Friendship
No one would choose to live without friends even if they had every other good. Book 8 is Aristotle's sustained argument for why friendship is not optional.
Summary
Book 8 opens by arguing that friendship is necessary for life — not merely nice to have. The rich and powerful need friends to use their prosperity well; in poverty and adversity, friends are the only refuge. Friendship also binds communities; legislators care more about concord than about justice. The claim is that where friendship exists, justice is not separately required, but where justice exists, friendship is still needed in addition. From the start, friendship is not a supplement to a good life but one of its structural conditions.
Three kinds of friendship are distinguished. The first is based on utility: each person is useful to the other, and the friendship lasts as long as the usefulness does — common in commerce, politics, and old age. The second is based on pleasure: each person enjoys the other's company, and the friendship lasts as long as the enjoyment does — common among the young, who live by feeling. Both are genuine friendships and have their proper place. But neither is friendship in the complete sense, because neither loves the friend for what the friend is; each loves the friend for what the friend provides.
The third kind of friendship is between two good people who love each other for their character — for what they genuinely are rather than for what they provide. This kind is rare, because good people are rare; slow to form, because trust and knowledge take time; and durable, because virtue is durable and the friend is loved as a second self. The rest of Book 8 examines friendships between unequal parties — parent and child, benefactor and recipient, political ruler and citizen — and the principle that governs them: the superior should receive greater honour, the inferior greater benefit, so that what each contributes is proportionate to what each receives. Friendships of unequal parties work when this proportion is maintained; they fail when it is not.
- Book 1Book 1 introduces the question and the method. All action aims at some good; the highest good is eudaimonia. The function argument...
- Book 2Book 2 introduces moral virtue as habit, distinguishes it from intellectual virtue, and gives the doctrine of the mean. Virtue is...
- Book 3Book 3 establishes the theory of voluntary action and moral responsibility, then applies it to the first two virtues: courage...
- Book 4Book 4 works through the moral virtues beyond courage and temperance: generosity, magnificence, magnanimity (the most contested)...
- Book 5Book 5 gives the treatise's full account of justice: general justice (complete virtue toward others) and particular justice...
- Book 6Book 6 introduces the intellectual virtues: scientific knowledge, technical skill, practical wisdom (phronesis), intuitive...
- Book 7Book 7 examines akrasia (weakness of will) — the phenomenon Socrates thought impossible. Aristotle argues it is real: the akratic...
- Book 8Book 8 distinguishes three kinds of friendship — utility, pleasure, and virtue — and argues that only the third is friendship in...
- Book 9Book 9 examines self-love, the dissolution of friendships, the question of how many genuine friends one can have, and the argument...
- Book 10Book 10 revisits pleasure — not a process but an activity, the unimpeded exercise of a faculty — and then answers the treatise's...