Aristotle on Friendship

Aristotle on Friendship What are the conditions of friendship? What are the different types of friendship? What

Questions for Discussion • (1) What are the defining features of friendship? • (2) What makes someone a good friend? • (3) What is the purpose of friendship? • (4) Are there different kinds of friendship? What are these? • (5) Is there any relationship between friendship and (a) morality or (b) love of self? What is that relationship?

Aristotle Background • Aristotle was born in Macedonia in 384 BC • He was a student and later critic of Plato who was in turn a student of Socrates. • His major book of ethics from which this is take is called the Nicomachean Ethics. • The NE is (like all ancient ethics) a eudaemonistic theory. It depends on the idea that we want to answer questions about how we should live and that is to seek the best (or happy) life. However, Aristotle follows Plato in arguing that only a good person can live a truly happy life.

Happiness • In Bk I (recommended but not required) Aristotle argues that we choose everything for the sake of the good. “Every skill and every inquiry, and similarly every actionadn rational choice, is thought to aim at some good; and so the good has been aptly names as that which everything aims.” 1094a • The good for which we do everything is happiness; We do everything for the sake of happiness.

Happiness is good without qualification • “Happiness is believed to be complete without qualification, since we always choose it for itself and never for the sake of anything else. Honor, pleasure intellect and every virtue we do indeed choose for themselves” [not for their effects] but we choose them also “for the sake of happiness.” • Happiness is also “self-sufficient.” A happy life [which includes wife, friends, fellow-citizens] doesn’t need anything added to it to be something we’d choose… 1097b

Virtue is necessary for happiness • Aristotle proves this through what is called ‘the function argument.’ • He asks what the function of a human being is and argues that it is a special kind of life. Plants are characterized by nutrition and grown, animals by sentience but humans by the life of action in accordance with reason. • A good lyre player plays the well, a good human being lives a life of action according to reason well. • “…the human good turns out to be activity of the soul in accordance with virtue, and if there are several virtues, in accordance with the best and most complete…” 1098a • Virtue is often translated as excellence. Examples of moral virtues are courage, temperance, generosity, etc.

Friendship • For Aristotle Friendship is important to ethics. He says “it is a virtue or involves virtue and is an absolute necessity in life. No one would choose to live without friends, even if he had all the other goods. Indeed, rich people and those who have attained high office and power seem to stand in special need of friends. For what use is such prosperity if there is no opportunity for beneficence, which is exercised…mainly toward friends?” 1155a • Is Aristotle right here? • Are the good things one gets from wealth and power better if one can benefit one’s friends with them? • [For Aristotle the point is that friendship is an opportunity to exercise one’s goodness.]

Characteristics of friendship • What are the characteristics of friendship? • What is worthy of love is the good, pleasant or useful. 1155b • Only the good and pleasant are loved as ends. • To be a friend—you must wish goods for his own sake—Friendship is reciprocated goodwill that people are aware of—You can have goodwill towards those you haven’t seen because you think they are decent or useful but they aren’t your friends

Friendship criteria • 1. You wish the other well—you want things to go well for this person. • 2. The other person reciprocates. Friendship is reciprocal. If I am your friend, you are my friend. • 3. You have to do what you can to make good things happen for your friend. Your attitude makes a difference in your actions. • 4. You wish good things for your friend for his own sake. • 5. Must be aware of one another’s good will—e.g., if you have a friend and she has a friend she tells you about you may have good will toward her but you would not be her friend… • Is this the definition of friendship? Aristotle adds another condition—you have to engage in shared activities…friends want to live together in the same community…

Three species of friendship • 1) The friendship of utility. “Those who love one another for utility love the other not in himself, but only in so far as they will obtain some good for themselves from him.” 1156a • (2) The friendship of pleasure: They love each other not in their own right because of pleasure. When one is friends with a funny person, one loves them for the pleasure their wit brings you, not for the person herself. • Aristotle says “friendship of the young seems to be for pleasure…” 1156b • These friendships aren’t lasting because these aren’t lasting characteristics necessarily.

Complete friendship • ‘True’ friendship is complete and the friendship of good people. • It is the friendship of those “who are alike in their virtue: they each alike wish good things to each other insofar as they are good…their friendship lasts…virtue is an enduring thing.” • One more colloquial way to put this is: You love the friend for their real self, the lasting and essential part of them. • This kind of friendship is “unqualifiedly good and unqualifiedly pleasant.” 1156b.

Difference with incomplete friendships • Incomplete friendships last the longest when the people are getting the same things from each other—e.g., pleasure or utility.

Complete friendship is between equals • But unequals can still have friendships—e.g., father to son, man to woman (!). However, the affection must be proportionate. 1159a

Bad people • Bad people can have friendships of utility or pleasure but only good people will be friends with another person for that person’s sake. • The friendship of good people is immune to slander.

Self love is required for friendship • Self-love is required for friendship. At 1166b1ff Aristotle argues that vicious and bad people don’t have these qualities of self-love. They (1) choose bad ends (2) They’ve done bad things and so hate life; (3) Don’t enjoy their own company because time alone only reminds them of the bad things they’ve done; (4) Don’t enjoy their successes or feel pain at their failures because there soul is completely in conflict and they suffer regrets.

You have to be good to love yourself • The virtuous person is the only person who is capable of complete self-love and therefore complete friendship. The vicious person cannot love himself because his character is not lovable.

The friend is ‘another self’ • The person cares about himself (loves himself) because of his goodness and the perception of one’s own or another person’s goodness is “pleasant in itself.” But what is most characteristic of friendship is “living together” and sharing “conversations and thought.” These are characteristically human activities—what makes us distinct from animals We take the same approach to our friend’s happiness that we take to our own. Our separate choices have happiness as their final end. So does our friend’s. We want our friend’s good as part of our good and she wants our good as part of her good.

Some other friendship issues • Should we break off friendships when the person doesn’t remain the same? • 1165b “But if we accept another person as good and he turns out to be an obvoiusvillian, should we continue to love him?...Should it then be dissolved immediately? Or is this required not in all cases, but only when they are incurably wicked.” • Aristotle: “…we should assign some considerations to past friends because of the former friendship…” provided they aren’t completely wicked. • It may not be possible to stay friends in such cases.

Aristotle on Friendship