Aristotle → Nicomachean Ethics → Books Ⅷ and Ⅸ (friendship)

One thing that you may have noticed about Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, as I’ve been describing it so far, is that it seems extraordinarily individualistic.

The ultimate end of our activities is eudaimonia, which is an assessment of individual human flourishing and success. The best sort of eudaimonia is a life of philosophic contemplation, which you can do all by yourself.

There is almost no discussion of family, except some brief mention of the father’s dominion over the family as being a variety of justice and of the necessity of bringing up children well so that they will be virtuous. Romantic relationships get no attention.

His example virtues are done with the motive of being virtuous, any people they effect are mere props. Courage in battle is for the sake of courage, not for the sake of your fellow-soldiers. Temperance is all about self-control. Honor, ambition, good temper, honest self-assessment: these are all for the greater glory of Me.

Other-facing virtues (or potential virtues) like loyalty, trustworthiness, kindness, obedience, devotion, gratitude, love, candidness, reliability, and sensitivity are absent. Even friendliness and wit, though exercised socially, are matters of bringing honor on oneself, not of respecting the needs of others. Justice is a matter of regulating our interactions with others not with them in mind, but with a mathematician’s attention to proportionality. Liberality and magnificence are ostensibly acts of generosity towards others, but are done from self-interested motives.

But Aristotle devotes two books of his ten-book examination of ethics to the subject of friendship, which he describes in explicitly altruistic, other-focused terms, at least in its best form.

Today I’ll try to summarize the first of these two books:

1. Friendship is a virtue, or at any rate it implies virtue. And it is necessary for eudaimonia; indeed, if you had everything else but had no friends, life would not be worth living. It is also an important consideration in justice and politics, as friendship is what holds states together.
2. Friendship exists when two people each wish for each other’s good, and are both aware of this mutual relationship of goodwill.
3. There are two sorts of friendship: 1) utilitarian friends love each other because and to the extent that they are useful or pleasant to each other. This is a selfish sort of friendship, and lasts only so long as it remains useful or pleasant. 2) perfect friends are good and virtuous and wish good things for each other for the other’s sake. Such friendship is more enduring, and can last as long as both parties remain good and virtuous. This is the rarer of the two varieties, and is slower to develop.
4. Perfect friendship is incidentally utilitarian (it is pleasant and useful) but not primarily so. It is only available to good people. This is partially because it involves trust, and it is difficult to put your trust in someone who isn’t virtuous. The lesser, utilitarian species of friendship is also worthy of attention, but it’s only a shadow of the real thing.
5. There are real-world friends, and then there are “Facebook friends.” Genuine friendship seems to require regular face-to-face time. Friendship is mutually- and equally-beneficial to good people, as good friends are valuable to have.
6. You need to be a pleasant, good-natured person to be a friend. Having good will for someone isn’t sufficient; you must also be pleasant to be around and enjoy spending time together. Perfect friendship also cannot be spread too thinly: you may have many utilitarian friendships or people you are friendly towards, but only a few perfect friends.
   
