Aristotle's Six Reasons to Study Friendship, and Friendship in Shakespeare: Its Excellence, Concord, and Return of Love

Orientation #

The recording opens mid-sentence at the end of the previous class, with a reply “to the third” that hate is caused from love, “as will be said below” (prev. lecture); he notes Thomas has treatises on hate, fear, and each passion. He says “we consider love, as we did in the treatise on love, before we consider friendship.” Verified sources: a handout page “Effects of Love,” p. 31 is read from for about four minutes (probably the second set of readings he “passed out”); the volume in use is DHB Vol. III, The School of Aristotle. The previous class treated love as cause of all a lover does; the next takes up envy and flattery as opposed to friendship.

The class, in order #

1. Wisdom shared with friends (“the two best things in life are wisdom and friendship”) #

Point: friendship is a major topic of ethics, and its consideration presupposes love.

• Two of the ten books of the Nicomachean Ethics are on friendship; Thomas comments on it. His saying to students: what could be better than friendship in the pursuit of wisdom? Wisdom shared with friends — “that’s what our friendship with God is.”
• Ancients vs moderns: ancients stress friendship (Cicero’s treatise, Plato’s dialogue); in the Middle Ages caritas is a form of friendship; perhaps friendship in the Trinity, since friendship needs at least two persons and mutual love. Love without friendship is possible; friendship without love is not — hence love is studied first.
• Etymology: Greek philein (love in the will, vs eros in the concupiscence) and philia; Latin amo/amare and amicitia; English “friend” from Anglo-Saxon freogan, “to love,” a verb we have lost.
• Aside: feast of Saint Pio of Pietrelcina (“so used to saying Padre Pio”).

2. First reason: friendship is a virtue or with virtue (“for it is a virtue or with virtue”) #

Point: the first reason ties friendship to what Books II–VII established, that virtue is the road to happiness.

• Ethics is chiefly about happiness, man’s chief good; virtue is the road there, vice the road to misery (Books II–V moral virtues, VI virtues of reason, VII things above or below virtue). Shakespeare in Taming of the Shrew can mention “that part of philosophy that treats of happiness by virtue” — so well known.
• The classroom test: would you want a coward or a courageous man for a friend? a drunkard or a temperate man? Don Giovanni — you couldn’t trust him with your wife or daughter; a stingy man, a thief? A friend is someone you can trust: can you trust the coward in battle, the glutton with your cake, the avaricious man with your money? Shows how vice disposes one badly for friendship.
• Aristotle leaves open whether friendship is itself a virtue or only with virtue. Thomas asks whether charity is a form of friendship and says yes — that friendship at least is a virtue. If human friendship is a virtue, it most resembles justice (concerns another, giving what is due, returning what you borrow — “we speak of the return of love”).

3. Second reason: altogether necessary to live well (“no one having all other goods would choose to live without friends”) #

Point: friendship is among the things needed to live well, which is ethics’ concern; shown by two inductions.

• General statement first; Robinson Crusoe, self-sufficient but lonely and sad without a friend.
• Induction by condition: the rich and powerful need friends — what is the use of prosperity without doing good, done most praiseworthily to friends? and how could wealth be guarded without those you can trust (bodyguards, kidnappers, “Saddam Hussein needed friends to stay in power”)? The greater the wealth or position, the more insecure. The poor and unfortunate think friends the only refuge.
• Induction by age: the young, to avoid mistakes (“Judy dropped you… your friend talks you out of” the crazy thing); the old, to be watched over (daily phone call, going over to check); those in the prime of life (his word, not “middle age”), to accomplish great things — “when two go together they are more able both to understand and to act.” Example: Msgr Dionne pacing before a conversation with Charles De Koninck in Quebec; his own best friend, each influencing the other’s thinking. Even more so in acting.

4. Third reason: friendship is natural (“every man is akin to and friend of man”) #

Point: friendship exists by nature between parent and offspring, among the same race, and among all men — and this belongs to ethics, not only to natural philosophy.

