matter. We got along but would speak only on Tuesdays and Thursdays when working on the assignment. Once the assignment was completed we parted ways never messaged about anything. He was a friend of utility as we both mutually benefited towards using our strengths on a common goal.

A friend who fell under the friendship of virtue was an old football friend named Mario. He was an overall nice guy but no one spent as much time as we did together. He would even buy me lunch time to time then I would buy him lunch sometimes as well. I went to meet his family many times and he knew mine as well so we both were familiar with what kind of background we came from. We always had each other back in situations so he only intended good which is why he is categorized as a perfect friendship as it follows Aristotle requirements. When Aristotle explains what a perfect friendship is it almost resembles exactly how Mario and I were. Aristotle definition of a perfect friendship is “Perfect Friendships which subsists between those who are good and whose similarity consists in their goodness: for these men wish one another’s good in similar ways; in so far as they are good (and good they are in themselves); and those are specially friends who wish good to their friends for their sakes, because they feel thus towards them on their own account and not as a mere matter of result; so the Friendship between these men continues to subsist so long as they are good; and goodness, we know, has in it a principle of permanence.” Aristotle lets us see people in a different view and allows us to identify the kind of people we have around us. He provided a new perspective which I intend to use from now on.