Selves and Other Selves in Aristotle’s Eudemian Ethics vii 12

Catherine Osborne

Of the several texts about friendship in Aristotle’s corpus, the most famous arebooks 8 and 9 of the Nicomachean Ethics.1 The others are Eudemian Ethics vii(one of four books in EE that are not in NE) and Magna Moralia ii. My focus ison Eudemian Ethics vii 12.In all these texts Aristotle notices an apparent conflict between the value of

self-sufficiency and the value of relationships with friends. I try to explain whyrelationships with friends are precious to us, using Aristotle’s discussion as aprompt. I then ask the same questions about what the good person gains fromencountering fictional characters in literature, and what kinds of literature wouldbe beneficial to the good life. I shall reject the fashionable view that Aristotlethinks that the good man gains self-knowledge from having friends, and argueinstead that the value of friends lies in looking out together at a shared world ofexperience. A friend, I suggest, is an extended self, because he stands alongsideme and together we become enlarged by appreciating what is good and sufferingwhat is bad. In the course of my argument I also suggest that the very idea of‘knowing oneself’ is problematic, since the self in Aristotle is actualised only inthe form of its thoughts and experiences, and not as a subject independent of theobjects of attention.

I. What was Aristotle talking about?In Nicomachean Ethics viii-ix, Aristotle famously uses the idea that the friend

is ‘another self’ to address various issues about friendship, including (at NE ix 9)the question of why one needs friends at all.2 In the Eudemian Ethics too, thisidea that the friend is ‘another self’ figures in Aristotle’s discussion of why thegood person needs friends. The relevant passage, EE vii 12.1244b1-1246a25, hasdrawn recent attention from scholars interested in self-knowledge and self aware-ness, because it appears to say something about how friends facilitate self-knowl-edge.3 This is the passage that I discuss here, but I reject the idea that it is aboutusing our friends to get knowledge of ourselves, and suggest rather that it isattempting to explain why our lives are enriched by watching the world through

Ancient Philosophy 29 (2009)©Mathesis Publications 1

1 Although, in general, the term philia does not exactly match onto our notion of friendship (seeOsborne 1994, 139-152), there is no significant misfit between them for the topic in EE vii 12.

2 Especially NE 1161b28-29; 1166a32; 1169b6-7; 1170b6-7.3 Recent contributions on this material include Sorabji 2006, 233; Kosman 2004; McCabe forth-

coming. Earlier contributions that pick up this theme include Stern-Gillet 1995, ch. 2, and Kahn 1981.

the eyes of a close friend, as we go through life together.The first task is to work out what Aristotle might have been trying to say in the

Eudemian Ethics passage. There are two main problems here. One is the state ofthe text. There are undoubtedly errors in the transmission and many people havetried to improve the text. Some of this intervention, inevitably, reflects particulartheories about what Aristotle ought to be trying to say. A second problem, com-mon in reading Aristotle, is that it is hard to discern where Aristotle is reviewingthe difficulties, or aporiai, in a way that is intended to problematise the issue butnot solve it, and where exactly he turns to presenting his own view in propriapersona. Unfortunately we cannot entirely disentangle these two problems, sinceour expectation about what Aristotle was trying to say will be affected bywhether we think that he is offering a solution to a puzzle, or is still trying to setout the puzzles that require a solution.Let us begin, however, by explaining, in simple terms, what puzzle is to be

addressed in EE vii 12. Basically, it is this. If the good person has friends, whatdoes he have them for? For surely, if the good person is as near as possible tobeing like God, and God is a perfect and sufficient being who has no needs, thenGod will have no need of other people, and nor will the perfectly good person.What can friendship add to the perfect life of the perfect being? If it adds nothing,then the life with friends is no better than the life without friends.On the traditional reading of EE vii 12, Aristotle solves the puzzle by propos-

ing that friends provide a way to acquire self-knowledge.4 There are parallels forthis idea in Nicomachean Ethics 1170b5-14 and Magna Moralia 1213a20-24,both of which imply that it is only by looking at my ‘other self’, an external ‘me’in the form of my friend, that I can see myself. Obviously we should concede atthe start that there is a prima facie case for expecting the same motif to appear inthe EE.5These passages about the need for friends have attracted attention because of

what they imply about Aristotle’s approach to the mind and to the idea of reflex-ive self-awareness. Scholars have found here what appears to be a rather un-cartesian model of the mind, in which one does not have privileged knowledge ofthe self by introspection, but rather one can see oneself only in a glass darkly.6 As

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4 No recent commentator presents the crude form of this reading. Stern-Gillet 1995, 37-58 offersa sophisticated account of how self-knowledge is enhanced by seeing excellence in one’s friend. Herreading already recognises the importance of Aristotle’s idea that actualisation of the known objectand of the knower are the same thing (on which see further below). The crude reading is best repre-sented by Williams 1981, 15-16.

5 Consequently, the reader who wants (as I do) to deny that the idea of self-knowledge figurescentrally in the EE solution has an uphill struggle. In principle, I ought to be able to explain why theother two texts do focus on that idea. All I can say is that I would like to give it a comparably reducedrole in the other two texts as well, or if not in both, then at least in the NE (and then blame the authorof the Magna Moralia for whatever strange prominence it acquires in that text). Perhaps that is a taskfor another article.

6 When I say that this model of the mind is ‘un-cartesian’ with a small c, I do not mean toattribute to Descartes the contrasting caricature, of a mind transparent to itself, but only to suggest

theMagna Moralia puts it, in its rather clunky version, we use our friends as mir-rors, because we cannot look directly at ourselves.7Besides the interesting hints of a strange model of the mind, the potential ethi-

cal implications of finding such a view in Aristotle have also featured in the liter-ature. If Aristotle meant that friends were valuable only in order to help us to seeourselves better, this might look offensive to post-Kantian sensibilities, since theother person seems to be serving merely as a means to one’s own ends. The ideaalso generates anxiety around the importance of the individual as object of love,if we suppose that a friend must be appreciated as an individual, not as a memberof a class, bearer of a property or, in this case, as a kind of tool, of which we eachneed one, though any one would do equally well.8However, there seem to me to be several prima facie reasons against supposing

that Aristotle is trying to solve the self-sufficiency problem in the EudemianEthics by invoking our inability to obtain self-knowledge without a friend. Onereason is philosophical; for (we might think) surely the proposed solution willnot work, since it implies that we cannot, after all, be self-sufficient. It effectivelyconcedes that there is a crucial part of knowledge, knowledge of oneself, whichone cannot obtain by oneself. This does not seem to solve the stated problem,which was how the perfectly self-sufficient person, the truly godlike person, canstill need or enjoy friends, for it turns out that there is no godlike perspective forus, and if there were, there would indeed be no point in having friends. Thatseems rather to endorse the problem, instead of rejecting it. Perhaps, instead, weshould say that such a ‘solution’ dissolves the puzzle, not by showing that a self-sufficient person can indeed value his friends, but by showing that there is noperfectly self-sufficient person without friends. After all, then, (on this construal)we would all benefit from a friend, because without a friend we are not self-suffi-cient as regards knowledge of ourselves. Self-sufficiency—or an approximation

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that such a view of introspective transparency is what commonly passes for ‘cartesian’. In factDescartes probably did not hold that view. This is a point that Ron Polansky has helpfully urged uponme, citing Descartes’s Discourse on Method part 1 in support.

