Aristotle on Friendship: Lesser Friendships, Habit vs. Act, and Choice

Orientation #

He opens by recapping the first three readings himself: reasons for treating friendship in this part of philosophy, the definition (mutual, known love because of the good, the pleasant or the useful), and the three kinds of friendship among equals (prev. lecture). He says he will come back to the idea of equality in friendship “later on” and develop it more. The neighbouring classes treat the definition and division of friendship before, and the number of friends and friendship between unequals after.

The class, in order #

1. Recap and the task of the fourth reading (“said completely or fully or perfectly only”) #

Point: friendship is not said equally of the three kinds; it is said fully only of friendship based on virtue, but the others are not called friendship purely equivocally, because they have a likeness to it.

• Likeness of the pleasure-friendship: the good (virtuous) are also pleasant to one another.
• Likeness of the utility-friendship: the virtuous are useful to each other — the courageous man is useful to have, the just man, the wise man who gives good advice.

2. When the lesser friendships last (“when the same comes to be from each”) #

Point: lesser friendships sometimes resemble the highest in not being wholly transitory, and he draws out the conditions.

• They last especially when the same thing comes from each, and the pleasure is caused by the same sort of thing: the witty — you tell good jokes and I tell good jokes. Example: informal clubs in the US Congress where Republicans and Democrats get along because both have a sense of humour; Abe Lincoln known for funny stories.
• Contrast: lover and beloved do not take pleasure in the same thing — the plainer one rejoices in seeing the other’s beauty, the beautiful one rejoices in being served and flattered. When the beauty ends, seeing is no longer pleasant, and service is no longer paid; the friendship ends.
• Second way of lasting: having the same customs. Antony and Cleopatra — a friendship of pleasure, but both like to live it up, so they stay attached.
• Least stable: those exchanging not the pleasant but the useful “in amorous matters” — he takes this as the mixed friendship. Examples: the older rich man and the young beautiful girl (he recalls a newspaper story of a rich man renting an airplane for the wedding ceremony; “that’s not going to last,” and in a few months it was over, she getting the money); his brother in a Chicago restaurant overhearing a businessman tell his good-looking secretary “we’ll go shopping afterwards” — she pleases him, he pays her off.
• Utility friends cease when the useful ceases, for they are friends not of each other but of the profit. Examples: politicians (“I need you to balance the ticket”); friendships among nations — England allied with France against Germany, but in the Napoleonic wars with Germany against France; the English statesman’s line, “We have no permanent friends; we have merely permanent interests”; England keeping a balance of power. Utility friendship is probably the least persistent.

3. Can the bad be friends? (“only the good can be friends on account of themselves”) #

Point: the question raised earlier is answered by distinguishing the three kinds.

• The bad can be friends of each other on account of pleasure or usefulness; even the good can be friends of the bad in those two ways.
• Only the good can be friends on account of themselves, where the friend is loved as such. The bad do not rejoice in themselves unless some utility comes about: the getaway driver example — “get the motor running and I’ll come out with the money”; you are attached not because of what he is but because he is useful.
• Aside: at a little automobile museum in Kentucky, a letter from Clyde (of Bonnie and Clyde) praising the car company for a good getaway car.

4. Trust: the friendship of the good “alone without slander” (“one does not quickly believe”) #

Point: a friend is someone you can trust, and only the virtue-friendship supplies that trust.

• When he asks students “is a friend someone you can trust?”, they spontaneously say yes.
• In the highest friendship you trust the other because of his virtue, known by experience; in pleasure or utility friendships you hear “I think she’s seeing somebody else” and half believe it. Antony and Cleopatra after Caesar’s victory: Antony is not sure she won’t set him aside and go with the winner (“she’s done that before”); earlier, when Antony marries Octavius’s sister as a marriage of convenience, Cleopatra cannot fully trust him. Politicians: “I’ve been thinking about you for the vice presidency” said to several people.
• Text: the friendship of the good alone is without slander, for one does not quickly believe something bad about someone tested by oneself over a long time. Example: a student’s prank phone call from a young girl asking for him; his wife says “it’s a joke” because she trusts him completely.
• Even two virtuous men need time to become friends, because I cannot know you are virtuous without having seen how you act over time.
• “For there is trust in these, and never to have been unjust, and whatever else is deemed worthy of true friendship.” Example: Abraham Lincoln chosen by Illinois lawyers to sit in for an absent judge, because they had seen his honesty in the courtroom over and over.
• “Nothing prevents such things coming to be in others” — in the lesser friendships, slander is easily believed: Hollywood marriages based on pleasure, quick to believe a partner is interested in a co-star.

5. Cicero vs. Aristotle on the word “friendship” (“in a weaker, diminished, much less sense”) #

Point: Cicero limits “friendship” to the virtuous; Aristotle agrees this is the only full and perfect friendship but keeps the common usage for the lesser ones.

