Types of Friends: NE 8.1–6

Given that living well is a form of activity, Aristotle suggests that we can categorize friendships based on what we do with our friends. He gives three broad categories of friendship based on pleasure, usefulness, and goodness/virtue (NE 8.3). Friendship based on pleasure may sound lurid. While he does speak of erotic relationships (1158a10–14, 1164a2–6), the category includes any relationship we may have simply because it is fun. He lumps children’s relationships into this class, since children live primarily by their feelings. College students might think of their going-out friends. These are the people with whom we enjoy doing things, without thinking about them the rest of the time. While we would be upset if something happened to these people, should our parents die, we would probably not invite them to the funeral. In such relationships, Aristotle argues, the two people care not so much about each other as about what they get from each other: fun. These relationships are a sort of transaction that both parties get something out of.

Closely related to this are friendships based on usefulness. This category might sound odd to English speakers, but is captured by phrases such as “I have a friend in IT who can help with that.” We all have relationships with people who can do something for us, whom we are generally pleasant around, but whom we stop thinking about the moment we do not need them. This type of friendship is even more clearly a transaction: it is not the person so much as what we get that we ultimately care about. As with friendships based on pleasure, friendships based on usefulness allow us to engage in various activities. In NE 1, Aristotle argued that pleasure and money—or resources generally—have a place in the good life, yet people who consider them to be the good life see only part of the picture. So too with friendships based on pleasure or usefulness: they are not bad; they are just incomplete.

Aristotle’s third category of friendship is based on virtue or the good. NE 2–6 laid out how a virtuous person leads a full, active, and disciplined life. She is engaged in her community and happily fills her days with purposeful activity. Now imagine that two such people meet each other: Marilyn Monroe and Ella Fitzgerald; Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey; Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama. Would each member of these pairs do things for the other? Of course. They would also enjoy spending time together. Nevertheless, their relationship would not be based on mere usefulness or pleasure but on the deep appreciation each has for the other’s virtuous character and activity.

These three categories of friendship interrelate in various ways. Friendships based on virtue bring both pleasure and usefulness, yet friendships based on pleasure or usefulness do not of themselves bring virtue. As in NE 1’s account of happiness as virtuous activity, which included roles for money, honor, pleasure, and study, friendships based on virtue are complete/perfect (teleion; 1156b7–17) in that they integrate pleasure and usefulness within a broader whole. Furthermore, NE 8’s bases for friendship line up with NE 1’s different understandings of happiness: pleasure to pleasure; virtue to virtue. Friendship based on usefulness is presented as a means to either pleasure or virtue, and Aristotle speaks of this category of friendship in value-neutral terms that mirror NE 1’s discussion of money. Meanwhile, in friendships based on virtue, each person values the other’s character and thus values the other for herself. Given that a virtuous character is a stable character, such friendships will be long-lasting. Friendships based on pleasure or usefulness, by contrast, will tend to dissolve when the fun or the benefit dries up.¹

Self-Sufficiency and Political Animals: NE 8.7–9.3

Human happiness is a matter of living to our full human potential, and “humans,” as Aristotle puts it, “are political animals” (1097b11, 1169b18–19). The second stage of Aristotle’s discussion of friendship elaborates this idea by exploring the different relationships that hold a state (polis) together. The sheer diversity of relationships (parent-child, fellow citizen, master-slave, fellow dinner-club members, mercenaries for hire) and topics (inequality, gift-giving, constitutions, families, conflict) can make this section seem like a hodgepodge. We can pull the pieces together if we view NE 8.10–12 as Aristotle’s response to Plato, Republic 8–9. In this earlier work, Plato uses his own account of justice to categorize political constitutions and relationships between the parts of an individual’s soul through an elaborate series of parallels. Aristotle takes the different approach of using his account of humanity’s political nature to categorize political constitutions and relationships within families. Aristotle’s ranking of acceptable constitutions roughly matches Plato’s in definition if not in name: monarchy (rule by one), aristocracy (rule by the few), and timocracy (rule by many). Yet, whereas Plato placed the worst constitution (tyranny) at the furthest remove from monarchy in his account of civic decay, Aristotle puts it closest: tyranny is the result when a monarch puts his own interest above those he governs. Likewise, aristocracy decays directly into oligarchy, and timocracy into democracy (see table 7). Given this setup, democracy is the least bad of the three bad options.

