About the virtue of Friendship

I am reading a book written by a neo-Aristotelian philosopher recently and just encounter his discussion about friendship. He claims the irreplaceability of friends, for although a good friend is good because of his or her embodiment of the ideal of goodness, the character of the person and the common life experience created together are hardly easily replaceable by someone else. However my story is a little different, irrelevant actually. It always comes to my mind when it comes to the word of friendship that several years ago my precious friendship with a girl during high school just broke up because of my forthright letter to her. We become intimate friends with each other after the first letter she wrote to me saying that she knew me in one way or another and hope to be my friend. Then we kept writing letters to each other for nearly four years until I became a sophomore. But it ended, for we grew up into two kinds of people, holding radically different evaluative outlooks toward how to live a good life. Anyway it is a story about my understanding of the ideal way of friendship when I was younger, which is quite Aristotelian. The friendship died by my letter and her ironic reply, which still kinds hurts.
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Aristotle repudiates the kind of friendship based on the mode of either desire-satisfaction or utility, and thus advocates the real friendship based upon moral excellence. Aristotle argues that “people do not become friends for both utility and pleasure, for things that are incidental are not often combined…it is bad people who will tend to be friends for pleasure or utility, since this is the respect in which they are alike.” (1157a-b)The reason why the preference of pleasure and utility constitute the badness of the agent consists in the fact that one does not build up the friendship for the sake of the friend, but instead the interest of agent himself. Friendship becomes something as instrumental to satisfy one’s need rather than the flourishing of the friend himself. When the importance of the friend is dependent on the external reason rather than the value of himself, he can be easily discarded or replaced by someone so as to meet the new need or end. It is a distain of human dignity. More importantly, pleasure and utility can be vicious without the scrutiny of rationality, and if so, the agents will be disqualified from talking about friendship, for their friendship only contributes to evil and evil friendship can be no longer called friendship. (1172a) Therefore, friendship should not be limited to those that friends qua friends could have towards one another, but should include all relations that friends qua human beings can have to one another. It is clear that we cannot really grasp the conception of friendship unless we first grasp what it is meant to be a human qua human. This is what Aristotle wants to make us remember: we should make ourselves worthy of friendship, not merely good at making use of friendship.
There is no doubt that the term “human qua human” can be equated with the conception of the characteristic activity of human beings. In the case of friendship, the ideal way of friendship lies in an objective goodness of friendship the grasp of which needs a full and proper engagement in it, and the way we arrive at the understanding of its intrinsic and objective goodness is to throw ourselves into it and seek what counts as a full and proper engagement. To put it another way, the value and meaning of friendship consists in an ongoing engagement in which we keep thinking and reflecting upon the value and meaning of it in terms of the nature and central constituent of a good friendship. Only through practicing and cultivating such kind of friendship can we enjoy the most satisfying sort of happiness: the kind of happiness only possible with the practicing and appreciation of objective goodness.