Two Initial Difficulties

29 Friendship michael pakaluk Aristotle s discussion of friendship occupies fully one-fifth of the Nicomachean Ethics and a comparable fraction of the Eudemian Ethics. Commentators have pointed out that this alone shows the great importance he assigns to the subject. Indeed, Aristotle tells us explicitly why he thinks friendship is important: it is either a virtue or something closely associated with virtue, he says, and it is centrally necessary for human life (NE VIII.1 1155a3 5). Aristotle thinks that friendship is a kind of natural outgrowth of goodness of character and that friendships are the ordinary context in which the virtues are acquired and virtuous actions are expressed. Furthermore, friendship seems naturally adapted to assist us in our needs and aims throughout life. Aristotle remarks famously that human beings are by nature social animals. It is in his account of friendship that Aristotle gives us his fullest explanation of distinctively human sociability. The criticism that one sometimes hears, that Aristotelian ethics is egoistic, can have weight only if one ignores the social philosophy developed in Aristotle s treatment of friendship. Two Initial Difficulties Aristotle begins his discussion of friendship by distinguishing three kinds of friendship: complete friendship; friendship for usefulness; and friendship for pleasure. It is important to grasp that he distinguishes these three forms, in the first instance, in order to resolve two difficulties. These difficulties, then, provide a constraint on interpretation: we must understand Aristotle s classification in a way that it is suitable to resolving these difficulties. The first difficulty is this. Do similar people become friends ( birds of a feather flock together ), or rather people who are dissimilar? Someone might try to resolve this difficulty by appealing to physical nature generally. For instance, some natural philosophers who preceded Aristotle held that, in general, like is attracted to like ; others held, instead, that opposites attract. Aristotle regards such an approach as misguided: in ethics, he thinks, we should attend to human character and what is distinctive about human beings (VIII.1 1155b9 10). We should resolve this difficulty, then, by looking to the basis of friendship in human character, affection, and choice. This is what the distinction of friendship into three kinds is meant to accomplish. 471 c29.indd 471 2008/9/4 05:39:20

michael pakaluk The second difficulty is as follows. Friendships seem to vary in degree; that is, of any two friendships, or of any one friendship at two different times, it seems to make sense to say that they are friendships to the same degree, or that the one friendship is more or less a friendship than the other. But, it seems, anything that can be compared in this way, falls along a single scale; and things that fall along a single scale, do not differ in kind: thus friendships do not differ in kind. And yet it seems commonsensical to say that there are different kinds of friendship. How, then, is it possible to compare friendships in degree, if in fact they differ in kind? Wouldn t that be comparing apples with oranges? Aristotle s distinguishing three forms of friendship, then, is also meant to explain how different kinds of friendships may nonetheless be compared in degree. From this brief description of Aristotle s approach to friendship, it should be clear that he takes a very different approach from what we might take today. He does not begin with psychological claims; nor, surprisingly, is he at first concerned with friendship as it relates to his general ethical theory. Rather, he is concerned to clarify the relationship between friendship and, on the one hand, theories of natural science (the first difficulty) and, on the other hand, the logical characteristics of schemes of classification (the second difficulty). His approach to friendship is, one might say, metaphysical rather than psychological or ethical. 472 Three Kinds of Friendship In defining friendship, Aristotle does not start from the consideration of an individual acting on his or her own and then build up a conception of friendship as composed of such actions. (This is one reason why he is not beset with any problem about the possibility of altruism. ) Rather, he views a friendship structurally, as a relationship which essentially involves symmetry, reciprocity, and mirroring. A friendship is a relationship in which persons similarly love each other, and in which they reciprocally wish good things to each other in that very respect in which they love (VIII.3 1156a9 10). By love Aristotle means an affection which has as its cause something that one recognizes in another and esteems as valuable. By wish Aristotle means a resolve to bring about something which one regards as good. The element of wish in a friendship is related to the love present in the latter, somewhat as effect is related to cause: we recognize something in someone as valuable; this may result in love; and love then manifests