[stblack]

Aristotle outlined two kinds of friendships:

1. Accidental friendships

2. Friendships of the highest order

He separated Accidental friendships into two types:

* friendship of utility

* friendships of pleasure

So three kinds of friends, according to Aristotle.

[noduerme]

It only took us 2300 years to add another kind that combines utility and pleasure, but isn't accidental: friends with benefits.

[malloryerik]

Ha, lovely joke, but indeed friends with benefits are clearly in the "pleasure" file. Ancient Greeks seem to have been expert at friends with benefits.

[noduerme]

Yeah, yeah. You got me. But I was kinda going for an unspoken point. Which man is sicker: One who needs to classify friendships as either pleasure or utility? Or one who admits a certain utility to pleasure, and a certain pleasure to utility?

And saying it was accidental in either case is quite a sophisticated little excuse...

[ycombinete]

Aristotle would have been using "accidental" as opposed to "essential". Both used slightly differently to today's common usage. Essential being of the essence of a thing, i.e. it could not be that thing without it. Accidental being non-essential, i.e. it can be itself without that thing`[0].

It's not clear how a friendship can be essential though. Of what is the friendship essential? Or is it more like a friendship that fits the platonic form of a friendship.

edit: I do realise that your comment was a joke, and doesn't deserve to be "uhm actuallied", but I've personally always found the essential vs accidental usage to be very useful and interesting :)

[0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/essential-accidental/

[noduerme]

Hah... that's fascinating (I by no means mind having a joke turn into a real dialogue, and this is good stuff). So, it's interesting to apply this ancient pre-Abrahamic-moralizing, Platonic division between extrinsic/intrinsic, deduction/induction to modern friendships. All of us westerners still have 19th C. romantic biases that make it hard to admit if a romance serves a purpose, that might block us from being honest with ourselves. Then again, we're not so different. Essential is that love who is so entangled with your life that you make every decision together. Aristotle might've well thought his relationship with a 12 year old slave boy defined the essence in "essential". So, no one's perfect, but it's still possible to guess the meaning.

We might do well to begin sorting our relationships again by those which possess intrinsic meaning and the others which don't.

[avereveard]

Friends that combine pleasure and utility are so few in a lifetime we established cultural norm to mark them with rings and loudly announce the pairing to the entirety of the town one resides, or smth.

[noduerme]

I'd say marriage is a doggedly hopeful way to make someone please you, be useful, and act like they're friendly, under color of law, but it rarely captures the actual thing you imagine it's enshrining.

[ev7]

But are friends with benefits friends?

[noduerme]

Sure. They just have a friendship where at least one of them takes the other for granted.

[swagempire]

Are your regular friends really friends...

[BLKNSLVR]

Only if they click like on every single one of my three-times-a-day-minimum pictures of food.

[noduerme]

funny little story. I changed my phone number a few years back. But a friend of mine didn't get the memo. He's a really foodie guy who loves eating breakfast in off the map diners, and tacos from obscure food trucks. He sends like 3-6 photos per day of food he's eating.

Anyway, I hadn't heard from him in a couple months, but we ended up in Vegas at the same time with some mutual friends. And I was like, hey, I haven't heard from you in months. He was like, "I thought it was really rude of you to tell me to stop sending you my breakfast photos".

We put it together eventually that he had been sending his breakfast photos for TWO MONTHS to some new guy with my old cellphone number, before that guy was finally like "shut the fuck up and stop sending me pictures of your food".

Funny side story about that guy (let's call him Bo). My brother is germaphobic and only eats tortilla chips up to where his fingers touched them, then makes a pile of tiny finger-touched corners of tortilla chips on a little napkin. Bo sits down at the bar and unconsciously just starts munching these tiny little corners for awhile, then goes, "where did you get these mini chips?" and watches in horror as my brother discards another one.

I'm not sure how this relates to the original conversation about friends, but I'm sure it does somehow.

[BLKNSLVR]

Whether in the proper spirit of HN or not, I very much appreciated both stories. Made me glad I posted my attempted humorous comment. Thank you :)

> watches in horror as my brother discards another one.

Love it.

Edited to add after further thought, bringing it back into relevance with the topic:

To steal a Hunter S. Thompson quote, the "too weird to live, too rare to die" friend: someone that just seems to attract unusual experiences and has great value merely for the volume of weird life stories they're happy to share and also somehow continue to collect.

Inevitably overlaps with other categories, but also absolutely require a category of their own.

I believe that I fit into this category for some of my more "vanilla" acquaintances (and even some family members).

[lotsofpulp]

Posting food pictures to your Facebook/snapchat/whatever is one thing, but texting them to people individually multiple times per day is bizarre.

[malloryerik]

The "highest order" in this case meaning of virtue. So three kinds of "friendship" (philia): of pleasure, of utility, of virtue (moral goodness). When we think of "real friendship" we're thinking of the third kind.