7 1213a20-24. Since the Magna Moralia is probably not written by Aristotle himself, it maymake the Aristotelian position rather too simple-minded, even if some Aristotelian source underliesit.

8 See Williams 1981, 15, against intersubstitutability, and Vlastos 1981, n100. Aristotle thinksthat the perfect friend must be a good person and like myself, so the idea that ‘anyone will do’ is lim-ited by those conditions. Yet however strict we make this condition it still means that I need eitheryou or someone else who meets the criteria. It still appears to fail Vlastos’s requirement that oneshould value one’s friend as the individual he is, rather than for some feature he has (assuming thatwe can make sense of this). On the other hand, even if Aristotle thinks that self knowledge is all thatwe actually gain from having friends, it need not follow that our subjective reason for having friendsis a lucid perception of their value in that enterprise. Nor does it preclude the possibility that (in ourpersonal relationships) we might treat friends as intrinsic objects of attention, while ignoring alto-gether the question of what benefit they bring to us. Would this help to answer the worries? Yes, pro-viding one rejects either (1) the assumption that rational interests must be self-interest, or (2) theassumption that rational behaviour must not be based on a mistake about value. I am not sure whetherVlastos and Williams subscribe to these assumptions.

to it—can be achieved only with the help of friends, so there is never a state inwhich we have no need of a friend.In fact, I think something like this probably is the form that Aristotle’s eventual

solution (or dissolution) of the problem does take, as we shall see in due course(see 1245b13-19). Still it does not make the friend a tool for self-knowledge, ornot in the simple way that the mirror analogy suggests.A second prima facie problem (for those who worry about such things) is that

the question remains unsolved in the case of God. For if God is genuinely self-sufficient, unlike us, he will still have no use for friends. Aristotle seems to bitethe bullet in this case (see 1245b13-19), but it might seem potentially uncomfort-able for us. Few thinkers today would be satisfied with such a distant and friend-less model for imitation as Aristotle describes under the concept ‘god’.Thirdly we should note—against the idea Aristotle answers the puzzle of the

value of friends by appealing solely to their contribution to self-awareness—thatour passage in the Eudemian Ethics refers several times to ‘shared feeling’ andother shared experiences in a situation of living together with a friend.9 Thesemotifs of shared experience do not seem very relevant to the idea that friendshipis a way of turning our attention onto ourselves. Rather they seem to allude to sit-uations in which you and your friend are looking out together at something else,and obtaining mutual enjoyment and appreciation of the same object, oblivious,presumably, of the self. If these passages are part of Aristotle’s proposed solutionto the puzzle, or if they are elucidations that he would himself endorse, then theycan hardly be supposed to contribute to that account of the value of friends, asvaluable for self-perception. Evidently at the very least there ought also to besomething else to add, something about shared perception. So let us take a closerlook at what Aristotle is really saying in the Eudemian Ethics passage.

II. A detour into the nitty gritty, 1244b1-29Aristotle begins Eudemian Ethics vii 12 by saying that we need to investigate

how self-sufficiency and friendship relate to one another. For, says he, ‘Someonemight puzzle over whether, if someone were self-sufficient in relation to every-thing, he’ll have…any friends, supposing that friends are sought on the basis ofneed.’10 The two premisses offered here seem straightforwardly to yield theanswer ‘no’ (for if (a) to have friends one must have needs and (b) there is some-one who has no needs, then evidently, (c) that person will have no friends). Aris-totle proceeds to problematise the conclusion a bit more:

Or will it be the most self-sufficient person that will be good, if

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9 I translate the verb aisthanesthai by ‘feeling’, and the verb gnorizein by ‘observing’. They areusually rendered ‘perceiving’ and ‘knowing’ respectively. Aristotle’s point is about the sharing ofexperiences and sharing of impressions of the world in the context of a shared life together.

10 EE 1244b2-4. On the lacuna in the mss see n31. All otherwise unidentified translations are myown (for the complete translation see the appendix at the end). I translate what I take to be plausiblereconstructions of the text, occasionally dissenting from the OCT text by Walzer and Mingay. Noteson these textual matters are given in the appendix.

the virtuous person is happy?11 What need would he have offriends, <then>? For it’s not part of being self-sufficient toneed the useful kind of friends, nor the fun kind, nor the sharedlife. For this person is good enough to share his existence him-self with himself. (EE 1244b4-7)

There are too many textual problems with this passage to be sure exactly whatAristotle has in mind. But the general gist seems clear: he thinks there is somereason to suppose that virtue (or being a good person) involves self-sufficiency;but then virtue will be incompatible with friendship. So if happiness is linked tovirtue, it will be incompatible with friendship. This is counter-intuitive.Aristotle proceeds to a brief discussion of God. This may be partly to motivate

the idea that self-sufficiency is part of the ideal of human success; for if God is abeing without needs, and the ideal life for humans is one that approximates to thedivine life, then surely a genuinely happy person will be one who comes as closeas is humanly possible to this ideal of divine needlessness. This tempting thoughthas two obvious exit routes, namely (a) to affirm that although self-sufficiency isan ideal, in practice it is an unattainable one, for the closest we can come to self-sufficiency is never very close, and (b) to deny that the self-sufficiency aspect ofthat divine life is one that humans should or could aspire to, even if it is desirablefor gods.12 Both these routes would grant that in a good human life we do needfriends, but at the expense of conceding that we are not self-sufficient when inthat condition. But there is a third, less obvious, exit route that I think we ought tobe finding in this passage, namely, (c) to say that self-sufficiency is indeed partof our goal, and that we can and do attain it, but we attain it together, in partner-ships that provide an extension of ourselves, so that it is a larger self that attainsit, not a solitary unextended individual self.13To start with, however, in setting up the problem, Aristotle just presents the

divine model and asks about his need for friends:This is especially obvious in the case of God. For it’s clear thatsince he doesn’t have any need of anyone [or, ‘anything’] hewon’t have need of a friend either. And a thing of which he

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11 On my emendation of the received text at this point, see n32. I am using the term ‘happy’ totranslate ‘eudaimon’ in the conventional way.

12 Sorabji 2006, 233 takes this line, dissenting from Aristotle’s suggestion that happiness orvirtue involves self-sufficiency. Compare the hostility to self-sufficiency in Williams, 1981. This isclose to what I take to be Aristotle’s own solution, though I shall argue that Aristotle thinks that thelife with friends is a kind of self-sufficiency, by extension of the self to include the friends.