itself in a resolve to bring about something good for that person. To say that friends wish goods to each other in that very respect in which they love is to say that the good wished for answers to the good loved. (Precisely how it does so, Aristotle thinks, varies among the different kinds of friendship.) Aristotle s view that friendliness is inherently reciprocal is of a piece with his view that human beings are by nature social animals (I.7 1097b11, IX.9 1169b17). When a person smiles at someone, he expects a smile in return. When we (in our current convention) reach out a hand for a handshake in goodwill, we expect that the other person will extend his hand similarly. We presume that one good turn deserves another. Aristotle similarly conceives of human action not, typically, as something that one person does to or for another, but as a step in a reciprocal action, or series of such actions, between two persons. This is why Aristotle begins his classification of c29.indd 472 2008/9/4 05:39:20

friendship friendship by presuming that, in a friendship, each friend will show toward his friend the same sort of love that his friend shows toward him. This is also why he presumes that the ordinary sense in which friends wish goods to each other in that very respect in which they love, is that each aims to confer some good upon the friend which is equal and similar to the good recognized in that friend and which was the reason or cause of the love. Since friendship for Aristotle is a social structure of reciprocated love and wellwishing, he thinks that there will be as many kinds of friendship as there are of love. But how many kinds of love are there? To answer this question, Aristotle once again does not proceed in a psychological but rather in a metaphysical way. We said that he regards love as an emotional response to something valuable that is recognized and esteemed in another, which results in a corresponding wish for that person s good. Love therefore involves a relation: love is always love for something (cf. Plato, Symposium 199e 210a). But, Aristotle thinks, when one thing is essentially a relation to something, then the former has as many kinds as the latter (cf. VI.1 1139a8 11). Thus, Aristotle thinks, there will be as many kinds of love as there are bases for loving someone (VIII.3 1156a6 8). Aristotle holds that there are only three bases for love. We value or esteem anything whatsoever, and thus a person also, only because of goodness or pleasantness (VIII.2 1155b20). But there are two ways in which someone may be good or pleasant. A person may be good or pleasant either in his own right or in relation to you. To say that someone is good in his own right is to say that he is a good human being: that is, that he has the virtues and acts accordingly. To say that someone is pleasant in his own right is to say that his life and actions are inherently pleasant. It was Aristotle s conclusion in his NE Book VII treatment of pleasure that only a virtuous person s life and actions are inherently pleasant (VII.13 1153b9 15). Thus, these two bases for love coincide, and they form the object of a single kind of love: to love someone because he is good in his own right just is to love him because he is pleasant in his own right. Aristotle calls a friendship in which this sort of love is reciprocated a complete friendship. (He calls it complete for a reason that will become clear shortly.) But there is not a similar coincidence in someone s being good in relation to you and his being pleasant in relation to you. To say that someone is good in relation to you is to say that he is useful to you. To say that someone is pleasant in relation to you is to say that he is entertaining. Clearly someone may be useful without being entertaining, or entertaining without being useful. Thus these two bases correspond to two other kinds of love and therefore friendship: friendship involving the reciprocation of love based on someone s being useful ( friendship for usefulness ), and friendship involving the reciprocation of love based on someone s being entertaining ( friendship for pleasure ). After Aristotle develops, in this metaphysical way, this distinction of three kinds of friendship, he confirms his scheme tentatively by a cursory appeal to experience. For instance, he points out that adolescents typically form friendships for pleasure; elderly people form friendships for usefulness (VIII.3 1156a24 b6). He also points out that a friendship of the one kind will display very different attributes from a friendship of the other kind which confirms that he has indeed isolated distinct kinds. For instance, elderly people who merely need help from each other won t spend time with each other, 473 c29.indd 473 2008/9/4 05:39:20

