That puts us in the "established (breeding)" population region. I guess it's officially an armadillo home range these days. Jerry Jeff would have been proud of us.
Nicomachean Ethics VIII.4
More on the friendships of good versus bad men. Ugly men are not considered.
This kind of friendship [i.e. the best kind], then, is perfect both in respect of duration and in all other respects, and in it each gets from each in all respects the same as, or something like what, he gives; which is what ought to happen between friends. Friendship for the sake of pleasure bears a resemblance to this [best] kind; for good people too are pleasant to each other. So too does friendship for the sake of utility; for the good are also useful to each other.
This restates the point from VIII.3: the best sort of friendship also captures the goods of the lesser sorts, but not vice-versa.
Among men of these inferior sorts too, friendships are most permanent when the friends get the same thing from each other (e.g. pleasure), and not only that but also from the same source, as happens between ready-witted people, not as happens between lover and beloved. For these [i.e. lovers] do not take pleasure in the same things, but the one in seeing the beloved and the other in receiving attentions from his lover; and when the bloom of youth is passing the friendship sometimes passes too (for the one finds no pleasure in the sight of the other, and the other gets no attentions from the first); but many lovers on the other hand are constant, if familiarity has led them to love each other's characters, these being alike. But those who exchange not pleasure but utility in their amour are both less truly friends and less constant. Those who are friends for the sake of utility part when the advantage is at an end; for they were lovers not of each other but of profit.
That seems to be true; if you were dating someone because that person could buy you expensive dinners, you'll find your 'friend' less useful in unemployment. If you were dating because you found the person fun to be around, you might still find the fun.
For the sake of pleasure or utility, then, even bad men may be friends of each other, or good men of bad, or one who is neither good nor bad may be a friend to any sort of person, but for their own sake clearly only good men can be friends; for bad men do not delight in each other unless some advantage come of the relation.
The friendship of the good too and this alone is proof against slander...
Irwin translates that line as "Moreover, it is only the friendship of the good that is immune to slander." I think that's clearer than this translation.
...for it is not easy to trust any one talk about a man who has long been tested by oneself; and it is among good men that trust and the feeling that 'he would never wrong me' and all the other things that are demanded in true friendship are found.
In other words, when two good people are friends, they won't believe bad things about the other even when people say bad things about them. They've tested and known each other, and found one another to be good and reliable people.
In the other kinds of friendship, however, there is nothing to prevent these evils arising. For men apply the name of friends even to those whose motive is utility, in which sense states are said to be friendly (for the alliances of states seem to aim at advantage), and to those who love each other for the sake of pleasure, in which sense children are called friends. Therefore we too ought perhaps to call such people friends, and say that there are several kinds of friendship-firstly and in the proper sense that of good men qua good, and by analogy the other kinds; for it is in virtue of something good and something akin to what is found in true friendship that they are friends, since even the pleasant is good for the lovers of pleasure. But these two kinds of friendship are not often united, nor do the same people become friends for the sake of utility and of pleasure; for things that are only incidentally connected are not often coupled together.
Friendship being divided into these kinds, bad men will be friends for the sake of pleasure or of utility, being in this respect like each other, but good men will be friends for their own sake, i.e. in virtue of their goodness. These, then, are friends without qualification; the others are friends incidentally and through a resemblance to these.
That seems clear enough: only the best sort of friendship is true friendship, and the others are called 'friendship' only by analogy.
"The Hardest Government Program to Reform"
It's the VA.
U.S. servicemembers who sustain injuries while putting their lives on the line for our country deserve generous treatment from the government. No veteran with a legitimate service-related injury should ever struggle to get care.At the same time, hundreds of thousands of people are gaming the Veterans Affairs system to extract payments for health issues that have nothing to do with their service. Such behavior has created a backlog and made it harder for other veterans to receive compensation they deserve. It’s also fiscally unsustainable...
This is why universal socialized medicine will never work in the United States. The VA is as good a public healthcare system as we can do. It has every advantage, including unfailing political support because almost every American backs the idea that our combat veterans deserve to have their health taken care of after their time of service.
Even so, we still can't do it. Maybe other countries can; we can't. This is as good as it gets, and it's 'the hardest to reform.'
The 2026 NC 11 Race Expands
There are a couple of veterans who have entered the race in my Congressional district. Democrat Moe Davis is back in, a retired USAF colonel who has run before. Nothing against Moe, but no Democrat is going to win NC 11, a heavily gerrymandered district partly designed to keep Asheville from having a Congressman.