   Friendships between people differently-situated in authoritarian hierarchies have their own issues. People in authority sometimes have quick-witted friends of the utilitarian-pleasurable sort, and obedient friends of the utilitarian-useful sort, but since quick-witted ones tend not to be obedient, and obedient ones tend not to be quick-witted, rarely do you find the two together. And good, virtuous people tend not to make friends with people above their station (except with those rare ones who are also exceptionally good and virtuous).
7. There is a variety of friendship that exists between unequals: like the friendship of a father and son, for instance. Rulers can even be said to have a certain sort of friendly regard for their subjects. In these cases, friendship is a sort of respect that should be divvied out, like justice, in proportion to the status of the parties. That is, a child should respect the father more than the father respects the son; subjects should love their king more than the king loves any subject; and so forth. However, in perfect friendship, the mutual love and respect is not given in proportion to worth or station, but is equal, and regardless of such things. This can serve to make it difficult for differently-situated people to become perfect friends, or for such friendship to survive a unbalancing in status between the friends.
8. Friendship is a form of love, and as such is best exhibited in the giving rather than in the receiving. This differentiates it from something like honor, where it seems better to receive than to give, or from flattery, which is a sort of false friendship that people value to receive. Loving is the characteristic virtue of perfect friends.
9. The ties that bind a community together and that make people of the same nation think of each other as being more closely-bound than people of different nations, are somewhat akin to friendship. Justice also has a connection to friendship; the closer you are to somebody, the worse it is to behave unjustly toward them — betraying a friend is especially bad. In any sort of coordinated activity, the people who come together cooperate for common advantage, and so become utilitarian-friends of each other. The state is a large-scale example of this phenomenon, and its citizens are utilitarian-friends of a sort.
10. There are three varieties of state: monarchy, aristocracy, and timocracy. Of these, monarchy is the best and timocracy the worst. Each variety has its decadent and corrupt counterpart: tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy. The difference between the good and bad versions has to do with how virtuous, or self-serving, are those in power. A monarch cares for his kingdom and subjects; a tyrant, for himself. An aristocracy looks out for the good of the polis; an oligarchy tries to accrue more power and wealth for itself. A timocracy has the good of everyone in mind; a democracy is always trying to rob the minority to feed the majority.
11. Each of these varieties of government “may be seen to involve friendship just in so far as it involves justice.” There is a friendship of sorts between a king and his subjects, like that between a father and his children. This sort of friendship implies an unequal relationship, and the justice associated with it is also unequal in the same proportion. The friendship between a man and his wife in a patriarchy is like the friendship between an aristocracy and the commoners; the friendship between brothers is like the friendship between timocrats. However, in the corrupt forms — tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy — justice and friendship can hardly be said to exist at all. In such systems there is no more friendship than between an ox-driver and an ox, or a slave-owner and a slave. One party sees the other solely as a means towards his own ends, and the other sees him only as one who frustrates his own ends. But at least in a democracy there is some equality in who may oppress whom, so friendship is more possible there.
12. The friendship between kin is tighter than that of fellow-citizens. And the closeness of such friendship is related to the closeness of kinship, as well as to the nearness-in-age of the friends, and the extent to which they have been brought up together. The friendship of parents and children is a special sort, akin to the relationship between the gods and mortals. The friendship between husband and wife is natural and fundamental — even more so than that of the tendency of people to come together in communities. Marriages can be utilitarian friendships or perfect ones. How friends ought to behave towards one another is a question of how they should behave justly vis-a-vis each other.
13. In friendships (whether utilitarian or perfect) between equals, the friends should love each other equally; in friendships between people not of equal station or honor, they should love each other in proportion to their station (the lower loving the higher more than the higher loves the lower). Perfect friends don’t have much reason to complain about the justice of their friendship, because if they love more than they are loved, that’s okay: it is the loving more than the being loved that is the valuable thing in such a friendship. It is usually more in utilitarian friendships that complaints and questions of whether one of the friends is keeping up his or her end of the friendship come up, and usually each friend is eager to be getting the better bargain: giving less and getting more, and this can lead to tension. For the sake of harmony in utilitarian friendship, it is a good idea to seek always for the just state of proportional equality, and if we find ourselves in a utilitarian friendship that we mistakenly thought was a perfect one, we should make an effort to resolve any debt we may have accidentally incurred. A perfect friend may do us a favor as its own reward, but a utilitarian friend will ultimately expect some other reward. Determining what is just in such a case is tricky, because the receiver of the favor and the giver of the favor may have different notions of the value of the favor and the value of what may be offered in return.
14. In friendships between unequals, each one has a tendency to feel like they’re getting ripped off. The superior person thinks that the superiority they bring into the friendship ought to qualify them for a superior share of its benefits; the inferior person thinks that their inferiority means that they ought to be able to expect more as they have less to give. Aristotle thinks one way of solving this is to allow the inferior person to have a larger share of actual goods and assistance, while the superior person gains the larger share of honor from such virtue and beneficence, so they both win. This is true of the polis in general as well: some people contribute little and take much from the commonwealth, other people contribute much and take little but are compensated with greater honor. This helps preserve the friendship that holds the political community together. So in unequal relationships, the lower person should give honor to the higher person, repaying as best he can, while the person in a higher station should be generous with wealth and virtue. This is how mortals behave towards gods, and children towards parents.