michael pakaluk because they are grumpy and bitter and do not find each other s company pleasant (VIII.3 1156a28, VIII.5 1157b13 24): this would be a friendship for usefulness which is clearly not a friendship for pleasure. Again, adolescents form and dissolve friendships sometimes on a daily basis (VIII.3 1156b1 6): these would be friendships for pleasure, but not for usefulness (because surely what is useful to them doesn t change so quickly). 474 Resolution of the Difficulties The first difficulty was: Do similar or dissimilar persons become friends? Aristotle uses his theory of three kinds to give a mixed resolution. Because friendship involves reciprocity, in which the love and well-wishing of each friend must answer to that shown by the other, it is inherent in friendship that similar persons become friends: typically two persons who are friends will both be inherently good and pleasant, or both useful to the other; or both entertaining to the other. Aristotle regards this as something like the default condition of a friendship. He thinks that there can be friendships which combine different kinds (IX.1), but these are aberrant and relatively unstable. His favorite example of such a relationship is pederasty, where a distinguished and mature man befriends a pubescent boy. The man offers his prestige and knowledge, as a way of advancement to the boy, and therefore is useful to the boy. The boy offers his good looks and, typically, sexual favors to the man, and therefore is pleasant to him. This relationship, then, combines different kinds: the acts and affections on each side of the relationship do not answer to those on the other side in the standard way. But as the natural tendency of a friendship to show itself in an exchange that is similar in kind is, in this case the older man s inevitably comes to expect that he be loved in return in the same way that he loves the boy. He wants to be loved romantically, as he loves the boy romantically; but because he is not physically attractive, his expectation, and the relationship, is ludicrous (VIII.8 1159b15 19, IX.4 1164a2 4, cf. VIII.4 1157a5 10). But another sort of similarity or dissimilarity involves goodness or badness of character. Thus, one might also wonder whether a good person can become friends only with another good person, or whether bad persons can form friendships at all. And here Aristotle s resolution is that only a complete friendship is sensitive to the moral differences in persons. Only good persons can become friends in a complete friendship, precisely because the love in such friendships is based on good character. But in the other kinds of friendship, a good, bad, or morally intermediate person can form a friendship with a person of any of these types. Clearly, someone may be good in relation to you that is, useful without being a good human being, or he may be pleasant in relation to you that is, entertaining without being inherently pleasant (and therefore good) (VIII.4 1157a16 19). Someone might object that it would be enough if people merely took themselves to be good: to love someone as a good human being, it is important not that he actually be good, but simply that the one who loves him believes him to be good. Aristotle has some sympathy with this view. He recognizes that people generally regard themselves as good, even if they are not, and he apparently thinks that a friendship of a limited and qualified sort can result (IX.4 1166a11 12, b2 6). Yet he is unwilling to give too c29.indd 474 2008/9/4 05:39:20

friendship much scope for this refractory sort of relationship. He holds, reasonably enough, that a friendship based on a recognition of the goodness of another s character will require spending time with another and becoming capable of trusting him in important matters (VIII.3 1156b24 29, VIII.4 1157a20 4). And if you take someone to be good, but he isn t, your trust in him will inevitably be disappointed; you will eventually be hurt or even betrayed. We can now see how Aristotle resolves the second difficulty which motivated his discussion of the kinds of friendship. As we saw, Aristotle thinks that anyone who is loveable as being good in his own right will also be loveable as being pleasant in his own right. But he also holds that anyone who is good in his own right will also be good in relation to you. The reason is the obvious one that people who are virtuous act in ways that benefit those around them. For instance, you d do well to be fighting alongside a courageous person on the battlefield; you d be fortunate if your associates were all enormously generous persons; and so on. Again, Aristotle thinks that anyone who is inherently good will be pleasant in relation to you. This is perhaps less easy to see. But consider that Aristotle thinks that among human virtues are to be included friendliness and ready wit. Aristotle s virtuous person is not austere and moralistic, but competent and gracious. We seen now why a friendship based on someone s being good and pleasant in his own right is a complete friendship: such a relationship, Aristotle says, contains within it every possible basis on which someone can be esteemed and valued (VIII.3 1156b17 24). (And this is an additional reason, Aristotle thinks, besides the enduringness of virtue, why such a friendship is remarkably stable.) In contrast, friendships based on usefulness or