13 This is somewhat similar to certain claims in McCabe forthcoming, especially her comparisonwith Aristophanes’ speech in the Symposium. Because my interest is in this aspect of friendship,notably the idea of broadening our subjectivity beyond the single viewpoint, I shall give less attentionto the points at which Aristotle alludes to the emergent awareness of oneself as perceiver, e.g.,1245a5-10, a34-37, 1245b1. But since having a friend gives one an external self who is subject to thesame experiences and feelings, and he is known to me as subject and I am known to him as subject,the idea is a natural extension of the one I am concerned with.

never has any need will not exist for him.14 So it follows thatthe happiest human being too will need a friend least of all,except just in so far as it is impossible for him to be self-suffi-cient. So it follows necessarily that the person who lives thebest will have the fewest friends, and that they should becomefewer, and he shouldn’t make an effort to ensure that he hasfriends, and he should set very little store by not just the usefulsort of friends but by those that are worth choosing for theshared life too. (1244b7-15)

The thought experiment is clearly not intended to be attractive, at least in the caseof human friendship. So we may read this argument as something of a reductioad absurdum. Aristotle’s next remark rather suggests that he intends it that way.Indeed his next comment appears to be a hint at some sort of (slightly premature)solution to the problem: ‘But, in fact at that point it would seem to be obviousthat a friend is not for the sake of utility or advantage, but for the sake of whatmakes him a friend by virtue alone’.15 Whatever the status of this remark, we areclearly still supposed to find it quite implausible that a good man has fewer andfewer friends the better he is, and that he does not value those whom he has, inany way, and certainly not as much as someone who is less virtuous.Still, this is not the end of Aristotle’s enquiry into the problem. In a new sec-

tion, 1244b21-1245a26, he suggests that we should ‘investigate’ it. As Kosmanhas suggested, Aristotle does not immediately begin solving the problem at thispoint, but rather unpacks its assumptions.16 What he does is to consider whetherwe have been too quick to take the god model as convincing; for although there issome truth in what it says about God, it turns out to be misleading in some waywith regard to human life. This seems to be what he thinks when he eventuallydoes offer what he explicitly marks as the attempt at a solution to the puzzle, at1245b28 and then again at 1245b13-19. The result is that while God may indeedbe such as to need no friends, we are not; for just as we are not sufficient in ourthinking by merely thinking of ourselves, in the way that God is self-sufficientwhen he thinks just of himself, so also we are not sufficient in our lives if we live

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14 On the textual decisions, see n33.15 1244b15-17. On the textual decisions see n34. One way of reading this remark is as a potential

solution (even those with no needs can have virtue friends, though they cannot have any other kind offriends, so good people and god etc. can have one kind of friend, and our initial worry is at leastdiminished). Another way of reading it is as a further problem, because any solution on these lineswould eliminate some kinds of useful and amusing friends, and hence rather undermines Aristotle’sotherwise plausible account of the many benefits of a life with all kinds of friends (the OCT text haschosen a reading on these lines). The remarks that follow in the text (1244b17-21) suggest that Aris-totle meant the former, although it is surely not meant to be a considered solution but rather part ofthe setting up of the puzzles.

16 Kosman 2004, 136 thinks that the aporia continues until 1245a28 where it is summed up,prior to a solution beginning at 1245a29. McCabe forthcoming suggests that 1245a11-26 reformu-lates the problems, a solution begins to appear at 1245a26-b9, and explanation of how it resolves theproblems occupies 1245b9-25. By contrast Stern-Gillet 1995, 54-55, and Whiting forthcoming thinkthe solution already begins here at 1244b21.

alone, even though God is (1245b14-19). For us, our good is located outside our-selves; it involves others, whereas that is not so for God.So after all it will turn out that there is no such thing as a solitary self-sufficient

life for human beings. The puzzle, it seems, was wrongly set up in the first place:we were tempted into it by thinking that the perfect human life is like the perfectdivine life, which is true in a way. But it is achieved with friends in the humancase; it is not first achieved without them and then the friends added on top, as wehad supposed.Still, however attractive this solution might be, Aristotle must flesh it out with

some account of what the good person’s friends are for and how they make agood life achievable, in terms of the human goal, and the best kind of human life.Otherwise we shall still be mystified as to why human beings cannot live the soli-tary life, as God can, and be happy that way. So what are friends for, and why arewe not happy unless we have them? Let us return to Aristotle’s statement of thepuzzle at 1244b21.

But we should investigate this puzzle, lest there is somethingright about it, and something else that we’ve lost sight of as aresult of this analogy (sc. with God), but which is clear to thosewho have a grip on what it is to live in actuality, and how it’sthe person’s goal.17

Although (as Kosman noted) we are still elaborating what is tempting about thepuzzle, this last mention of how something might be clear to those who have agrip on what human living is all about looks like a hint towards the solution, andto that extent those who see Aristotle as moving towards a solution here are notentirely wrong. It leads into a positive suggestion, namely, that life is a matter ofconsciousness of things outside ourselves (that is, feeling and observation),18 andhence that ‘living together’ is going to be a matter of shared feeling and sharedobservation: ‘what it is to live in actuality, and how it’s the person’s goal. Well,it’s obvious that it’s feeling and observing so it follows that shared living isshared feeling and shared observation’ (1244b24-25).19 The terms for ‘sharedliving’, ‘shared feeling’ and ‘shared observation’ are all one-word compoundscomposed by adding ‘sun’ to the front of the verbs that have just been mentionedas the activities constitutive of life. So the reasoning goes something like this: lifeis a matter of engagement in active awareness of the environment. Life withfriends will be the same activities but done together with others. So the question

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17 1244b21-4. On the textual decisions see n35.18 The combination of aisthanesthai and gnorizein gives us two aspects of our contact with the

outside world, one more sensuous, the other more intellectual. I have chosen to translate ‘feeling’ and‘observing’, but I mean the feelings to be understood as responses to what is outside (for instance theexperience of watching a play). I think part of the important point here is that human life involvesawareness of what is outside oneself (unlike god’s life in which the object of awareness is himself).So these verbs of cognition are about being in touch with the environment: to be alive is to be awareof the surroundings, to perceive and observe. Shared life is doing these things together with someoneelse, and the question is why it should be better if we do it together.

19 Kosman, 2004 translates ‘co-living is co-perceiving and co-knowing’.

is, what is the point of doing these things with others and not by yourself?Despite the appearance of progress, we have just got a restatement of the diffi-culty, but now it has been formulated to suggest that the puzzle is going to beanswered (or needs to be answered) with reference to some kind of cognitivegoal. What is it, in the way of cognitive achievements, that we cannot do ade-quately by ourselves but can do better in company?We need to remember this reference to shared feeling and shared observation,

because (at least at first glance) these verbs seem to imply that we look outtogether with our friends, at objects in the world, and perceive them alongsideour friends. What is it to live a shared life? It is to share something of the sameperspective on the world: to observe the same things and respond to the sameexperiences, it seems. We should remember this, because the next bit of text isbadly corrupted and hard to reconstruct, and we need to find some grip to holdonto, in deciding how to reconstruct it.There are two existing interpretations of the next part, 1244b26-1245a10,

available. According to one interpretation, the more traditional one, Aristotlebegins to talk about the most desirable activity being getting to know yourselfand perceive yourself, leading to the idea that the usefulness of friends is to befound in assisting us to come to know ourselves. According to this reading, Aris-totle has a notion of the mind that is—according to those who favour this read-ing—distinctly un-cartesian (again using ‘un-cartesian’ here in the popular senseexplained above in n6). That is, according to this interpretation, we have noaccess to self-awareness except in the mirror of our friend.20If we adopt this interpretation we need to go back and re-read the sentence just