Of greater interest, former Special Forces operator Adam Smith is challenging the sitting Republican congressman for that party's nomination.
Adam Smith says it’s time for a change and that he’s ready to stand up for Western North Carolina in ways incumbent Rep. Chuck Edwards hasn’t — particularly, in Hurricane Helene recovery.“I think the only time I saw Chuck during the disaster was when President Trump showed up [in Swannanoa, last October],” Smith said. “Why did it take a visit by the President in order for the congressional representative to show up? While my team, volunteers, myself and a multitude of other nonprofits on the ground were actively working in disaster relief and rescue to provide supplies, I never saw him until the president showed up. Then I saw him for 15 minutes. Then I didn't see him again.”Trump commended Smith for his relief work at the Oct. 21, 2024, Swannanoa event, less than a month after Helene.“One of the patriots who stepped forward to help was Adam Smith, a former Green Beret,” Trump said, with Edwards looking on from the background. “Adam transformed the parking lot of a Harley Davidson dealership into a makeshift airbase to help distribute supplies, did an incredible job. Adam, what an amazing act of citizenship and service.”
That story was also covered here at the time, as it was too in Reason magazine's article "The Remarkable Redneck Airforce of Asheville." (It doesn't alliterate as well, but the proper pejorative for Appalachian Highlanders is "hillbilly"; the rednecks are from the lowlands.)
I might have to change party affiliation to vote for Smith. Those of us who came through the hurricane together ought to stick together, and I know he's for real after what all he's done. The story is 100% true; I've been to that Harley dealer and talked with them about it to verify the details. His organization was the one they mentioned by name to me.
The Cost of Not Speaking to Women
The NYT has an article today about an artist I've never heard of before: "She Didn’t Speak to Other Women for 28 Years. What Did It Cost Her? When it came to using her life in her work, the artist Lee Lozano went about as far as a person can go."
The article doesn't answer the question it asks; if it cost her anything at all, it's not evident in the text. In fact the matter is really only discussed in one paragraph of a longer piece.
In August 1971, eight months after the opening of her Whitney show, she undertook another, even more audacious project, “Decide to Boycott Women,” stating her intention to stop speaking to other women. In her notes on the piece, she suggested it would be temporary — an experiment that would go on for about a month and “after that ‘communication will be better than ever.’” But it ended up being a practice she continued throughout the rest of her life, mostly, though not entirely, avoiding women (even allegedly once refusing to be helped by a female clerk at a grocery store). The blunt hostility of this piece struck many of her friends and, later, art critics and historians as an act of self-destruction. The curator Helen Molesworth called it “consummately pathological.” Lozano’s friend the artist David Reed said it was “masochistic.”
Maybe it didn't cost her anything. Perhaps she enjoyed the relative quiet, given that she expanded the project voluntarily from "about a month" to 28 years.
BORTAC to Chicago
Following a dramatic but nonlethal ambush of Homeland Security agents in Chicago, DHS is sending what they describe as "special operations" personnel to Chicago. This seems to be BORTAC, the Border Patrol's tactical unit.
Pace the ACLU, these are not "special-forces style" personnel. They're like a SWAT team; their closest military analog is probably the 75th Rangers, but this is a police rather than a military function. The Border Patrol (which is providing the "BOR-" here) also has a search and rescue unit called BORSTAR in their Special Operations command, which presumably is not being deployed since neither searching nor rescuing is needed in this case.
If you're going to fight the Federal government, you have to expect to face this sort of thing. Eventually you have to expect to face the actual Rangers and Special Forces, in fact; escalation into actual insurrection is only going to loosen the limits on the Federales in terms of what kind of force they can bring to bear. I don't know that Chicago is ready for what they're asking for by encouraging this level of resistance -- the mayor issuing a statement against the Feds, and the Chicago Police Department refusing aid to Federales under attack. Maybe they think the voting public will be turned off by it and hand their party back some power to put the brakes on it, but that's more than a year and a half away in the best case.
Fighting the Feds can be the right thing to do under extreme circumstances; the Declaration of Independence sets permanent terms for when it is right or even morally mandatory to resist any government. No American government, deriving their legitimacy entirely from the revolution successfully fought under those terms, can deny the validity of the Declaration's arguments.