pleasure have a superficial resemblance to complete friendships. They capture just one aspect of a compete friendship. That is the reason, Aristotle says, that we regard them as friendships to a lesser degree. It is not that we are placing all friendships on a single scale and evaluating them with respect to that; rather, we are recognizing, perhaps only implicitly, that one kind of friendship is the ideal, and we say that a relationship is more or less of a friendship insofar as it has or lacks characteristics that we look for in that central case (VIII.6 1158b5 11). Egoism and Altruism in Friendship Aristotle s distinction of three kinds of friendship, then, is developed in response to the two difficulties he raises. Yet once Aristotle presents this distinction, we may raise other difficulties with respect to it. This in effect is what John Cooper does in a widely studied article on Aristotelian friendship (Cooper 1977a). Cooper first raises a question about whether Aristotle s theory can account for our ordinary experience of friendship: Aristotle says that complete friendship is based on a recognition of the good character of another, and therefore only good persons can form such a friendship; yet if few of us are good, then few friendships are like that (VIII.3 1156b24 5), and Aristotle s theory could not serve to explain, then, those common relationships that we call friendships. Second, Cooper worries whether Aristotle s theory involves an untenably bleak a view of human nature: if Aristotle holds that an altruistic regard for another person s good is found only within complete friendships, and that the other forms of friendship, in 475 c29.indd 475 2008/9/4 05:39:20

michael pakaluk contrast, are merely expressions of self-interest; then, since he thinks that complete friendships are rare, he must hold the unappealing and untenable view that nearly all human relationships are expressions of selfishness. In response to the first concern, Cooper points out that virtue, and the virtuous person, serve as ideals for Aristotle. In practice, most people will approximate these ideals only partially. If so, then someone who approximated, to some degree, the ideal of human virtue could presumably form friendships which correspondingly approximated the ideal of friendship. One might also add that Aristotle recognizes that even persons who are not virtuous often act as virtuous persons do in limited circumstances: for instance, even people who are not ideally virtuous will typically treat their own children in much the same way as a virtuous person would (VIII.8 1159a33 5). In response to the second problem, Cooper proposes a particular interpretation of the three kinds of friendship. Cooper maintains that, for Aristotle, friends of all three sorts evince a genuine, disinterested goodwill toward one another. The three kinds differ merely in the conditions under which that goodwill is displayed. In a complete friendship, Cooper says, the goodwill of the friends is not conditioned in any way: the friends wish good to each other come what may. But in a friendship for usefulness or pleasure, the friends show goodwill toward each other only on the condition that the friendship remains generally useful or pleasant to them; moreover, neither friend will promote the good of another if this tends to destroy the ground of the friendship. For example, a friend for usefulness will do favors for his friend, even at cost to himself, so long as the friendship continues in a general way to be profitable to him over time; he wishes good to his friend in a disinterested way, but only on the condition that the friendship retains a useful character. Moreover, he won t wish any good to his friend that would imply that his friend would cease being useful to him. Suppose for instance that his friend is useful because the friend lives nearby and can help him with difficult jobs around the house: then he won t wish that his friend take a new and better job, if that means that his friend will move to a distant town and be unavailable for helping out. So, according to Cooper s interpretation, friendships for usefulness or pleasure are subtle mixtures of altruism and egoism: altruism because they contain the same disinterested goodwill as does complete friendship; egoism because this goodwill is evinced only given certain (egoistic) conditions. But does this interpretation match Aristotle s thought? We saw that Aristotle is concerned with the nature of reciprocation in a friendship; he thinks that the actions of a friend should properly answer to those of his friend, and that friends wish goods to each other in the very respect in which they love. At one point Aristotle illustrates this with the story of a musician who plays the flute for a dinner, believing that the dinner host has contractually agreed to pay him a good fee afterwards. That is, the musician conceives of his playing as part of an exchange of useful goods, a service for a fee. But after dinner the host declines to pay him, insisting that there has been a fair exchange of pleasure: You pleased me with your playing; and I pleased you in return, because you were pleased insofar as you anticipated getting a handsome payment for your playing (cf. IX.1 1164a13 22). What the story shows is that friends do not wish for, or accept, just any sort of good from the other: they regard only a certain kind of good as properly reciprocating what they render. For Aristotle, the kind of well-wishing is not a constant across different kinds of friendship. 476 c29.indd 476 2008/9/4 05:39:20

