aristotle on friendship

i need to figure out how to put captions on my photos. this one could read "friendships of the good."

aristotle answered a question i sometimes thing about: what about the friends that you make in certain situations? your entertaining colleagues at work, or business associates whose company you enjoy as they treat you to meals in good restaurants? what about people you meet sharing a table in a trattoria in siena who then call you when they turn up on a trip to detroit? what about cute guys sitting in the back of philosophy class with me? he divides these into "friends of utility" (e.g., colleagues), and "friends of pleasure" (e.g., folks you chat with in your tai chi class, also romantic liasons). these friendships have their moments, but will probably pass as the occasion passes.

i've heard them called, "friends along the way," lumping aristotle's two categories together.

but the more important type of friends, according to the philosopher, are "friendships of the good." these are based on mutual respect, admiration for each other's virtues, and a desire to aid and assist each other. these friendships may be few, but they will last. they require time to develop: "according to the common saying, it is not possible for people to know one another until they use up the proverbial amount of salt together." (nicomachean ethics, 1156b 26).

marcia, oded, and i have used up a lot of salt together. first at college in massachusetts; then cleveland, paris, on the kibbutz in israel, detroit, virginia, georgia, tennessee, maine, jerusalem, wadi rum, even new york, where oded first stepped off the boat from israel. this weekend we spent a couple of leisurely days together here, chatting, eating, drinking some surprisingly good red wine from virginia, watching the woodpeckers at the feeder and the possum cleaning up underneath.

there's no citation from aristotle on the possum per se, since he couldn't have known about marsupials. they evolved in the southern hemisphere only when the continents there were joined--think kangaroos and koala bears. the local opossums migrated up our way from south america. theirs is an ancient lineage; possum fossils have been found from the jurassic period, the age of the dinosaurs.

marcia, a philosophy major, is still devoted to plato but i'm all for aristotle: "friends seem to be the greatest of external goods." (1169b 10).