Episode 148: Aristotle on Friendship and Happiness

0:08 Mark: You are listening to the Partially Examined Life, a philosophy podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our Questions for episode 148 are what is friendship and what is happiness? And we continued reading Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, this time focusing on books 8 through 10. You can join the discussion, get the text and lots More information@PartiallyExaminedLife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer, friends with others as I am with myself in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:36 Wes: This is Wes Alwan repaying what I owe in Cambridge, Massachusetts. That's from one of my least favorite sections on credit and repayment.

0:47 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey being at work in accord with my nature in Middleton, Wisconsin.

0:51 Anna: This is Anna Sandoyu, living a contemplative life in Brighton, uk.

0:57 Mark: Welcome, Anna.

0:58 Anna: Hey guys, thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me on. I'm super, super happy to be doing this with you.

1:06 Wes: Why don't you give us some background on how you got involved in all

1:09 Anna: this, in working with you guys and the podcast?

1:13 Wes: Yeah.

1:13 Mark: Then that's the only thing about you that matters, isn't it?

1:16 Anna: Yes.

1:17 Dylan: The way in which you reflect our genuine smartness for bringing you around to our podcast.

1:24 Anna: Well, apart from the writing that I've been doing for you guys, I've been l the life of a budding independent researcher and writer. I used to work as an English teacher before making the decision to take a few months off and go freelance and give writing a full time go. I've got graduate and postgraduate studies in philosophy and literature. My research and writerly interests are very broad, from literature to transhumanist technologies and post genderism. But they all stem from ethics or have an ethical component to them. And I guess if there was a common thread that kind of ran through my intellectual life, it would be the idea of empathy from an ethical perspective and the efforts that we make, or should make to increase empathy and diminish cruelty and suffering.

Right now I'm mainly working on a research project which might turn into a PhD proposal on the concepts of evil and cruelty and what makes human beings want to hurt others, whether there's a connection between cruelty and existential anxiety.

2:27 Wes: Sounds fascinating.

2:29 Anna: Oh, gosh, yeah, it is. It is awesome.

2:31 Mark: Your writing for us has already shown that you qualify as a friend of utility. And your accent makes you a friend of pleasure, at least until we get tired of it. So a friend of virtue will have to see we don't know you quite well enough. That's the nature of friendships, of virtue.

2:48 Wes: Although you've displayed plenty of intellectual virtue

2:51 Anna: that can be both utility and it could be the ultimate thing. Right?

2:55 Wes: Intellectual.

2:56 Anna: Yeah. If you find intellectual virtues in a friend, that makes them the best friend. Right.

3:01 Dylan: But we're missing the proximity. Right. That's something that Aristotle would find completely crazy. That you wouldn't be within like five

3:09 Mark: miles of each other unless you live together. You're not really friends. I mean, come on, Friends live together. That's the thing that friends do.

3:15 Wes: Yes, but we should say by live together, I don't think he means move in together. I think he means do things together,

3:22 Dylan: Living life together, going to the market together.

3:24 Wes: Hey, do you want to go to a movie? That's living together.

3:26 Mark: Not really. I mean, you're my friend, but I don't really want to hang out with you. Wait, who Aristotle would find that funny? That's what I'm saying.

3:35 Wes: Yeah.

3:36 Mark: So, yes, the books 8 and 9 are about friendship. Book 10 is about happiness and pleasure. So that gives us nice. We can try to get done with friendship in our first half here and have a nicely divided discussion.

3:51 Dylan: We should also make sure we, in talking about friendship in the books is ask why they're the penultimate books before wrapping up a book on ethics and happiness.

3:59 Wes: Yeah. Why are we talking about friendship in the first place?

4:02 Dylan: Exactly. And especially talking about friendship after having talked about all the other virtues and as a prelude for talking about the best life as being a life of

4:13 Wes: natural happiness, we came out of all the other books thinking we could be self sufficient. Ubermenschen. Is that the. And now it turns out that's not the case.

4:23 Mark: I didn't come out of that thinking that.

4:24 Wes: But I know, I know. I was actually like channeling you, Mark, when I exaggerated in that way.

4:30 Dylan: But no one can fake being Mark. It's just too hard to do.

4:35 Wes: That's true.

4:36 Dylan: He is exemplary.

4:38 Mark: So apparently, according to the first sense of this, a discussion of friendship would naturally follow from what has been said, since it is a virtue or implies virtue and is besides most necessary. With a view to living without friends, no one would choose to live, though he had all of the goods. There you go.

4:54 Wes: And in my translation, necessary to happiness. So if we're asking the question of what makes us happy, and happiness is activity in accordance with virtue and friendship is necessary to that, then we have some hunch that friendship is at the very least related. Although he does again flat out say that friendship is a virtue.

5:11 Mark: Right. Well, and we've kind of put out the thesis in Our joking here, which is that only virtuous people can really be friends, and they're friends in virtue of their virtue. There are other types of relations, it seems like that doesn't make any sense. You have the most craven, the most idiotic, rude, crude people have friends, but those kind of friends actually make them worse. And they can't really trust each other. So if somebody says, hey, this guy said something bad about you, then you might believe it because you don't know if they're a rude and crude person.

You really can't trust them to be steady friends. So whatever utility people might get by hanging out with each other, and of course, even co workers is sort of a society of friendship. You're pursuing supposedly at least one purpose, but those don't seem to be often the most lasting kinds of relationships. Once you're not working there anymore, unless you've established some real friendship on top of the working relationship, then you just never bother to see the people again.

6:09 Dylan: Well, but he makes all these distinctions, right, Mark? I mean, he calls them kinds of friendship.

6:13 Wes: So, yeah, let's make them more distinctly here. This threefold distinction in book eight, part three, friendships of usefulness, pleasure and goodness. So we're friends with some people because they're useful, some because they're pleasurable, and some because we think they are good, which will also involve pleasure and utility sometimes. But their goodness will be the primary motive there. And that's really what we're talking about. We're talking about a psychology here at this point. We're talking about motives. And I think, Mark, what you are kind of getting at is the first two types of friendship are not, for Aristotle, not really friendship in the fullest sense, although he's going to continue to use that word for them.

The true friendship will involve this relationship, this being motivated by the goodness of others. But loosely speaking, we can speak of friendships of usefulness and pleasure as well.

7:04 Mark: Do we want to say what is, what is the Greek?

7:06 Dylan: It's philos. All different versions of philosophy. Yeah.

7:11 Mark: Is there an association in the friendship? Is philia in the Greek, you know, such that any type of association would count as philia, or does it really involve love as in love of wisdom

7:22 Dylan: philosophy, when all these cases where they talk about love and the love involved in friendship, I believe if you were to be really, really super literal, you might call it friending. Right. It uses the verb form that's associated with philia. It's not the verb form associated with eros.

7:41 Mark: But in section two, when he talks about the Object of love. Is that Eros or is that Philia?

7:46 Wes: That's philia. Philia is friendship and love is Philos and Anna. Are we right about that?

7:53 Anna: Yeah, that's what I was thinking. I think it's Philia everywhere in books eight, nine and ten, right?

7:58 Wes: Yeah. When we talk about in this part three, are they chapters really? Should we call it chapter three of book eight?

8:04 Dylan: You can call them chapters.

8:06 Wes: So one of the phrases he uses is loving someone for who they are. And the other kind of thing he talks about is wishing others well, which in the Greek for that is eunoia or eunoia. So well thinking in a way, well wishing. So wishing others well as who they are. In the case of true friendship between good men who resemble each other in virtue, there's this well wishing aspect as being what they are. So I thought those two ways of putting it are really interesting and probably worth exploring a little bit.

8:37 Dylan: Well, and also point to why it's at the end of this book, this focus on something becoming what it is. And happiness is an actively pursued life of virtue oriented towards the good. So the fact that your friendships would be a reflection of that active life oriented towards the good because it would be in line with you having rightly oriented pleasures and appetites.

9:03 Wes: What does it mean to love someone for who they are in this context?

9:07 Anna: I was thinking that this is connected to a point later on where he says that the peak of friendship is like friendship towards oneself. And I kind of see the good and virtue and friendship and self love all connected to each other. The only reason why you would love a friend for who they are and in themselves would be because you yourself are a good person and you can see the good reflected in the other person as well. So your friend is like a mirror of yourself and the good in yourself. Because I wondered about that as well. What does it mean to say that you love someone else for who they are as opposed to loving them for utility or for pleasure?

Like, for example, if they're funny or smart, that would be for utility and that wouldn't be good because obviously utility fades away with time and people change and the only thing that remains the same is virtue. But then again, later on he talks about other situations where your friend starts out as being virtuous but then changes. And there's the question of whether you should still be friends with them or not.

10:18 Dylan: At the beginning, he talks about whether or not the paradigm of friendship would be the affection that a parent has for a child. Now, ultimately that's not quite right, but the reason that seems applicable here is the idea that you would love something for what it's becoming without necessarily its attachment to what it provides you. Acknowledging that it's okay for that relationship to be pleasing. And you love it for what it is. And so you love that person for who they are in their fully active being, what they do and how they act.

10:56 Wes: And I think active is actually. Yeah. The key thing there. Because really, when we say, you know, loving someone for who they are. When we say that colloquially, we may not mean what Aristotle means. Right. Because we may think, well, that person just loves me for my looks or because I'm useful. They should love me because I'm pleasant and charming and this and that. But those qualities themselves would not count here, because what really matters is loving someone for all the virtues that Aristotle has described in previous books. And ultimately, one of the things we got out of the previous books was that what those virtues really are, what makes them virtues or forms of excellence, is this energeia concept, is this idea of actualizing these certain kinds of dispositions or hexeis.

So in a way, what we are loving in the other person is their activity, their reality. But to put it more simply, it's virtue in the Aristotelian sense and not their charms and all that other stuff.

11:54 Mark: It's interesting. It starts right at section two that he talks about. Not everything can be loved, but only the lovable.

12:01 Dylan: Yep.

12:01 Mark: And this is good or pleasant or useful. So we usually think of love me just the way I am means don't just love me for my nice qualities. You have to kind of get into even the kind of annoying parts. The flaws. I was going to say the parts that are not beautiful. But really it's a matter of seeing those flaws as forming part of the beauty, the individuality. Whereas it sounds like here, if virtue is really everywhere, the same, my virtue and your virtue. He's not Nietzsche. And the way that Anna was just putting. Which is how he puts it at the end of book nine, which is loving someone as kind of a reflection of your virtue, then it sounds like you're loving them for something that's not unique to them. You're loving them for something that is generic.

12:45 Wes: Exactly.

12:46 Mark: Sort of the divine in general.

12:48 Wes: Yep. I think it is generic because loving them for what they are, who they are. In this case, the who they are is their nature. There's a very specific thing meant by that. It's not their particular quirks and their individuality. Oh, aren't they such a unique character it's not character in that more specific sense, I don't think. I think it's character in this more generic sense, the what you are. Because virtue is sort of the highest actualization of the who you are or the what you are, but the who you are in this sense as human, not Wes or Mark or Dylan.

13:23 Dylan: Yeah, but there's a challenge here. You are. Divine might be the right word, but in being excellent in Aristotle, you as a particular entity would be reflecting the full flourishing of something general. Right. So in being an excellent human being, or being an excellent oak tree or whatever, it would be a particular flourishing that would be wholly particular in its own particular activity. But it would be also reflecting, in the case that you were talking about, a quintessential example of species would be reflecting that. And there's room, it seems to me, in Aristotle, even within a given species, for those particular instances to be spoken of as flourishing in their own right, in their own ways.

14:18 Wes: Let me give you the contrast I'm thinking of. So in a Nietzsche virtue ethics, my goal might be to be the best west possible, where my specific makeup, my particular character, in a way, is definitive, of certain ends and certain virtues or excellences. Whereas with Aristotle, I think we're not talking about that. We're talking about being the best human being possible, not the best Wes or Mark or Dylan or Anna possible.

14:45 Dylan: I guess the question is, how does changing that phrase to the best example of a human being differ from being the best human being? All of these things are always particular examples. Right. They're always individuals in Aristotle.

14:59 Wes: Right.