friendship The gloomy view that human beings are entirely selfish is not a real possibility for Aristotle on entirely different grounds. As we have said, he thinks that human beings are by nature social, and what is natural to us is unavoidable and spontaneous we can hardly become used to acting otherwise (II.1 1103a19 23). As Aristotle points out, we can observe the innate sociability of human beings when we travel, since strangers spontaneously act in a friendly way toward us, simply because we are fellow human beings (VIII.1155a21 2). Human beings are naturally friendly to one another as herd animals are naturally gregariousness. (Nor does Aristotle hold that mental acts or emotions must have one s own welfare as their object: he thinks that we frequently respond to one another with emotions that are not self-interested, such as pity or hatred.) Thus a natural friendliness will mark any sort of friendship, even if the friendship itself is constituted by a distinct and limited sort of reciprocity. At the same time, Aristotle is sensitive to the distinction between friendliness and friendship. A person may be surrounded by a plethora of friendly associates, and yet be unhappy, because he lacks a true friend (IX.9 1169b16 22). Surely it is this further thing that Aristotle wishes to isolate, in his identification of complete friendship. Just as Aristotle is interested in the reciprocal structure of friendships, rather than in the structure of particular actions, so he is interested in what a particular sort of friendship implies about the character and dedication, and life, of the person who enters into it. His mention of a willingness to spend time with another (IX.12 1172a1 3, VIII.5 1157b17 21), and, in another context, of being prepared to give up one s life for another (IX.8 1169a18 20), seems directed at this. Even if friendships for usefulness and pleasure did contain the disinterested goodwill that Cooper claims for them, there would be an important sense in which they were, nonetheless, not altruistic enough, because they would not represent the altruism of character and of a life which Aristotle seems more interested in as most characteristic of a genuine friendship. Extended Friendships It is commonly, and rightly, said that Aristotle regards friendship as a much broader phenomenon than those intimate personal relationships that we call friendships. This is evident from the role that Books VIII and IX play in his Ethics. These are not a treatise on friendship alone so much as Aristotle s discussion of human sociability generally: personal friendships; romantic bonds; the nuclear family; the extended family; voluntary associations ; political society; business partnerships; and the market. In doing so, he is not simply following the ideas of his time (see Konstan 1997). Rather, his view about how friendships vary in degree, and his structural definition of friendship, allow for that wide extension of the notion. As we have seen, relationships count as more-orless friendships insofar as they resemble the central case of friendship. But, more importantly, Aristotle defines a friendship as a reciprocation of love and the wishing of goods to another. That is, friendship includes both an affective component and some component of resolve and purposefulness. Thus he can count as a friendship not merely relationships that arise at first from emotions, so long as they have some purposeful aspect (such as love affairs between adolescents), but also associations constituted by 477 c29.indd 477 2008/9/4 05:39:20

michael pakaluk deliberate resolve or even contract, so long as they admit the development of an aspect of emotion. For Aristotle, every friendship involves a common good, which is the sort of reciprocity that the friends recognize. Understand a common good as a goal that two or more persons share and work together to achieve. Something as simple as a contractual agreement thus constitutes a common good: if I am a carpenter, and you are a farmer; and you and I agree that I-will-build-you-a-shed-in-exchange-for-one-hundredbushels-of-apples; this agreed upon coordination of our action is a common good. We need to have a shared understanding of the exchange if the contractual arrangement is to work, which requires that each person see things from the other person s point of view: I have to understand how the shed I build has as much worth to you as the bushels you convey have to me. Aristotle thinks that the terms of the exchange of a friendship for usefulness usually have to be stipulated fairly precisely, but that, in