On the family side, a father’s relationship to his children mirrors monarchy, in that the father looks after the well-being of his children and his children reciprocate by honoring and obeying him above all. The relationship of husband and wife mirrors aristocracy, insofar as each has something like equal footing in the relationship, albeit divided over different spheres: a husband working outside the house and a wife working inside the house. The relationship between brothers, finally, mirrors timocracy, insofar as many people look after their shared interest from positions of equal footing (see table 8).

All of these relationships within the family are, of course, ideal situations. Aristotle does not take the time to discuss fathers, wives, or children who fail at their roles. Given the widespread sexism of antiquity (to say nothing of Aristotle’s own biological theories), such a discussion would have been a valuable slice of sociology. What we get instead is a normative argument: given humanity’s political nature, these are the relationships people should have within a family. The family provides a context for individuals to learn the social roles that they will then bring into the state at large.² The state, in turn, should provide a context in which families may flourish through nurturing such relationships. Just as NE 5 implicitly criticized Plato’s Republic for seeing justice as a relationship between parts of one’s soul rather than as a relationship between people, this middle section of NE 8–9 continues the project by looking to families, rather than character states, as the model and causal complement to different forms of political constitutions.³

^* The numbering represents Aristotle’s ranking of constitutions from the best, monarchy, to the worst, tyranny.

To modern ears, the result of this new approach can sound somewhat odd. NE 8.2, for instance, asks, “If someone has ransomed you from pirates, should you pay him back no matter who he is? And if he does not need to be ransomed but asks to be paid back, should you pay him back or ransom your father?” If this sounds like nonsense to us, it is likely due to the emphasis on impartiality and objectivity in modern moral theory.⁴ According to the main lines of Utilitarian and Kantian ethics, a person owes his father no more, morally speaking, than he owes anyone. To give relatives preferential treatment outside the home is simply nepotism. Yet, as main lines of feminist ethics point out, an attitude of impartiality is best suited to life in a society of strangers and seems ill suited to thinking about family life. For Aristotle, politics is a personal affair. When it comes to the self-sufficiency of the happy person, we must therefore take into account humanity’s political/social nature and the concrete relationships in which individual human beings are positioned. Despite the Greeks’ patriarchal tendencies, the relationship of father to children or husband to wife does not figure in the main arguments of the treatise’s final third. It is, rather, the relationships of a mother to her children and of brothers to each other that provide the model for friendship in the truest sense. Individuals learn the skills of such relationships in the home and carry them into the city in friendships of joint activity, drinking together, working out together, and doing philosophy together.

Self-Love and Competing for the Kalon: NE 9.4–12

Everything up to this point has prepared the way for the final stage of Aristotle’s discussion of friendship, which proceeds through a series of interlocking ideas. In some passages, Aristotle explicitly presents problems as puzzles (aporiai). In other passages, he lays out ideas that he takes as straightforward but modern readers have found puzzling. It is in the latter case that ideas drawn from the ancient gym will be of the most use.

NE 9.4–6 begins as Aristotle fleshes out what it means for one person to treat a friend as “another himself” (1166a31–32). Building on NE8’s discussion of families, Aristotle holds up how “mothers feel toward their children” as a paradigm case of people who relate to others as they relate to themselves (1166a1–10). When a mother wishes for what she sees as best for her children, she does so for her children’s own sake, not merely as a means to her own happiness, and she acts accordingly. This is the attitude, Aristotle suggests, that a decent person (epieikēs; 1166a10–13; compare NE 5.10) has toward himself. The rest of NE 9.4 spells out how this can fail to happen: as we have seen in NE 7, weak-willed people act against their own understanding of their own self-interest. Aristotle’s analysis in NE 9 is that such people fail to identify with their reasoning. Rather than seek their own overall good through practical wisdom, they identify with their lower appetites and thus fail to hit the mean in all they do. In modern terms, such people are their own worst enemies. A decent person, by contrast, feels goodwill (eunoia) toward himself. This goodwill is necessary for friendship but is not in itself sufficient. After all, one may feel goodwill toward an athletic competitor (agonistēs; 1166b34–1167a3), “when that person strikes one as beautiful (kalos), brave (andreios), or something like that” (1167a18–21). In such instances, the fan “will wish with him,” namely, for the competitor to win, “but will not act with him.” Given the individualistic nature of Greek sports, it is unclear what “acting with” could even mean. A spectator can hardly jump into the sandpit and start punching their favored competitor’s opponent or lend a hand in throwing a discus. The more general point seems to be that joint action is needed for mere goodwill to turn into full friendship. NE 9.5 adds that friendship requires a common will (homonoia). This is not a matter of merely shared beliefs, but decisions (proairesis) in great (megas) questions about what course of action to pursue. Talk of decision situates common will within NE 3’s discussion of deliberation and practical reasoning, while the greatness involved nods to NE 4’s big spending and greatness of spirit. An individual who embodies these virtues will be a friend to himself insofar as he avoids weakness of will and the self-sabotage that comes with it. As with the individual, so with the state, which ideally will have all its citizens organizing their actions around a common will. When it comes to the relationships between individuals, the political example suggests that friends do not merely have parallel goals, but that each person is somehow integrated into the other’s own particular goals.⁵ With this, the stage is set for NE 9’s final string of puzzles.

