You may be familiar with this work, maybe not.

Aristotle, when he was trying to ponder what is the good life, wrote a work called the Nicomacian ethics.

Sometimes people just refer it as the ethics, okay, of Aristotle.

And he gave a really central role to friendship.

And he wrote something in that, that I think, says it all.

He said, without friends, no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods.

That is a pretty strong statement about friendship.

I mean, that even if we had every other good, we wouldn't want to live if we didn't have friendship.

Now, this is a perspective of Aristotle.

He's living several centuries before the time of Christ. And he named three different kinds of friendship.

And I'm going to start with this, even though it's very elemental, just because some of you

may not already be familiar with some of his terminology. But you might have to let go of a little

bit of our modern usage of some of these terms to get what he's saying.

But this is just foundational, and hopefully you'll get where I'm going. First, he talks about the friendship of use. Now, you might say, use, use is not friendship at all. If I use another

person for something, that sounds terribly negative. It sounds like it's all about self. It doesn't

sound like friendship at all. But what he meant by a friendship of use was a relationship where each person receives a

recognized and understood benefit from the other.

And that's kind of the limit of the relationship.

So I'm going to give you an example.

Your dentist.

Okay.

If you have a good dentist, you expect that when you go to the dentist, they take good care of your teeth, and he expects that you're going to pay him fairly, he or she, for the services given.

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