Aristotle on Friendship: Who Can Be a Friend, Friends Among Unequals, and God and Man

Orientation #

He opens by asking “what’s the transition from what’s gone on up to this point and the sixth reading”: we have learned what friendship is and its kinds; now the practical question, in whom they can be realized. He refers back to “the friendly topics” (earlier classes) on free/friend and on the actor Garrick, and to “the treatise on love”. He closes by announcing that next time will be “the last reading here”, followed by “fundamental things in ethics”, the good, since the object should have been treated before the act. The previous class read readings four and five (imperfect vs. perfect friendship; friendship as habit and act, living together); the next takes up loving vs. being loved.

The class, in order #

1. The transition: from what friendship is to in whom it can be realized (“in whom can these friendships be”) #

The point: reading six turns from what friendship is and its kinds to the practical question of who is capable of each kind and toward how many.

• Analogy from political philosophy: it is one thing to say what government is and distinguish its kinds, another to ask whether this kind can be realized in this people (a democratic form in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, an African country). After the Second World War many African colonies got parliamentary government “in name at least”, but in practice bloody tyrants: people are naive about whether a people is ready. So too here: who is more capable of “this quality, this habit of friendship”, and who is not so suitable.

2. The harsh and the old make friends less (“Friendship comes to be less in those harsh”) #

The point: friendship arises less among severe characters and among the old; the young make friends swiftly.

• The harsh: people of severe, “foreboding” personality may have good will, not malice, but are “not so fruitful a soil” for friendship.
• The old: ailments, pains, hard of hearing, so more discontented and enjoying company less, “can’t stand the noise and the hub of it all”. Not every old person is so: Samuel Johnson kept making new friends in old age, “the exception that proves the rule”.
• The young become friends swiftly because they are easily pleased and enjoy company; people looking back find their closest friends are from high school or college. Why the young are more suitable “seems to be a matter of experience”.
• Reading: the old and the harsh “do not become friends of those whom they do not enjoy”; they can still be well-wishers, wishing good and coming to each other in need, but “are not altogether friends” because they do not spend the day together or enjoy each other. Tied back to the earlier point: living together is more the act of friendship; as courage is not just having the habit but acting according to it, so those who do not want to live together are not friends “in the fullest sense”.

3. Perfect friendship is hardly had for more than one: the intensity (“not possible to be a friend of many”) #

The point: first reason why the perfect friendship cannot be had toward many: it is intense, like sexual love, which is one-to-one.

1. Sexual love, though based more on the passions, is so intense that one cannot be that passionate about two people at once. Romeo, seeing Juliet, forgets Rosalind: “a nail to drive out a nail”.
2. Aristotle’s comparison suggests the perfect friendship has an intensity of its own. Examples: Hamlet and Horatio (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are “nothing compared to Horatio”); Bassanio and the Merchant of Venice, who is willing to lay down his life for him (“greater love than this hath no man”), though both have many other friends in the play; Achilles and Patroclus in the Iliad, where Achilles “will never have a friend like this again”.
3. Conclusion: as the famous sexual loves are one-to-one (Romeo–Juliet, Antony–Cleopatra, Bassanio–Portia), so the noblest friendships; “you’re lucky if you have” it for one other person, maybe two or three. His text: it seems like “the excessive”, which “is apt to come to be towards one”.

4. Two further reasons: pleasing in many things, and long experience (“not easy for many to be pleasing”) #

The point: second and third reasons, plus a summary of all three.

• Second reason (third paragraph): “it is not easy for many to be pleasing to the same one at the same time”. He takes this of lesser things beside virtue: eating habits (garlic; a friend who rose at one in the afternoon and studied through the night; nothing wrong in it, “any more than the English driving the left side”); his Irish mother working as a maid in Jewish households with different eating habits, not sinful, just hard to take; fish four times a week; his Minnesota walleye pike vs. his wife’s East-Coast lobster; beer drinker vs. wine drinker; when one plays music (was it Karl Barth who had to hear Mozart on rising?). To be really close “you got to have a lot of both things alike”; “Aristotle starts being very human here.”
• Aristotle’s “footnote”: “and perhaps not good” — if many were extremely pleasing to him he could not get his work done; maybe nature or providence keeps this intensity from being for everybody, as if Romeo were interested in as many women as in Juliet.
• Third reason (top of page eight): one must have long experience of the other and become intimate through conversation, “which is the most difficult of all”; one must be thrown together with the person. A student’s wedding-reception acquaintance from another part of the country; someone met at a philosophical conference who goes back to his college.
• Summary, three reasons: intensity; must be pleasing even in secondary things; the intimate experience requires circumstances that bring one together.