NE 9.7 asks why benefactors love their beneficiaries more than beneficiaries love their benefactors. While goodwill (eunoia) alone is insufficient for friendship, a benefactor (euergetēs) actually “does good.” Aristotle presents this as a puzzle insofar as most people would take the cynical view that benefactors love their beneficiaries insofar as they relish the thought of calling in favors. This transactional thinking has a place in Greek culture, but Aristotle argues that it gets the best type of friendship wrong. People who think in terms of calling in debts are too focused on pleasure or usefulness. In terms of goal hierarchies, they are stuck in the details without seeing the whole. Proper benefactors, by contrast, are like craftsmen who love the products of their crafts or mothers who love their children. The reason is the same in each case: craft products and children are both the result of work. Aristotle goes so far as to explain that mothers love their children more than fathers do, since birthing a child is considerably “more laborious” (epiponos) than begetting a child. With this, Aristotle affords women a brief moment of heroic glory, as his choice of words likens the labors of childbirth to the labors (ponoi) of Herakles. All of this is grounded in NE 1’s account of happiness as a life of excellent activity. For craftsmen and mothers, the fruits of their labor are intimately tied up in the goal hierarchies that ideally structure their lives. This solution, however, leads to another puzzle.

NE 9.8 asks whether a person ought to love himself or someone else most of all. Aristotle sets out this puzzle as a dilemma. On the one hand, we typically criticize people for being selfish and praise people who put the interests of others before their own. This is, in modern terms, a statement of altruism: the right thing to do is what benefits someone else. On the other hand, Aristotle has already laid out the idea that one is a friend to oneself, which suggests that an individual should put his own interests first. This is, in modern terms, a statement of egoism: the right thing to do is what benefits oneself. Since egoism and altruism make conflicting claims, we are left at an impasse. Aristotle solves this impasse by introducing NE 8’s three-part categorization of friendship. Egoism is bad when a person’s friendship with himself is based on pleasure or usefulness. Since such people do not set their sights on virtue, the pleasures they seek for themselves are physical. Physical resources, however, are limited. When confronted with a zero-sum game, such people seek what is pleasant or useful for themselves at others’ expense. They are selfish in a bad sense. By contrast, a person whose friendship to himself is based on virtue will always seek the kalon through virtuous action. Aristotle claims that such a person is more of a self-lover insofar as he seeks the best good for himself. Meanwhile, other people would hardly complain that such an individual goes out of his way to engage in just and disciplined actions. On the contrary, this individual embodies greatness of spirit and will give up external resources in service of the common good, foregoing money, honor, pleasures, and—if need be—life itself. This turns the zero-sum game on its head, since in seeking the kalon, a virtuous person confers material benefits on others, his friends most of all.⁶

Aristotle goes so far as to say that people whose self-love is based on virtue will “compete (hamillaomai) for the kalon and strain after the most beautiful things for the common good” (1169a8–9). This picks up an earlier discussion in which he says that friends of virtue “compete to benefit each other,” and each will “avenge himself” (amunō) by benefiting the other, in turn (NE 8.13, 1162b6–10). The verb hamillaomai is unusual. These are the only two times it appears in all of Aristotle’s writings.⁷ This suggests that he is alluding to another text. The most obvious parallel is Plato’s late dialogue Laws, which uses the term seventeen times. The first passage, Laws 730e-731a, contains three of them. Here the work’s mysterious Athenian Stranger explains that in an ideal state

every citizen will strive after victory (philonikeō) in virtue without envy. For a man will make his state greater by himself competing (hamillaomai) but without slanderously cutting off others. But the jealous man, thinking that he must surpass (hyperechō) others through slander, exerts less effort in seeking true virtue (aretē) himself and obstructs those people competing against (anti-hamillaomai) him through unjust lies. Through all these things, he makes the entire city untrained (agymnastos) in the competition (hamilla) toward virtue, and he makes the city smaller insofar as he plays a part in its good reputation.

