A Beautiful Friendship

τέλειος φιλία pronounced as teleia philia and translated as “completed”, “perfected” or "spotless" friendship.

This expression is the third form of friendship identified by Aristotle in his treatise Nicomachean Ethics ~ the first being one that's pleasure based, the second of utility.

Teleia Philia is intended to convey a species of friendship that expresses the end or purpose served by human associations. The grounding of this form of friendship is virtue itself. In these friendships, the friends share a set of values and principles of an essentially and irreducibly moral nature. In turn, making what one person wants for their friend ito be good for the friend solely for the friend’s sake.

In such a friendship, is a constructive relationship where each friend, in virtue of their own qualities, helps to realize ever more fully what is not only potentially in the other but also realized in the other.
These are friendships of a lifetime. They exist in virtue of the fact that they
conduce to goodness, understood as moral excellence, or arête in the attic greek.

Aristotle argues that this kind of friendship is available not to the many and that these virtuous or perfected friendship are possible only between those who are equal, though the measure of equality, not quantitative but proportional.

In the right context sufficient equality can exist between father and daughter, mother and son, brothers and sisters, teacher and student, audience and performer, and obviously close friends, because each grants the other what is due. In more words he finishes with "The only degree of equality that would negate the possibility of friendship would be that which divides humanity from the gods!".

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