gone, which we took to be about shared feeling and shared observation, so as toreinterpret the reference to ‘shared feeling’ as a reference to apperception, andthe reference to ‘shared observation’ as a reference to reflexive self-awareness,and not to a shared activity at all. We can achieve this if we read sunaisthanesthaias meaning not ‘jointly feel’ but ‘be self-conscious’ (which is a recognised senseof the word, at least in the later period of Greek philosophy, though one mightwonder whether the use did not originate in this passage, and the parallel pas-sages in the Nicomachean Ethics). Thus we might suppose that Aristotle hasequivocated on sunaisthanesthai so as to move, by sleight of hand, from ‘jointlyfeeling’ and ‘jointly living’ (one sense of sunaisthanesthai and suzen) to ‘apper-ception’ and ‘self-awareness’ (the other sense of sunaisthanesthai, though thereis not an equivalent reflexive sense of the ‘jointly living’ verb). On such a read-ing Aristotle was illicitly suggesting, but not proving, that self-consciousness is aresult of friendship with another self.According to this interpretation, the next sentence, 1244b26-29, reads: ‘But for

each person, the most choice-worthy thing is to perceive himself and to knowhimself, and this is what gives us all the innate appetite for living. For one must

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20 This reading still assumes that Aristotle thinks that there is a hidden self that we badly need toperceive, and in this I would say it was deeply Cartesian and rather unlike the Aristotle that I shall goon to describe.

suppose that living is a kind of knowledge.’21To yield this sense, a number of corrections have had to be made to the text, to

make it talk about perceiving oneself. We shall come back in due course to lookat what the manuscript readings are before correction. But do we want it to beabout perceiving oneself? To my mind, it is not actually at all obvious why we, orAristotle, or any of Aristotle’s readers should be disposed to assent to the ideathat knowing oneself is the most desirable thing, nor why that should explain ourappetite for life (and especially so if life is about looking out at the world, as wehave just been persuaded). It is particularly not obvious if you do not have aCartesian notion of the self as the object of introspective knowledge, for it is notobvious what ‘self’ there is to know, as the object of self-knowledge. It would bemore plausible, it seems to me, to claim that perception and knowledge (that is,normal knowledge of external objects) are key parts of what makes life choice-worthy, and that if living is to be equated with being perceptually aware of yoursurroundings (rather than of yourself), this desire to know about what is aroundyou might indeed explain our unanimous desire for life.A rival interpretation of this part of the text is offered by Kosman 2004, 138,

who suggests (along these very lines that I have just sketched) that the issue isnot about self-perception but about oneself as subject of the activity of perceiv-ing. On his view, what is most choice-worthy is that one should oneself be doingthe perceiving, not someone else. We might translate as follows: ‘But for eachperson, the most choice-worthy thing is that he be perceiving, and that he beknowing, and this is what gives us all the innate appetite for living. For one mustsuppose that living is a kind of knowledge’ (1244b26-29, reading tÚ aÈtÚnafisyãnesyai, tÚ aÈtÚn gnvr¤zein and de› tiy°nai). This thought leads Kosmanto suggest that this sentence is still problematising the issue, not solving it. ForAristotle’s puzzle is not resolved in any way by this proposal because there is,after all, still no role for joint perceiving, or shared understanding, or any situa-tion in which someone else is perceiving, and so there is still no point in having afriend, if the most important thing in life is to be the subject of one’s own (soli-tary) awareness. So according to Kosman, the puzzle about why we need a friendis not addressed or resolved until 1245a30-35, which is where the idea of anotherself is introduced.Still, when the solution comes, the role for this other self now appears to have

very little to do with the idea canvassed at 1244b24-28 that the desire for living isa desire for personal subjectivity and awareness, although 1244b23 had impliedthat this was the key to the problem. Kosman’s account of the solution at1245a30-35 is rather peculiar. He puts a lot of weight on the idea of ‘another Her-akles’, invoking a passage in Plutarch to suggest that this refers to collaborativeaction, although to my mind it is not clear that the Plutarch passage does actuallysupport this idea. But in any case, we might ask, what has collaborative action

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21 1244b26-29, reading the text as given in Walzer and Mingay’s OCT, with tÚ aÍtoË afisyã-nesyai, tÚ aÍtÚn gnvr¤zein, and de› tiy°nai.

got to do with anything worth having in life (once we truly understand what isworth having)? Given that collaborative action does not pick up on the value ofone’s own personal subjectivity, Kosman is obliged to say is that this elaborationof the puzzle at 1244b21, which introduces the idea that our desire for life is actu-ally a desire for subjectivity, contains not even the germ of a solution to it. Ratherit raises only further problems, since the desirability of being the subject of per-ceiving does not in any way give us a need for friends, but rather counts stronglyagainst it. The consequence seems to be that friends do not assist us with any-thing that is mentioned here as making life desirable. Instead we have to look forthe need for friends in their contribution to action, as help in times when we arenot self-sufficient in a practical way. Thus it emerges (on Kosman’s account) thatthe other self is nothing to do with cognition or personal identity, but just aboutordinary helpfulness. So, although Kosman’s interpretation of this preliminarypassage, looks more attractive than the one that takes it to be about self-knowl-edge, in the end the reading seems to yield no genuine or satisfying answer to thepuzzle, or at least not one that makes any use of this idea of perceiving for one-self. And perhaps this is right, for after all why should the justification of friend-ship have anything to do with being the subject of one’s own perceptions?According to Kosman, that was part of the problem, not part of the solution.McCabe forthcoming follows Sorabji 2006, 236 in finding a third way through

this chapter that helps itself to both alternatives, by suggesting that self-aware-ness is not merely perception of oneself (so McCabe), or not merely perception ofthe object of shared attention (so Sorabji), but includes both. According to theseauthors, Kosman is right that one’s own subjectivity comes into it, and on theother hand the self-awareness reading is right because awareness of oneself alsocomes into it. So the fact that the chapter talks about both self-awareness andshared outlooks is compatible with the idea that Aristotle has quite a rich under-standing of what shared attention is, and it involves both self-awareness—aware-ness that one is perceiving—and awareness of an object perceived. Togetherthese are supposed to yield some reason why it is better to share one’s life with afriend (although exactly how that follows remains somewhat opaque in bothcases).I want to suggest that there is a fourth route that is not identical to any of these,

although it takes as highly pertinent the comments that Sorabji 2006, 25-26 and236 makes about the importance of the phenomenon of shared attention in humanpsychology. Unlike Sorabji, I want to suggest that Aristotle does not think thatthere is a determinate but hidden self there to be discovered by some means.Rather, I am suggesting, the self becomes actual and determinate only when theagent or subject actualises their agency or subjectivity. The subject of attentioncannot become determinate in perceiving itself, since there is nothing determi-nate there to be perceived, but it becomes determinate in the perception of adeterminate object, a perceptible object (or object of thought) that is itself actu-alised in being perceived. To perceive that one sees is not to perceive an act ofseeing, or to perceive a self doing some seeing, or anything like that: it is to per-