15:00 Dylan: That are manifesting these virtues and these characteristics of flourishing or not flourishing. And I think you're right. It's not like Nietzsche, where in some ways there's no such thing as a species in Nietzsche. Right. If you get really radical about it, there's only particulars, especially for people.

15:18 Wes: Yeah. So in other words, for a different kind of virtue ethics, it might be my virtue to become a doctor. That's the specificity I'm talking about. Whereas in Aristotle, it's just a matter of becoming courageous or one of those other lists of virtues. So even though it's true that in all cases it's got to be particulars, particular human beings who manifest these virtues. It's just whether or not you can define them based on our particular characters or whether or not they're defined based on human nature. Dylan. Nature or human nature. And I think in this case, it's a matter of human nature.

15:53 Mark: So either way, there are things in this book that sound kind of New Agey. You know, you got to love yourself in order to love others. But then there are things, you know, that you can just be objectively not worthy of love.

16:06 Wes: Well, you can be worthy of love if you're useful or pleasant, though.

16:09 Dylan: You know of that lower kind of friendship, right?

16:11 Wes: Yeah, but there's the lovable. Right? Includes the good, the pleasant and the useful. Yes.

16:17 Anna: I was thinking about the general versus particular thing. First of all, I was thinking that it was really interesting how in his view, what makes us special is in a way also what makes us we as humans, imperfect. So you guys were saying about the human nature, how you're supposed to be excellent at either what makes humans humans in general or whether you're supposed to be virtuous and excel at what makes you as an individual the best, right?

16:46 Mark: Yes. Your personal teleology, your personal. I totally could get that of I know you well enough to kind of know the kind of person you want to be. And insofar as you are that person, that's what I really love. And even just having that goal in there is one of the things. As opposed to all the times you slip and ignore me and act like a jerk or something.

17:04 Anna: Yeah, I got that. To be generally our human nature, and not just our human nature in general, but the best, best part of us as humans in general. And it ties in with that bit where he says that your best part, I mean my translation says your authoritative part is the one, I mean, obviously that distinguishes you from animals, but then it's also the one that you share

17:24 Wes: with the gods, which is reason.

17:26 Anna: Exactly. And it's at once the thing that makes you virtuous or gives you the ability to become virtuous. And it's your little piece of divinity that you have in yourself. And I think he actually says that you should try to emulate the God and try to be as divine as possible. But at the same time he also says it's impossible for you as a human to be perfect at that all the time because you have all sorts of obstacles and all sorts of bodily needs and. Etc, etc. So yeah, I thought that was interesting, how there's this one thing that's our excellence, and at the same time it's bound to be imperfect. But also the general versus particular thing, isn't it more like our reason? Our rational part, our most authoritative part is our most virtuous part. It's what helps us achieve virtue. But at the same time there are several particular instances where we achieve that

18:23 Wes: virtue yeah, the particular instances are the particular virtues, though. Well, I mean, we can talk about it in two senses. So reason in each one of the virtues, whether it's courage or magnanimity or any of the rest, it's reason, which is sort of the common element there that makes them virtuous. Those are the particular. So we could talk about particular virtues, and then we could also talk about particular instances of displaying those virtues or exercising those virtues. But the particularity that I was talking about was going beyond the Aristotelian generic virtues to thinking of, you know, doctoring.

Not just being courageous, but doctoring might be my particular virtue. And I was arguing against that kind of conception in this case of. It's not a thing I want us to get bogged down on. It's just. I was trying to sort of get us at this whole distinction of what Aristotle means by loving someone for who they are and how that's actually quite different from what we might think it is. And Mark also put it well in the. You know, in the sense that we often mean that as, you know, loving someone for their flaws. When I think, for Aristotle, the perfect kind of friendship is between good men who resemble each other in virtue and basically love each other for that virtue.

19:34 Anna: Yeah. Except I understood that to be exclusively rationality and reason, actually, and understanding and pursuing a life of happiness and contemplation. For me, it didn't read as though he allowed for anything else to be a virtue that we could love each other for as friends.

19:53 Dylan: I think it all comes as a package. Right. The rationality is the highest one, because in some ways, it's the most. As Wes said, all the virtues involve reason. But thinking is the one that most involves reason. And the exercise of that in contemplation is. That's why it's sort of at the pinnacle. But the happy life is being at work or living and breathing according to virtue, for Aristotle. And so that's the way in which you brought up the striving to be godlike. And the part that's being godlike is doing all these things without having to actually exercise your choice about doing them.

In that you are acting and being virtuous as a natural action of yourself. So it's not as if you are, for Aristotle, constantly faced with choices and struggling with them and then choosing the right one. That's not the excellent virtuous life. The excellent virtuous character in life is one in which you are just like a God, sailing through, making those choices in accord with virtue all the time.

20:59 Anna: Naturally, because you've got the right habits and the right dispositions for that.

21:04 Dylan: Yeah, exactly. And I think you're right to point out that that's the standard, but it's also very hard. Right.

21:12 Wes: This is a good question here. We've kind of jumped ahead to book 10, chapters seven and eight, where chapter seven, and we saw this in the politics kind of as well, it turns out that the perfect happiness is this theoria contemplation and its superiority to practical virtue within. In chapter eight he'll say practical virtue, sort of that life is secondarily happy or it's happy in a secondary sense. Whereas the primary sense is theoria. There are a few reasons why, but I think the main one is that it's self sufficient. Practical action involves a lot of contingencies.

We depend on a lot of external things in practical action. Whereas in contemplation there's a sort of inherent self sufficiency and continuity and its objects are always the highest sorts of objects and so on. But I think Anna was asking a good question in the sense of. Well, you know, if friends are loving each other for their virtue, then what counts in this, you know, sense is loving someone for their courageousness. Is that legitimate? Or can we only love them qua contemplators? I think that's actually a very interesting question.

22:18 Mark: I didn't find anything in the friendship sections that would support the latter. I think that what you said before about reason being involved and reason is how you find the golden mean in any particular thing. So if somebody is brave but they don't have any reason, then they're probably going to be foolhardy or brave at the wrong times or reckless or whatever. So in a sense, because you're loving them for their bravery, you are loving them for their reason, but it's not direct. And I think maybe one of the things that the experience of friendship we described these.

There are three types of friendships, but of course you don't know, as we said at the beginning, whether somebody is virtuous. You don't know whether you can have that type of friendship with them until you know them really well. And then the only reason you hang out with them to start with, so you could get to know them that well, is because they are pleasant and. Or they are useful. So those are the initial attractors. And then I think, as Dylan was saying, they all do kind of go together that it turns out that if you are a virtuous person, you are going to be the kind of person who's going to have the energy, you're going to be quick witted, you're going to be pleasant to be around.

And you're also, you know, because you're a capable person, you're going to be able to do things for your friends. You know, again, it's not that then they like you only because you do those things. That would be a strictly a friendship of utility. But if you consistently are able to be pleasant and do those things, then that will sort of be an indicator that you are virtuous. And there's no direct line from those to contemplation that is at least obvious to experience. Unless you're reading someone and saying, I really Heidegger is my friend.

I like the way he contemplates. Unless you're listening to this podcast and liking us for that reason because of the way we contemplate, then no, their contemplative abilities is not why you become friends with them.

24:00 Wes: Well, he does talk though, a lot about in this context of living together, which we already talked about. I mean, it'll turn out that conversation is a big part of that. I'm looking for the section here, and that's something where obviously your contemplative virtue would manifest itself. Does anyone remember where conversation is the thing?

24:19 Dylan: Well, in chapter 12, he talks about friendship as being part of being in a community, but that's not exactly what you're talking about.

24:27 Wes: Okay. It's in chapter nine, actually, of book nine, where it turns out that the happy person needs friends. And he gives that really fascinating argument, which we don't have to talk about now about why the happy person needs friends, but along the way, at the very end of that, we become conscious of the existence of our friends by doing things with them and by having rational conversations with them. And this idea of the consciousness, of the existence of friends is a pretty crucial idea. It's not a simple, oh, look, there's my friend. There's a high bar to what it means to gain consciousness of the other. I thought a lot of by the way of Hegel in some of these sections.

25:06 Dylan: That actual line there has a great. I was just going to look it up in another translation. In my translation it says, therefore one also ought to share in a friend's awareness that he is. And this would come about through living together and sharing conversation and thinking. For this would seem to be what living together means in the case of human beings not feeding in the same place like fatted cattle.

25:28 Wes: That's great. Yeah. So not to divert us, but yeah, I think I mean, Mark is right. You could love someone for their courageousness. And there's. In each of the virtues, there's rationality is kind of manifested. But I think there's something for Aristotle about the things that you can do together that's important. Including especially conversation, which is sort of the prime area where the contemplative virtue can manifest itself.

25:53 Anna: I was thinking that if contemplation, I mean, is happiness, basically, then perhaps the highest form of friendship would have been a friend from one contemplative person to another.

26:04 Wes: I think he does actually say that's the highest form of friendship.

26:07 Mark: It's actually right before the quote that Dylan was reading. I think this is, Anna, what you were referring to earlier about the perceiving. There's quite a long paragraph here about if life is desirable, and particularly so for good men is because to them existence is good and pleasant. For they are pleased at the consciousness of the presence in them, of what is in itself good. And if, as the virtuous man is to himself, he is to his friend also. For his friend is another self. If all this be true, as his own being is desirable for each man, so or almost so is that of his friend. Now, his being was seen to be desirable because he perceived his own goodness. And such perception is pleasant in itself. And then is what Dylan read. He needs, therefore, to be conscious of the existence of his friend as well. And this will be realized in their living together, et cetera.

26:56 Wes: So this is a really fascinating and amazing argument. This idea that in order to explain why the happy person needs friends, we sort of have to talk about the friend as another self. That's pretty amazing. And I think why Aristotle thinks that's necessary is because happiness is an activity. It's our own energeia, this exercise of faculties or this activity that he talks about. And it's clear that we can be pleased by our own exercise. But then we want to say that we're pleased by a friend's exercise in

27:28 Dylan: a way that's different than our own pleasure of our own exercise.

27:32 Wes: Well, he wants to sort of assimilate it by saying that in a certain sense, the friend is another self. So that, in other words, there's almost this empathetic enjoyment of the other person's exercise. It's not like seeing someone who's really good at something do that and thinking, wow, that person's amazing at doing that. It's sort of like we're almost sympathetically activated in our own virtuousness. I don't know If I have a good way of explaining that. But I think the empathy part is crucial here. He uses this phrase belong to us. In a way, the actions and activities of our friends belong to us. So it's when they are doing something virtuous, it's almost as if we are doing something virtuous and then we get that pleasure that naturally follows on the unimpeded activity of a. Of a faculty, which is what virtue is. Does that make sense?

28:21 Mark: Yeah, I think it's really. It's hard just the fact that we're using virtuous this way and because of our cultural associations, we're going to think like, oh, because someone is being, you know, really upright and proper or something. And that's why we love. But it's that the last part of what you said, Wes, that's important there is that virtue is just the unimpeded faculty. It's kind of what we're all trying to do already. It's not something that, you know, religion has externally imposed or something. It's something that comes from realization of our own internal tendencies.

28:50 Wes: Right.

28:52 Anna: Yeah. Maybe it also gives us a standard. Maybe it's about helping us, sort of like leading by the power of example or something like seeing that another person is doing righteous things also helps us do virtuous things. Yeah.

29:07 Dylan: I think we have to be a little bit careful in that. You know, from the beginning of this book, virtuous action, excellent activity, is something you develop habits towards as a child. You might be well trained to do so, such that as you grow older, you then choose those activities for themselves. And that is really the culmination of that virtuous activity, as opposed to when you're a child and you're doing it out of duress or because you're told to do, which is not in the most excellent way at all. So you're doing the activity, you're doing the excellent activity, but not out of rational choice. And I was having a little bit of a hiccup there with what Mark was saying, because it would seem to not seem to be whatever you were doing, however you were most manifesting yourself, that would be excellent. But that's not true.

30:03 Mark: The unimpeded exercise of a faculty doesn't mean letting loose. It means the faculty being optim. Being finely tuned to do what it's supposed to do.

30:13 Dylan: Yes, that's the qualification that I would make. Yep.