5. Useful and pleasant friends can be many; the pleasant is nearer to friendship (“possible to please many through the useful”) #

The point: the lesser friendships can be had with many, and of these the friendship of pleasure is more like friendship, the useful more like commerce.

• Garrick the actor (from the friendly topics) always invited to someone’s house. Successful politicians have many useful friends and need them: reading a Lincoln biography (begun at his son’s in Kentucky), all the people Lincoln knew by name on the Illinois circuits became useful for the 1860 nomination. “Social friends” are usually friendships of pleasure; such people are many, the services short, one is not devoted entirely to them.
• Reading: the friendship through the pleasant seems more like friendship when the same things come from both and they enjoy each other, as in the friendships of the young; “the liberal is more in these, but that to the useful is commercial.” Liberal from Latin liber, free, Greek the same; in English free and friend are related (etymological dictionary). So the pleasant friendship is closer to the highest; the useful is more like business.
• Sign: the blessed have no need of the useful but of the pleasant, for they wish to live with someone; one may put up with the disagreeable “for a short time” (he corrects the text’s reading) but not continuously, “not even the good itself if it were disagreeable”; hence they seek pleasant friends, who ought also to be good.

6. Those in power keep separate friends (“Those in power seem to have separate friends”) #

The point: the powerful have some friends for use, others for pleasure, never both in the same; they do not seek the virtuous.

• Aristotle had experience of the powerful: teacher of Alexander the Great, whose later relation to Aristotle is disputed, with a question whether Alexander was corrupted by power.
• Reading: the powerful seek the witty for pleasure and “the terribly efficient” for their commands, not the virtuous, though the good man is both pleasant and useful; such a man becomes a friend of one in power only if the latter is “overtopped in virtue”, otherwise the proportion is not made equal — and this is not customary. “Aristotle may be hinting that power corrupts.”
• Aside: at St Mary’s College in the early ’60s a sophomore with a freshman carrying his books “like a slave” told him “now you know that power corrupts”.

7. Epilogue on the friendships in equality (“The foresaid friendships then are in equality”) #

The point: the friendships treated so far are among equals; they are and are not friendships by likeness and unlikeness to the perfect one.

• Because of the connection between friendship and equality, the equal friendships come first; reading seven turns to unequals. (Asked: friendship of God the Father and God the Son? Among equals.)
• Equals are equally useful or pleasing, or exchange one for the other (pleasure for utility) to equalize. Summary: these are less friendships and less lasting; through likeness to the friendship “simply, and not by happening” (they have the pleasant and the useful) they seem to be friendships; through unlikeness (the perfect is without slander and lasting, these quickly change) they seem not to be. Cicero counted only virtue-friendship as friendship.
• True love seems eternal: Shakespeare’s sonnet on love; Lincoln’s wedding ring inscribed “Love is eternal”; prenuptial agreements are “we’re going to get married and see if it works out”; “something wrong there”. Put to the class: do we love each other if our love is not forever? Answer: no (the class says “Yes” to the point).

8. Friendship according to superiority: its kinds (“another form of friendship”) #

The point: the other genus of friendship is among unequals, with three prime instances.

• Homer: the Iliad (which the Greeks rank higher) is the tragedy of the equal friendship of Achilles and Patroclus; the Odyssey celebrates unequal friendships: Odysseus and faithful Penelope who waits twenty years, Odysseus and his son, Odysseus and the faithful swineherd. The same three in St Paul’s epistles as Thomas divides the text: advice to husbands and wives, fathers and sons, masters and slaves; and in Aristotle’s treatment of the household.
• Reading: father to son (Cicero: “the son is always indebted to the father”), and generally older to younger, “in all the different arts and sciences”; man to woman (“very popular in our days”); ruler to ruled (the pope and Ratzinger).
• These differ from each other, and also each side from the other: the father’s friendship for the son is not the same as the son’s for the father, nor husband’s for wife and wife’s for husband, nor ruler’s and ruled’s — whereas Hamlet’s for Horatio and Horatio’s for Hamlet is the same kind.

9. Proof: virtue, work, and the reason for loving differ (“the virtue and the work of these”) #

The point: the two friendships differ because the virtue and work of each are different and that on account of which they love is different.