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ceive the object of sight, the whiteness, the largeness, actualised at the time ofseeing. It is for this reason that Aristotle always speaks of ‘seeing’ that one sees,for what one sees is not a self but the seen object actualised as seen.22 So it is notthat we are aware both of ourselves and of the object of attention, as though sub-ject and object were two separate things, for the actuality of subject and objectare just the same thing. There is no such thing as awareness of oneself that is notconstituted by awareness of what we are aware of. Then shared attention tosomething outside ourselves is awareness of a sort of self, namely, the actualisedagency that is actually constituted by the determinate objects that I, and the exter-nal parts of myself that are my friends, are jointly perceiving. If these are finethings, then our perceiving selves will, in the process, be actualised as finethings.On my reading, then, unlike the other rival readings just surveyed, we should

retain the reading tÚ aÈtÒ that appears in the vast majority of manuscripts at theproblematic point we have reached, namely, 1244b26-29, and reckon that here, amoment after mentioning the idea that shared living is shared attention (sharedfeeling and shared observation, 1244b25) Aristotle is talking about how preciousit is when those who live together direct their shared attention at the same thing.This is not (not at this point) anything to do with knowing oneself, nor self-con-sciousness. The idea then leads directly to a solution that involves the idea thatthere is, after all, still something cognitive that can only be achieved with friends.We should translate this tricky passage as follows, I suggest (starting from1244b24):

Well, it’s obvious that it’s feeling and observing, so it followsthat shared living is shared feeling and shared observation; andfeeling the same and observing the same is what is mostchoice-worthy for each, and due to this the appetite for living isinnate in all; for living is organising some knowledge.23

The solution, which emerges in due course at 1245a29 onwards, building on1245a18-26, will take seriously the idea that we are oriented towards objects ofattention outside ourselves, and fulfilment comes that way, not in contemplationof the self alone as in the case of God. And this is because the object of attentionis what determines the quality of your thinking, and in our case the best objects(including God himself, but also all other fine things such as music, plays andphilosophical truths) are to be found in directing the attention to what is externalto ourselves. Sufficiency, then is achieved (whether alone or in company) byattention to fine things in the environment. But why do it in company rather than

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22 Some considerations in favour of this position can be found in Osborne 1983, although morecould be said. In the parallel passage at EN 1170a29 Aristotle does speak of the one who sees or hears‘being aware’ in a more generic sense, not ‘seeing’, that he is seeing or hearing or walking, but thisstill need not mean that there is a generic sense that takes self as its object, as opposed to a sense thathas actualities such as the seen object, or a heard sound, or a walking agent, as its objects.

23 1244b26-29, retaining tÚ aÈtÚ afisyãnesyai, tÚ aÈtÚ gnvr¤zein, and retaining diatiy°nai atb28.

alone? The value of the shared life with friends, I suggest, is that it enlarges theself: it enlarges the subject of attention (the self that looks out) so that we canhave more of those experiences and occasions of agency that constitute ourengagement with what is good. To borrow the image from Aristophanes’ speechin Plato’s Symposium 189c-193d, especially 190a, which McCabe uses to goodeffect in her treatment of this passage, by looking out with a friend I can look outfrom the eyes of the other half of myself and see (so to speak) both ways, not justforwards. Or, to borrow an image from Xenophanes, we can get closer to being inthat ideal godlike condition in which ‘all of him sees, all of him thinks and all ofhim hears’.24 In addition, because our actual perceiving self is constituted by itsobjects of attention (both perceptual and intellectual) and becomes determinate inthat way, the effect of viewing fine things is that one becomes a fine self that isworth noticing, one one that can be noticed with profit by one’s companions.25

III. The value of friendsHaving got this far, it would evidently be good to see how such a reading

might make sense of the rest of EE vii 12 and the surrounding context. Yet topursue such a project now, in this kind of detail, for such a difficult text, wouldbe both tedious and fiddly. Instead I have attempted a sketch of how that projectmight look, in the form of an annotated translation of the whole text in theappendix.At this point, instead, I propose to broaden the discussion, first to consider in

its own right the idea that I have been attributing to Aristotle, that the value offriendship might lie in the shared perception of a shared world, and in the exten-sion of oneself to another sympathetic outlook, in such a way that one’s perspec-tive is both broadened and yet not divided or frustrated. And secondly to look athow this might help us to understand the value of fiction.Aristotle’s reflections on the value of friends are interesting not just as history,

but also as contributions to a debate that should still matter to us now. What Iwant to suggest is that the view that I have attempted to diagnose in theEudemian Ethics is attractive in certain respects as a contribution to ethics andphilosophy of mind, because it provides an explanation for why the life withfriends is a richer and more enjoyable life, while retaining the sense that friendsare not merely instrumental tools for our own betterment.My thought is that rather than think that the friend helps us to see ourselves as

objects of attention, by turning our gaze back to our own virtue and knowledge,we should think of the self as the subject of attention and of judgement. On thisview, what I am is a way of seeing the world, a perspective on the world, an agentin the world, and one who makes value judgements and discriminates. Life, as

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24 Xenophanes fragment 24 as quoted by Sextus Empiricus Adv Math. ix 144.25 That is, the only actual self we have is the actualised objects of our attention, but if these are

good and determinate our friend sees us engaged with those, and we see our friend engaged withthose same things, and we thereby have and notice our shared self engaged in fine and determinatethings (see 1245a1-5 and a5-10).

Aristotle suggests, consists in perceiving and making discriminations (as well assome other things).26 I, as a perceiver and discriminator, consist of that way ofseeing things.Now, we might ask, how can I become a virtuous person? If we follow the line

that I have been exploring, the answer will be something like this: You become avirtuous person by bringing your outlook on the world into line with the idealway of seeing things, so that your judgements and discriminations are correct andsound. In Aristotelian ethics such an alignment is achieved by habituating your-self to do what a virtuous person does and to see as the virtuous person sees.Once I have done that and become a virtuous perspective on the world, what

would be the use of a friend?27 For I would not choose to have friends if they hadno genuine value, either for me or in themselves. What value can they have?The next thought is that just as I am one outlook on the world, so the friend is

another outlook, from another perspective—another way of seeing the world, andone whose perspective I can come to share. If to be a self is to be a point of viewupon the world, then that is also what ‘another self’ is. If, as I have suggested,Aristotle thinks of the self as what is actualised as the perceived object, or theobject of thought, so that seeing oneself would be seeing the actuality of the per-ceived object, and thinking of oneself as thinker would have no other contentthan thinking of the thought that is currently (or perhaps has been) the object ofattention, then the self is not an additional part of the world that stands apart fromthe objects of our awareness. We might compare the remarks of Wittgenstein atTractatus 5.633 and 5.641, ‘The philosophical self is not the human being, notthe human body, or the human soul, with which psychology deals, but rather themetaphysical subject, the limit of the world—not a part of it’ (see also Wittgen-stein 1975, §47). Here Wittgenstein refers to this subject as ‘metaphysical’, bycontrast with the object of psychologists’ study. But I think it would be better tosay that he is precisely not saying that there is some metaphysical self or soul ofthe Cartesian sort. There is just the world as perceived from where I stand. Whathe calls ‘the metaphysical self’ is nothing more than that.Wittgenstein borrowed this idea that the eye is not part of its visual field from

Schopenhauer, but whereas Schopenhauer inferred that there is an eye that is thesubject of the seeing (Mounce 1997), Wittgenstein said that there is just the limitof the seeing. It seems to me that in Aristotle, similarly, we can think of the sub-ject as nothing over and above what is seen. The actual self is constituted in theactualisation of the object seen. Similarly in thought there is no extra subject,over and above the object of thought.28

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26 Although it is the cognitive attention to the world that interests Aristotle particularly and hasthe highest value in his eyes, he does mention mutual practical agency as a second best (1245b7).