Thus, at least sometimes such resistance is moral and proper; and to some degree it remains a matter of individual judgment when those terms are satisfied. I won't say, therefore, that such resistance is categorically wrong; but you'd better be sure.
Nicomachean Ethics VIII.3
In this chapter, Aristotle gives his case for an ideal friendship.
Now these reasons differ from each other in kind; so, therefore, do the corresponding forms of love and friendship. There are therefore three kinds of friendship, equal in number to the things that are lovable; for with respect to each there is a mutual and recognized love, and those who love each other wish well to each other in that respect in which they love one another.
This is a good point to mention that Ancient Greek has several words that are all translated as "love," just as we have already seen that Ancient Greek had a number of different words that are translated as "knowledge." Here as there, it is important to know which word is being used and what the deeper sense of that word happens to be.
When Americans say that two people are "lovers," we almost always mean "love" in the sense that the Greeks would call eros, ἔρως, clearly the root of our word "erotic." That is not the word being used in these passages.
The word being used here is philo/philia, φιλία, which is the root of philosophy ("love of wisdom," philo - sophia) or of Tolkien's passion of philology (love of words, philo - logos). It can be a very deep love, as we will be exploring, but not an erotic love: a love appropriate to deep personal passions or affection between friends, especially as we shall see the closest and deepest friendships of all. One might say that good marriages proceed from eros to philia as the couple age and develop these deep connections and mutual feeling for each other as a people; perhaps the very best manage to retain both.
Now those who love each other for their utility do not love each other for themselves but in virtue of some good which they get from each other. So too with those who love for the sake of pleasure; it is not for their character that men love ready-witted people, but because they find them pleasant. Therefore those who love for the sake of utility love for the sake of what is good for themselves, and those who love for the sake of pleasure do so for the sake of what is pleasant to themselves, and not in so far as the other is the person loved but in so far as he is useful or pleasant. And thus these friendships are only incidental; for it is not as being the man he is that the loved person is loved, but as providing some good or pleasure. Such friendships, then, are easily dissolved, if the parties do not remain like themselves; for if the one party is no longer pleasant or useful the other ceases to love him.
In the last chapter, I mentioned that neither the useful nor the pleasant would turn out to be a real candidate for what was worthy of love. You can see here a new reason for that conclusion: what a person loves, insofar as they have friends who are useful or pleasant to be around, is something of that first person's own. It's not really something about the other, but something the first person hopes to gain from them: either something valuable (useful) or something pleasing (pleasure).
Now the useful is not permanent but is always changing. Thus when the motive of the friendship is done away, the friendship is dissolved, inasmuch as it existed only for the ends in question. This kind of friendship seems to exist chiefly between old people (for at that age people pursue not the pleasant but the useful) and, of those who are in their prime or young, between those who pursue utility. And such people do not live much with each other either; for sometimes they do not even find each other pleasant; therefore they do not need such companionship unless they are useful to each other; for they are pleasant to each other only in so far as they rouse in each other hopes of something good to come. Among such friendships people also class the friendship of a host and guest.
I don't know if it is still true that old people pursue friendships chiefly for utility, as we have social structures that take care of a lot of the needs of the elderly. You can see how it was likely to be true in Aristotle's time that the elderly would seek others who could still do some of the things they could no longer do for themselves, and perhaps in return offer what they could still do that their 'friend' could not. Perhaps one was blind(er), and the other more deafened by age; or one could walk about more easily, and the other still had clearer thoughts.
On the other hand the friendship of young people seems to aim at pleasure; for they live under the guidance of emotion, and pursue above all what is pleasant to themselves and what is immediately before them; but with increasing age their pleasures become different. This is why they quickly become friends and quickly cease to be so; their friendship changes with the object that is found pleasant, and such pleasure alters quickly. Young people are amorous too...
Here the word being given as "amorous" is in fact a version of eros, ἐρωτικόςof.
...for the greater part of the friendship of love depends on emotion and aims at pleasure; this is why they fall in love and quickly fall out of love, changing often within a single day. But these people do wish to spend their days and lives together; for it is thus that they attain the purpose of their friendship.
So much for the lesser species of things we call "friendship."
Perfect friendship is the friendship of men who are good, and alike in virtue; for these wish well alike to each other qua good, and they are good themselves. Now those who wish well to their friends for their [i.e. the friend's own] sake are most truly friends; for they do this by reason of own nature and not incidentally; therefore their friendship lasts as long as they are good-and goodness is an enduring thing.