30:16 Mark: Which is not too extreme in either direction.

30:19 Anna: Yeah, yeah. And optimizing that would be also by adding pleasure to it. But again, we're moving forward from the

30:27 Dylan: beginning and earlier, before these books that were talking about pleasure is one of the big things. Aristotle's doing is acknowledging and arguing that virtuous things give us pleasure. And surely partly in contradistinction to the idea that if you like doing something, it must certainly be bad and certainly not be as good as the things that are really hard to do. He completely disagrees with that. Right. The things that are truly good are also things that give us pleasure. We're guided by our pleasure. If it's properly oriented, it's a good guide as long as it's properly oriented.

31:04 Wes: He even sort of suggests that in our current reading that pleasure could be considered the ultimate good as long as we understand the only thing stopping us from saying that is that it's not just the pleasure of any old person, because people who are vicious, they take pleasure in vicious things, and they have been sort of derailed from being cognizant of the pleasure that comes with the exercise of virtue. So it's the pleasure of the virtuous person that is the ultimate. That's the standard that could be considered the ultimate good.

31:34 Dylan: Rightly oriented pleasure is a proper guide to happiness and to goodness. But the challenge with that is that you can have wrongly oriented pleasures. Your pleasure can be wrongly oriented.

31:44 Mark: So the connection that Anna was pointing out between pleasure and completeness, I see in book 10, chapter 4, I have a quote that says, pleasure completes an activity, not as the corresponding permanent state does by its imminence, but as an end which supervenes as the bloom of youth does on those in the flower of their own age.

32:04 Anna: Yeah. God, I read that quote like 500 times trying to figure out exactly what he means. It's also because the Greek word for completes is telein, right? The verb. I think that's what my translation was saying, which is, by the way, the Susan Collins in the Bartlett one, the latest one, I think. So if it's from Telain, and it's the same family as telos, Right. So pleasure brings any activity to its final end, Right. It fulfills it, it perfects it. But I also got the feeling that pleasure and activity go hand in hand. There's like. There's a very intimate relationship between these two. In a sense, that activity is necessary for pleasure to exist or to arise. Like pleasure can't arise from something that's not an activity. But at the same time, if you want that activity to be complete, and if you want to perfect it, you need pleasure.

32:59 Mark: The very next sentence is so long as both the intelligible or sensible object, in other words, the thing you're dealing with, and the discriminating or contemplative faculty, in other words, your mind, are as they should be, as long as everything is as it should be, the pleasure will be involved in the activity. So pleasure is intrinsic to the completion involved in any activity. That almost sounds exactly like the unrestrained or, you know, fine tuned exercise of the faculty. That's what shows us that it is the telos. So pleasure is kind of a signal.

33:30 Wes: So the way he puts it, so. And further, the pleasure completes the exercise of the faculty, but the pleasure completes it in a different way from that in which the object and the faculty of sense complete it, when both are as they should be, just as health causes healthy activities in a different way from that in which the physician causes them. So how do we interpret that?

33:52 Anna: Can you tell me exactly where you read that? Is it right immediately after what Mark read? Right. Oh, yeah, sorry, chapter four, book ten. Yeah, yeah.

34:00 Dylan: In 1174 B32 or something like that. That's where the bloom of their powers part is.

34:08 Mark: Anna was wondering what those words mean. And as an end which supervenes, as the bloom of youth does in on those in the flower of their old age. So the way I was interpreting that teleologically is that, Sorry, do you have old age?

34:23 Anna: Because I've got the prime of life.

34:25 Mark: So read your version of it, Dylan.

34:27 Dylan: This is from the Sachs translation. It's one of them I read. But the pleasure brings the activity to completion not as an active condition present within it all along, but as something that comes over it, like the bloom of well being in people who are at the peak of their powers.

34:42 Wes: By the way, active condition is Sachs' translation of hexis, what you might call disposition or faculty or state. So he's saying pleasure makes the energeia, the activity, complete, not as a hexis does, but it's something kind of super added on top of that. Although it's unclear how the hexis completes it, except that it's just the other part of the equation that, you know, you have the hexis and then the energeia of that. I guess that's the sense in which those two elements make a whole complete thing. And then pleasure is something more. I don't know. The word supervene, I think, is actually pretty good there.

35:18 Anna: Yeah. So in a way, it's like a cherry on top of a cake.

35:22 Wes: There you go. There you go.

35:23 Anna: I was Thinking of pleasure as that extra element that kind of puts you in a state of flow, I guess we would say today, because he was talking about geometers and musicians and how, yeah, you only excel once. You take pleasure in that, in what you do. But at the same time, right after the bloom of youth, supervening bit from the middle of the next paragraph, he says some things, because they are novel, do give delight, but later on they do not do so as much. So at first our thinking is roused and active to the utmost degree regarding them, as is the case with sight when people stare at something.

But subsequently, the activity involved is not of such intensity, but has instead become relaxed. Hence the pleasure involved, too, is dimmed. So in a way, it almost reads as though you have to put some effort into whatever activity it is that you're involved in at some point in order to feel a pleasure that is proportionate to that. Just as you do when you reach a state of flow, there's a little bit of difficulty, but there's also pleasure that comes with it just enough to make you excel at it.

36:31 Mark: Well, and you're pushing toward. But contrary to my prediction, we are not talking about friendship in the first half and happiness in the second half. We are giving more or less a complete presentation of the theory in the first half, and maybe in the second half we'll actually talk about whether we like it in the practical applications. But anyway, it seems from what you've said and the way the discussion is going, we're about set to at least clarify what he means by happiness. And you were just saying that it involves activity. It's not just, you know, feeling happy.

And we've already said that it involves virtue. So again, just because somebody, you know, a pig enjoying the food, is not happy, or maybe he has the appropriate happiness for a pig, but a human being is not the same as a pig. And so we, in virtue of our rational nature, have a different kind of happiness. And so our happiness involves contemplation, as we were saying. So what do we have to add to that picture to finish his little sketch of what happiness is?

37:27 Wes: So we're talking about book 10, chapter 6, on just for Listeners.

37:32 Dylan: He makes the distinction that happiness is a kind of energeia. Right?

37:37 Wes: Yeah. He says it's not a hexis. He says it's not a hexis, it's an energeia.

37:41 Mark: It's not a state, it's an activity.

37:43 Dylan: Yep.

37:44 Mark: And what kind of activity is it going to be? Is it just amusing Yourself?

37:49 Dylan: No.

37:49 Mark: Is that it?

37:50 Dylan: No, no. I mean, he says it at the first chapter. So I'm going to read from the Sachs translation, which uses this phrase, being at work, to mean activity, as a way of translating energeia. One ought to instead place happiness in some form of being at work, is what was said before. And among ways of being at work, some are necessary and are chosen for the sake of something else, while others are for their own sake. It is clear that one ought to place happiness as one of those that are chosen for their own sake and not among those that are for the sake of something else. Since happiness stands in need of nothing, but is self sufficient. So happiness is activity directed for its own sake out of self sufficiency, which gives us a clue as to what we were talking about earlier, why contemplation would be the highest form of happiness.

38:36 Anna: Yeah, the self sufficiency bit is really crucial to it, isn't it? Yeah. I thought it was interesting that for someone who's so fond of the social aspect and the social nature of human beings, self sufficiency would play such a huge role. That's basically the main reason why contemplation is the highest form of activity, isn't it? I mean, on the one hand, because you exert the highest part of yourself, the authoritative part, in order to contemplate, but also because you could do it pretty much wherever you are, regardless. I mean, you could be in a desert and still contemplate.

You don't need people for it. Because he makes that comparison with other activities. Right. Even with political actions. I think he talks about. I mean, I got. He probably doesn't use the word activist, but I got the feeling that he was talking about people who want to change things socially. And he says that even for that, you need other things. So first of all, you need other things, like other virtues, like bravery and courage and whatever, but also you need resources, and also you need other people. Whereas to contemplate, you only need yourself and your brain, your faculties.

And it's also the fact that out of the contemplation, there's nothing else that needs to come out of it for it to be worthy of being pursued.

40:01 Wes: This part that Dylan just referred to and pointed in book six, this idea of self sufficiency, he's kind of reiterating something he said, I think, in book one, which is that happiness must itself have the self sufficiency. So we ought to remind ourselves why he thinks that and what that means exactly.

40:18 Mark: Well, can I just clarify the word? It's not like Anna was saying, you as an individual human being being self sufficient. No, it's happiness. The activity is self sufficient.

40:29 Wes: Those are very different things, although they're not, I think, unrelated when we get to the contemplation point. But yeah, here in this specific passage, happiness lacks nothing. It is sufficient in itself. It really has something to do with happiness being the telos, sort of the buck stops here point. The point at which you can't really go beyond an explanation not desirable for

40:52 Mark: the sake of something else. That is, I think all self sufficient means. It doesn't mean that you don't need anything to have happiness. Of course there's a lot of things that you need to have happiness. It's just that once you have happiness, you don't do it for the sake of something else.

41:06 Wes: Those two criteria are actually distinct. I think they seem related. But he makes a point of saying that there are a few different criteria and one of them is that happiness can't be for the sake of something else. The other thing is it has to be sufficient unto itself.

41:19 Dylan: Well, this question of self sufficiency and happiness being attainable all alone. I don't know if it's just attention or if it goes to one of the things we asked at the beginning why these books on friendship are here and why it makes sense. As he says, we of course would start talking about friendship now and then at the end of book 10, we're led to the politics and to the proper ordering of a community as being fundamental to the pursuit of happiness. There's a way in which, yes, it can be attained in some sense in a solitary way, but it seems to be deeply dependent upon the conditions under which that flourishing self grew up. Right.

42:02 Mark: It seems there's a conflict between being the best kind of person and being like a God. And that's. I know we've been trying to say what that means, but on the face of it, they sound quite damn different. Humans are social animals, so being the best kind of person means you can be a good friend, you are a good social animal. But insofar as we have reason, then we are not even individuals. This is going back to our De Anima episode that we partake of something that is not even in time and space. That is what the gods are made of. And so in a certain way, the best part of us is this divine part.

And to fully actualize that would be to be beyond the need for friends, beyond the need for anything, except for we ask, what would the gods do? How would the gods be virtuous, they're not tempted, and so they have to show temperance. They're not facing things that scare them and so they have to show bravery. The only way that they could show their virtue is through contemplation, he claims so. Those just seem different to me. It almost seems like he has this great idea about the telos of human beings, but then he's got this foreign idea to that whether he's inherited it from his culture or something, that what is best in us is what is divine and that we should be like the gods.

Of course, the gods provide the model of ethical behavior. You know, that's just something that they all believed. And I just don't think those two things go together.

43:25 Anna: Yeah, for me it was like he just remembered that he was a pupil of Plato and he was like, oh, I gotta give a nod to Plato. I have to say something about the divine because it doesn't really fit in with the rest of his ethics, I don't think. I mean, I don't think he supports it very well.

43:41 Wes: That's sort of at the end of section seven though. I mean, is that really the primary argument? I think the primary argument is, look, we've been talking about happiness as the activity of these faculties that we have as these virtues. And in the overriding common thing between them is this what he calls the best part of us, which is reason. So reason sort of has its role in all those other virtues, but the activity of reason itself will turn out to be the highest virtue. Contemplation is the activity of reason, but not for the sake of one of the other practical virtues like courage. It's simply for the sake of itself. It's at that point you truly reach this endpoint where it's no longer for the sake of anything else.

44:26 Mark: Which of course seems really wacky to us because we would think that if we're contemplating, even if we're saying, oh, I need to use reason to be a better engineer for actually being philosophers, you say, well, I want to understand knowledge so that I can obey the correct laws of knowledge, so I can be, you know, believing true things and not stupid things. And so there's kind of always a practical benefit that we think, even for the most die hard armchair type philosopher, that we want to understand virtue so we can be virtuous. It's not just contemplation in and of itself self sufficient. It's always for life. Contemplation is for life.

45:03 Wes: I think you're just restating the end of Contemplation. If you say, look, I just want to know the truth. If you put it that way. And then someone asks you, well, what's the point of knowing the truth? You could say, well, it's going to help me build better bridges. Or you could say, in certain cases where it has no practical application of value, I just think the truth is good in and of itself. And that's what we're talking about with contemplation.

