Aristotle on Self-Knowledge and Friendship
Zena Hitz (2011)
Philosophers' Imprint, Vol 11, No 12, August 2011

"Self-sufficiency in the Nicomachean Ethics has two features: something self-sufficient is *final*: it is sought for its own sake and not for the sake of something else; and furthermore, something self-sufficnet is *free from necessary conditions*. Both features can be understood as types of independence, and so ways of being complete and self-contained." (HITZ, p. 5)

"By calling the friend another self, Aristotle is not appealing to a general, implausible analogy between oneself and one's friend. Rather, he understands friendship to involve collaborative activity." (HITZ, p. 10)

"The emphasis on the value of life, perception, and thought, while applying, broadly taken, to a variety of types of virtue friendship, also explains the special way in which friends may be valuable in contemplative activity." (HITZ, p. 11)

"Aristotle makes explicit the value of collaboration in the highest friendships toward the end of the final argument of 9.9....: 'So [the good man] must be aware also of his friend that he is, and this will happen in living together and in sharing discussion and thought. For this is what living together for human beings seems to mean, and not as for cattle, grazing in the same place.' [1170b10-14] Here Aristotle contrasts the merely shared activity of cattle (and human gluttons) with the collaborative activity of philosophic friends, who think and discuss in common and so help one another to achieve shared goals." (HITZ, pp. 12-13) [PSA: logos is present in *all* activities toward shared goals, not *only* in philosophy; cf. Depew]

"The activities that constitute our life are desirable and pleasant, and because for Aristotle living things are defined by their characteristic activities, these activities are also what we are. Accordingly, we identify with our activities and their products; we value them as extensions of ourselves. Likewise, those with whom we share our activities, especially those who share our goals and help us achieve them, will be valued, desired, and found pleasant because of the role they play in our activity. The integration of the person into our activities makes them 'another self'." (HITZ, p. 14)

"Aristotle is not talking about bare self-consciousness at all but rather consciousness as integrated into various life-activities - for example, in the pleasure or appreciative awareness we take in our various activities.... Thus the awareness of life and its goodness... should imply awareness of a life in its fullest sense - of a whole human life, not just bare self-consciousness." (HITZ, p. 15)

"In 10.4-5 Aristotle indicates that all pleasure is connected with either perception or contemplation (1174b14-1175a3, and throughout these chapters)." (HITZ, p. 16)

"Perception or awareness does not only provide the crowning pleasure for a life of moral virtue. It is what a human being is; it is part of what constitutes his essence. Our friends and their actions are 'our own' because in some sense they are us... in that they share the activities that constitute what we are and help us with them. So Aristotle emphasizes repeatedly by connecting friends with what it is to be or *to einai* for a person." (HITZ, pp. 16-17)

"Awareness of one's life and ways in which it is good, while it can (and ought) include a simply joy in one's good existence, can also be taken to include quite sophisticated, philosophical understanding of one's own nature as a human being." (HITZ, p. 17)

"[T]he good man thinks about the goodness of his whole life. This could cover a range of states, from awareness of the goodness of his actions... to awareness of the goodness of specialized knowledge... or to a quite broad appreciation of his life as a perceiver or thinker, of what it is to be a human being. This last appreciation is a broad type of self-knowledge - knowledge of what one is, of one's nature and its defining good." (HITZ, pp. 17-18)

"For a good man, a friend is valued - like other external goods - by reference to his end, virtuous activity. Accordingly, the friend is integrated with his life: in other words, the friend's goodness and pleasantness are intimately bound up with the goodness and pleasure of his own life. That is because a good man's life consists of virtuous activity rather than the acquisition of external ends." (HITZ, p. 22)

"[F]riends are choiceworthy in order to be fully and properly active... they improve our virtuous activities rather than providing necessities for our bare survival or for external goods that are not properly integrated." (HITZ, p. 22)

On page 23, Hitz draws a distinction between "moral friends" and "contemplative friends" - a distinction which is not present in Aristotle's ethical works. She then goes on, I would say on somewhat shaky textual ground, to argue as follows: "friends as collaborators remove impediments to activity and so are needed on account of one's defects. As such, friends imply a lack of self-sufficiency.... Human beings are not pure activity. They can always be further actualized; they can do what they do still better, more often, or more independently.... But the need for contemplative friends will be gradually overcome as one reaches higher levels of intellectual achievement. The wise man will gradually acquire more knowledge to contemplate on his own, and he will need friends less for help in acquiring or perfecting it. He will achieve greater self-contained unity this way, and so greater self-sufficiency." (HITZ, p. 24) [PSA: We need to look at Aristotle's analysis dialectically. Once he moves beyond a deficiency account of pleasure in EN Book X, the way is opened to an account of philia based not on deficiency but on abundance.]

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