27 We might want to reject the question, on the grounds that it takes a utilitarian approach tofriendship. But the point remains: why would I choose to have friends if, ex hypothesi, I am makingsound judgements of what has genuine value, all by myself?

28 When I say there is nothing apart from the actual objects, I do not mean that there is no poten-tiality. Aristotle holds that objects of perception are potential until perceived, and so too our senses

So if this is all that the self is, when it comes to friends, your friend will not besomeone who looks at you in particular, nor someone who looks at himself inparticular, but someone who looks out with you on the same shared world ofthings and people—someone who perceives, judges and discriminates with you,standing alongside as it were, and becoming, like you, actualised in the sharedexperience of the very same set of objects in such a way as to become just likeyou. So real friends will be real people who stand alongside us and share our val-ues and our virtues. They extend ourselves, by enabling us to see more of theworld and to see it through another’s sympathetic eyes.

IV. LiteratureAs regards fictional people, of course Aristotle does not ask, here in the Ethics,

about our reasons for finding value in the people we encounter in literature. Nordoes his account of the value of literature in the Poetics invoke the idea of friend-ship. He does not make that connection.Still, it seems to me that we might try doing so. For it seems that when we read

a novel or see a film we are invited to inhabit a world seen from another person’sperspective. It is tempting to say that the author gives us a window into anotherperson’s mind. But, I suggest, a window into their mind is not a way of lookinginto that person, but a way of getting to look out at the world from that perspec-tive, in the way that we take a shared view of the world with the friends. For inthat case too, it is just this that we mean when we talk of seeing into our friend’smind. We mean that we can see how things look to them.In fact, literature does this more obviously than real friends, because what

seems private in ordinary life is often deliberately exposed by the author. Theauthor sets out to lay it bare for the reader. For there would be no story to read ifwhat the characters were thinking and the judgements that they were makingremained in their non-existent heads.So we find it relatively easy to relate to the character in the fiction as intimately

as we do to our closest friends. This allows us to see the world from a perspectiveadjacent to our own, or one to which, in our imagination, we manage to comealongside. In many cases it is a window onto a world that is quite unfamiliar tous, a world of experiences we have not ourselves encountered, a world full ofpeople we don’t know among our own acquaintance. So the book gives us moreto see, and a way to see it as through the eyes of a friend. We become enlarged.The new perspective becomes our own. It is like another self, and we enjoy it forall those reasons, though this does not mean that we value it for its utility. Rather,

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are potential until they are actualised as perceiving some actual sensory input. Once the actualisationoccurs there are then not two things, but one. Subject and object are only potentially separate, butthere is not actually a subject distinct from its thoughts and perceptions. Additional complexity can beadded by distinguishing first and second actualities: the difference between a blind eye and a closedone for example, or the baby’s capacity to do geometry versus the sleeping mathematician’s capacity.But the main point remains the same: that the actual exercise of perceiving just is the occurrence ofthe actual object of perception.

besides its usefulness in enlarging our experience, we also value it (as we valueour life with friends) for the intrinsic joy of perceiving more of the world, a worldlived through and with the other person.By telling a story, by narrating the thoughts of another character, by describing

a scene as viewed through the eyes of a well-drawn character, the author givesthe reader a new take on a part of the shared world, inviting her into someoneelse’s way of seeing it. It is like acquiring a new friend, and one whom perhapswe could not have known personally because, say, she belongs to another time oranother country, or she is purely imaginary, even a creation of mere fantasy.But now, we might ask, would such a fictional friend be more valuable if her

way of seeing things were very different from the reader’s existing take on theworld? Is there any reason to think that her outlook needs to be similar to myown? Aristotle’s assumption is that we like our friends to be like ourselves, thatwe enjoy the company of those whose values are similar to our own, and the vir-tuous person needs only virtuous friends. Yet if the aim is to enlarge our vision ofthe world, would it not be better if the friends were coming from a very differentpoint of view, and enabling us to see things that we were not yet seeing, fromwhere we are currently placed? And then, in literature, would it not be better ifthe author created a character who was quite unlike us, perhaps even an evil char-acter, through whose eyes we could come to experience the world in a very dif-ferent way? Would variety not be an improvement?This thought might seem plausible (in a way it did not seem plausible to Aris-

totle) if we thought (unlike Aristotle) that it was beneficial to see things in theway other people with very different values see them—for instance if webelieved there were other standards of value that were both different from ourown and also valid. If we supposed that to be a virtuous person one should beopen to alternative points of view, then we could and should find value in friend-ships that enable us to step outside our own narrow take on the world (the viewthat currently constitutes my self), and to engage in a broader outlook, in whichvarious different kinds of value and various different kinds of interest would pre-sent the world under various different descriptions. Such a model of virtue wouldindeed value the place of strange and different characters (though perhaps notevil ones) in literature. Such a model of virtue might well seem attractive tosome.But that is not the model of virtue that Aristotle is working with, because he

does not have a pluralistic or relativist model of value. For Aristotle, things arenot valuable because the virtuous person perceives them as valuable. Rather thevirtuous person perceives them as valuable because they are valuable.So on Aristotle’s view, presumably we would not benefit by viewing things

through the distorting spectacles of a non-virtuous evaluation. If our human viewis too limited, it is presumably not because it is just one view among manyequally good ones; it can only be because it is only part of the fuller view of theworld and of the best things in the world, that is the best available self for humanperceivers. On such a view, we could not enhance it by adding false or distorted

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perceptions, though we might enhance it by adding an intimate relationship withsomeone else whose sympathetic outlook on their world is as sensitive to truthand goodness as our own is (or indeed more so).This suggests that for Aristotle, there could be no value to literature that gives

an inviting picture of a non-virtuous character. And we might think that to be sat-isfying, an account of the value of literature would need to make space for worksthat give an utterly compelling rendering of the world as seen by a non-virtuouscharacter. Aristotle’s view might look too much like Plato’s notorious argumentfor censoring the dramatic portrayal of bad characters,29 or the views on literatureoften unfairly associated with Tolstoy.30 So what, if anything, are we to do withit? Shall we retain the idea that literature, like friendship, can be a way of lookingat the world through another person’s eyes, but accept that we risk finding thatour literary friends give us a less good view of the world, as do our moreunsavoury companions, and are of dubious moral value as a result? Shall we lookfor some other account of the value of fine portraits of quirky and evil characterswhom we find engaging in our literary encounters?Aristotle’s own account, in the Poetics, offers one solution, though we need to

be cautious about what we attribute to Aristotle there too—for Aristotle says verylittle about what the point of literature is, and much has been hung on his onepassing mention of catharsis at 1449b27. But let us suppose, for the sake of argu-ment, that he has a theory, and that catharsis is supposed to explain why the rep-resentation of tragic emotions in a character on stage, which engages our fear andour pity, is beneficial and ennobling for us, and not harmful and weakening asPlato seems to suggest. Then it might seem that Aristotle could say that identify-ing with the emotions and responses of a character who is not wholly good, andwho is not wholly in sympathy with our own emotions and responses, could bevaluable, because it yields some purgative effect, some way of cleaning up ouremotions (whether that be by ridding us of them, or by giving us an outlet inwhich to exercise them in a noble and purified way). This has been a popularreading of what Aristotle means, especially among those who think that he pro-vides an answer to Plato, so as to rescue a role for works of art that engenderemotion or encourage vicarious suffering on behalf of a character on stage or in