45:27 Dylan: But isn't the contemplation, the happiness is the active state of knowing that truth in some sense? Right. Of thinking? And so it would not be like, oh, I have this in my toolkit in my bag and and therefore I'm happy. That's not it. It's that active exercise of one's rationality in line with the truth and the good. Anna used this analogy with flow, which seems to me to be exactly right. I mean, if I thought of a more. Maybe not crass isn't the right word, but a more sort of pedantic example where you're participating in some activity. I'll pick one that seems less.

Not a sports analogy, but seems more rational, where you're trying to figure something out. Say for me, it would be fixing a motorcycle, or just wholly absorbed in that activity where I'm not thinking about the thinking of fixing a motorcycle. I'm actively solving that problem and going from one piece to another, testing this out, testing that out and solving it at each step along the way. Oh, here's what's wrong and here's the solution, here's the next step. And that activity is pleasure in itself on its own terms, regardless of whether I fix the motorcycle or not.

46:39 Mark: And it's your fine tuned faculty of reason.

46:41 Dylan: Yeah. And that's where the pleasure comes from.

46:44 Mark: But it's not for the sake of the pleasure, because it has to be in itself. The pleasure is the cherry that comes with it.

46:51 Wes: It is for the sake of the pleasure. If you think of the pleasure as the completion of the activity.

46:57 Dylan: Yeah. So why do I fix motorcycles? Right. One reason would be, oh, I got to get from here to there. That would be the fixing motorcycle for the sake of utility. Right. And there would be a way of doing that that would be the highest reason you'd go out and pursue that activity is just for the sake of itself, because you want to solve that problem or make that thing run.

47:17 Wes: The paradox here is it is, in a sense, in a way, he defines pleasure as just that. So I think the way to think of this is if you're doing things for the sake of pleasure. That's a kind of generic concept where it could be anything, including vicious things. So you could say you're doing it for the sake of a particular kind of pleasure, but that's another way of saying it, that I'm doing it for the sake of the activity itself.

47:41 Dylan: Yeah. At the end of chapter three in book 10, he says no one would choose to live throughout life having the thinking of a child, even while having as much as possible the pleasures of which children are pleased. Nor to enjoy something of the most shameful kind, even if one is never going to feel any pain from it. And we would eagerly exert ourselves for many things, even if they were to bring no pleasure, such as seeing, remembering, knowing and having the virtues. And if pleasures necessarily follow along with these things, that makes no difference, since we would choose them even if no pleasure were to come from them.

It seems clear then that pleasure is not the good. And that not every pleasure is choice worthy. And that there are some pleasures that are choice worthy in themselves, differing in kind or in the things they come from. So pleasure is a guide. But it's not that everything that is pleasurable is choice worthy in itself. Some things are choice worthy in themselves that are pleasing.

48:39 Wes: I found this section on self sufficiency in book one, and I think it's important just because it's the only other place I think he talks about what he means by self sufficiency. And he's careful to tell us it doesn't mean a solitary life. So this is just from book one, chapter one. So this is after a section where he talks about the final good being an end in itself. And then this is the third criteria. After that, the final good is thought to be self sufficing. In applying this term, we do not regard a man as an individual leading a solitary life, but we also take account of parents, children, wife, and in short, friends and fellow citizens generally.

Since man is naturally a social being, some limit must indeed be set to this. For if you go on to parents and descendants and friends of friends, you will never come to a stop. But this we will consider further on. For the present, we will take self sufficing to mean that what by itself makes life desirable and in want of nothing, and happiness is believed to answer this description. So there's one concept of happiness being in the end and end in the sense of it's not for the sake of anything else. But there's also the sense of happiness being self sufficing in the sense of we don't need something else on top of that.

I think that's what self sufficiency is getting at.

49:51 Mark: Let's return to friendship. Section three says 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. That seems like we're just repeating what we said before.

50:05 Anna: Shall we go through the three types of friendship, like in a more simple and teacherly way?

50:10 Dylan: Sure.

50:11 Mark: So let's look at how these things actually play out in our own relationships in our lives. Because I've been wondering about this, but sure, give the definition again if you

50:19 Wes: want the three types.

50:21 Anna: Yeah, so there's the utility based friendship and the pleasure based friendship and the real friendship, which is based on virtue. And the pleasure based friendship doesn't really last because the things in the other person that bring you pleasure won't last. And the same with utility.

50:38 Dylan: Well, so let's give examples. I mean, so one thing to point out is it's not like friendships of utility and pleasure are bad. They're just kinds of friendship that aren't as, as fully friendship as the others. But Mark wanted to say we all have friendships of utility. Right.

50:52 Mark: Well, my reflection on this whole book is sort of what the sad state of our culture is with regard to friendship, which at least reflecting in my own case and people I talk to around here, is that most of the real friends that we have are people that we befriended when we were too young to really be critical about it. Like maybe it's not the people actually from grade school when we were really. But at least it's from high school, from college, when we're still developing. And then as people get older, it's hard to make real friends. Like you might have a lot of people that you wish.

Well, we have all these Facebook friends, but in terms of the people that you really can unload on, like, well, we kind of channel this into our relationships if we're lucky. Or maybe we have a best friend that may or may not be left over from high school or college or something like that. And I know it's a lot different between men and women. I'm glad we have Anna on here. You can represent your whole sex in the difference.

51:44 Anna: Oh my God, the misogynistic jabs. Aristotle just takes at women here and there are just adorable.

51:51 Mark: Well, yes, we can, we can ignore.

51:53 Anna: I mean, because it's Aristotle, you just go, ah, that's endearing. I mean, at least it's not as bad as saying that women are like deformed men or whatever it was he was saying in the biological writings. Yeah, so. But a friendship between a husband and wife, just because we're here is a friendship based on superiority. Right. The husband is superior to the wife. Just wanted to say that.

52:15 Dylan: He says that just in case you wanted to know that.

52:17 Mark: Yeah. We can modernize it, of course, and say the way he talks about marriage is it starts as something for utility's sake, right. That we have a common interest in reproduction. And then there's other utilities because we divide household chores in a certain way.

52:31 Dylan: Common interest in the household beyond that,

52:33 Mark: if both of the parties are good, then they can still have a friendship of virtue. They can still have a real friendship. And so fine, forget about his cultural conventions of the separation of chores. You might still say you start with your partner based on pleasure. And well, we might not think of it in terms of utility in our modern, you know, it's not like in traditional societies where like I'm just trying to hook up with someone to support me or something like that, even just assuming that the two are economically self sufficient. So that maybe it starts based on pleasure, on the delight that they give each other, on sex, on all that stuff like that. But a good friendship within a relationship is then going to develop in entirely the way something that resembles the way he's talking about it.

53:16 Wes: We should say, by the way, that kinship, family members, that's a particular form of friendship that he talks about in Section 12 of Book 8. But it sounds odd for us to say that, you know, we use the phrase like friends and family. We sort of distinguish those two things. So maybe even in this sense we could think of friend or broadly his loved one. But for Aristotle, your child can be your Philia, your child can be your friend. And we wouldn't really think of it that way.

53:39 Dylan: Well, only as they became adults. Right.

53:40 Mark: If you're cool dad, then your kids are your friends.

53:43 Wes: Right? Right. But you can. Yeah, your young child could be your Philia, it could be your loved one.

53:47 Dylan: But that would be a love between a superior and an inferior. For Aristotle.

53:51 Wes: Exactly. That's one of the reasons why it's so important to talk about those unequal friendships, because those occur between you and your kids, which is really one of the most important love relations. But yeah, so with the wife, he calls it a natural sort of friendship. And why does he call it that?

54:06 Anna: So I know for a fact that in chapter seven in book eight, he's going through all the friendships that are based on superiority. And he says the friendship between a father and a son and an older man for a younger, a husband for a wife, and every ruler for one who is ruled. I think in some other part, I'm not exactly sure where. Now, he says that the friendship between a husband and a wife maybe is what you were saying, Mark, In a way, each of the two parties put in something in the common good, as it were. There's a community between the two. And then what comes out of the community is better than what each of them would have had on their own. I think I must have read that somewhere.

54:43 Wes: It's book eight, section 12, where he starts off talking about your friendship with your children. Friendship between parents and children, between siblings, all those different relationships. And I think at the end of that, we get at the friendship of the man and wife. So.

54:58 Anna: Mm.

54:59 Dylan: Which is present by nature because human beings by nature are disposed to pair off even more to form political associations to the extent that a household is prior to and more necessary than a city and the production of offspring is more common among animals.

55:12 Anna: Mm. But generally his definition of friendship is very, very broad, isn't it? I mean, citizenship is a kind of friendship as well.

55:19 Dylan: But Mark was reflecting on the. I mean, would this be a way of saying it, Mark, that the experience of at least modern life would be one in which all friendships are friendships of. Of utility and pleasure? With very few exceptions, and particularly, it's hard as you grow older to generate friendships that go beyond those basic friendships of utility and pleasure and maybe citizenship. Aristotle doesn't have that exactly as a separate category. And to develop the kinds of friendships as you grow older that Aristotle seems to point to as being the best form of friendships.

55:53 Wes: Well, Aristotle sort of says that himself, right, in book eight, section six.

55:57 Mark: Well, that's just because older people are cranky or more sour. It's hard. They don't give pleasure.

56:03 Wes: You always go for the part. I just bracket out. There's always one interesting part to me, and my notes just say morose, elderly. And then it moves on to. So the interesting part to me was this sense in which friendship requires testing and becoming accustomed. The testing, by the way, is empeiria, sort of empirical experience. And then. And basically being together, that's the becoming accustomed. What becoming accustomed translates. That's more literally just being together. And then he says, which is very difficult. So that's why you can't really have friendships with a lot of people. And basically it takes time. There's this whole process involved before you can actually become Friends with someone, it's work.

56:42 Mark: We do distinguish very helpfully these relationships of utility. And we might even put pleasure in the same category. I'm not completely sure of that, but I guess I'm reflecting first of all on when you have co workers, even the parent child relationship. Like, we recognize very much in something like what Aristotle is talking about how as the kid gets older and stops dealing with the parents, just as parents, but like, as human beings, you could actually become friends with your parents or with your siblings in a way that you're not as kids, you know, your siblings, you're just kind of forced, your cattle grazing next to each other, as he puts it.

And I don't think we would characterize it, the change as recognizing the virtue in the other person, but it's certainly focusing on the particularity of the person and really getting to know them as a person and not as a role anymore. So we do have that insight and we have that division. We have that sort of in our lexicon that sort of runs counter, though, to our generally economic way of thinking of things.

57:47 Wes: Things.

57:48 Mark: So that even if you're thinking of your friend who calls you all the time and complains about stuff or whatever, then you're kind of thinking about, what am I giving, what am I getting? On the other hand, Aristotle uses that terminology as well. And sort of that's when friendships go wrong, is when one person is giving more than they're getting or one person is feeling slighted because of some inequality. I'm just trying to get a feel for how our current ways of thinking about these things map onto Aristotle's terms here.

58:14 Anna: There's that bit where he talks about whether we should share our grief with our friends or not. That ties in with what you were saying, Mark, earlier. But yeah, I just wanted to say that he talks about that whether it's better to have friends in fortune or misfortune. And I think the idea is you should always try and protect your friend and not share too much grief with them because they're going to empathize with your sorrow. And you should try and protect them as much as possible. And he says something about manly men who do that very well. And then women lament because that's what they do. So in that sense, they are less moral, I guess, in their friendly relationships. This is section 11, book nine, chapter 11.

59:01 Mark: Yeah. He starts about if we need friends more in good fortune or in bad. Well, really, they're good in both, but especially in bad, because grief is lightened by sharing it with People. But then in the second paragraph, he goes on and makes the point that Anna was outlining. The very seeing of one's friends is pleasant, especially if one is in adversity and becomes a safeguard against grief. But to see him pained at our misfortunes is painful. For everyone. Shuns being a cause of pain to his friends.

59:27 Anna: Yeah.

