Kitap 7
4
Perhaps, therefore, there are some services that ought to be rendered to the useful friend and others to the good friend: for instance, if a friend gives you food and necessaries you are not therefore bound to give him your society, and accordingly also you are not bound to render to the friend to whom you give your society the things that you do not get from him but from the useful friend; but those who by so doing wrongly give everything to one whom they love are good-for-nothing people.
4
And the defining marks of friendship stated in the discourses all belong to friendship in some sense, but not to the same kind of friendship.
5
It is a mark of the useful friend that one wishes the things good for him, and so of the benefactor, and in fact a friend of any sort (for this definition of friendship is not distinctive); of another friend, that one wishes his existence, of another that one wishes his society; of the friend on the ground of pleasure, that one shares his grief and his joy.
6
All these defining marks are predicated in the case of some friendship, but none of them with reference to friendship as a single thing. Hence there are many of them, and each is thought to belong to friendship as one, though it does not: for instance, the desire for the friend’s existence—for the superior friend and benefactor wishes existence to belong to his own worki.e. the beneficiary.—and to him who gave one existenceThis also means the beneficiary, who is the cause of the benefactor’s being a benefactor; so the benefactor ought to repay him in kind by wishing his existence (as he does also for the reason that he is his own product.) it is one’s duty to give existence in return; but he wishes the society not of this friend but of the pleasant one.