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29 That Plato presents an argument, in the mouth of the Socrates in the Republic, for such censor-ship in his imaginary polis is undeniable. However, we can only infer that Plato himself recommendsthis policy if we suppose that the Republic is intended, without irony, to recommend a blueprint forsocial policy, and not just to explore the (potentially problematic and unattractive) consequences thatfollow from a certain hypothesis. I am here gesturing at work I have not yet published, but seeOsborne 1993 and (recognising that Plato’s rejection of poetry presupposes that it would have to bevalued as knowledge) Geuss, 2003.

30 Leo Tolstoy’s What is Art argues courageously against certain fashionable aesthetic attitudesof his time, and defends the idea that art that should have something worthwhile to say. His work isoften misread, both in respect of its idea that effective art infects the reader with a certain livelyresponse, and in respect of its condemnation of art that is merely designed to titillate or display thedecadent tastes of its owners. For a sympathetic assessment of what Tolstoy really meant, seeMounce 2001.

the narrative.Yet this still does not make use of the idea that we need to extend our percep-

tion and discernment of the world. If friendship is important for what it offers inthat way, as I have suggested, it does not seem that Aristotle himself saw how lit-erature or drama might do the same. Perhaps we might say instead that his notionof catharsis appeals, in an analogous way, to the idea of an extension of our emo-tional self, rather than our perceiving self. Drama, he might say, provides a sec-ond self through whom we can experience vicarious emotions. Although notidentical to the idea in the Eudemian Ethics of a second self that provides vicari-ous experiences and observations, whose view of the world we are able to enterby living a shared life of joint perceiving and joint evaluation, this would be aclose parallel, especially in so far as emotions are closely related to evaluationand discernment of the good. Yet we might still feel (with Tolstoy perhaps) thatthe vicarious emotions would need to be true to the world and appropriately mea-sured if they are to be of value in providing a richer form of life than we can liveby ourselves.So we might want to extend Aristotle’s account of what ‘living’ is (EE

1244b23-24), to add the idea that it includes feelings in the sense of emotionalresponses to events and disasters and not just cognitive discernment of things inthe world. But we shall still conclude that the best friends will be ones whoextend our sympathies in ways that are both enriching and genuine. Still therewill be no use for friends, whether real or literary, who have nothing to contributeto our deeper understanding of what genuinely matters and how the virtuous par-ticipant ought to respond.Is this a problem? I think not. For surely it is true that a great work of literature

will not be one that provides only trivial or repulsive characters, whose take onthe world is merely superficial; there needs to be someone there who engagesmore deeply with the mysteries and horrors of life, and who prompts us to engagewith them in the lives they are living. And if the novelist needs to portray somesuperficial or rebarbative characters as a foil for those perceptive ideals, thosewill not be the ones who take the role of friends in our lives. So, I think we mightwant to say that there is indeed no value in poetry, plays or novels that aremerely, trivially, imitative of the world we already know, especially of shallowor unedifying aspects of the world we know. Literature will be life-enhancing if itenables us to see through the eyes of another good and interesting person. And ifthat is true of literature, perhaps it is true of friendship too. Perhaps, if we thinkabout it, those close friends with whom we love to do and see things, are wonder-ful for us just in so far as they are another perceiving subject, but at the sametime one into whose mind we can begin to look—not by looking into it, so tospeak, but by looking out with it and seeing another person’s world, and findingthereby a deepening and enrichment of the integrity of our own vision. And is itnot the case that when we do that, we feel just a little closer to being like God: tobeing ecstatic in the literal sense.

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V. Appendix: Aristotle EE vii 12, A Translation with textual notes1244b1-4: We ought also to investigate questions regarding self-sufficiency

and friendship, how they stand to one another in respect of what they can do. Forsomeone might puzzle over whether, if someone were self-sufficient in relationto everything, he’ll have…any friends, supposing that friends are sought on thebasis of need.311244b4-7: Or will it be the most self-sufficient person that will be good, if the

virtuous person is happy?32 What need would he have of friends, <then>? For it’snot part of being self-sufficient to need the useful kind of friends, nor the funkind, nor the shared life. For this person is good enough to share his existencehimself with himself.1244b7-15: This is especially obvious in the case of God. For it’s clear that

since he doesn’t have any need of anyone [or, ‘anything’] he won’t have need ofa friend either. And a thing of which he never has any need will not exist forhim.33 So it follows that the happiest human being too will need a friend least ofall, except just in so far as it is impossible for him to be self-sufficient. So it fol-lows necessarily that the person who lives the best will have the fewest friends,and that they should become fewer, and he shouldn’t make an effort to ensurethat he has friends, and he should set very little store by not just the useful sort offriends but by those that are worth choosing for the shared life too.1244b15-17: But, in fact at that point it would seem to be obvious that a friend

is not for the sake of utility or advantage, but for the sake of what makes him afriend by virtue alone.341244b17-21: For whenever we are not in need of anything, then we all seek out

those with whom we will find shared fulfilment, and particularly people who

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31 Both the main families of manuscripts collated for Walzer and Mingay’s OCT text contain aspace where I have inserted dots here, roughly 12 letters length (C and L) or nineteen letters’ length inP. There is no clue as to what (if anything) might be missing. The sense seems satisfactory withoutany supplement. Von Fragstein’s conjecture, t“ aÈtarkestãtƒ, is no more secure than anything elseit seems to me. See Von Fragstein 1974, 344.

32 I am reading aÍtark°statow at line 1244b4-5, which obviates the need to supply a definitearticle (ı) as in the OCT, and linking this clause to the conditional in the next clause by a commarather than a full stop. As far as I am aware no one has suggested this before. It does not do much toimprove the sense, but I am assuming that the thought is this: if the virtuous person is the happiestperson he will also be the most sufficient person (since one cannot be happy if one is dependent). Butthen it seems he needs no friends, and as we know virtuous people have good friends and value themtoo, so this creates a puzzle. There are several other problems with this passage, including an instanceof asyndeton regardless of where we punctuate. The translation given here is not the only possiblereconstruction, but renders something of the apparent sense.