contrast, the exchanges of complete friendships are loose, because the manner of reciprocation is different Aristotle says that the friends reciprocate with their purpose or choice, and that the friends expect this to be equivalent, not the worth of the service provided (VIII.12 1162b16 21, VIII.13 1163a16 23). If every friendship involves a common good that is aimed at purposefully and perhaps even contractually, then, Aristotle reasons, any association through which human beings aim at a common good purposefully is potentially a friendship of sorts. This is the correct way of understanding his extended comparison of the family and political society in VIII.9 12. In the comparison, Aristotle views political society as that association which shows most clearly the ways in which human beings may deliberately coordinate their actions for the sake of some shared goal. We can do this in three ways, corresponding to the three main kinds of constitutional government: kingship, aristocracy, and timocracy. ( Timocracy is what we should call republicanism. ) Aristotle regards these structures as revealing the justice of an association. On the other hand, Aristotle views the family as that association which shows most clearly the different sorts of affection that we can cultivate toward one another; he seems to think that we first cultivate them within a family and then extend them outwards to others. Aristotle next maps family relationships onto political structures: the relationship between father and children is mapped onto kingship; that between husband and wife in governing the household in a complementary way is mapped onto aristocracy; and that among siblings is mapped onto timocracy. He then concludes that each association formed on a pattern of one of the kinds of political constitution (e.g. a club which is run democratically ) is capable of carrying along with it the affections typical of the family structure which is mapped onto that constitution (in this case, fraternal affection). Such affections will naturally arise so long as the due structure or justice of the association is preserved, that is, insofar as the ruling group serves the interests of the ruled rather than its own interests. The argument is evidently meant to apply to every possible human association. It yields not only a theory of civic friendship, but also a theory of what we should call civil society. Aristotle pictures political society as a society of societies: he holds that the members of each subordinate society should naturally be motivated, not simply by a sense of justice or duty, but also by fellow-feeling and loyalty, which come from the recognition of a shared purpose. 478 c29.indd 478 2008/9/4 05:39:20

A Friend as Other Self friendship We saw that Aristotle thinks he can rely on each person s having implicitly an ideal of complete friendship. We also saw that he is disposed to extend the notion of friendship very widely, to encompass cooperation and friendly affection as found in any human association. In both cases he relies on the notion of a friend as another self, which he develops in the final chapters of his treatment of friendship (IX.4 9). Indeed, that a friend is another self explains why Aristotle defined friendship in the first place in terms of symmetry, reciprocity, and mirroring. The Greek for other self, allos autos, means literally other same. The notion looks paradoxical and contradictory: either a thing is the same or different (we might think); it cannot be both different ( other ) and the same. Aristotle of course recognizes the jarring character of the phrase. He does not, however, leave it simply as a paradox. He gives it a definite meaning: to say that each of two persons is an other self relative to the other, is to say that each is related to the other, in affection and well-wishing, as he is to himself (IX.4 1166a29 33). But how precisely can a person love and wish good to himself? For Aristotle, we can construe an action or intention as an expression of self-love, only if we somehow analyze a person into two, either synchronically or diachronically (IX.4 1166a33 1166b2). We analyze a person into two synchronically by regarding his thinking part as primarily what he is: a person then loves himself, at some time, if the rest of what he is contributes to the good of this part. Thus a person would fail to love himself, in this sense, if he showed weakness of will and failed to carry out what his thinking part enjoined. We analyze a person into two diachronically by considering the same person at different times. Thus a person loves himself in this way if what he does at one time benefits himself at another time if, for instance, through delay of gratification when young he puts himself in a better position when old. Aristotle s argument that a friend is another self involves looking at self-love as shown in various synchronic and diachronic relations that a person has with himself, and arguing that friendship involves a kind of substitution, by which the friend comes to occupy one place in these various