59:27 Mark: For this reason, people of a manly nature guard against making the friends grieve with them unless he be exceptionally insensible to pain. Such a man cannot stand the pain that ensues for his friends. And in general does not invite fellow mourners because he is not himself given to mourning.

59:43 Anna: But women and men of such a sort delight in laments. You have mourning and they love their friends as friends who share in their suffering.

59:53 Wes: My translation has but weak women and effeminate men.

59:57 Mark: Yeah.

59:57 Dylan: Mine says girlish women and womanish men.

1:00:01 Wes: Oh, that's. See, Sachs is.

1:00:04 Anna: That's the best part.

1:00:05 Wes: I'm liking what I hear from Sachs in terms of preserving the Greek.

1:00:09 Dylan: Yeah. Enjoy having people lament with them and love them as friends and partners in grief. But it is clear that in all things one ought to imitate the person who is better. I have actually in my annotations seems wrong on friendship. So this question of whether sharing one's sorrow or lamentation is a burden or not. Part of true friendship seems to be tied up with whether or not you consider feeling, demonstrating pain and the anguish of one's soul as being virtuous or not.

1:00:45 Wes: But also whether or not you. I mean, and I think this is always a real decision you have to make when you want to talk about your problems with another person. Then have them console you. Is how much do you do that? I think we are conscious of causing other people pain and discomfort because that is what it's going to do. And this is also a reason why we have therapists. So we can just do this to an unlimited degree with someone that we pay to do it with.

1:01:15 Anna: Yeah. That's a valid point. And that's a tough choice to make. And definitely something that we have to consider every time. Right. I mean, today in our daily lives, when we decide whether to share our grief or not with our friends, but also with him. I think maybe I'm just obsessed with a bit about pleasure, but I think it ties in with the idea of pleasure as well. And more specifically, the idea of competing pleasures. I think, first of all, he says at some point later on that, yeah, you can't really enjoy several things at the same time because that diminishes the intensity of the pleasure.

And then, similarly with friendship, it's difficult to. Like, if you're a person who has several friends and they all have several joys or several misfortunes that they want to share with you, it's going to be difficult for you to share all of them simultaneously. Like, you'd have a person who's really happy and a person who's really sad, and you'd have to simultaneously share the pleasure of one person and the misfortune of another. And that's just very difficult to do.

1:02:14 Mark: Clearly, you should dump the one who's sad. You should just.

1:02:18 Anna: Yeah.

1:02:18 Wes: This is also something where we're conscious of with friendship. Right. Is the fact that pleasure is a big part of it. And if we make ourselves. I think even Aristotle would agree, if we make ourselves consistently unpleasant to other people, we're not going to be able to maintain our friendships with them. And we can't have this sort of idea of friendship as just this, oh, accept me for who I am, Even if who I am means completely abusive and unpleasant and all and so on. It turns out, luckily, that the virtues are not only pleasant for us to exercise, but they're pleasant for our friends to be conscious of as well. So in the highest form of friendship, that is the way you give pleasure. By just being virtuous.

1:02:59 Anna: Yeah. You also have to make sure you don't make yourself pleasant to too many people at once. Right.

1:03:05 Wes: Because then you are a virtue whore. Virtue prostitute. Kind of virtuous for money.

1:03:12 Mark: Well, no.

1:03:13 Dylan: Doesn't it just diminish the pleasure? You spread the pleasure too thin. Right, Right.

1:03:16 Anna: Yeah, exactly.

1:03:17 Wes: This is actually a difficult question because Aristotle's argument is that friendship is difficult in the sense that we need this experience of the other person. We have to test them. We have to become accustomed to them. But then I think there's a legitimate question here of why do you have to know the person that well to be friends with them? If friendship is just sort of appreciating the goodness of others, and if I'm right in my. When I was talking about that being pretty generic, it's. Then why can't I be friends with strangers? I can appreciate the goodness of strangers.

I know when a stranger is being courageous. Why isn't that enough? Do you see what I'm saying? We turn to our question of particularity and our sort of contemporary intuition that friendship has to involve particularity of the other person. There has to be something about Dylan in particular, that makes him my friend. And it can't just be because of these virtues in the generic sense. So I think those two things are actually in tension.

1:04:16 Dylan: I was thinking of something similar when we were talking about this. Taking pleasure in your friend is a reflection of yourself. And what you're doing is you're enjoying witnessing and being part of them flourishing and them being virtuous. It seemed to be absent the consideration of the pleasure one would have in having someone else be witness to you being virtuous. So in other words, there's the one side of you are in some ways the spectator of a excellent performance. I think this is the way in which it's in line with what you were observing, Wes. But there's another part of it. Why do you want to have your friends be around you? Right? It's not just that you want to witness them do excellent things, you want them to witness you do excellent things. And that part doesn't seem to be factored in very much in Aristotle.

1:05:10 Anna: Yeah, I think witnessing is a tricky word because if I say witness, I'm thinking of being passive to something. And I think for him, I think he makes the distinction between loving or being a friend actively as opposed to being loved passively. You would just be more fulfilled by loving actively and witnessing somebody else's excellent performance, as you put it so beautifully, than being loved and witnessed passively.

1:05:40 Wes: So I think it's important to say when we talk about loving actively, he's careful to make a distinction. In section 5 of book 8, friendship is not a feeling. Love is a feeling. And friendship comes from a hexis, come from a disposition. And that's because it proceeds from a decision which comes from that disposition. And what he distinguishes feeling from pathos is well wishing. Eunoia. So that is the active thing that we're doing. That's not just the passive love part. That is an important component of friendship that is active, this well wishing.

And he goes on to talk about well wishing later on in book nine, section five. And it'll say, but well, wishing is necessary to friendship, but it's not the same thing as friendship because you can be engaged in well wishing towards people you don't know. So we started off this discussion asking, well, why do you actually need to know your friends? That's the question I was asking. Why do you need to know them? Well, why do you need to go through the testing and the experience and the acclimation? And I still don't have the answer

1:06:44 Dylan: to that, except that he's recognizing that that not doing so ends up being merely a friendship of pleasure or utility?

1:06:52 Wes: No, because I think you can. So early on he says friendship involves well wishing, like the highest form of friendship, well wishing between human beings who are virtuous and whose well wishes come from recognizing the virtue of the other person. And we don't need to know another person very well to know that they're virtuous. That's the problem.

1:07:12 Dylan: Is that part true that you don't need to know someone well in order to recognize their virtue?

1:07:17 Anna: Yeah. I'm guessing if we remember the bit with where a friend is another self, maybe you're supposed to know them as

1:07:24 Wes: well as you know yourself knowing ourself. In what sense? I mean, so all of this rests on whether I'm right about whether there's a genericness to this. Right? If the highest form of friendship crucially involves recognizing virtues in others. Again, I'm not loving Dylan for his Dylan ness. I'm just loving him because he's courageous. And for all these other things that make up who he is. Going back to that phrase, maybe I'm wrong about that, but the whole question rests on that. And then the other question, the one you brought up, Dylan, is whether I need to know you in order to know that you're courageous.

And to some extent, yeah, I have to have some familiarity with you. But I could just be think of if I'm in a polis, if I'm in some sort of community in which we're all citizens and I don't spend a lot of time with you, I don't, to use Aristotle's phrase, live with you, engage in all these activities with you, and yet I've seen you out and about. I've heard word of all the things you do. There's lots and lots of evidence that you are a virtuous person. I think to some extent I could know that. I could observe that without knowing you very well.

And I could admire you for that without knowing you very well.

1:08:35 Dylan: Maybe I'm wrong putting aside Aristotle for just a second, and maybe he doesn't have an answer for that. What would we say is the difference? Right? Because it seems like on the face of it, there is a distinction to be made between admiration and the pleasure we get from admiring great acts and friendship and the pleasure that comes from friendship and the kind of friendship that is born out of getting to know someone over a long period of time.

1:09:02 Wes: I still don't know how to talk about that distinction.

1:09:04 Mark: Maybe he's actually getting a big insight that crushes one of our Modern myths, which is that each one of us is a unique little snowflake. And that for me, to get to know you personally is to get to know your Dylan ness or your Westness or your Ananas. Maybe you can know someone as an individual, but that doesn't mean you know traits that they only uniquely have. It's just. It's a connection between you and another token. And in some ways you can't even say it's this activity that we have gone through together. And you can ask, well, why do I consider you my friend?

And you can point to virtue, like virtue is the thing that I'm focusing on. But that doesn't mean that I am friends with your virtue. I'm friends with you as an individual. But yes, it is in virtue, always, if you have this notion that if the only way to really be friends with someone is to really know that unique, special part of them and to know them as they know themselves, that seems like a recipe for existential loneliness. You will never be able to penetrate to the core of someone like that. And maybe, in fact, we don't even have a core like that.

But if you start as Aristotle seems to do and say, no, actually we don't have a core like that. There's just these sort of generic qualities that we have and share with other human beings who are in a corporate greater or lesser state of dysfunction, and that's the way we relate to other people, then, yeah, we can have plenty wonderful friendships without having this mystical bond.

1:10:25 Anna: That's beautiful. I'm just. I'm.

1:10:28 Wes: Yeah, the token part, it's just I'm

1:10:32 Anna: trying to find clues in what he wrote that might support that. And it is a recipe for a solitary, miserable existence. Also, since you're supposed to, the other person has to be your complete equal as well. To have a proper friendship. The other person has to be have

1:10:50 Wes: a perfect or complete friendship.

1:10:52 Anna: Perfect friendship, yeah, yeah, he does set that up.

1:10:55 Mark: He does actually just to sort of turn it around by talking about perfect friendship in this way. He does likewise set up this kind of goal that is a recipe for guilt and feeling inadequate and feeling like your friendships don't measure up.

1:11:08 Wes: And also, I mean, realistically, none of us are this virtuous in the Aristotelian sense. We can only be on sort of spectrum that maybe approaches it. But we can't be these perfectly virtuous beings with perfectly virtuous friendships. Everything is going to fall short. This is just sort of an ideal standard, as far as I can tell.

1:11:27 Mark: Maybe the Key then is to not, as we've been pursuing here, say, well, true friendship is really the only kind of friendship there is. I mean, that he really has to admit, and he does, I think, that even animals flocking together, they do have some sort of friendship and that fulfills their social nature, our social nature. So you really can get by, have your needs fulfilled without having these perfect. I'm of perfect virtue. That he does talk in very practical terms of the best kind of friends are alike in virtue. It's not that we are both the most virtuous possible, but that we are at a similar level of virtue.

1:12:02 Dylan: If you think about neighborliness or the friendships that come with the community activity you're in, or if you're in a church, you know, the friendships that come along with that and the social activities there that people maintain for years and years and years and years. But I mean, in most of those cases, if they moved away, they wouldn't stay in contact with any of those people, right?

1:12:26 Mark: Yeah, no, those are exactly the kind of things that haunt me. You know, I was in a band with somebody for like four years in college, and when we moved away, then at some point I was visiting, he was like, well, I hope we're friends, but like, it wasn't obvious. And I'm like, of course, when you're in an association, so it's a friendship of utility, then it's hard to tell when it's actually transcended that. I kind of think it's almost if you're a sensitive person, if the activity is not an impersonal. We use each other again on this podcast for other voices to respond to and create this product.

But due to the nature of the activity, it's not merely like we're doing carpentry together, or frankly, even if you are just doing carpentry together, it seems that if you have a certain sensitivity and are not just like very self consciously, as I have done in many workplaces, just like, I'm just going home, I'm not going to invest myself in this office and try to chum around with people. I'm just gonna keep that for my home life. If you're not turned off in that way, then friendships do develop. And it's just that we have this complex here, or at least I feel like I do, of not always knowing the degree to which something is just a friendship of utility.

And maybe that's because unlike Aristotle, I do have this more mystical take on what would be a real friendship is getting to know them as an Individual, something like that. Whereas, and not. I've known you long enough to appreciate your virtue as a person. Like that just seems weird to me. And I've been trying. I know we've been trying throughout this discussion to make that sound more sensible. There might just be an unbridgeable cultural gap here.

