We are about halfway through Book VIII, after which there are two more books. Presumably this is good for you, those of who who are reading through all of it. Dad29 once told me that sitting through the bad church music that has become commonplace is a way of reducing your time in Purgatory, front-loading it as it were; perhaps this is something similar, except hopefully by increasing one's understanding of and ability to actualize virtue.
Most people seem, owing to ambition, to wish to be loved rather than to love; which is why most men love flattery; for the flatterer is a friend in an inferior position, or pretends to be such and to love more than he is loved...
Most of us would say that a flatterer is not a true friend, rather than a 'friend in an inferior position'; the dishonesty involved sets the relationship on different ground than any sort of real friendship.
...and being loved seems to be akin to being honoured, and this is what most people aim at. But it seems to be not for its own sake that people choose honour, but incidentally. For most people enjoy being honoured by those in positions of authority because of their hopes (for they think that if they want anything they will get it from them; and therefore they delight in honour as a token of favour to come); while those who desire honour from good men, and men who know, are aiming at confirming their own opinion of themselves; they delight in honour, therefore, because they believe in their own goodness on the strength of the judgement of those who speak about them. In being loved, on the other hand, people delight for its own sake; whence it would seem to be better [to be loved] than being honoured, and friendship to be desirable in itself.
Here we see again the now-familiar distinction between 'what is worthy of honor' and 'concern with being honored.' The former is a reliable guide to best action (IV.3-4), as it allows us to identify what is exceedingly virtuous, and it is virtue that is worthy of honor. The latter was dismissed from the outset of the EN (I.5) as a proper end for ethics, as it surrenders one's own judgment about what is right and places the end of one's own ethics in the hands of others. This is unworthy.
But [the best thing] seems to lie in loving rather than in being loved, as is indicated by the delight mothers take in loving; for some mothers hand over their children to be brought up, and so long as they know their fate they love them and do not seek to be loved in return (if they cannot have both), but seem to be satisfied if they see them prospering; and they themselves love their children even if these owing to their ignorance give them nothing of a mother's due. Now since friendship depends more on loving, and it is those who love their friends that are praised, loving seems to be the characteristic virtue of friends, so that it is only those in whom this is found in due measure that are lasting friends, and only their friendship that endures.
It is noteworthy that Aristotle resorts to 'a mother's love' as the proof of the superiority of loving rather than receiving love. The purity of this, when it occurs, has been universally moving across the millennia. We have in our own era serious reasons to doubt that a mother's love is something that is reliable or even fully natural; the frequency of abortion in our culture suggests that many mothers don't love their children, or even want them enough to endure the difficulties of parenthood. Yet the example remains moving when it does occur, for when it does it is a kind of love that is especially pure and selfless.
It is in this way [i.e. giving love to the other] more than any other that even unequals can be friends; they can be equalized. Now equality and likeness are friendship, and especially the likeness of those who are like in virtue; for being steadfast in themselves they hold fast to each other, and neither ask nor give base services, but (one may say) even prevent them; for it is characteristic of good men neither to go wrong themselves nor to let their friends do so. But wicked men have no steadfastness (for they do not remain even like to themselves), but become friends for a short time because they delight in each other's wickedness.
The claim that the wicked do not have steadfastness because they don't remain 'like to themselves' is striking. Virtue and vice are both habits that become habitual states of character; thus, we ought to expect the wicked (being vicious) to have a habitual character that is in its way just as steadfast a set of habits as the virtuous. What distinguishes the virtuous from the vicious isn't the having of habits, but the goodness of the habits -- a goodness that is empirically testable against their ability to reliably create good outcomes in the world (I.3).
What I do think of when I reflect on this is the regret that the wicked sometimes suffer, in what the Pulp Fiction assassin Jules refers to as "a moment of clarity." The alcoholic has periods of hangover in which he may swear he will never drink again, knowing that of course he will; the gambler may sob piteously at the knowledge that he has lost everything he ever worked for, but will be gambling again when he has scraped up a new stake. The virtuous rarely has these moments of regret for his character -- rarely, I say, because as Aristotle points out in I.3 sometimes even courage leads to death, and even riches can lead to ruin. Chance and fortune play a role, so that even the virtues are not fully proof against harm; but their reliability means that regret for one's character will come up less often. Even when a brave man dies of his courage, those who mourn him can feel pride in having known a man of such character.
Friends who are useful or pleasant last longer; i.e. as long as they provide each other with enjoyments or advantages. Friendship for utility's sake seems to be that which most easily exists between contraries, e.g. between poor and rich, between ignorant and learned; for what a man actually lacks he aims at, and one gives something else in return.
Capitalism has made 'friends' of the utility model out of many men who might otherwise have despised one another; but the workman needs the wealthy man's coin, and the wealthy man comes to respect the quality of the workmanship. In the spirit of showing analogs with the other historical traditions, this has two New Testament analogs, Lk. 10:7 and 1Tim 5:18. (There are Old Testament verses about not withholding pay from laborers too, but they do not imply friendship or a sense that the workman is worthy, just needful of the pay to survive, e.g. Deut 24:14-15 and Lev 19:13.)
But under this head, too, might bring lover and beloved, beautiful and ugly. This is why lovers sometimes seem ridiculous, when they demand to be loved as they love; if they are equally lovable their claim can perhaps be justified, but when they have nothing lovable about them it is ridiculous. Perhaps, however, contrary does not even aim at contrary by its own nature, but only incidentally, the desire being for what is intermediate; for that is what is good, e.g. it is good for the dry not to become wet but to come to the intermediate state, and similarly with the hot and in all other cases. These subjects we may dismiss; for they are indeed somewhat foreign to our inquiry.
This passage seems strange to contemporary readers, but Aristotle is talking about the sort of homoerotic love common in his day between a young man (and presumably 'beautiful' in the manner of youth) and an older, uglier man. The older man would provide benefits such as social introduction or access to wealth or station to the younger man, taking the younger under his wing and guiding him towards greater success (and, allegedly, virtue); the younger man would provide access to himself and his beauty to the elder. Socrates and Alcibiades playfully mock this in the Symposium, for example, Socrates being notoriously (and rather proudly) ugly.
Aristotle's criticism of homosexuality doesn't occur in the ethics; he rejects it as irrational and a lifting of pleasure over reason's capacity to see what the sexual function is actually for on biological rather than ethical grounds. His criticism makes up the root of the Western rejection of the homoerotic for centuries, though it is also reinforced by Biblical authority after Christianization. It is curious that he doesn't really take it to be an ethical concern, however, but a concern based on his understanding of science and reason: ironic, too, given that our own Supreme Court rejected all laws based on this tradition as being fundamentally lacking a rational basis.
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