relations. So, for instance, for a friend to accept a sacrifice now so that his friend will be better off later is not unlike a good person s delayed gratification in his own case. Of course, there must be reciprocity: by definition, another person will not be another self, if you alone make such sacrifices for him, but he is not disposed to make a like sacrifice for you. So Aristotle reduces the great diversity of phenomena of friendship, which we have noted, to a single core conception: a friend is another self. Insofar as any relationship counts as a friendship, to that extent it involves persons relating to one another as a good person relates to himself. But this conclusion leads rather naturally to two further discussions in IX.8 9, which are, surely, two of the most interesting chapters in the Aristotelian corpus. The first is this: If a friend is another self, and a good person s self-love is a paradigm for friendship, then it seems that a person should love himself, and do so more than he loves anyone else; however, this goes against the common wisdom that we should avoid selfishness. Aristotle resolves the difficulty by drawing a distinction between good and bad self-love. Good self-love is when a person loves his thinking part. We saw that Aristotle in IX.4 analyses synchronic self-love as the relationship of a person to his 479 c29.indd 479 2008/9/4 05:39:21

michael pakaluk thinking part; in IX.8, he apparently wishes to analyze all good self-love in this way. He draws on his general conception of a virtuous action as an achievement which gains for the agent an enduring rational good, which Aristotle elsewhere describes as something noble (kalon). To do a virtuous action, he thinks, is to render a noble good to the thinking part of one s soul. In bad self-love, in contrast, we aim to satisfy the nonrational, non-thinking part of the soul. It is only the good sort of self-love which is a model for friendship, and no one would object if someone loved himself to an extreme in that way (VIII.8 1169a11 18). As we said, Aristotle wants to claim not simply that a good person should love himself, but also, shockingly, that he should love himself more than he loves anyone else. We would expect that to be the case if self-love is a paradigm for love of others; but, still, the claim is shocking. For Aristotle, it is a necessary truth that a good person loves himself more than others in this way. The reason has to do with an asymmetry between loving and being loved. To love is to act; to be loved is to be acted upon. But Aristotle holds that the goods we can gain through acting, especially the noble good that we attain through virtuous action, is incommensurably higher than any good that we might gain through being acted upon. Suppose, for instance, that one s friend has three million dollars, and he gives two million to his friend, keeping only one for himself. Someone might suppose that the giver has therefore shown greater love for his friend than for himself: after all, he gave him the greater sum. But Aristotle would say: assuming that the gift was genuinely virtuous (that is, that it was the expression of generosity, magnificence, or some other virtue, and defensible as such), then he achieved something noble in giving it; and this good is incommensurably greater than the merely useful sum of money which his friend received. Clearly, any good thing we do for another will have the same structure (IX.8 1169a19 b1). Aristotle s distinction of two senses of self-love, good and bad, suggests that an important idea which underlies his entire theory of friendship is that of identification. For Aristotle, each individual seems to be faced, in particular actions and in the development of his character, with a decision involving identification: which part of himself will he take himself to be? Will he identify with his thinking part, or with the nonthinking part of his soul? Aristotle seems to think that an individual acts well or not, and becomes a good or a bad person, depending upon which he chooses. It seems also to be Aristotle s idea that this choice of identification makes possible the identification with the other that one finds in friendship. That is, it is precisely because the thinking part is rational, that we can regard the thinking part of another to be the same as one s own, so that another person takes the place of oneself (as we have seen) in relations of self-love. In contrast, there is no sense in which one may intelligibly take another person s non-rational part as equivalent one s own. Thus someone who identifies with his non-thinking part condemns himself to isolation and to perpetual conflict with those who have made a similar act of identification (IX.8 1168b15 21). We have seen that Aristotle aims to unify the various phenomena of friendliness in relation to the ideal of other self : persons are friends precisely to the extent that each is an other self to the other. We have also seen that, on Aristotle s view of human sociability, we are constantly led by natural motives to become related to others in that way: within the family; with associates; in political society; and so on. The question then arises: Why do we act in this way? What is it about us that impels us to become 480 c29.indd 480 2008/9/4 05:39:21