1:14:06 Wes: So we should talk probably. I think these two really interesting sections in book nine, sections four and eight, which are related. Section four. Basically the point is that our friendly relations to others are derivative of our relation to ourselves. And then in eight, he asserts that friendship is found in its highest degree in relation to the self. And he sort of explore this question of self love. And well, usually we reproach self love. So how is it possible to think of self love as the ultimate form of friendship in the way that. That he does?

1:14:41 Mark: Yeah, it's very parallel to what we were saying about pleasure before. It's like, is pleasure bad? Is pleasure good? Well, if a good person does it, it's good. If it's a good activity and you're taking pleasure in it, then that's good. And it's kind of the same thing that a virtuous person's self love is going to be good friendship. Whereas a person with a lot of vice who's not capable of a good friendship, their type of self love is going to be kind of the poor thing that we normally associate with that term.

1:15:08 Wes: He says we are right to reproach self love if we equate that with love of our own pleasure seeking. But if we're loving ourselves because we are giving well wishes to ourselves, because we are recognizing our own virtue, then that's legitimate. And then he comes up and I think Anna brought this up earlier. He says the good man's self love gratifies the ruling power himself, which turns out to be reason as opposed to simply the passions. Right. So it's the kind of self love which manifests itself in obeying reason as opposed to obeying passion.

1:15:46 Dylan: At the end of this chapter he has this discussion of the base person. Right. And the relationship they would have with themselves and concludes that a base person is not even disposed in a friendly way towards himself on account of having nothing lovable about him. Then if being that way is too miserable, one ought to avoid vice with the utmost effort and try to be a decent person. For in that way one can be in a friendly state with oneself and also become a friend to someone else.

1:16:13 Wes: You're back on section four. Yeah, these two are so related.

1:16:15 Mark: Gotta love yourself before you can love Others.

1:16:17 Anna: Yeah, I've been watching a lot of RuPaul's Drag Race. I don't know if you guys have seen that show. No, RuPaul, it's a reality TV show with the drag queens. She says at the end of each section, she goes, if you can't love yourself, how the hell are you going to love somebody else? And I was reading Aristotle, and all I could have in my head, it was just RuPaul going, if you can't have friendship towards yourself, how in the hell are you going to have towards someone else? Yeah, it's a beautiful idea. But also, that's not realistic that a person who is base doesn't love themselves. I don't believe that.

1:16:52 Dylan: You don't think that people who are base, I mean, part of the reason of them being corrupt has to do with the bad relationship they have with themselves.

1:17:00 Wes: Well, also, let's keep in mind the specific kind of self love Aristotle has in mind is wishing for ourselves what both is and seems good and for its own sake, which is to say for the rational part of ourselves and for the preservation of that rational part. So how do we think about base people by that standard? I think that's the question.

1:17:22 Mark: I think Donald Trump wishes for himself what is and seems good. Yet I still think he is base.

1:17:28 Anna: Yeah, you can't think of these things without taking some psychology into account. And sure, on some really profound level, yeah, you hate yourself or your ego is very fragile, so you've built up all these mechanisms that protect it, and you end up being extremely narcissistic, borderline sociopathic, and you're doing really mean things to other people. That's one psychoanalytical perspective of things. But I don't think that's what he meant.

1:17:59 Wes: I think he does mean that the way you translate it is there are other things that you love more than your own good, which I think, in a way, is a sort of perfect summation of pathology of the tyrant.

1:18:11 Dylan: Yeah, well, it's the incontinent person. Right. I mean, this brings us back to book seven in the incontinent person who, I guess in the case of the incontinent, as opposed to the intemperate, the incontinent person knows what they should do but fails to do it. And it's not clear if the base person knows what they should be doing but fails to do it, or if they're more like an intemperate person who has misaligned understanding.

1:18:35 Wes: They know, in a sense, but it's not Active knowledge.

1:18:38 Anna: I'm somewhere in book nine, chapter nine, where he says that in the case of a corrupt person, what he ought to do and what he actually does are in discord, whereas the decent person does what he ought to do. That's not very clear whether the base person knows what it is that he ought to do and just doesn't accord it with what he actually does.

1:18:59 Mark: Yeah, it seems he believes in both that what Dylan said, that the truly base person would not know. He would pursue what seems good to him, but not what is good. So maybe that's the response to my Donald Trump thing, is that he has things that seem good to him and. But because we're not base, we know better.

1:19:14 Wes: Yeah, I think, though there's more complexity in a sense. I think there is a sense in which Donald Trump knows what's good, in which we all know what's good. But from our previous podcast, recall all that ambiguity about knowledge, Right. The way in which you can know and not know at the same time, which is important to all of us.

1:19:33 Anna: What makes you think that they would know, though?

1:19:35 Wes: Well, if we're talking about an incontinent person. So Aristotle starts off entertaining the Platonic idea that no person knowingly does evil, that when we do bad things, it's simply a matter of a lack of knowledge. And he doesn't think this is quite right. But by the time he gets to the end of his analysis, he's. Well, you know, Socrates and Plato kind of have a point. The incontinent person knows what they're supposed to be doing, but they only know it in a latent sense, in a sense in which someone who's asleep or drunk knows it. It's not active knowledge.

And I think you can expand that sort of analysis to talk about the unconscious and things like that. But the main point here is that there's nothing explicit in Aristotle about this. But probably it's not going to do enough justice to human psychological complexity to say, oh, well, they just don't know what's good for them. Even the most vicious person on the planet is in some sense socialized. Or here's another way of putting it, it. Because of our inherent teleology, these standards live within ourselves, like the standard of what we ought to be doing.

We don't need anyone to tell us that that sort of is there, really. Yeah, of course.

1:20:46 Mark: We need someone to remind us. Is that the Platonic way of putting it?

1:20:51 Wes: No, the standard of what we ought to do is based on our own structure. It's a teleological end that's built into us. It's what our faculties sort of strive to do. Unless they're in conflict.

1:21:04 Mark: Well, unless they're in conflict or we've had a bad upbringing.

1:21:07 Dylan: But you're allowing for the separate question of whether that standard is well aligned or maybe you're not. But in the case of the incontinent person, you know what that standard is and you fail to live up to it. In the case of the intemperate person, that standard is genuinely misaligned such that you have a self understanding of doing the right thing, but you're genuinely not doing it right. And that's why the intemperate person is so much more difficult than they're uneducatable, whereas the incontinent person is educatable.

1:21:33 Wes: Yeah, I think it's good to recall the difference between the incontinent person and the intemperate person. But my point is even the most intemperate person, it's possible to analyze this, to give a subtle psychology to this, where they're at some level they are aware of what their own good is. Because that's just sort of a built in factor in the organism. You don't have to agree with that. I'm just opening up that kind of possibility.

1:21:56 Dylan: I mean, on the face of it, what you just said would seem to be at odds with what Aristotle says. He doesn't seem to allow for that. The intemperate case would seem to be the exception. That would completely disagree with Plato's case of not being educated properly.

1:22:12 Wes: Yeah, unless you expand the concept of latent knowledge, you know, the intemperate person, it could just be deeply buried. They're constantly drunk.

1:22:21 Dylan: Well, but that's the incontinent person.

1:22:22 Mark: Right?

1:22:23 Dylan: So then that would just mean that you would say that there was no such thing as an intemperate person.

1:22:27 Wes: At a conscious level, the intemperate person doesn't think anything they're doing is wrong, but the incontinent person does and struggles with it and so on and so forth. But that's just at the conscious level. And Aristotle opens up with his latent knowledge stuff. He opens up the possibility of a more subtle analysis. That's all I'm saying. I'm not saying it's his analysis, I'm just saying we could expand it even to the profligate or the intemperate person.

1:22:50 Mark: Well, he has to believe that there has to be a way of telling that they are misaligned and that it's not just ethical relativism. So there has to be some way in which people in general, you know, it's a phenomenological fact that anybody theoretically could sit back and figure out the standards. And that's just what Wes was saying. By the standards come out of our own being, of our own setup. That doesn't mean that any individual is going to be in the state where they are calm enough or reasonable enough or whatever to get at that standard.

1:23:20 Wes: Right. And this is sort of a good segue into one of these interesting things he says towards the end, which is that it's kind of a stronger statement of what we need to have virtue. Like it's not enough to know about virtue or to have speculative knowledge about it, but we must possess it. Right. And you can't change people's characters by arguing with them. And that ultimately what we need is not reason, but force. Kind of a shocking conclusion to all of this. Force being one of two things, instruction or law.

1:23:53 Dylan: Hence the politics.

1:23:54 Anna: Is the next book I was also thinking about. There's a bit where he talks about how base people feel that they're torn in different directions and they feel pain in some ways and pleasure in other ways.

1:24:09 Wes: Oh yeah, that's section four of book nine.

1:24:12 Anna: Book nine, Section four, yeah. I'm wondering if what he means by that is. I mean that brings that element of being conscious that what you're doing is wrong for you. Or is it more like you're pursuing your pleasure but because you don't have self restraint or basically you don't know what you're doing, you end up harming yourself and then you have to suffer the consequences of what you thought was pleasure seeking behavior, but it actually turned out to be harmful. Like is the contradiction between what you do, you think you're pursuing pleasure and then the consequences are harmful, and then you experience both pleasure and pain at the same time. Or is the feeling of being torn in different directions given by the fact that you're aware that you find harmful things pleasurable. And you're supposed to not feel that.

1:24:59 Wes: I think it's the latter. He's talking about the incontinent person there where you know what you're supposed to do, but you just can't control yourself?

1:25:07 Anna: Yeah. So you know what you're supposed to do. You can't control yourself for that reason. You can't love yourself. You can't really stand being alone with yourself for too long. Also, I think there's a point where he Kind of makes this allusion to the fact that maybe people who are excessively extroverted are not that good people. I mean, I read it to mean that. Because he says at some point that base people can't really stand being alone with themselves for too long, and they seek the companionship of other people. But. But in a way that's a bit exaggerated. He says corrupt people seek to pass their days with others, but they flee themselves because when by themselves, they are reminded of many odious things and anticipate still others when they are with others, however, they forget. And since they possess nothing lovable, they feel in no way friendly towards themselves.

1:25:55 Wes: Keep reading there, because I think this is kind of a great passage. It gets at the conflict that you were talking about.

1:26:00 Anna: Yeah. So such people certainly do not share in either joys or sufferings with themselves, since their soul is torn by faction. One part, on account of its corruption, feels pain when abstaining from certain things, while another part feels pleasure. One part drags them here and the other drags them there, as if tearing them asunder. And if it is not possible for someone to feel pain and pleasure simultaneously, the base person can, after a little while, at least be pained because he felt pleasure and he would wish that he had not gotten pleasure from those things. And those base people teem with regret. That's a very idealized version of a base person.

1:26:39 Wes: Yeah, it doesn't sound like the intemperate person all of a sudden. Actually, this does kind of complicate things, but. Yeah, sounds more like the incontinent.

1:26:47 Mark: Yeah, so it does sound like he's making the more extreme point that you were making before Wes, which is one that you hear from religious people, or many times that they think that if you are bad, then really you know it. You might deny that you know it, but come on, look seriously at yourself. You'll see the lack of God or the lack of virtue or the lack of whatever. So maybe this is just something that people who think themselves good tell themselves to differentiate themselves. Surely this wicked person could not be happy even if he acts happy and looks happy. I bet when he gets home and alone in his bed, he just. He can't even stand to look at himself in the mirror. I bet that's what happens happens.

1:27:27 Wes: Or not even that, just that someone could even believe that they're happy all the time and yet not be happy. Which is completely consistent with Aristotle.

1:27:36 Mark: Yeah, definitely. So does the contrary also follow that if you feel at war with yourself, if you don't like Being alone. If you kind of loathe yourself a little bit, as I think most people do in the modern age, maybe that you are there for Mark, hit a

1:27:52 Wes: little hum a little bit too much.

1:27:53 Dylan: Sure.

1:27:55 Mark: I'm just wondering. It doesn't seem to leave room. What I think are some of the most interesting people are the people who kind of agonize with themselves and this is what drives them to do great things. And it seems like those people are just not virtuous on his take.

