In his seminal book The Politics, Aristotle sought to understand the essence of any group of people living and working together. At one stage, he asked what a city is. His answer is very insightful: “A city is a partnership for living well.” We can take that thought and extrapolate it further. By Aristotle’s own reasoning, we can see any group of people associating and working together for good in precisely the same way.⁶⁰ A neighborhood ideally can be thought of as a partnership for living well. So can a business. And this may be the best way to think of a team of any kind. More to our purpose, perhaps this same analysis can apply to the family unit. Ideally, a family is a particularly intimate partnership for living well. In fact, if the members of a family don’t understand this about their relationship, it’s likely that things will never be as good in that family as they are capable of being. It can even be argued that the family is the most fundamental human partnership, and the one that provides for all the others. We come into this world because of a partnership of a special kind, and we survive our early years because of the supporting environment provided by others. As we grow, we learn new ways of participating in this earliest and smallest community unit. And what we learn there will send us into the world with certain expectations and tools for living in the broader community of human beings, whether good or bad.

Of course, not all the members of a family have to be related by birth and blood, but to share this most intimate of bonds with a specific group of other people, an individual not so related would typically have to be accepted into the unit with a good measure of support and commitment, and then would himself have to come to display a supportive attitude, a commitment to the others, and an inclination to engage in actions that are in line with the good of those others. In another place, his Ethics, Aristotle offered an analysis of friendship that we can also use here to shed some light on the family. He distinguished three types of friendship, those based on benefit or utility, those based on pleasure or enjoyment, and those reflecting the mutual commitment and respect that arise out of virtuous goodness.⁶¹ The relationships between family members typically reflect at least one or two of these bases for friendships, if not all three. Now, no one would doubt that family members can be very unhelpful, hard to take, and cantankerous in their interactions. So can friends, at times. But in order to take on and maintain the bond of a family—even that of an extended family—the individuals who are involved have to be in some way able to forgive, or overlook and overcome contrary attitudes and actions that would otherwise break up their unity and alienate them from each other. No friendship is perfect, and no family is either. The members of the Fantastic Four certainly argue and get mad at each other, but their fundamental commitment to each other, and basic enjoyment of each other always brings them back together.

Let’s dwell for just a moment on the three bases of friendship identified by Aristotle. First, consider utility. People are friends at this level because of benefits they both get from the relationship. Ben gets a sense of belonging and family when he is with Reed, Sue, and Johnny that he didn’t have anywhere else in his life. At various points throughout his crime-fighting career, he does strike out and experience other friendships, other teams, and other environs outside of his Fantastic Four family. But none of these other experiences, from joining another team of super-powered individuals, the Avengers, to engaging in a super-powered wrestling career, could equal the benefits he received from being a member of the Fantastic Four. In Ben’s case, the main benefit is familial love, and a true sense of being both wanted and needed. Other teams may enjoy his company and value his ability, but only when serving as Reed’s conscience and sounding board does Ben feel truly of use. Reed and the others need him, and he needs them.

Then there are friendships of pleasure, or enjoyment. These are relationships between people who just like being around each other, even if no other benefits accrue. Ben would be hard-pressed to admit this one, of course. It’s in his nature to mask his deeper feelings through wisecracks. But his intellectual and emotional capacity are far greater than he lets himself show to the world, feeling that he must portray a persona as gruff and craggy as his exterior. For years, he and Johnny have enjoyed the analogue of a sibling rivalry that has often led to acrimony, and yet the pleasure Ben gets from being on the receiving end of Johnny’s childish machinations cannot be completely masked by the arch comment, the flung couch, or even those times when he stomps off in anger, promising to never return. He always does return, of course, because there is a level at which even these friendly battles give him pleasure and a true feeling of family. Families fight and disagree, he knows as well as any of us. And it’s often because they care—which allows them to prevail.

Finally, there is what Aristotle calls a friendship of virtue, or a complete friendship. This is the highest relationship between morally good and virtuous people who respect and care about each other. In this sort of friendship, each friend loves the other for his sake alone. In other words, Ben and Reed can be complete friends if Reed cares about Ben’s good for Ben’s sake, regardless of whether he, Reed, benefits in any way. And, likewise, the same holds true in the other direction. Not only is this the strongest form of friendship, it’s also the one that Reed and Ben experience to the strongest degree. And it’s also the form of friendship that causes Reed the most guilt.

Reed genuinely cares about his friend Ben as much as he does his core family—the two are interchangeable in his mind—and yet Ben serves as a daily reminder of Reed’s extreme failure as a friend. Does a part of their bond of friendship exist because Reed needs to feel that guilt every day? Perhaps. Seeing Ben’s appearance and knowing it was Reed’s fault may even somehow strengthen their mutual reliance on one another. For all the great deeds Reed performs, and for all the wondrous inventions and machines that he creates, it never leaves his mind that the one miracle he can’t perform is restoring his best friend’s human form.

As we survey all the interactions of the Fantastic Four, we find that Aristotle’s understanding of friendship, along with the idea that a family can be viewed as a partnership for living well, can both help us understand this superhero team as a vibrant family unit made up of friends who really care about each other, despite their differences and disagreements. Family members, in a healthy family, support each other (utility), enjoy each other (pleasure), and care about each other’s good (virtue). Any family is strongest if they have a sense of partnership in support of shared values and goals as well. Ben Grimm, a child of a broken home, realizes this and finds a unique sense of place within the nurturing support system of the team, with these good friends who care about him and each other.

