[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.