In short, just as an unenvious individual makes the city greater through truthful competition for virtue, the jealous person makes the city less through deceitful competition. Laws’s next thirteen uses of hamillaomai are explicitly connected to traditional Greek sports (running, wrestling, chariot racing), where they simply mean to compete in an event.⁸ The final instance, Laws 968b, refers to the process of passing laws as itself a “contest.” These outer passages frame what comes in between, as the various athletic competitions are set out as a means for improving the state via truthful competition for the personal excellence (aretē) of its citizens. Whether Aristotle is meaning to refer to Laws or not, this earlier text associates hamillaomai with athletic contests, links such contests to the good of the state, and suggests that such contests can be pursued either as zero-sum or as non-zero-sum affairs.

Scholars have found NE 8–9’s idea of competing for the good and the beautiful to be surprisingly offensive. One author sees it as “a subtle kind of assault upon or attempt to get the better of one another,” resulting in “unseemly contests” and “an infinite regress of noble self-denials.”⁹ Other authors have debated whether NE invokes a zero-sum concept of competition, though both parties to this debate admit to shortcomings in their own interpretations.¹⁰ Translators have attempted to sidestep the whole issue by translating hamillaomai as “strives” rather than “competes,” and amunō as “defends” rather than “avenges himself.”¹¹ Rather than gloss over or explain away this aspect of NE, I suggest we explore more fully how athletic ideas play out through the remainder of NE 9.

NE 9.9 opens by raising the now familiar dispute over why a happy and therefore self-sufficient person would need friends. The ensuing discussion ties together threads stretching back to the start of NE 1. Aristotle starts by quickly recounting points already made: virtuous activity requires at least some external goods, and friends are the best external goods there are (compare NE 1.8–10 and 4.1–4). Humans are by nature political animals; thus, friends are for us a natural good (NE 8.7–9.3). People who think that friends are needed merely for pleasure and resources have an incomplete view of friendship (NE 8.1–6). Having summarized these previous passages, Aristotle presents three or four new arguments, each of which builds on NE 1.7’s account of happiness as a life of virtuous activity.

The first two arguments present friends as a sort of mirror of the self. The first (1169b28–1170a4) builds on the fact that since virtuous activity is pleasant for an individual, observing the virtuous activity of his friend who is “another himself” is also pleasant. Aristotle introduced the idea of another himself through mothers’ love for children. The second (1170a4–11) asserts that by sharing in virtuous activity, each friend makes the other’s life easier, thereby making his virtuous activity more continuous and raising quality overall. Aristotle likens this to musicians who enjoy listening to each other perform.

Aristotle presents the third argument (1170a11–13) via a literary reference: “For good (agathos) people, living together provides a kind of practice (askēsis) in virtue, as Theognis says.” The term askēsis has clear athletic overtones, though it can also be applied to craftsmen and professionals, such as doctors who practice medicine. What is noteworthy here is that in speaking of the practice of good people, Aristotle seems to have in mind people who are already virtuous. This is corroborated by the general context, which seeks to explain why happy (and therefore already virtuous) people need friends. If that is right, then askēsis cannot refer to the process of acquiring character virtues laid out in NE 2.¹² What, then, does it refer to?

Aristotle returns to the poet Theognis to close his discussion of friendship in NE 9.12, quoted in this chapter’s epigraph. That passage in its broader context runs:

Whatever someone holds as the goal for which he chooses to exist and be alive, that is the activity he wishes to pursue in his friend’s company. Hence some friends drink together, others play dice together, while others work out at the gym together (syngymnazō) and go hunting together, or do philosophy together… . Hence the friendships of toxic people (moxthēros) turn out to be vicious, for they are unstable, and share toxic pursuits; and by becoming similar to each other, they grow vicious. But the friendship of decent people is decent (epieikēs) and increases the more often they meet. And they seem to become still better (beltios) from their activities and their mutual correction. For each molds the other in what they approve of, “learning what is noble from noble people.”