• Parent and offspring (Aristotle calls even father–son a friendship, of unequals): the mother cat carrying each kitten out of the burning building, singed each trip, firemen cheering; his daughter’s cat Tabitha waiting until the last of six or seven kittens finished before drinking; Macbeth’s “most diminutive of birds” fighting for its young — natural in men, birds, most animals (more the mother in animals).
• Same race, and all men: we praise lovers of mankind, philanthropists; the sign from “wanderings” — giving a stranger directions on the street.
• Objection he raises: isn’t the natural a matter for natural philosophy? Reply: if nothing were naturally good or bad in human affairs there would be no ethics, only sociology, a narration of customs (“customs in my country is to eat daddy when he gets to be 70”). Aristotle always follows nature; in Book II of Natural Hearing, nature is something like an art in things, not human but divine; to follow nature is in a way to follow God, learning as we first learn, by imitation.

5. Fourth and fifth reasons: friendship and justice (“lawgivers are more concerned about it even than justice”) #

Point: friendship holds cities together and is more necessary than justice; with friendship justice is not needed, but justice alone does not suffice.

• Fourth: enmity among citizens is destructive; punishing justly can breed hatred among the punished man’s supporters, so lawgivers care more for friendship than justice. Justice gets a whole Book V, friendship two books, courage and temperance less than one — a sign of its rank. Harmony (peace among citizens) is something like friendship; discord is banished as unfriendly. Examples: the American Civil War (Henry Clay, “the great compromiser,” delayed it ten years; died 1852, last compromise 1850); Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War, democratic and oligarchic cities each with an internal opposing faction — civil war inside each city.
• Fifth: “in being friends there is no need of justice” — a friend gives more than what is yours. Marriage: husband and wife do not divide “your job / my job”; the wife mows the lawn, the husband does the dishes; strict justice is not enough to live pleasantly with someone. If you have friendship you don’t need justice; with justice alone you still need friendship. “What is most just seems to fit a friend” — the likeness again; St Catherine of Siena, “don’t forget to pay the debt of love”: you owe your neighbour love.

6. Sixth reason: friendship is noble (“we praise those who love their friends”) #

Point: friendship is not only necessary but desirable for its own sake.

• To have many friends seems beautiful; “some think that good men and friends are the same” — Christians think so, since caritas makes one good and is a kind of friendship.
• Foreshadowing (his own, “getting ahead”): Aristotle will distinguish kinds; the best and fullest friendship is only between good men; in lesser kinds bad men can be friends of bad men or even of good men.

7. Like to like, or opposites attract? (“the opposite is useful”) #

Point: Aristotle reports the disagreement (going back to Plato’s dialogues) and sets the natural-philosophy side of it aside.

• Likeness: “like to like,” “jackdaw to jackdaw” (our “birds of a feather”); we saw likeness as a cause of love. Against: “all such are potters to each other” — two potters compete for the same buyer; a wine-seller and a potter don’t. “Opposites attract”: he notes de Sales [ed.: name unclear in recording] almost speaks as if there were two, and grandparents love grandchildren.
• Those who seek “higher and more according to nature”: Euripides, the dry earth wants rain, the rain-filled heavens want to fall on earth; Heraclitus, “the opposite is useful” — his gloss: the whole American way of life rests on it (economic competition, the Chevrolet dealer improving cars because of the Japanese; prosecutor and defender in the courtroom; opposing parties, while the one-party state has been tyranny — Nazis, Communists, Baathists); every article of Thomas’ Summa begins with the opposite, to make one stop and think. Heraclitus again, “the most beautiful harmony is from those differing” — he asks students what this says of homosexual marriage; Rembrandt’s man in the helmet (shaft of light against dark), stars against the black sky, sunrise and sunset, moonlight through bare trees on snow. “All things come to be by strife.” Empedocles on the contrary: like wants like.
• Aristotle: doubts about natural things belong elsewhere; here we examine what is human, pertaining to customs and passions.

8. Aristotle’s two questions (“whether there is one form of friendship or many”) #

Point: two questions posed, not yet answered.

• Can the bad be friends? His preview: not in the perfect kind, yes in defective kinds.
• One form or many? Those who think it one because it admits more and less “do not believe by sufficient sign,” since things differing in kind can also be more and less: wisdom is better than candy, but are they good in the same way? Plato seems to make a father’s rule over a family and a king’s over a city differ only in number ruled; a student answers they are a different kind of rule — “yeah, I think so.”

9. Readings: the excellence of friendship (“a noble and a true conceit of godlike amity”) #

Point: the second handout is to “loosen up your mind” on aspects of friendship before the treatise.