Here we see the connection between at least true friendship and virtue. True friends are "alike in virtue," meaning that they are not necessarily perfectly virtuous, but are fitted together by their similarity in virtue. Yet they are definitely at least somewhat virtuous because they are "men who are good," and that means that they possess virtue.
The best -- i.e. the magnanimous -- will have very deep and meaningful friendships with each other, because they are gracious and good to each other in the most honorable ways. Those who are 'equitable' in Aristotle's sense will have deep friendships because they will go beyond what mere fairness requires to bestow on the other what their friendship really deserves. Those who are merely just will still have good friendships because their virtue will compel them to treat each other fairly, and thus they will not slight one another.
Only those who have no virtue to speak of will be unable to know this sort of friendship, but only the sort that comes from finding someone pleasant or useful. Yet the true friends will not miss out on either pleasure or utility, because we shall see that those things come into the bargain with true friendship:
And each [true friend] is good without qualification and to his friend, for the good are both good without qualification and useful to each other. So too they are pleasant; for the good are pleasant both without qualification and to each other, since to each his own activities and others like them are pleasurable, and the actions of the good are the same or like. And such a friendship is as might be expected permanent, since there meet in it all the qualities that friends should have. For all friendship is for the sake of good or of pleasure-good or pleasure either in the abstract or such as will be enjoyed by him who has the friendly feeling-and is based on a certain resemblance; and to a friendship of good men all the qualities we have named belong in virtue of the nature of the friends themselves; for in the case of this kind of friendship the other qualities also are alike in both friends, and that which is good without qualification is also without qualification pleasant, and these are the most lovable qualities. Love and friendship therefore are found most and in their best form between such men.
Back to philos as the root here, both for love (φιλέω) and friendship (φίλιος).
But it is natural that such friendships should be infrequent; for such men are rare. Further, such friendship requires time and familiarity; as the proverb says, men cannot know each other till they have 'eaten salt together'; nor can they admit each other to friendship or be friends till each has been found lovable and been trusted by each. Those who quickly show the marks of friendship to each other wish to be friends, but are not friends unless they both are lovable and know the fact; for a wish for friendship may arise quickly, but friendship does not.
Reflecting on this, you can provide your own examples from your lives of the best and truest friends you have had.
Valhalla
It was interesting to note this line from SECWAR Hegseth's speech, given the recent invocation of Valhalla by FBI Director Kash Patel.
If you want a beard, you can join Special Forces. If not, then shave.We don't have a military full of Nordic pagans.
Not full of them, no, but it is a recognized religion in the service. The VA offers Thor's Hammer headstones, number 55 on this list, and to my knowledge at least two servicemembers are buried under them.
Naturally I support accommodation for genuine religious traditions in the service, which in the case of beards also means the Sikh. (They also have an approved headstone: number 36). In general the desire to restrict religious expression is baleful, and if it were to be invoked for any reason one might think of another religion -- sometimes but not always associated with beards -- that would be the most obvious candidate. It wouldn't be because of the beards.
The usual reason military (and fire) services discriminate against beards is because of an alleged difficulty getting a proper seal with protective breathing equipment. This is a misconception; I've used the stuff and it works fine. Hair is dead skin like skin, and with adequate pressure protective masks mate down just as well over hair as over flesh. Bearded men also uses equipment like CPAPs without difficulty.
Patel, meanwhile, looked rather foolish invoking what is usually a military phrase -- The Hill cites the Navy and Marine Corps, but I've also heard it used for the same Green Berets Hegseth is willing to grant beards -- as Kash is a Hindu-raised man who was praising a devout Protestant Evangelical Christian. Not, however, as foolish as the idiots who decided to treat "See you in Valhalla" as neo-Nazi code. Those people are desperately trying to wish into existence an opponent they would rather have instead of the ones that they do.
The Great Smoky Mountains is Open
In spite of the Federal Government shutdown, the most popular park is fully funded and wide open.
📣BREAKING NEWS!!! 📣 Beginning tomorrow (Oct 4), the entire Great Smoky Mountains National Park will reopen, despite the Federal government shutdown!!! In anticipation of the shutdown, Sevier County, the cities of Gatlinburg, Sevierville, Pigeon Forge, and Pittman Center, Blount County, Cocke County, the State of Tennessee, the Tennessee Department of Tourist Development, Friends of the Smokies, along with the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, began working together on a plan to provide financial support to keep the national park fully operational in the event of a shutdown.