1:28:11 Anna: It could just be that they're a lot smarter than everybody else and they're just exercising their rationality to its highest degree possible. So they just can see farther away, higher up, up they can see the highest form of virtue and the highest form of good that we could possibly attain as human beings and then just get super depressed at the thought, the realization that they can't really get there

1:28:37 Mark: or how messed up society is, you know, in comparison to this ideal that they can see.

1:28:42 Anna: Yeah, exactly.

1:28:44 Mark: I don't know. These are all very Nietzschean responses to Aristotle. It's not surprising.

1:28:49 Dylan: But let us point to something that's sort of of not missing out of the book. Right? You're told to live a happy life, you want to live virtuously and stuff like that, but it's not exactly practical in that respect. A lot of like real world contemplations of, you know, what to do when you are indecisive and how do you negotiate your way through unhappy times and stuff like that. None of that's in here. Right. And the idea of being conflicted and how that bears out in a happy life, none of that's in here either.

1:29:24 Mark: He does at least acknowledge in a couple places like, I think he's talking about honors due to friends as opposed to honors due to the virtuous. He just says these are hard, you know, that's why you need practical wisdom, is to figure this stuff out. This view of virtue as this generic homogeneous thing makes us think that there's a right answer for everything. But. But the practical matters of getting through life are not like that. And that is one of the whole lessons of his focus on practical wisdom, is that it's a skill of dealing with these often insoluble things.

So it's probably not fair just because he's giving this picture of vice as somebody who's conflicted to say that everybody who's conflicted is therefore in vice. No, there's a lot of legitimate stuff to be conflicted about. It's just that hopefully you don't let that completely mess up your life and ruin your happiness. The fact that you're doing the best you can. And if you're not faced with any, you know, huge tragedies, if you're just dealing with the difficulties that we all have in getting through life, you can be sort of unquestionably happy as long as you're virtuous.

1:30:29 Dylan: And you. You point to another aspect of it, which is it's possible that you don't live in conditions to allow for your happiness. As far as Aristotle is concerned, the circumstances of your living could basically preempt you being happy.

1:30:43 Wes: Your life could just suck.

1:30:45 Dylan: Your life could just suck. In Aristotle's case, where he would just say, look, you're not going to be happy. You know, what comes to mind in philosophy is thinking about the Republic when Glaucon asks Socrates, who claims that the just man, facing all acts of injustice and lack of recognition of his justice and is tortured and just treated terribly, will still be the happiest person, and they just don't believe it.

1:31:12 Wes: Right.

1:31:12 Dylan: Aristotle would seem to be on the side, the implicit side of someone like Glaucon, which is that there would easily be circumstances in your life that preempt you genuinely being happy because you won't be flourishing anyway. Go ahead.

1:31:25 Mark: Maybe even just being a woman. On his take. Right. On his analysis. Certainly. Being a slave. If you're a slave, you don't get. Get to play this whole game of happiness. Like you could still, there are proper ways for a slave to be in honorable ways, and you could be kind of as happy as a slave could be, but you're not going to be the optimized functioning of the human being if you're having to do whatever somebody else tells you.

1:31:47 Dylan: And that seems to be. Right. Right.

1:31:51 Anna: Yeah. I don't think you'd even have the faculty to be able to be happy as a slave. Right.

1:31:56 Wes: Well, no, this is where the Stoics. Right. That's the point of the departure for the Stoics.

1:32:00 Dylan: Yeah, the Stoics. You could be a slave and be happy. For a Stoic.

1:32:04 Anna: Yeah. Well, for Aristotle, you're an inanimate tool or no inanimate tool.

1:32:10 Dylan: But there's a separate question of whether there are natural slaves for Aristotle. Right. Which he sort of brings up very briefly in the politics. But in general, slavery would be a condition of your life which you may not have control over. And you're being treated, as you said, as a tool. But it's not as if that's an impediment to your flourishing, as opposed to that being a condition, your natural condition.

1:32:33 Wes: We should keep in mind, though, there are still these tensions within the text, because when we think of contemplative self sufficiency, and I know I was careful to try and say self sufficiency wasn't a matter of being alone or something like that, but there is something to the contemplative life that seems available to the slave. And this is where I think, in a way, the Stoics pivot off of this. Right? Because for the Stoic, happiness is entirely a matter of what you do with your mind. So anyway, I just wanted to point that out. There are obvious roots within Aristotle of the Stoic point of view.

1:33:15 Anna: Completely changing the topic, though, can we take a moment to acknowledge that bit where Aristotle sounds exactly like Descartes? Or actually Descartes seems to have plagiarized Aristotle? Did you find that? I thought that's what happened. Book nine, chapter nine, 1170, right before 1170 B talks about activity. Okay, so I'm gonna read just before that. If living is itself good and pleasant, as it seems to be also from the fact that. That all people, and especially the decent and blessed, long for it, since to such people life is most choice worthy and their life is most blessed.

And if he who sees, perceives that he sees, he who hears that he hears, he who walks, that he walks. And similarly in the other cases, then there is something that perceives that we are active. The result is that if we are perceiving something, we also perceive that we are perceiving. And if we are thinking, that we are thinking. Yeah, I was surprised to read that bit because it sounds so much like Descartes.

1:34:20 Dylan: Cogito, I think, therefore I am. I hadn't thought of them being so similar, but seeing thus, it makes me think of Descartes in a different way, of the inherent activity. If I think of him in that Aristotelian way that I understand my being alive is in my own activity, as in my being something that perceives and thinks, then yeah, you're right, they sound very similar.

1:34:45 Anna: Yeah, I googled it and turns out there's a whole Reddit thread that's called is Descartes a plagiarizing son of a bitch. Or am I missing something? And there's just loads of people who have written all sorts of. Yeah, like quotes from aristotle and from St. Augustine and all sorts of influences that Descartes might have picked up on.

1:35:07 Dylan: Which is great because of all the times he insults the scholastic Tradition of Aristotle.

1:35:13 Anna: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Very ironic.

1:35:17 Wes: You know, that's part of a larger chain of argument where he's trying to say why the happy person needs friends and to explain the necessity of consciousness of the other. You can even sort of kind of refer this to Hegel as well, although there is that very Cartesian sounding step in the argument. So later on he'll say, the good man then should be conscious of the existence of his friend. Also this consciousness will be given by living with him and by rational converse. This is. I brought this up earlier with him, for this would seem to be the proper meaning of living together when applied to man and not merely feeding in the same place, which it means when applied to beasts.

I know we've quoted this before, but. But he's talking about the consciousness of our own existence, on the one hand, sort of being a necessary component of that existence and then moving from there to the necessity of being conscious of the other. So I think that's also another fascinating part of this.

1:36:15 Anna: It's worth talking a little bit about what I perceived as his thoughts on economic relationships. He calls them friendships, but I think he talks about how to set a price for services rendered, basically. Well, that's what it is, isn't it?

1:36:35 Wes: Yeah. No, the whole creditor and debtor thing, which I basically skimmed over.

1:36:41 Mark: Right. Because there was a whole book of this on economic relationships earlier that we didn't read at all. But it was interesting with regard to, again, thinking about the modern way that we think about relationships in terms of what am I getting out of it and what am I putting into it. And he really thinks of it very, you know, I don't know if he was revolutionary at the time or this is just the way people talked about relationships like this because they were free of the touchy feely. Oh, we're just friends. There's no purpose to it. We're just friends together.

I think he's probably channeling the norm and just trying to systematize it in terms of. Yeah, of course a friendship is not going to work out if unequal things are coming out of it. And as we referred earlier, you know, he's got what, like three whole sections in here on friendships between unequals. So like we got Lucy Lawless on the show like a celebrity or a politician. What does it mean to be a friend with such a person? Is it like the parent child thing to kind of get to know them enough as an individual that you transcend that? That, I think is the answer is that it's like being friends with anybody else.

And he even refers to that like, well, if you equal things out in terms of love. So if you are friends with the tyrant. Yeah, okay, there's that hanging over you that the person could kill you at any point. I'm thinking of the last King of Scotland movie where the guy becomes friends with the African tyrant at the time. Can you form a friendship with somebody that is like in a different social stratosphere of you, or is it doomed to this kind of, you know, he puts it in terms of like, the person who's in the superior position would expect to get more out of it because like, they're sort of deserved more honors out of it.

1:38:21 Wes: Well, they get more honor. The superior gets more honor. The inferior needs more profit. Like, you can make it work as long as you. Each one gets what they can get out of it. As the inferior person, you can't demand honor from them. And as the spirit, that's nothing that they can profit from from you. So you praise them and tell them how wonderful they are.

1:38:40 Mark: Doesn't he also say somewhere else about the equalization? Yes, chapter eight of book eight. Even unequals can be friends. They can be equalized through loving. Most people seem, owing to ambition, to wish to be loved rather than to love. This is the context. And he talks about how friendship is more about the loving than the being loved, and gives this example, which is interesting given other things we've said about the most loving mother is one that would like, give her kid up for adoption because the kid wouldn't even know. So that's like a truly selfless loving.

You don't even get the cuteness of the baby and the activity of interacting with them. 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 in those in whom this is found in due measure that are lasting friends and only their friendship that endures. It is in this way more than any others, that even unequals can be friends. They can be equalized. So I don't know what your translations say about that, but that struck me as surprisingly modern.

1:39:38 Wes: So, Anna, you had brought up the role of the credit and repayment. What was interesting about that for you? Because it wasn't for me.

1:39:46 Anna: But yeah, now I'm thinking about how exactly do you equalize these relationships just through love? Is that it?

1:39:54 Dylan: He doesn't say much more about it.

1:39:56 Wes: It's in book eight, section 13 that he starts on to the inequality in friendships and proportionality and loving in proportion to merit. And then in section 14, we get that bit about the superior friend needing more honor and the inferior needing more profit. And then it's in book nine in section one, it's the proportionate exchange maintains dissimilar friendships.

1:40:18 Anna: The things that I found interesting about the economic relationships, basically I read it as the price of a transaction should be set by the person who wants the service or who needs the thing that they get from the person who gives it to them. You have the giver and then you have the receiver. And the receiver is the one that should set the price and the value for what it is that they receive.

1:40:39 Wes: Yep, that's in this section.

1:40:41 Mark: And from what I remember of the justice section earlier, that we skipped the whole other justice chapter, chapter five, that. That is. Yeah, it's very capitalist sounding. Let demand set the price. So applying that to friendships, you're the one who judges whether the other person in the friendship is giving you what you need. Not. Well, I'm trying.

1:41:00 Anna: Yeah. But he also seems to endure some sort of system of maybe donations or something. He gives that example with Protagoras, who apparently asked before teaching other people how to be great orators and whatever and great sophists, he would ask them how much they think his services are worth and then that's what he would charge. And I think he also says that whatever it is that the receiver thinks is right is what is right, is what is just, is a fair price. So that kind of reminded me of our donations systems, like online platforms that are always like, if you've taken any joy from blah, blah, blah, the blog post above, please consider making a donation.

So it's pretty much the same thing, isn't it? It's leaving it at the. Except it's the other way around. Because Aristotle says you're supposed to set the value thinking of how much you wanted it and before you received it, the service or the thing that you need and not after. Because after you've received it, that value is bound to change and you're bound to think it's worth less than you thought it was before you had it. Which again, I thought it was interesting that he had this psychological insight into how we value things. They always seem more valuable before we actually have them.

1:42:16 Mark: So if the student of Protagoras would say, yeah, I think it's worth about a nickel, your advice, then would it be a very passive aggressive lecture from that fourth floor, like in the case of the unjust man looking at you, the service changes based on the offering. It's like if you tipped in advance, if you tip your waiter and you just tell them, I'm only going to give you a quarter, what kind of service are you going to get?

1:42:38 Wes: Yeah, it's playing with fire. Do not want spit in my food.

1:42:45 Mark: You start with a stack of quarters, you say, this is your tip. And then you just take them off as things go wrong.

1:42:53 Dylan: That's just the way we judge the Olympic gymnastics competitions, right? You start with a perfect score and you get deductions.

1:42:59 Wes: This reminds me of the benefactors section, which is chapter seven of book nine. And this also reminded me of Nietzsche talk of the giver and the receiver. And so benefactors seem to love those whom they have benefited more than those who have received benefits, love those who have conferred them. And then he gives this explanation of that. And in giving that explanation, he compares the person we've benefited to, sort of the product of a craftsman's work. If we're a rich benefactor and we give something to someone who has nothing, we can't really get anything back from them.