• Merchant of Venice: Portia sends Bassanio to Antonio’s aid, no honeymoon; Lorenzo praises her “noble and a true conceit” (old word for concept) “of godlike amity” (amity from French). Shakespeare calls few things godlike — reason, in the exhortation to use reason, and friendship here; we too think friendship godlike (Father and Son).
• Homer: the Iliad celebrates the friendship of equals (Achilles and Patroclus); the Odyssey friendship of unequals — wife, son, servant Eumaeus the swineherd, all faithful to Odysseus. Aside: the Greek waitress in Worcester called Penny, really Penelope — a great name recalling twenty years’ faithfulness.
• Sonnet couplets: “while I think on thee, dear friend, all losses are restored and sorrows end”; “for thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings that then I scorn to change my state with kings.” Two metaphors: wealth (as our Lord uses it for heaven, the treasure in the field) and sweet. Thomas on the Psalms, “taste and see how sweet is the Lord”: metaphor is a figure based on likeness; sweet has three — pleasant (every kid likes candy), restful or tranquil (the policeman’s ice cream to the lost child, candy in the car on long drives), refreshing. All three fit a friend’s love; hate is unpleasant, unsettling, wearying (Buckley’s “tenacious ill will”). “Sweet form” = beautiful form: the beautiful pleases when seen, is restful, refreshes (“a sight for sore eyes”).
• Boswell’s Johnson: the longer we live and the more we think, the higher the value we put on the friendship of parents and friends (Aristotle too calls parent–child a friendship); one who expects many true friends “promised himself too much.”
• Smollett, Travels: seeing the white cliffs of Dover after two years, he loves England as a land of liberty, cleanliness and convenience, but more tenderly as the habitation of friends “for whose conversation, correspondence and esteem I wish alone to live” — very strong. Humphry Clinker: old decrepit companions reunited — “mutual goodwill” (he stresses: goodwill must be mutual for friendship), the happiest day in twenty years, “a renovation of youth, a kind of resuscitation of the dead,” joking on their calamities; “such is the power of friendship, the sovereign cordial of life.”

10. Concord and the return of love (“return of love”) #

Point: friendship is concord of hearts and requires mutual love; the phrase “return of love” itself shows its likeness to justice.

• Concord passages: “bind this knot of amity” (amity a synonym for friendship); a heart “in a fair consent with ours”; Julia’s ring to Proteus “to remember my goodwill”; “they that thrive well take counsel with their friends.”
• Return of love: if I love you and you don’t return it, we’re not friends. Puzzle: return normally means you no longer have what you gave back, yet if you return my love you still have it; nor does it mean “take your love back” — the girl returning the ring ends things, returning love starts a friendship. Why speak so? It shows the likeness to justice: as if you return the very love received.
• Much Ado: Benedick overhears the plotted talk (“they seem to pity the lady… love me? why, it must be requited”) and is “censured” for not loving in return; Act 5 sc. 4, “no, truly, but in friendly recompense.” Merry Wives: Fenton — “you mutually have answered my affection… so far forth as herself might be her chooser,” the old idea that parents choose the spouse (Romeo and Juliet depends on it). His defence of it: the made belongs to the maker — a driftwood statue belongs to the carver, a book to its author; “the Lord’s is the earth” because he made it, and God creates matter as well as form, so we belong wholly to God; in a way the child belongs to the parents more than to himself. Venus and Adonis: Adonis, “’tis much to borrow, and I will not owe it” — justice language again. Sonnet: “plead for love and look for recompense”; “thou gavest me thine, not to give back again.”

11. Friendship and justice in Shakespeare (“make us even with you”) #

Point: our speech about love and enmity borrows the language of justice.