Oktoberfest
AVI recently mentioned wanting to visit Swiss-influenced villages. Helen isn't that, but it does attempt a version of Bavaria.
The town doesn't have any legitimate German roots. Georgia itself does -- even in Colonial days it was taking in Protestant refugees from the ongoing religious wars in what was not yet Germany -- but not Helen. Helen was a timber industry town that was failing by the mid-20th century, so they decided to try to make it into a tourist attraction in the 1960s. At that time there were some WWII vets still around who had fond memories of Germany, so that's how they decided upon the theme -- indeed one of the highlights has long been Hofbrauhaus Restaurant and G.I. Germany Pub. The understanding of Germany is what it is, but the understanding of what a WWII G.I. pub was like was spot on.
Oktoberfest is in full swing. They were singing The Wild Rover translated into German and played on Oompah band instruments at the Festhall. On Main Street they were dancing the Macarena, often in cheap replicas of German traditional dress. It's definitely a spectacle.
A Fine Mountain Town
Last week I rode to Tennessee; this week I rode down into Georgia, and visited the mountain town of Dahlonega. It is the home of Georgia's Military College, North Georgia College which is these days a full fledged state university. It was also the site of the first gold rush in US history.
The gold rush museum is in the center of the town square.
Some fall color is beginning there.
The General Store is not only the same as it was when my son was a boy, it is the same as it was since I was a boy. It has a player piano that plays late 19th and early 20th century tunes, flawlessly for decades.
There was an art festival in Hancock Park off the square. I met an old friend I haven't seen in probably twenty years.
No bear is served at the Outlaw House of Jerky. I did get some shark and elk jerky, though.
The Mellow Mushroom pizza is always excellent.
Songbird
A new album of newly released Waylon Jennings songs is out today. His son Scooter found them in old tapes from the 70s, which is when his band was at its height and recording constantly. These were ones they never got to putting out.
High Ground
It’s open from the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and the Cherokee Reservation to Mount Mitchell now. Still some work to do beyond that.
UPDATE: I went up there to check on the autumn color. Those mountains are about two thousand feet higher than the one whose shoulders I live upon. If you’re curious, it’s still getting started up there.
A Colorful Fellow
I’m working from the Blue Ridge Parkway today, and I ran across this fine fellow going about his day.
Civic Organizations versus the State
The Firearms Policy Coalition has won some important legal victories lately. The courts are limiting those victories to actual members of FPC and other plaintiffs, ironically because of another major legal victory.
[T]he Supreme Court’s June 2025 Trump v. CASA decision... held that so-called “universal injunctions” “likely exceed the equitable authority that Congress has granted to federal courts.” Because of this decision, the government and some courts are limiting the application of relief, sometimes only to named plaintiffs such as FPC and its members.
Two important such victories have occurred lately: Hoffman v. Bonta held that California cannot deny FPC members and other plaintiffs the right to use non-resident carry permits. That means that if you are a resident of another state who has to travel into California, you can as an FPC member compel California to process you for a non-resident carry permit there. Meanwhile the just-decided FPC v. Bondi compels all states and the Federal government not to enforce Post Office carry restrictions against FPC members.
FPC has responded by creating a secure site for members to download an ID card identifying them as such, so they can make use of these legal victories. Membership is cheap, and funds the effort to repeal bad gun control laws through lawsuits like these.
This points to a general principle of resisting government or corporate power through civil organizations that aim at human liberty. Just as some fight for freedom of speech, and others for freedom of the right to keep and bear arms, and others to hold the government to privacy laws or to prevent unconstitutional searches or arrests, these civic organizations have proven to be a major force historically in holding the line. Or even in expanding it: our modern 1st Amendment freedoms did not exist a hundred years ago, until they were won in courts by anarchist organizations and their lawyers, as Michael Willrich demonstrated compellingly in his history American Anarchy: The Epic Struggle between Immigrant Radicals and the US Government at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century. Whether or not one agrees with their general thrust politically, we would all be much poorer in freedoms if it hadn't been for the work of such organizations a hundred years since.
FPC does good work. We're lucky they're out there.
Nicomachean Ethics VIII.2
Today's short chapter treats a small question.
