Thick as Thieves | Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, Book IX
If you aren’t trust-worthy, you can’t be trusted. And friendship requires trust, and so friendship requires trust-worthiness, and trust-worthiness requires virtue.
Monday was a holiday here in the United States, and I had intended to be with friends and family all day. So, today we are catching up on our Aristotle read-along with a discussion of Book 9.
July 8: Book I
July 15: Book II
July 22: Book III
July 29: Book IV
August 5: Book V
August 12: Book VI
August 19: Book VII
August 26: Book VIII
September 2: Book IX
September 9: Book X
September 16: Retrospective
We’ll have our next Zoom call on September 15 at 8 PM Eastern. It will be our general retrospective discussion of the entire Nicomachean Ethics.
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Book VIII, I have said many times, is my favorite book in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Few books I read in graduate school gave me a way of looking at the world, and in particular the social world, in a new, clarified way; Book VIII was one of the few. Understanding the difference between friendships of pleasure, utility, and virtue gave me a way of thinking about my relationships to other human beings.
Suddenly, I didn’t consider everyone my friend. I had previously thought that friendship was just a nice thing to offer, that saying ‘Everyone is my friend!’ is a way of expressing a commitment to human fraternity. Yet, Aristotle changed my mind. I wish for all creatures to flourish and thrive, but this does not mean that I have a friendship with all of them. It would, in fact, be impossible for me to do so.
Book IX is easily understood as a clarification and elaboration on Aristotle’s theory of friendship. Aristotle restates some claims – like that friendship is based on proportionality, that we use a common measure (like money) to assess transactions, and so on – but he also wades into new waters. Let’s talk about a few of them.
Are you your own friend?
When I was teaching ethics to undergraduates, I was always surprised to learn that students did not believe that they had duties to themselves. They certainly felt they were entitled to act in their own self-interest, sometimes to laughable degrees, but they rarely wanted to concede that they had obligations to do so in some circumstances. I suspect it was because they did not like the thought of being constrained by morality in this most private of affairs (how one relates to oneself).
Yet, I think this is a stage in moral development that you need to reach. You can fail yourself, just as you can fail others. Taking care of yourself, for instance, is an obligation one has to oneself. But also, you owe it to yourself to be good, to live up to your ideals, to become better.
Of course, this will be distinguished from a kind of self-infatuation — as Aristotle writes in Chapter 8, the self-lover’s intellect can lose control, and he will be excessive in his love. But the possibility of excess implies the possibility of virtuous restraint.
I believe this is intimately related to Aristotle’s discussion of whether or not you are your own friend. Remember what Aristotle said about complete friendships, friendships of virtue: they are of one mind, these friendships persist over time, you wish to live together for a long while, you find your friend pleasant to be around. A decent person, Aristotle says, will find all of this in relation to himself.
Aristotle’s later discussions – of goodwill, like-mindedness, etc. – all seem relevant here as well.
The intimation is that if you are decent, you will be your own friend. Yet, Aristotle does not say that. He simply sets this aside, because he notes that there are problems — the many, the vicious, the base all seem to have this kind of self-regard, too.
Which brings us to the next important part of this book.
(NB: I won’t touch on this too much, but I think there is a connection to Chapter 9 as well, in which Aristotle ponders whether the happy person will need friends. If you are your own friend, that condition would be immediately satisfied, making the point moot.)
The base cannot be friends
If you are base, which we can treat as lacking in virtue and being a slave to one’s passions, then I do not see how you can have friends. You may have fleeting friendships of utility and pleasure, but you cannot have those stable friendships which are a feature of a good human life. Friendship requires giving, not simply taking. It requires thinking of another person non-strategically; you cannot be thinking about the optimal path to gain. For Aristotle, it also requires a recognition of common virtue. Yet, a common virtue cannot be found among those who lack virtue.
Virtue is difficult to obtain; Aristotle is no egalitarian. This opens up a rather terrifying possibility. It may be that very few of us have real, stable friendships. Our relationships may just be those friendships of utility or pleasure, or perhaps political friendships, masquerading as something more. We may be engaged in an elaborate game of self-deceit.
Think a little bit more about the idea that the base cannot be friends. To use an example from film, I was reminded of Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs.
The story is one of a heist gone wrong. The criminals begin to suspect that there is an undercover cop among them, which leads to the disastrous heist. The drama of the film comes from not knowing if there is an informant and, if there is, not knowing who it could be. So, they turn on each other.
In the end, nearly everyone is dead — some at the hands of the police, some at the hands of each other. No one can trust each other, save for perhaps Eddie Cabot and his father. (They are the only ones with some kind of bond beyond utility.)
The film illustrates a common truth: if you aren’t trust-worthy, you can’t be trusted. And friendship requires trust, and so friendship requires trust-worthiness, and trust-worthiness requires virtue. ‘Thick as thieves’ is a rather hollow idiom when viewed from this perspective.
excellent
This theme that everyone dies a premature death who stays in the Mob carries over to Pulp Fiction, Quentin Tarantino's other film. The only gang members who survive are the guys that opt out.