• As You Like It: Celia to Rosalind, “the truth of thy love… so righteously tempered” — truth is like justice. Macbeth: Malcolm will “reckon with your several loves and make us even with you” — getting even, being even, is justice (settling up after buying milk). Romeo and Juliet: Capulet and Montague “lived at odds so long” — at odds is the opposite of even. Egeus: Lysander “filched my daughter’s heart” — stolen love is unjust (cf. the charge of alienation of affection). Don John: “rob love from any,” “a plain dealing villain.” Julia: Ariadne’s Theseus, “perjury and unjust flight” — unfaithfulness called unjust. Two Gentlemen final scene: Valentine on Proteus (well named, the shape-changing god, twenty oaths to Julia then Sylvia) — “thou common friend, that’s without faith or love… perjured… amongst all foes that a friend should be the worst.”
• Closing aside: his “love and friendship plays” of Shakespeare, six: Midsummer Night’s Dream, Two Gentlemen, Merchant of Venice (early), Much Ado, As You Like It, Twelfth Night (mature) — romantic love alongside friendship, sometimes in conflict; usually two men are friends, but in Merchant and Midsummer the women are friends. Recording ends mid-sentence.

His words #

• caritas: charity, considered in the Middle Ages a form of friendship.
• philein / philia: Greek verb “to love” (in the will) and “friendship”; eros: love more in the concupiscence.
• amo, amare, amicitia: Latin, love and friendship.
• freogan: Old Anglo-Saxon “to love,” root of “friend.”
• proemium: Aristotle’s preface giving reasons to consider friendship.
• Natural Hearing [ed.: Physics]: nature as something of a divine art in things.
• prime of life: Aristotle’s term for those between young and old (not “middle age”).
• friendship of equals / of unequals: Achilles and Patroclus vs husband–wife, father–son, master–servant.
• conceit: old word for concept, understanding.
• amity: friendship, from the French.
• sweet (metaphor): pleasant, restful/tranquil, refreshing — Thomas’ three likenesses.
• mutual goodwill: the love of wishing well, which must be mutual for friendship.
• even / at odds: justice and enmity in ordinary speech.

Texts #

Read in class

• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, proemium to the treatise on friendship (Book VIII opening), in his own translation.
• Handout of literary passages (verified: “Effects of Love,” p. 31, probably): Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice (Lorenzo to Portia); Sonnets (couplets; one cited as Sonnet 23 — locus as stated, unverified); Much Ado About Nothing (Benedick overhearing; Act 5 sc. 4); Merry Wives of Windsor (Fenton); Venus and Adonis; As You Like It (Celia); Macbeth (Malcolm); Romeo and Juliet (Capulet); Midsummer Night’s Dream (Egeus); Two Gentlemen of Verona (Julia; final scene); Boswell, Life of Johnson; Smollett, Travels through France and Italy and Expedition of Humphry Clinker.

Mentioned

• Thomas Aquinas, commentary on the Ethics; question whether charity is friendship; Summa, every article beginning with the opposite; commentary on the Psalms (“taste and see how sweet is the Lord”).
• Aristotle, Physics Book II; Cicero on friendship; Plato’s dialogue on friendship; Plato on rule of father and king.
• Homer, Iliad and Odyssey; Thucydides; Shakespeare, Taming of the Shrew, Macbeth (“most diminutive of birds”); Defoe, Robinson Crusoe; a biography of Henry Clay; Euripides, Heraclitus, Empedocles (as quoted by Aristotle); St John’s epistle (God is love); St Catherine of Siena; Psalms (“the Lord’s is the earth”).

His questions #

• What could be better than friendship in the pursuit of wisdom? Wisdom shared with friends — which is our friendship with God.
• Would you like a coward or a courageous man for a friend? Can you trust a coward, a drunkard, a stingy man? Everyone chooses the virtuous man; vice makes one untrustworthy and so unfit as a friend.
• Why does Aristotle give the naturalness of friendship as a reason in ethics rather than natural philosophy? Because without something naturally good or bad in human affairs there would be no ethics, only a narration of customs; following nature is following the divine art.
• If you have justice, is that enough in human affairs? No — marriage shows one must go beyond strict justice; friendship does the job better.
• Is it that you are drawn to one like you, or attracted to the opposite? Both sides reported (like to like; potters, Euripides, Heraclitus; Empedocles); Aristotle sets the natural question aside.
• Is the rule of a father over his children and of a king over citizens the same, differing in more or less? Student: a different kind — “yeah, I think so”; more and less is not a sufficient sign of one kind.
• Why do we say “return of love” when the one returning still keeps the love? It shows the likeness of friendship to justice, as if repaying what was received.
• To whom does the carved statue belong? To the maker — so we belong to God, and in a way the child to the parents, whence the old right to bestow in marriage.