• Children playing together are friends of pleasure (“did you have a good time?”), and since men also call friends those on account of usefulness — as cities do: friendly relations with England, “not so friendly with France right now” — alliances of cities show the likeness of utility friendship; so perhaps we ought to call these friends too, but in a weaker sense.
• Link to Thomas’s treatise: the two loves, love of wanting and love of friendship. Naming the love of wishing well “love of friendship” shows they were thinking of friendship in the full sense; the love of wanting is more characteristic of the lesser friendships — I want a recommendation from you, I like your jokes, I like to ride in your fast car.
• Aside: he and his brother Mark, young-looking professors at St Mary’s College, buy a flashy red Oldsmobile from a filling-station man going to work for Ford; a student comes up “really friendly” — a love of wanting; they were nicknamed “the pale face twins.”

6. Friendship simply vs. friendship “by happening” (“not purely by chance called friends”) #

Point: there are many forms of friendship; the first and chief is that of the good as good; the rest are friendship by likeness, since pleasure and usefulness are in some way good.

• The pleasant is good to those who love pleasure, but “these are not all joined together,” for things by accident are not all joined.
• The bad are friends through pleasure or the useful, being alike in the same; the good through themselves. The good are friends simply; the others by happening: you happen to please me today, not tomorrow; an auto mechanic happens to be useful some day; you happen to be in a position to recommend me.

7. Fifth reading: habit and act in the virtues (“some are called good according to habit”) #

Point: as in the virtues, “just” is said of a man by habit or of a deed by act, and the two are connected but not the same.

• The habit of a moral virtue is acquired by repeated acts (by doing just things we become just); once acquired, the habit lets us do the acts better, more firmly, with more pleasure. The habit can be lost by contrary acts (eating and drinking a little more each day, losing temperance).
• The connection differs before and after acquiring the habit: instability and difficulty before, stability and pleasure after.

8. Habit and act of friendship; absence (“the places do not destroy the friendship simply”) #

Point: friendship too has a habit and an act.

• Those living together enjoy each other and do good to each other; those sleeping or separated do not act, but are disposed to act, and habit is a firm disposition. Separation in place (he in Kentucky, they here) removes the act, not the friendship.
• But long absence makes friendship forgotten: high-school friends who go to different colleges “drift apart”; “lack of conversation” — being together, taken broadly — destroys many friendships.
• Aside: a seminary teacher who had to relearn Greek each time he taught it; take the second year of a language right after the first.

9. Who is unfit for friendship; living together (“nothing belongs more to friends than living together”) #

Point: the old and the harsh are little fitted for friendship because there is little pleasant in them, and no one can pass a day with someone painful; nature flees the painful and desires the pleasant.

• Those who approve of each other but do not live together seem more to wish well than to be friends. He flags this as almost touching something more required for friendship than the definition brought out: if you and I wish well but would rather not spend time together, are we fully friends?
• Those in need want usefulness, but even the blessed spend the day together. Student exchange on heaven: the blessed need nothing, yet look at God and praise God together; it is least of all suitable to them to be solitary.
• Living together is impossible if they do not enjoy the same things: rock and roll vs. Mozart; the policeman in the Worcester package store who wanted the baseball game over the Metropolitan Opera (“I’m going to shoot that radio out”).
• Asides: the Yankees–Red Sox game running against last night’s debate, with a comic broadcast cutting between them; a student’s “Bambi game” story of a network cutting off an overtime football game.

10. The friendship of the good is greatest, “through both” (“a double reason for liking each other”) #

Point: the good or pleasant simply seems loved and chosen, but by each what is such to him; the good love the good through both. If two enjoy bad things together they have some reason to like each other, but the things are not really enjoyable; if they rejoice in good things they have a double reason — the things are truly good for them and they enjoy them.

11. Loving as passion, friendship as habit; choice from habit (“in friendship they love in return with choice”) #

Point: “something kind of subtle” — loving (in Greek more like eros, he says) is a passion, directed even to inanimate things; friendship is a habit, since friends love in return with choice, and choice is from habit.

• Hamlet on Horatio (“since my dear soul was mistress of her choice … her election hath sealed thee for herself”): friend by choice, not by feeling.
• Love at first sight is possible for the passion (the poets; President Bush in last night’s debate on his wife); friendship at first sight is not — at most a desire for friendship, since I cannot choose you without seeing your habits.
• Choice proceeds from habit: Aristotle’s Book II definition of moral virtue as “a habit with choice … in the middle towards us as determined by right reason,” almost “a habit of choosing.” The temperate man is habitually inclined to choose the right amount as reason sees it now (a big breakfast when it will be long before the next meal).
• So whom you choose as friend says something about your habits: not habituated to rock and roll, he will not choose its devotee; a Mozart lover, or someone interested in philosophy and theology, he is disposed to choose. Hamlet’s character is revealed by choosing Horatio (“give me that man that is not passion’s slave”); the weekend drunk looks for another weekend drunk.
• He admits Aristotle is “a little bit brief here” and may need more unfolding than he gives.