Yesterday, I summarized book eight of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, the first of two books on the subject of friendship. Today, I’ll summarize what Aristotle says in book nine:

1. Sometimes friends have conflicting expectations of the friendship (for instance, one thinks it a matter of love, while to the other it is merely a matter of utility), and in such cases one friend may feel taken advantage of. These sorts of conflicts aren’t best handled by some formal model of objective justice, since for one thing there isn’t anything like an explicit contract, and for another, there is no common measure by which things like “love” and “utility” can be measured against each other the way we can use money to provide a common measure for dissimilar goods in the marketplace. But, as a rule of thumb, in such cases, in the absence of any contract, the value of favors received (and therefore how much return is due) ought to be determined by the recipient.
2. What do you do when your obligations to friends conflict with each other, or with other obligations? It seems that for most general rules for dealing with situations like these, it’s easy to think of exceptions where the rules shouldn’t apply. A set of heuristics is the best the subject matter allows: repay debts, prefer kin to non-kin, prefer friends to others, respect your elders, and so forth. Different strengths of obligations apply depending on how close you are to another person (either in blood-relation or some other sort of relation) and what sort of honor is at stake. It is not that there is no right answer, but that there is no simple formula that can apply to all of the complex cases in real-life.
3. Under what circumstances is it appropriate to break off a friendship? Utilitarian friendships, as we have seen, ought to be expected to last only as long as the mutual utility. That said, if you have been led to believe that you are in a perfect friendship, and it turns out to be a utilitarian one that is broken off when you become less-useful or less-entertaining, you have reason for complaint. Perfect friendships also may end: perhaps one of the parties becomes or turns out to be a vicious, unlovable person (though even in such a case, it would seem the duty of a friend to at least try to repair the fallen friend’s character). Alternatively, what if one friend advances far beyond the other in virtue so that the two no longer have much in common? In such a case, though we should expect some residual fondness to remain between them, they probably could not remain friends.
4. The kind of regard for another that is necessary for friendship is like the kind of regard for oneself that a virtuous person has. A virtuous person has integrity, and wishes what is actually good for him or herself, for his or her own sake; in these things, he is like a friend to himself, for a friend will be in harmony with a friend, and wish for a friend what is actually good for the friend’s sake. An excerpt from this section is worth repeating here, as it’s a good summing up of Aristotle’s ethics, and also has echoes in some of the Hannah Arendt I’ve commented on hereabouts. Aristotle describes the virtuous man thusly:

   [H]is opinions are harmonious, and he desires the same things with all his soul; and therefore he wishes for himself what is good and what seems so, and does it (for it is characteristic of the good man to work out the good), and does so for his own sake (for he does it for the sake of the intellectual element in him, which is thought to be the man himself); and he wishes himself to live and be preserved, and especially the element by virtue of which he thinks. For existence is good to the virtuous man, and each man wishes himself what is good, while no one chooses to possess the whole world if he has first to become some one else (for that matter, even now God possesses the good); he wishes for this only on condition of being whatever he is; and the element that thinks would seem to be the individual man, or to be so more than any other element in him. And such a man wishes to live with himself; for he does so with pleasure, since the memories of his past acts are delightful and his hopes for the future are good, and therefore pleasant. His mind is well stored too with subjects of contemplation. And he grieves and rejoices, more than any other, with himself; for the same thing is always painful, and the same thing always pleasant, and not one thing at one time and another at another; he has, so to speak, nothing to repent of.