You could think that what we want is love. And that's kind of why he brings up the craftsman, because the craftsman loves the products of their work, even though those products can't love them back. And then he gives into this explanation. We all desire existence and love it. But it is the exercise of our faculties or in the realization of ourselves that our existence lies. This is similar to some of this language we are looking at at other places, for it lies in living and doing. But that which a man makes is in a way a realization of his self.

Therefore he loves it because he loves existence. We get a parallel, by the way here to the reason why the happy man needs friends, right? So that the consciousness of the friend's virtue being important. And here we get this satisfaction. And again, the Hegelian sounding or even Marxian sounding sense, this satisfaction in the products of the exercise of our faculties, the products of our energeia, in the sense that it enhances our existence by revealing our existence to us. So I thought this was actually a very fascinating section in that sense.

1:44:42 Anna: Yeah. I think it also ties in with effort. You're more invested into the product of your effort. And yeah, there's the analogy with the mother and the child and how invested they are in their children because they had to go through labor, basically, because

1:44:58 Mark: people like things that they win through labor.

1:45:00 Anna: Yeah, work is such a huge thing for him. I mean, you don't work in order to achieve leisure, you just take a break and you play in order to be able to work some more. Work is also what makes you love things or people. The more work you put into it, the more you love them, Right. The more effort you've invested, the more you love them.

1:45:25 Dylan: But in that sense, the work is literally the activity of doing what you're doing, right? Yeah, it makes sense because the work is in some sense your manifestation.

1:45:36 Wes: Well, he uses this phrase, what a thing is as yet potentially is exhibited in realization by that which it makes or does.

1:45:43 Dylan: Yeah.

1:45:44 Wes: The manifestation of this action is beautiful to the benefactor, he delights in the person, makes it manifest. But to him who has received the benefit, there's nothing beautiful in the benefactor. So he brings it back to the one we've benefited. They are like our work that we've done work on them and so we get something out of that. We love them for that more than they can love us for being just passive recipients of something.

1:46:11 Mark: Yep.

1:46:11 Anna: Do we know where he uses the word work here? Do we know if he uses ergon for this? Yes, he does.

1:46:19 Dylan: It depends. I mean, Energeia, at least in my translation, for instance, it gets conflated as being at work as it's the way Sachs. It's a little bit of a ham fisted translation, but to try to get across that active sense of actuality, I

1:46:35 Wes: didn't look at the Greek here. So for every craftsman loves the work of his own hands more than it would love him if it came to life. The work could be a word derived from. I forget if it's poema or something like that. Like products of craft or things we make.

1:46:51 Mark: I just looked it up. The Greek there is coochie. So there you go. We all like the products of our coochie, obviously. Just trying to wrap it up, okay? Not grind everything into a freaking halt or another translation issue in the last five minutes of the show.

1:47:10 Wes: Yeah, it's interesting. Mark was actually really patient with all the translation stuff. In the last in the place first.

1:47:15 Mark: First part of this, it was funny. So in the last episode, you know, the last full episode, we dedicated a lot of time to translating the different intellectual virtues. But then I think when we got to the second half and talked about weakness of the will, I don't know that the Greek term Akrasia or Ekrasia, I don't know if that was ever uttered.

1:47:35 Wes: No, we did.

1:47:36 Mark: I didn't remember that. That's like the one Greek term that people should remember from that entire episode. And There was instead of it was all this about states versus activities and blah, blah, blah. Let's wind into closings. I think that the last point that Wes just made about the joy that we get in our work is another example of sort of tying the self and regard for the self with regard to others. I think that's one of the most important things that Aristotle, you know, his legacy is that straight up division between being selfish and being selfless is a kind of a tone deaf.

It's not a subtle enough distinction that you really have to look at. Well, what are we considering the self? What is it to have self regard? That there are base versions of that and there are very together versions of that. There are versions of that that result in altruistic looking behavior. At least just acknowledging that man is a social animal. One of Aristotle's big things, really, I think is one of the correctives that our modern language of talking about ethics and needs that if. Unless you get that, then Nietzsche is going to just seem like an insane person.

Like Nietzsche really has to be understood in the context of Aristotle. And likewise, what we were saying this time about pleasure, that pleasure, it's not a matter of is pleasure bad or is pleasure the only good as certain kind of utilitarianism would have you believe, that there's more subtlety to it than that. And also just the acknowledgement throughout here that we are morally justified in acting, for instance, on behalf of our friends, in preference to and more than strangers. So one of the next things we're going to read is Peter Singer making a moral argument against that.

That really we should be giving so much of our wealth to the poor and distant parts of the world, because a human being anywhere on earth has just as much of a moral claim on us as any other human being. And that might also follow from the Levinas that we just did of just the very existence of the other person gives us this really unquenchable obligation towards others. And I just think that it'll be interesting when we talk to Singer about that if we can try to bring in our. What we've gained here from reading Aristotle and the talk of the good life.

And how does this match up with our obligations towards others? Who else has some closing thoughts?

1:49:51 Anna: Just. Oh my God, are you gonna have Peter Singer on? Yes, that's my closing thought. Yes.

1:49:57 Dylan: He's your follow up.

1:49:59 Anna: Amazing.

1:50:00 Mark: We're gonna insert another little episode before then. We received a submission of a recorded performance of Plato's Crito.

1:50:08 Wes: Yes.

1:50:08 Mark: So you decided to just have a Quickie little one part half the length of a normal episode on that. But our next full episode. Yes. Is an interview with Peter Singer.

1:50:17 Anna: He's come under fire recently for some comments he's done on Twitter. Apparently Twitter is the death of many living philosophical philosophers.

1:50:24 Wes: What did he say?

1:50:26 Anna: Well, I'm not exactly sure, but I think it was something about children with down syndrome or something.

1:50:32 Mark: Yeah, I just looked it up. Peter Singer, Twitter scandal that he sent pictures of his junk

1:50:37 Wes: to Anthony Weiner.

1:50:40 Mark: Two needy people in distant parts of the world that were lacking pictures of anyone's junk. They you have an obligation.

1:50:49 Wes: That's hilarious. Distribute the sexual harassment equally between, not just between friends.

1:50:56 Mark: Yeah, he's not going to listen to this episode. He's not going to listen to the end of this, at least not before we have him on.

1:51:03 Dylan: The closing thought I have is just that I was reminded in reading the last three chapters about just the importance of understanding the role of pleasure as being a good thing. And I think that it's still the case that we often think of the pleasurable things as being associated with things that really aren't good for us. And it's just a nice reminder to me that the things that really aren't good are also pleasurable. And it's not just doing good things and doing the things we most want to do are also pleasurable things.

1:51:38 Mark: We didn't actually read the one quote about amusement when we brought it up. That what you're saying makes me think of that is in chapter six of the last book, is that happiness does not lie in amusement. It would indeed be strange if the end were amusement and one were to take trouble and suffer hardship all one's life in order to amuse oneself. So that's sort of like when we think of pleasure, we think of amusement.

1:51:59 Anna: Yeah, I think it's great to see such a focus on pleasure and friendship and happiness in a book on ethics. And that's also conducive to his views on politics as well. And I was actually thinking that we're kind of losing sight of the importance of these values when we have a political discussion nowadays. I was thinking a lot about immigration laws and deportation and stuff like that. And I was thinking that a lot of the time, I mean, you don't have to believe in open borders or not to like be on one side or the other of the argument with immigration and anti immigration laws.

But a lot of people would have the argument saying, hey, these people are here illegally and they just have to be deported. And of Course there's going to be heartbreak. That's just the law, right? Like that's been the case, at least in the UK with some scandals that have taken place recently regarding immigration and deportation. I was thinking that maybe Aristotle wouldn't necessarily agree with that. I think he would think of happiness and friendship and how politics can try and blend in with that and make sure that ensures the conditions for us to live a happy life.

For me, it was a nice reminder of the fact that that's what politics should do. It should help us have those things that are pleasurable and conducive to a happy life. So, yeah, I thought that was a nice thing. Nice thought that I got from reading

1:53:28 Wes: him the previous books. He's set himself the challenge of. I mean, if you think of what is ethical primarily in terms of the excellence of an individual, their virtues, even if those sort of virtues are in some sense other directed, you're always, and I think this goes for other forms of ethics as well, like deontology, but you're always kind of confronting this problem of escaping ethical solipsism. In some sense you need to talk about things in terms of the individual. So for the deontologist, kind of deriving what is ethical from the nature of the will, or for Aristotle from the nature of the organism and what is good for it.

But how do you explain, if you think of what is ethical and what is virtuous as sort of this high functioning of this marvelous machine, then where do you get any necessity for others? How do you make this connection from the virtuous human being to others? And how do you explain how it's necessary? There are some really interesting and sophisticated arguments in this about how you make this. For instance, in the section why the Happy Person Needs Friends, Aristotle is sort of trying to build in this the importance of other regard and tightly connected to one's potential for living a life of virtue and for being happy through a life of virtue.

This whole question of other regard, you know, that sort of looms large in some of these contemporary accounts. Well, especially since Hegel and then we saw it in Levinas. It's the ever returning question escaping sort of the Cartesian solipsistic situation. Anyway, so I thought in a way, because it's been so long since I read this, I had forgotten about that and how contemporary in a way it seems and how sophisticated and fascinating it all is. So that I was pleasantly surprised by that.

1:55:20 Mark: All right, hey, we're supported by your donations. Please go to partiallyexaminedlife.com to make a contribution. Most of our donors come in the form of partially examined life citizens who have paid $5 a month or $50 a year to receive access to our back catalog of old episodes ad free access to all episodes, bonus content and participation in our not school cooperative education program. There are too many of those people for us to name here, so we're only going to read the names of those of you who have just now given $100 or more. So in this case, it's Alexis Brandt, Peter Thigpen, and of course Leah Boyle who sponsor this episode as a wedding gift for her friend and didn't know she'd be getting two episodes out of this, not one. So do that. Give us a lot of money. Be a friend. Thanks, guys. Thanks, Anna, for staying up so late your time.

1:56:10 Wes: Yes, thank you, Anna. It's a pleasure.

1:56:12 Anna: Thank you. It was great. I mean, it's great listening to you guys, which sometimes makes me forget that I'm supposed to chime in as well. It's just because you're too nice to listen to. So it's a problem for when you have guests on, you have to try and be less interesting.

1:56:28 Wes: Thank you. Hey all, Brian Wilson here to update you on the not school program. We've had a good crowd for our last several Introduction to Philosophy series seminars. We've explored some of the foundational works of philosophy to include Plato's, Aristotle, Descartes and Montaigne. We're continuing our seminars in October with selections from St. Augustine's Confessions. We'll explore the concepts of sin and morality for the individual. And in terms of religion, we've got more coming up after Augustine with Freud's Ego and the Id scheduled for November, and Jung's Modern man in Search of a soul wrapping up 2016 in December. If you have any questions, you can reach out to me@brianartiallyexaminedlife.com Hope to see you at a seminar soon.

1:57:07 Mark: Thank you everybody and good night.

1:57:09 Wes: Good night.

1:57:09 Anna: Have a good night.

1:57:17 Mark: Sam. Take out a circus flow it's your day.

1:57:51 Wes: Markets to everything in your way.

1:57:59 Mark: Fil to philosophy maybe they'll think you're

1:58:04 Wes: worth it

1:58:08 Mark: Me don't mind if you come down if you come down

1:58:15 Anna: don't

1:58:15 Wes: mind a few bum down a few bum down down. Just move on then just move on

1:58:33 Mark: Just gesture within to what you have so. Gesture with unto what you will. Don't mind me shaking as a shepherd to move on to better things. Pay them attention they'll think that you can and they'll never leave you alone don't make just move around Then just

1:59:29 Wes: see he'll fall through don't fall through we'll see the truth and stone you my way.

1:59:40 Mark: I can't go beautiful stay away. Dress like a psychosplent it's your day. Don't mind a man like me? You don't want to make me your way don't mind. Don't make me sa.