The kinds of friendship may perhaps be cleared up if we first come to know the object of love. For not everything seems to be loved but only the lovable, and this is good, pleasant, or useful; but it would seem to be that by which some good or pleasure is produced that is useful, so that it is the good and the useful that are lovable as ends.
It's really only the good, then, because the useful is always posterior rather than prior for Aristotle. This is because the useful is useful for something else that is wanted for itself. Since we just finished the last book on a meditation proving that pleasure was a good -- and perhaps the highest good, if properly considered -- we know that "good" is the last candidate standing here.
Do men love, then, the good, or what is good for them? These sometimes clash. So too with regard to the pleasant. Now it is thought that each loves what is good for himself, and that the good is without qualification lovable, and what is good for each man is lovable for him; but each man loves not what is good for him but what seems good. This however will make no difference; we shall just have to say that this is 'that which seems lovable'.
The obvious problem here is when one falls in love with someone who is bad for you: perhaps they don't really love you back, or perhaps they have destructive qualities that will be harmful to you if you stick with them. This experience is universal enough that all of us know someone who has been in a love relationship like that, if we haven't been in one ourselves.
Aristotle doesn't mention this aspect explicitly, and indeed he rarely discusses such things except in biological terms. Yet it is clear that we don't love that which is good per se; nor even what is good for us. We often love mistakenly because of what seems so to us.
Now there are three grounds on which people love; of the love of lifeless objects we do not use the word 'friendship'; for it is not mutual love, nor is there a wishing of good to the other (for it would surely be ridiculous to wish wine well; if one wishes anything for it, it is that it may keep, so that one may have it oneself); but to a friend we say we ought to wish what is good for his sake.
This gives us our first premise: true friendship and genuine love generally are reciprocal and mutual.
But to those who thus wish good we ascribe only goodwill, if the wish is not reciprocated; goodwill when it is reciprocal being friendship. Or must we add 'when it is recognized'? For many people have goodwill to those whom they have not seen but judge to be good or useful; and one of these might return this feeling. These people seem to bear goodwill to each other; but how could one call them friends when they do not know their mutual feelings? To be friends, then, the must be mutually recognized as bearing goodwill and wishing well to each other for one of the aforesaid reasons.
One can imagine two people of fair fame who know of each other but haven't met; and each one thinks well of what he has heard of the other, and thus they wish each other well. Yet they clearly aren't friends, because they haven't met.
Aristotle gives us a condition of recognition of the friendship, but that probably isn't quite strong enough. Even if they were informed of each other's good will and recognized it, but still had never met nor communicated directly, it would be strange to call them 'friends.' Allies, perhaps: they might well have common aims in the world, and see each other as usefully advancing those aims. Friendship seems to require more.
Home Engineering
This is the bridge my son and I built this summer. It’s got twin pressure-treated 6x6 beams as the undercarriage, set in stone and concrete pylons of ~200 pounds each. We ripped and sawed the planks ourselves, also out of pressure treated lumber. Everything is attached with decking screws rather than nails for strength. It’s all sealed in Australian timber oil which was applied to each individual piece and cured before assembly; after we put it together I reapplied oil to all the screw holes to make sure no untreated wood was exposed to the weather.
Nicomachean Ethics VIII.1
We are about seventy percent through the EN at this point. Close to twenty percent of the book is on the inquiry into friendship, which we are now about to begin. The final book draws out more thoughts on pleasure, upbringing, and happiness.
After what we have said, a discussion of friendship would naturally follow, since it is a virtue or implies virtue, and is besides most necessary with a view to living. For without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods; even rich men and those in possession of office and of dominating power are thought to need friends most of all; for what is the use of such prosperity without the opportunity of beneficence, which is exercised chiefly and in its most laudable form towards friends? Or how can prosperity be guarded and preserved without friends? The greater it is, the more exposed is it to risk. And in poverty and in other misfortunes men think friends are the only refuge.
Is friendship a virtue, or does it imply virtue, or is it both? It does not seem like a virtue. A capacity for friendship would seem to be a candidate for a virtue, as virtues are excellences of capacity. An actual friendship is a relation between two individuals, not a quality possessed by either individual independently.