The passage paraphrases Theognis, Elegies 1.29–38, using language and ideas drawn from NE, while the final quotation is left in Theognis’s own words. What then does practice (askēsis) mean in NE 9.9? While Theognis does not use the term himself, Aristotle points us to Theognis to illustrate it, thereby placing questions of gym buddies squarely on the table. Given that askēsis can be undertaken by already virtuous people, it cannot refer exclusively to the process of acquiring virtue, which Aristotle calls training. This leaves two possibilities. First, askēsis might refer to the virtuous activity of people who are already virtuous. This would make practice resemble training, insofar as repetition enhances activity in both cases. In practice, though, people do not become more virtuous but better (beltios is the comparative form of agathos), which is to say that their virtuous activity is enhanced through collaboration with friends. Disciplined people who go to the gym together might not become more disciplined, but they do get stronger. Compare NE 4.3’s great-spirited person, who possesses all the virtues of character and puts them to use through a life tightly structured around overarching goals. As I argued in chapter 13, greatness of spirit “makes the other virtues great” not by making a person more virtuous, but by allowing him to pursue ever greater feats of virtuous activity. Alternatively, and more plausibly I think, askēsis might be a general term that can refer to both acquiring virtue and using virtues that have already been formed. This has the advantage that it better accommodates the summary of Theognis, as well as the original poem, which includes virtuous people, people still developing virtue, and people who are actively vicious.

I claimed above that NE 9.9 presents “three or four” new arguments for why the happy person needs friends. Sandwiched between Aristotle’s initial reference to Theognis and the closing summary of Theognis’s poem is Aristotle’s claim that we may look at the question “from a more naturalistic perspective” (physikōteron; 1170a13–22). The argument runs:

1. Human life is characterized by the activities of perceiving and thinking.
2. Life is especially pleasant for virtuous people.
3. This pleasure comes when a person perceives himself perceiving or thinking.
4. One’s friend is another himself.
5. Therefore, virtuous friends take pleasure in perceiving each other perceive or think.

Older readings see this as simply a recasting of the mirror view of the first argument.¹³ Since then, however, scholars have read this argument in terms of friends’ collaborative activity, forming a “common consciousness,” “refiguring separate I’s into a we.”¹⁴ On this newer reading, friends in virtue treat each other neither as mere means to their respective end (the mistake of base people) nor simply as intrinsic goods in themselves (as the mirror view does). Friends, rather, constitute “integrated goods” who share common high-level goals and organize their lives around goal hierarchies that are to a fair degree intertwined.¹⁵ From this perspective, the fourth, “more naturalistic” argument is a recasting not of the first argument but the third, which looks to Theognis to illustrate askēsis in virtue. Such shared goals, shared deliberation, and joint activity fit nicely with my reading of greatness of spirit, which, along with practical wisdom, structures the activities that make up one’s life.¹⁶

Given all that, what should we make of NE 9’s closing reference to gym buddies? First, we should note that NE 9’s final argument lays out a stage of moral development and activity that lines up with work in developmental psychology. NE 2–3 lays out the beginning of a process in training whereby young people explore interests as they develop skills and talents. NE 4’s account of greatness of spirit and NE 6’s account of practical wisdom lay out a more developed stage in which individuals organize their lives around driving interests, creating hierarchies of high-, mid-, and low-level goals. This is a common developmental path for Angela Duckworth’s gritty, elite performers to take. The point when an individual’s passion for an undertaking really takes off, though, is when the individual aligns his interests with some purpose beyond himself. In psychological terms, talent is what a person is good at, and interest is what he enjoys. Purpose comes when he can align these talents and interests with a meaningful need in the world beyond himself.¹⁷ In our world, such issues tend to come up in offices for career planning as students approach the completion of their studies. Aristotle suggests a more personal approach. Rather than viewing purpose in terms of the individual’s relationship to a society of strangers, Aristotle aligns the interests of self and other through concrete relationships between individuals. While he may be wrong to suggest that those concrete relationships extend only so far as one’s state, his account of drinking buddies, gym buddies, and philosophy buddies suggests that our typical career-office approach leaves out vital intermediary steps. Gym buddies help us to learn discipline more easily and to hold to our goals with greater pleasure. What is more, through such concrete relationships, we become more adept at aligning our goals with people and concerns beyond ourselves. As Aristotle first stated in NE 2, virtues of character strike means that are defined by reference to some kalon end. NE 8–9 finally fleshes out what that process looks like. Far from being problematic, the heroic ethos of pursuing deeds because they are awesome is what holds the account together, as concrete relationships within our families, gyms, and communities provide a context in which we may determine what awesome, kalon deeds would be for us.