Nicomachean Ethics IX.7

Today's topic is the friendship-like relation between benefactors and those they help. A lot of what Aristotle says here is likely to seem straightforward and need little comment. 

That said, there is a concept in this chapter that is crucial to understanding Aristotle more broadly, the concept of the 'active' and the 'passive.' We have seen very little of this in the EN, but it is hugely important elsewhere in his corpus. For example, it informs his theory of mind in De Anima, and how we come to understand the world. This is later important in medieval philosophy as they try to bring their theology in line with classical philosophy. Likewise it informs his biological theory, and very importantly his physics and metaphysics. 

Aristotle believed that the things we encounter in the world are made up of a combination of form and matter. You can think of a pile of wood on the ground (matter) versus a table (matter plus the right form). The material stuff is all the same, but whereas before it was only potentially a table, now it is actually a table and can be used for table activities like holding up your coffee cup. 

Form is active -- indeed, form is said by Aristotle to be an activity, and a pure activity is an Unmoved Mover because such a being has no material, only form. Since an Unmoved Mover has no material, it also cannot be acted upon: it is already pure activity. This is why it is Unmoved; it cannot be moved by anything else. (Why it is a Mover is a topic for another day.) The reason it cannot be moved is that only material, not form, is receptive -- i.e. passive. 

Thus when we get to the theory of mind, the Passive Intellect has the capability of taking on forms it encounters outside, such that you can receive the form into your mind and realize it in your Active Intellect. That is how you come to learn that the world involves things like tables: you meet a table, through interaction your Passive Intellect receives the form, and then the form of a table passes into your Active Intellect as a concept you now have drawn out of the world and can use (perhaps by building new tables where you want them).

Both of these things are necessary for the world to exist; without potential we couldn't make or do things, and thus passive things are necessary. Without the forms, there would be nothing to strive to create in the world. Yet Aristotle is often said to favor the active over the passive; to view the table as superior to the wood from which it was made. I'm not as sure that he does this to the same degree that other scholars attribute it to him; I think to some degree they are misunderstanding what he means by other qualities like priority, for example. That's an aside; for today, we'll see how it plays out here in the Ethics.

Benefactors are thought to love those they have benefited, more than those who have been well treated love those that have treated them well, and this is discussed as though it were paradoxical. Most people think it is because the latter are in the position of debtors and the former of creditors; and therefore as, in the case of loans, debtors wish their creditors did not exist, while creditors actually take care of the safety of their debtors, so it is thought that benefactors wish the objects of their action to exist since they will then get their gratitude, while the beneficiaries take no interest in making this return. Epicharmus would perhaps declare that they say this because they 'look at things on their bad side', but it is quite like human nature; for most people are forgetful, and are more anxious to be well treated than to treat others well.

That would seem to follow from Aristotle's own account, which was only in the prior chapter discussing how people are more eager to receive justice than to behave justly to others. Yet he has more to say: 

But the cause would seem to be more deeply rooted in the nature of things; the case of those who have lent money is not even analogous. For they have no friendly feeling to their debtors, but only a wish that they may kept safe with a view to what is to be got from them; while those who have done a service to others feel friendship and love for those they have served even if these are not of any use to them and never will be.

When you hear Aristotle say things like "the cause [is] rooted in the nature of things," you should pay attention. He's going to tell you something about how a practical observation ties into basic reality. 

First, however, some unreality (perhaps appropriate on Halloween!). 

This is what happens with craftsmen too; every man loves his own handiwork better than he would be loved by it if it came alive; and this happens perhaps most of all with poets; for they have an excessive love for their own poems, doting on them as if they were their children.

Every now and then in Aristotle you get one of these flights of fancy in which he assumes a practically impossible thing, and then proceeds to conclude something from the impossible that he thinks is plausible. A similar one occurs in Physics II.1 in which he concludes that, if you were to plant a bed of rotting wood, it would more likely grow a tree than that it would grow another bed. 

This is what the position of benefactors is like; for that which they have treated well is their handiwork, and therefore they love this more than the handiwork does its maker. The cause of this is that existence is to all men a thing to be chosen and loved, and that we exist by virtue of activity (i.e. by living and acting), and that the handiwork is in a sense, the producer in activity; he loves his handiwork, therefore, because he loves existence. And this is rooted in the nature of things; for what he is in potentiality, his handiwork manifests in activity.

At the same time to the benefactor that is noble which depends on his action, so that he delights in the object of his action, whereas to the patient there is nothing noble in the agent, but at most something advantageous, and this is less pleasant and lovable. What is pleasant is the activity of the present, the hope of the future, the memory of the past; but most pleasant is that which depends on activity, and similarly this is most lovable. Now for a man who has made something of his work remains (for the noble is lasting), but for the person acted on the utility passes away. And the memory of noble things is pleasant, but that of useful things is not likely to be pleasant, or is less so; though the reverse seems true of expectation.

Thus, the benefactor loves the person he has benefitted -- a beloved nephew whose education he has helped further -- because the benefactor regards it as part of his own noble work. He is proud of it like the poet is proud of his poems.  

Further, love is like activity, being loved like passivity; and loving and its concomitants are attributes of those who are the more active.

Again, all men love more what they have won by labour; e.g. those who have made their money love it more than those who have inherited it; and to be well treated seems to involve no labour, while to treat others well is a laborious task. These are the reasons, too, why mothers are fonder of their children than fathers; bringing them into the world costs them more pains, and they know better that the children are their own. This last point, too, would seem to apply to benefactors.

Mothers are another place where the active/passive distinction applies in Aristotle; he regards male sexuality as active (passing on the form of the father) and the female as receptive and passive (receiving the form and creating material in its shape). This isn't really how it works, of course; in fact mothers pass on more of their own form than of the father's, as we now know, because the X chromosome transfers more information than the Y. Nevertheless, among those who think that Aristotle considers the active to be superior to the passive, it's taken as evidence of him not thinking much of women. 

Against that, consider how he here considers the mother's love to be superior to that of the father's in the context of such love being akin to the love a poet has for his own poems. The mother, then, is here the craftsman to a greater degree than is the father, and perhaps less passive to that degree. Recall too how in VIII.8 a mother's love was used as a proof that loving was better than receiving love; and how in VIII.12 the friendship between husband and wife was thought to be more basic to human nature than even the formation of cities or polities. I suspect contemporary scholarship is overcorrecting a bit here, perhaps because Aristotle's positive regard of mothers' love and the friendship of husband and wife is less striking than his teacher Plato's robust embrace of female equality as citizens and soldiers (seen both in the Republic and the Laws). Aristotle may not go as far as Plato, but nevertheless he has some strongly positive things to say about women.