Friendship (continued)
The deepest claim in Books VIII–IX: the virtuous friend is the mirror in which you see yourself most clearly. Self-knowledge, Aristotle argues, requires another person.
Summary
Book 9 opens with the problems of reciprocity in friendships between unequal parties: how is the return to be measured when one person gives knowledge and another gives money, or one gives pleasure and another gives utility? The guiding principle is that the person who receives the first benefit should be the one to fix the value — since the giver cannot know in advance what the other will receive from the exchange. This applies even to the relationship between teacher and student of philosophy, where no precise price can be fixed but something proportionate should be offered.
Among the most philosophically significant passages in Book 9 is the argument for self-love. The good person has the right kind of self-love: they love the rational, ruling part of themselves and live in accordance with it. The base person, by contrast, loves the passions and tries to satisfy those — this is the wrong kind of self-love, and it is from this that the derogatory use of "self-lover" derives. Aristotle's argument is that the virtuous person is most fully in accord with themselves: their reason, their desires, and their emotions all point in the same direction, which is what genuine harmony of the soul amounts to.
Book 9 also makes the deepest claim in the whole treatise on friendship: that even the happy person needs friends, not for utility or pleasure but because virtuous activity is better shared and because self-knowledge requires another person. We perceive our own actions and characters less clearly than we perceive those of others; the virtuous friend, who knows us well and is genuinely good, is the mirror in which we see ourselves with the accuracy we cannot otherwise achieve. This is why friendship of virtue is not a luxury supplement to the good life but one of its structural requirements. The book closes by observing that one cannot have many friends of this kind — genuine friendship of virtue requires time, knowledge, and intimacy — and that "a few friends" is the proper answer to the question of how many.
- 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...