1. Virtue and work: the son’s virtue is obedience; the father’s is to discipline, advise, have foresight. Parents obeying the child, or the child disciplining and providing foresight for the father, is “a disorder in the household”.
2. Reason for loving: the same principle used among equal friendships — love is because of something lovable, and different goods make different lovings and different friendships. The father loves the son as a continuation of himself: “reproduction” means to produce again, and it is the parents who are reproduced, not the son; Shakespeare’s line about seeing one’s blood warm when one feels it cold. The son does not see the father as a continuation of himself but loves him as having given life, nourishment, education. If the reason differs, the love differs; if the love differs, the friendship, a habit of loving, differs.

• The principle traced to the De Anima: powers (“abilities”) are distinguished by acts, acts by objects; color and sound differ, so seeing and hearing differ, so the ability to see and to hear differ.
• Side note, God and man: an unequal friendship. God’s reason for loving us: we are made in His image (not that we made God in ours, as the poets did Zeus). Our reasons for loving God: He created us, conserves us in existence, shepherds us to our goal — none of which He has toward us (“God is dead” is nonsense; the cartoon “Nietzsche is dead — signed God”). Likewise virtue and work: God’s work is creation and conservation; ours is humility, obedience, the theological virtues — we believe and hope in Him, He does not. “Beautiful, the Aristotle gives here.”

10. Husband and wife, officer and soldier; proportional loving vs. justice (“The loving ought to be proportional”) #

The point: the same holds of the other pairs; equality in unequal friendship is by proportion, and equality enters friendship differently than justice.

• Husband and wife: virtue and work differ (a student: sewing — even queens sewed, men never); whether the wife’s reason for loving the husband is the same as his for her is “more difficult to see” — left to think about.
• Officer and soldier: soldier’s virtue is obedience and bravery; officer’s is foresight, not sacrificing men needlessly (First World War officers criticized for massive killing; Churchill’s Gallipoli plan; MacArthur island-hopping to reduce deaths; Shakespeare’s Henry V at Agincourt).
• Reading: “the same things do not come to be to either from the other, nor ought they to be sought”: each should not expect from the other what the other expects from him. When children give parents what is owed to those who engendered, and parents give children what is owed (nourishment, advice on what to pursue and avoid), the friendship is lasting and good.
• Loving ought to be proportional: the better should be loved more than he loves; loving according to worth makes “in some way equality”, which belongs to friendship.
• Justice vs. friendship (“Now, what the hell does that mean?”): in justice the equal is first according to worth, then by quantity; in friendship quantity first, worth second. His gloss: if you buy me milk and bread, I first find the worth and then make it equal; when a house is sold for its market value the work of justice is over and “we have nothing to do with each other anymore” — justice begins from inequality and makes equal. In friendship there must first be a kind of equality between us, and then I treat you as myself, another self, as an equal is worthy to be treated. “Kind of a subtle thing here.”

11. Great distance ends friendship; no precise limit; God and man (“if there is a great distance in virtue”) #

The point: great disparity in virtue, wickedness, wealth or the like makes friendship no longer expected, but without a precise limit; this raises the question of friendship with God.

• David Copperfield: one goes to London and becomes famous and wealthy, the other stays poor in the small town. Boswell’s Johnson: a bumpkin from Lichfield expecting intimacy with world-famous Johnson. Degrees and knowledge vs. remaining ignorant. The wealthy marry the wealthy; yet love was earlier said to overcome distances, “a power that unites”.
• Reading: clear in the gods, who excel in all goods, and in kings; those far below do not expect their friendship, nor do the worthless expect that of the best or wisest.
• No precise limit (Aristotle at the start of the Ethics: no mathematical precision here): friendship remains with much taken away, becomes impossible when separated much — “as from God, no longer”. He may be speaking by the Greek position about the gods (would a Greek hope to be Zeus’s friend?), though Aristotle also says that if God is friends with man it would be with the philosophers.
• The question for Christians: how can there be friendship across an infinite distance? Thomas gives friendship between God and man as one reason why the incarnation is reasonable: God becoming man makes friendship easier — not absolutely necessary (there was friendship between God and Moses), but otherwise “much more difficult”. The Fathers on the burning bush: bush the human nature, fire the divine which does not consume it; Moses’s wonder anticipates the incarnation, which Thomas in Summa Contra Gentiles IV calls the most wonderful thing God has made, and by Aristotle’s principle that what is most in a genus is the cause of the rest, the reason for everything else wonderful. So there is more friendship between God and man since the incarnation, and those who turn from the incarnate one tend to lose it.