friendship related to others as we are to ourselves? Why should we care so much about this? so much so that, as Aristotle says, we would not find life valuable if we had no friends (VIII.1 1155a5). Given that Aristotle thinks that happiness (eudaimonia) is the inherent goal of our nature, it is not surprising that he gives his answer as to the purpose of friendship, when discussing the relation of friendship to happiness (IX.9). He adverts to the definition of happiness he had offered in I.7, as activity in accordance with virtue over a complete life (1098a16 18). As regards the first part of the definition, activity in accordance with virtue, it is clear what role friends are meant to play: they are invaluable for perseverance, constancy, and growth in virtuous action, since we do everything better with friends; moreover, we can more reliably grasp the deficiencies of our own character, and thus act effectively to remedy or improve it, with the help of our friends. Such at least seems to be the main lessons of a somewhat obscure and much-discussed preliminary argument which Aristotle gives (IX.9 1169b28 1170a13). But Aristotle then turns to an even more perplexing argument, which he refers to as better grounded in a consideration of the nature of things (IX.9 1170a13). This argument, as it involves an analysis of what it means for a human being to be alive, seems to be related to the second part of the definition of happiness, that it involves a complete life. Life is perception, Aristotle claims, and a distinctively human mode life must consist of intellectual perception. To wonder, then, why we seek friends for happiness, is to wonder what role a friend plays as regards intellectual perception. Aristotle points out that whenever we think, we perceive that we think. Thus there is a distinction of two, and a kind of self-love, implicit in every act of perception. A friend who shares in thought with you, assumes the same relation to you, as you do to yourself in a single act of intellectual perception: just as you perceive that you think; so your friend perceives that you think; and just as you perceive that you think, so you perceive that your friend thinks. But, more than this, the friend takes on this role at exactly the same time, and to an almost identical extent, as you are taking on this role. Contrast with this a case of reciprocal giving: if you give a gift to your friend, the reciprocation is not complete until your friend gives something in response, and there never was anyone one time, in the exchange, in which your friend has to yourself the relationship, or nearly the same, that you have to yourself. Aristotle seems to think that thus to share in thought with another is a kind of fulfillment of an incipient sociability that is present in the very reflexive character of a single act of human thought. A human life, then, can fail to be complete not simply in its length (as when someone dies young) but also, so to speak, in its breadth, if we fail to relate to the inner intellectual life of another as we are related to our own life. Aristotle s final word on the point of friendship for human beings, then, is that through it we understand and are understood. Bibliography Books Blum, L. (1980). Friendship: Altruism and Morality (New York: Routledge, Chapman and Hall). Konstan, D. (1997). Friendship in the Classical World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). 481 c29.indd 481 2008/9/4 05:39:21

michael pakaluk Pakaluk, M. (1998). Aristotle: Nicomachean Ethics VIII and IX, trans. with comm. (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Pakaluk, M. (2005). Aristotle s Nicomachean Ethics : An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Price, A. W. (1989). Love and Friendship in Plato and Aristotle (New York: Clarendon Press). Smith-Pangle, L. (2003). Aristotle and the Philosophy of Friendship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Stern-Gillet, S. (1995). Aristotle s Philosophy of Friendship (New York: SUNY Press). Articles in journals Annas, J. (1977). Plato and Aristotle on Friendship and Altruism, Mind, 86, pp. 532 54. Annas, J. (1988). Self-love in Aristotle, Southern Journal of Philosophy, suppl. 7, pp. 1 18. Cooper, J. M. (1977a). Aristotle on the Forms of Friendship, Review of Metaphysics, 30, pp. 619 48. Cooper, J. M. (1977b). Friendship and the Good in Aristotle, Philosophical Review, 86, pp. 290 315. Kahn, C. (1981). Aristotle and Altruism, Mind, 90, pp. 20 40. Kosman, A. (2004). Aristotle on the Desirability of Friends, Ancient Philosophy, 24, pp. 135 54. Millgram, E. (1987). Aristotle on Making Other Selves, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 17, pp. 361 76. Schwarzenbach, S. (1996). On Civic Friendship, Ethics, 107, pp. 97 128. Whiting, J. (1991). Impersonal Friends, Monist, 75, pp. 3 29. 482 c29.indd 482 2008/9/4 05:39:21