Well, sort of. Aristotle's ontology states that there are, most basically, substances that have attributes; one of those kinds of attributes is relations. Yet a relationship doesn't have independent existence for Aristotle. In other words, as Aristotle conceives the world it's not the case that I exist, and you exist, and the friendship between us also exists. It is the case that I exist, and you exist, as substances -- and substances are the realest things in the world. As a substance, I have as one of my attributes a relation: ("Friend to X.") My friend X, likewise a substance, has a completely separate attribute: ("Friend to Grim"). So our friendship is not an independently existing thing, as he sees it: it's a attribute of mine and, separately, an attribute of yours. Thus, a friendship can belong to you the way a virtue ought to do; and it can be done well or badly, thus admitting of an excellence. For that reason, friendship can be a virtue.
Yet it also makes sense to say that friendship implies virtue. Who seeks vicious friends? Even among members of organized criminal enterprises, i.e. people who might wish to be able to be vicious to outsiders, among friends what is wanted is honor and respect, loyalty and courage, faithfulness and generosity. The ability to win and sustain friends implies that you have virtues that others would seek in a friend.
[Friendship] helps the young, too, to keep from error; it aids older people by ministering to their needs and supplementing the activities that are failing from weakness; those in the prime of life it stimulates to noble actions-'two going together'-for with friends men are more able both to think and to act.
The original Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser stories were collected in a book called "Two Sought Adventure." We see the truth of these remarks clearly in fictional accounts such as this: Frodo is able to go forth because of Sam's friendship, which is enhanced necessarily by Merry and Pippin; yet it is when they befriend Aragorn that their counsel improves and their capacity to reach help. What kind of help? More friends, and more councils, which increase their capacities further yet. That is how they come to understand together, to develop a plan that might work, and to dare it.
Again, parent seems by nature to feel [friendship] for offspring and offspring for parent, not only among men but among birds and among most animals; it is felt mutually by members of the same race, and especially by men, whence we praise lovers of their fellowmen. We may even in our travels how near and dear every man is to every other.
We might even divide animals by this quality: snakes do not have it, but birds do; sharks do not, but whales; the lion loves his children but slays another male's.
Friendship seems too to hold states together, and lawgivers to care more for it than for justice; for unanimity seems to be something like friendship, and this they aim at most of all, and expel faction as their worst enemy; and when men are friends they have no need of justice, while when they are just they need friendship as well, and the truest form of justice is thought to be a friendly quality.
Most of us would not consider "political friendship" to be real friendship, but only 'friendship' by analogy. Yet Aristotle -- for whom politics was much smaller, and much more built upon actual personal relationships with other people one really knew -- does consider political friendship to be the foundation of successful politics. In the Politics III.9 he describes the will to live together in a city as a sort of friendship, an extension of how roommates who choose to live together do so because they like each other's company to some degree. They join societies together, hold festivals that all participate in, feasts, celebrations, holidays, and so forth. The community as he sees it is an kind of extended friendship.
But it is not only necessary but also noble; for we praise those who love their friends, and it is thought to be a fine thing to have many friends; and again we think it is the same people that are good men and are friends.
Consider that question for a moment. Whom do you consider to be a good man? Can you think of an example of someone who was not also a good friend to his friends? Even among bad men, we tend to find it a redeeming quality: as in the case of Doc Holliday, the murderous gunfighter who has passed into American folklore as a heroic figure because of his loyal friendship with Wyatt Earp.
Not a few things about friendship are matters of debate. Some define it as a kind of likeness and say like people are friends, whence come the sayings 'like to like', 'birds of a feather flock together', and so on; others on the contrary say 'two of a trade never agree'. On this very question they inquire for deeper and more physical causes, Euripides saying that 'parched earth loves the rain, and stately heaven when filled with rain loves to fall to earth', and Heraclitus that 'it is what opposes that helps' and 'from different tones comes the fairest tune' and 'all things are produced through strife'; while Empedocles, as well as others, expresses the opposite view that like aims at like. The physical problems we may leave alone (for they do not belong to the present inquiry); let us examine those which are human and involve character and feeling, e.g. whether friendship can arise between any two people or people cannot be friends if they are wicked, and whether there is one species of friendship or more than one. Those who think there is only one because it admits of degrees have relied on an inadequate indication; for even things different in species admit of degree. We have discussed this matter previously.
I hope you will find these next two books engaging; many people find them to be the most intriguing part of the work.
Good Reading from a former Commander
CDR Salamander was one of the original Milbloggers. He remains one of the best and clearest thinkers on naval and national policy. Today's piece is illustrative of his insight, and will be clarifying for any of you who read it.
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