12. The problem: do friends wish friends to be gods? (“if friends do not wish to friends the greatest of goods”) #

The point: a friend wishes his friend well, but the greatest goods would make him so unequal that friendship, itself a great good of mine, would be lost.

• He sets up the tension: friends are goods; one loves oneself most (even in the order of charity one loves oneself more than one’s neighbor); wishing you so much good that you become a god would cost me friendship with you.
• A nun’s account: a young man who wanted to marry her, and the religious state being higher, said “I’m glad God’s getting you instead of another man.” Would I want my best friend to become pope? A bishop must cut himself off from his buddy friends; “I couldn’t sit around on Friday evenings and drink beer or wine with you anymore”; Thomas Becket and the king.
• Reading: if the friend wishes goods to the friend for the latter’s sake, the latter must remain such as he is — he wishes him the greatest goods “as being a man”; and “perhaps not all”, since each wishes goods especially to himself. Greek mythology raises men to gods: would I want that for my friend? Left there: “we have to quit now.”
• Closing aside: next time the last reading, then the good, the fundamental thing in ethics and object of love; Plato’s Symposium, occasioned by the victory of the tragic poet Agathon (from agathos, good), has six speeches about love; “you have to understand good before you can understand better, because better means gooder.”

His words #

• well-wishers: those who wish good and help in need but do not live together; not altogether friends.
• “the excessive”: his rendering of what perfect friendship is like, apt to be towards one.
• liberal / commercial: the pleasant friendship is more free (liber; free and friend related), the useful more like business.
• the blessed: those who need not the useful but the pleasant, wishing to live with someone.
• overtopped in virtue: what the powerful would have to be for a virtuous man to be their friend.
• friendship “simply, and not by happening”: the perfect kind [ed.: per se, not per accidens].
• friendship according to superiority: the genus of unequal friendships.
• reproduction: to produce again; the parents, not the child, are reproduced.
• abilities: the powers of the soul, distinguished by acts, acts by objects [ed.: potencies].
• loving according to worth: proportional loving, the better loved more than he loves.
• “better means gooder”: good is prior to better.

Texts #

Read in class

• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book VIII, handout reading 6 (in whom friendships arise; perfect friendship not of many; the useful and pleasant; the powerful; epilogue on equal friendships) and the beginning of reading 7 (friendship according to superiority through “wishing friends to be gods”) (probably chs. 6–7, inferred) Mentioned
• Homer, Iliad (Achilles and Patroclus); Odyssey (Odysseus, Penelope, son, swineherd)
• Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet; Hamlet; Merchant of Venice; Antony and Cleopatra; Henry V (Agincourt); a sonnet on love as eternal; a sonnet on seeing one’s blood warm when cold
• Boswell, Life of Johnson; Dickens, David Copperfield; a biography of Lincoln
• Cicero (only virtue-friendship is friendship; the son always indebted to the father)
• St Paul, epistles, household advice as divided by Thomas
• Aristotle, De Anima (powers by acts, acts by objects); Nicomachean Ethics, opening (no mathematical precision); Aristotle on God’s friendship with philosophers
• Thomas Aquinas, on the reasonableness of the incarnation (friendship with God); Summa Contra Gentiles, Book IV (the incarnation the most wonderful work)
• Church Fathers on the burning bush
• Plato, Symposium (Agathon, six speeches on love)

His questions #

• What is the transition to the sixth reading? From what friendship is and its kinds to in whom and toward how many they can be realized.
• Is it possible to have the perfect friendship for more than one person? Hardly: intensity, the need to be pleasing in all things, and the difficulty of intimate experience.
• What does the word reproduction mean, and who is reproduced? To produce again; the parents are reproduced in the children.
• Are the parents supposed to obey the child? No; that is a disorder in the household.
• Does God have the same reason for loving us that we have for loving Him? No: He loves us as His image; we love Him as creator, conserver, shepherd.
• Do we love each other if our love is not forever? No; true love seems eternal.
• What does it mean that the equal comes about differently in justice and in friendship? Justice starts from inequality and makes equal by worth; friendship presupposes equality and treats the other as oneself.
• How much inequality makes friendship impossible? No precise limit; when separated much, “as from God”.
• Would I want my best friend to become pope, or a god? left open.