12. Wishing well “not by passion but by habit” (“wish good things to the beloved for their sake”) #

Point: “again, a very subtle thing” — in the highest friendship they wish good to the beloved for his sake by habit, not passion, and he explains why passion cannot do it.

1. Choice is an act of will, desire following reason; only man chooses (Hamlet had a reason for choosing Horatio over passion’s slaves).
2. Emotions follow sense, shared with animals; sense knows good only as what pleases the senses, bad as what pains them.
3. The pleasure of the senses is the good of the one who has the senses; so by the emotions one seeks one’s own, not the other’s good.
4. Friendship requires loving the other for his own sake; therefore one must be habituated to wish well to others.

• The child is naturally selfish; moral education is habituation by repeated acts: the child made to share his candy and given the example of sharing; the boy who took bat and ball home when the game went badly, whose mother brought them back out; children fighting over the toy the other is playing with, and mothers adjudicating turns; his own mother separating fighting brothers until boredom made them make up.
• Summary of the connections between friendship and habit: friendship is itself a habit (though also said of the act); it is produced by choice, and choice comes from habits; and wishing well must be habituated. Aside: he did not choose to be a philosopher by a sudden feeling but from prior studious habits (Aristotle: philosopher and sophist differ by choice of life).

13. Friendship is called equality (“for friendship is called equality”) #

Point: in loving the friend they love what is good for themselves, for the good man becoming a friend becomes good to his friend (he recalls scripture: God is good to those who love him, who seek him); they give back the equal in wish and in kind.

• Equality shows the likeness of friendship to justice (“courts of equity”). It belongs most to the friendship of the good.
• Hence the difficulty of friendship between God and man, given the inequality; one reason given for the Incarnation is God coming down to our level to make love between us and God easier. Even among men far apart, friendship is difficult. To be developed later.

His words #

• friendship “purely equivocally” vs. “by a certain likeness”: the lesser kinds are not the former but the latter.
• “friends of the profit”: what utility friends really love.
• “without slander”: the friendship of the good, where bad reports are not quickly believed.
• “by happening” vs. “simply / without qualification”: the lesser friendships vs. the friendship of the good [ed.: per accidens vs. per se].
• “love of wanting” vs. “love of friendship”: Thomas’s two loves [ed.: amor concupiscentiae / amor amicitiae].
• “habit is a firm disposition”.
• “lack of conversation”: being together, taken broadly.
• “loving” (eros, a passion) vs. “friendship” (a habit, with choice).
• “a habit with choice … in the middle towards us as determined by right reason”: his rendering of the Book II definition of moral virtue.
• “friendship is called equality”; “courts of equity”.

Texts #

Read in class

• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book VIII, handout readings 4 and 5 (pp. 5–7) (inferred): likeness of the lesser friendships; bad as friends; trust; friendship in a weaker sense; habit and act; living together; loving vs. friendship; wishing well by habit; equality.

Mentioned

• Cicero, work on friendship (limits “friendship” to the virtuous).
• Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra (customs; distrust after Caesar’s victory; marriage to Octavius’s sister).
• Shakespeare, Hamlet, Hamlet on Horatio (from the “friendly topics” handout).
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book II, definition of moral virtue.
• Thomas Aquinas, treatise on love: love of wanting and love of friendship.
• Scripture, “God is good to those who love him / seek him” (locus not stated).
• Aristotle on philosopher and sophist differing by choice of life (locus not stated).

His questions #

• Is a friend someone you can trust? Yes — but only the virtue-friendship gives that trust; the others admit suspicion.
• Can the bad be friends of the bad? Yes, on account of pleasure or usefulness; only the good are friends on account of themselves.
• If we wish well to each other but would rather not live together, are we really friends fully? Seemingly not: nothing belongs more to friends than living together.
• Even the blessed spend the day together — what about heaven? The blessed need nothing, yet look at and praise God together; solitude suits them least.
• Can there be love at first sight? Can there be friendship at first sight? Love as passion, yes; friendship, no — only a desire for it, since choice needs knowledge of habits.
• Do your choices proceed more from your habits than anything else? Yes: moral virtue is nearly a habit of choosing; whom you choose as friend reveals your habits.
• How do the senses know good and bad? Only as what pleases or pains the senses — the good of the one who has them.
• By the emotions, am I really wishing well to another? No; I seek my own, so wishing well for the other’s sake must come by habit.