The Family During Turmoil

Every family and every team faces turmoil, and the Fantastic Four has seen more than the average share. Yet they always persevere. Sometimes, their troubles come from the villains they have to fight; at other times they arise out of a normal urge to live an “ordinary life.” In their forty-five year history, the team has had its share of break-ups, let-downs, and splits. Ben has wandered off in search of himself, only to find that the path he sought led him right back to the team. His sense of self is grounded in a need to be needed, a desire to do good, and a sense of belonging. Johnny, the youngest member of the team and the person most likely to assert his independence by leaving the supposed confines of the family, has discovered that the independence he has often sought isn’t as appealing as the family he’d helped build. Reed and Sue, now married and with children as they are, have experienced their share of marital strife—saving the world and finding time for intimacy can be tricky business—but also have hung in there and stayed committed to each other. Often, the threats to the team have made them ponder whether or not fighting super-powered villains created the proper environment in which to raise a family, and this resulted in an attempt to carve out a suburban life away from the team environment. But, inevitably, each effort to live “normal” lives outside the core family of four somehow turned into a worse environment than the previous one.

All of the team’s members have sought to extricate themselves from the group at times, and all have ended up back together, wiser and happier than when they split. The potential to live a good, meaningful, and virtuous life apart from one another existed, certainly. So the appeal of the family unit for each of them has had to do with more than just these things, however vitally important they are. It has had to do centrally with a feeling of comfort, and of being truly able to develop their potential better as a part of the unit than separate from it. The four members have all had solo adventures, but each of them has experienced a feeling of completeness as a member of the team that they couldn’t find elsewhere. Only together do any of them experience the deepest feelings of trust and trustworthiness, a real fundamental sharing of common goals, and a firm foundation of confidence.

The best families are not judgmental; they allow for each member’s potential to be encouraged and realized. In a good family, each family member’s goals run parallel with, and not counter to, those of the other members. And a family exists as the most dependable source of support any of us can have. Good family members seek to pick each other up in times of need. We see all this in the Fantastic Four.

And yet, some of what makes the Fantastic Four more like a family than any other super-team has also served as a detriment. Ben’s role within the team in its earliest days could very easily be seen as in many ways dysfunctional, as he early on settled into an almost childlike role with Reed and Sue, often “running away from home,” with Reed and Sue continually taking up the parental duties of retrieving the wayward child. On this view, Ben’s frequent squabbles with Johnny are even further identifiable as sibling rivalry, with the two bickering to gain the attention of their “parents” Reed and Sue.

Conversely, Reed’s misplaced paternal feelings toward Ben have extended even further than the team’s early adventures. At one point, Reed realized an important fact about Ben’s inability to regain normal human form, and rather than acting as a friend and telling him the truth about what he has discovered, Reed takes it upon himself to keep this unsettling fact a secret from Ben, because, much as a father might say about a son, “It was for his own good.” Father, in the form of Reed Richards, knows best.

A sense of betrayal actually once forced Ben to leave the Fantastic Four for the longest of the several times he has departed from the team. But like all the other members of the team who have at one point or another elected to leave, he returned, not from any sense of duty, but finding himself drawn to the others, despite himself. As has often been said, you can choose your friends, but you can’t choose your family. The choice seems to be made for you. This often seems just as true of “constructed” families as of natural families. We find each other and then feel a bond; we don’t deliberate about it and then consciously decide to set up house as a family unit. It’s more like a mutual affinity than decision and duty that brings about this bond of family.

Even the temporary “fill-in” members of the Fantastic Four have more often than not come to the team through a familial connection. Several have come to the group, as new extended family members often do, through relationships with the team’s “children,” as in the case of Johnny’s girlfriends Crystal, of the Inhumans, and Lyja, or Ben’s romantic connection to “Ms. Marvel,” Sharon Ventura. And even the “replacement” member with the longest tenure, Jen “She-Hulk” Walters, quickly found herself adapting to familial roles, both settling into her own sibling-like squabbling with Johnny and entering into a romantic relationship with Wyatt Wingfoot, the Fantastic Four’s longtime family friend. We can see that, even for those who intend to serve with the team in only a professional capacity, the group’s true nature as a family eventually subsumes them.

The Ethos of Teamwork

A family is a small unit of society that aims at sustaining the life of its members. Aristotle understood that we derive additional advantages from being part of a larger society; otherwise, he contended, we would be content to live in smaller families, or tribes. But family is where it all starts. As we have seen, living well is the ultimate goal for any group like a family, beyond just living and keeping fellow family members alive. The Fantastic Four, bonded through being a family and banded together for the greater good of society, have achieved both these goals.

Normal families often initially form as a way to create a protective unit to safeguard young children. In a greater sense, the Fantastic Four turns this protective nature outward—the normal citizens of the entire world become like their children and live under their protection. The members of the Fantastic Four also work to enable each other to live well. But with their powers, wealth, and freedom, they always also turn their attention to improving the lives of others. With their special family bond, they have become friends in the highest sense of that word and partners for a greater good.

Such genuine, self-giving friendships are rare, and they exemplify the differences between the Fantastic Four and other super-teams. Aristotle recognized the complete friendship as that which exists between persons who love one another and wish only to benefit the other. The difference between this team of four and, say, the Avengers, might seem to be negligible in many ways. That team, too, is comprised of friends, for the most part, and they unite to fight evil. However, the friendship between the members there, or on other teams, is most often mainly self-oriented, or even a bit selfish—the people they regard as friends are seen as such primarily because they serve their own primary interests. In contrast, the friendship between the members of the Fantastic Four seems to be more like the true and complete friendship that even amounts to love. It’s unselfish, benevolent and aims only at serving the good of the other. In the case of the Fantastic Four, it is this love for each other that finally binds the team together into a family.