   The virtuous man, that is, the sort of man capable of perfect friendship, will seek out friendships that resemble the sort of relationship he has with himself, says Aristotle. Vicious people, on the other hand, are in conflict even with themselves (their appetites conflict with their reason, and so forth), and so they don’t have a good foundation on which to build good friendships.
5. Mere goodwill should not be confused with friendship. It is more superficial and ephemeral. It is at best the spark that might potentially ignite a friendship: necessary but far from sufficient. It usually arises when we see something noble or beautiful in another person and sympathize with this, for instance when we see a good athlete about to attempt some feat and we hope they succeed.
6. Common opinions as to goals and means, which I’ll call “unanimity” (though this doesn’t mean unanimity in every possible opinion), is how friendship manifests itself between comrades or citizens: political friendship. It is possible for a group of virtuous people to have this sort of political friendship, but impossible for people who are not good, since each one of them will desire more than his or her share of goods at less than his or her share of cost, and there can be no mutual agreement on such a scheme. (This seems to contradict modern American political history, in which politicians are unanimous in promising their constituents that they will each get more than their share of government benefits while bearing less than their share of the costs of such munificence. Aristotle warns that when things degenerate that far: “the common weal is soon destroyed. The result is that they are in a state of faction, putting compulsion on each other but unwilling themselves to do what is just.”)
7. When a person becomes someone’s benefactor, they may adopt a sort of proprietary attitude toward the person they are helping, and indeed may feel more fondly toward that person than that person feels toward them. This may seem paradoxical or maybe a product of resentment, but there’s a better explanation: to the benefactor, the generosity is a matter of action, part of the benefactor’s being in the world, whereas for the recipient it is more of a passive thing, and while advantageous and properly worthy of gratitude, is not the same sort of extension of ego. For this reason also, giving is more enjoyable than receiving, just as actively loving is better than passively being loved. Furthermore, the more effort you expend on something, the more you are likely to value it.
8. Self-love, self-regard, selfishness — these things are looked down on, except perhaps in objectivist circles. Certainly vicious people are frequently condemned for seeming to care only for themselves, even when they do so in ways that are objectively self-destructive. But, as mentioned above, enlightened self-love is an important prerequisite for loving others. The seeming difference between these two views may come from different understandings of “self-love.” There is the self-love of someone who seeks from appetite to acquire more goods and honors and pleasures than they ought to have, but then there is the self-love of a person who values him or herself and treasures virtue more than goods and honors and pleasures. These people are different and behave quite differently, yet can each be described as being motivated by “self-love.” This seems to be the source of the confusion: intemperate “self-love” is worthy of reproach, but enlightened “self-love” is necessary and proper. It follows that a good person ought to be encouraged in self-love, while a wicked person ought to be discouraged in it, since he or she doesn’t know how to do it properly. Even those who sacrifice their lives for others are doing so in order to gain for themselves the prize of having done such a noble deed, because they value such a thing more than the value of living a humdrum life.
9. Some people think that a happy person ought to be self-sufficient, ought not to need friends at all. But I think that having friends is one of the characteristics of happiness. It is in our natures to live among people, and friendship is an excellent way to do so. True, a happy, self-sufficient person will not need friends of the utilitarian variety, but will desire perfect friends and will delight in their friendship and in their activities. Perfect friends participate with us in our virtuous actions, and spur us on to greater virtue, and therefore improve our lives. We come to value their lives and activities almost as we do our own, and for the same reason: that we delight in what is virtuous and good.
10. There seems to be a limit to the number of utilitarian friends one can have, for one can spread oneself too thinly. Is the same true of perfect friends, or is the more the merrier? I think there is a limit. Great friendship can only be felt for a few people, and indeed that only if we’re lucky.
11. In times of bad fortune, it is good to have friends who can help you out, but in times of good fortune, it is even better to have friends you can help out. In bad times, friends help take the burden and help lighten it too by their pleasant presence; although if your own pain causes pain to your friends, as by sympathy it can, this may be an additional source of pain to you, so this may be a mixed blessing. The pleasures of sharing your good times with friends are less mixed. For this reason, you should readily seek out your friends when things are going well, but only with hesitation when bad fortune strikes you, for instance when they might with little inconvenience do you a great favor. On the other hand, we should not hesitate to go to the aid of a friend in bad straits, even if they have not asked, but we should not go out of our way to try to be the objects of our friends’ kindnesses.
12. Friends should live and play and work and act together, should share their lives and virtues, for they love each others’ companionship and become better by virtue of each others’ care and interests.

Coincidentally, a review of the history and philosophy of friendship was published a couple of days ago in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

This concludes our look at The Nicomachean Ethics.