33 The text translated here is an emendation by the editors and is almost certainly wrong. JenWhiting has forcefully pointed out that the editors have unanimously edited out what appears to be areference to the master-slave relationship. Still, it is hard to see why a master of slaves, archetypicallysomeone who is not self-sufficient as an individual, should be used as a comparator for God or for theperson with no need for others. It is not clear how to restore good sense (Whiting forthcoming, criti-cising, e.g., Von Fragstein 1974, 344).

34 Reading oÍ diÉ éretØn f¤low at 1244b16-17. The text is somewhat uncertain.

stand to benefit rather than those who do us good. And we make a better choicewhen we are self sufficient than when in need, which is when we most lackfriends who are good enough for the shared life.1244b21-24: But we should investigate this puzzle, lest there is something

right about it, and something else that we’ve lost sight of as a result of this anal-ogy (sc. with God), but which is clear to those who have a grip on what it is tolive in actuality (kat’ energeian) and how it’s the person’s goal.351244b24-25 Well, it’s obvious that it’s feeling and observing, so it follows that

shared living is shared feeling and shared observation;361244b26-29: and feeling the same and observing the same is what is most

choice-worthy for each, and due to this the appetite for living is innate in all; forliving is organising some knowledge.371244b29-32: So if someone were to slice off the knowing and make it a thing

in itself [and not…]38 (but you don’t notice—that’s how it’s written in the story,though in practice it is such that you would notice), it wouldn’t be any differentfrom someone else knowing instead of him.391244b32-34: And the same for someone else living in place of yourself. But

reasonably enough, your own feeling and observing is more choice-worthy.401244b34-35: What we have to do is combine two things in the story: (a) that

living is [both] choice-worthy and (b) that the good (sc. is choiceworthy);411244b35-1245a1: and out of these we have to draw the consequence that such

a nature (sc. being choice-worthy) applies to them both in virtue of the samething.1245a1-5: So if, in a table of this kind,42 one of the two is always in the column

of the choice-worthy, both what can be observed and what can be felt are in thecolumn of the choice-worthy in virtue of their participation in the determinatenature (generally speaking);43 whence wanting to feel it is wanting it to be of

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35 I have taken this as a single sentence in which there is a contrast between the point that wemiss (in lanyãnei) at b22, and what is clear (d∞lon) in b23.

36 Kosman 2004 translates ‘co-living is co-perceiving and co-knowing’.37 Retaining tÚ aÈtÚ afisyãnesyai, tÚ aÈtÚ gnvr¤zein, and in b28 diatiy°nai.38 Something is missing in the text here. It is hard to determine exactly what has gone wrong.39 Reading ényÉ aÈtoË. The text seems to refer to some science fiction example that is not avail-

able to us, but may be a kind of brain transplant, or alternatively a thought experiment about out of thebody existence (e.g., immortal souls). It is not clear whether the subject himself is unaware of havingbeen displaced from the body, or the observers are unaware.

40 Taking •autoË in attributive position to be a possessive, not the object of the perceiving.41 Alternatively, that living is also good (as well as choice worthy). The premises are to serve as

the basis for the conclusion that is to follow. I think the form of the argument is ‘Living is choice-worthy. What is choice-worthy is what is good (expressed as ‘The good is <identical with> what ischoice worthy’). Therefore living is choice-worthy for the very same reason as the good is choice-worthy’.

42 Aristotle evidently points to the Pythagorean table of opposites on the wall of the lectureroom.

43 Reading t“ in 45a3 with Fritzsche and the OCT.

such and such a kind.441245a5-10: Since, then, we are not each of these things by ourselves, but by

partaking of the faculties, in virtue of feeling or observation (for in feeling onebecomes an object of feeling in just this respect, and in virtue of this very thing,in just the way that one first feels, both how and of what, and one becomes anobject of observation by observing).45 So it’s for this reason that one wants tolive for ever, because one wants to go on observing for ever, and one wants thisbecause one wants to be an object of observation oneself.1245a11-16: Yet choosing the shared life might look somehow foolish when

you consider it, firstly in respect of those things that are common to other animalstoo, like eating together and drinking together. What difference does it makewhether these things happen when you’re close together, or apart, if you excludelanguage? But then sharing in any old language is another thing of the same sort.1245a16-18: At the same time it’s not possible for self-sufficient friends to

teach or to learn; for on the one hand the learner isn’t himself in the state heshould be in, and in the case of the teacher his friend isn’t; but friendship is thesimilarity.1245a18-22: Yet, it does appear so—and all of us enjoy sharing good things

more with our friends, to the extent that each of us gets a chance to do so, and ofthe best he can get, but for one of us it will be the best of bodily pleasure, foranother the best of watching artistic performances, for another the best of philos-ophy.1245a22-26: And it has to be together with the friend. That’s why they say

‘Far away friends are a pain’. So they mustn’t be apart when this is going on.Hence love seems similar to friendship; for the lover longs for the shared life,46but not in the way that one most ought, but in respect of feeling.1245a26-29: Well, the story presents the first set of considerations as difficul-

ties. But in actual fact the second set of considerations is how things evidentlyturn out. So it’s clear that the presentation of the difficulties must have led usastray in some way. We should start our investigation of the truth from this point.1245a29-34: For, in the words of the proverb, the friend is supposed to be

‘another Heracles’, another self.47 But things are scattered and it’s hard to findeverything48 concentrated in one individual, but rather it’s the one that’s mostakin in respect of nature—yet on the other hand one person is similar in respect

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44 Reading aÈtÒn twice in 45a4 with the mss.45 This section appears to be about awareness of one’s own perceptual actualities in virtue of

being aware of the objects of those actualities as the objects that they are. One becomes an object ofthe same faculty as one is exercising because one is aware of exercising that faculty, in virtue of beingaware of an object of a determinate kind. Because objects of knowledge fall into the desirable class,which is the class of the good, this is something we want to be: we want to be an object of knowledge,to ourselves if not to anyone else.

46 Reading suz∞n with the OCT. The mss have eÔ z∞n, which would mean ‘for the good life’.47 Reading aÈtÒw with the OCT. Mss apart from one of the Latin versions read otow (render as

‘another this man’).48 Reading pãnta with Richards and the OCT.

of body, another in respect of soul, and among these they differ from one anotherpart by part.491245a34-37: But none the less the friend is supposed to be something like a

separable self. So being aware of one’s friend necessarily (seems to) amount tobeing aware of oneself in some way, and observing oneself in some way.1245a37-b2: So it makes sense that one shares pleasure even in crude things,

and that the shared life is pleasant to the friend (for awareness of that friendalways comes at the same time)50 but even more so when one is enjoying themore divine pleasures. The reason for that is that it is always more pleasant toregard oneself in the superior pleasure. This is sometimes an experience, some-times an action, sometimes something else.1245b2-7: And if it is well for the person himself to live, and so also for the

friend, and for them to cooperate in their shared life, then the fellowship is espe-cially among the things that are included in the goal.51 That’s why we (should) goto the theatre together and dine together. For such convivialities do not seem tobe for the sake of food and the necessaries,52 but are rather the fulfilment. Buteach person seeks a shared life within the goal that he is able to attain. If that isnot available, then they choose (a life of) mutual beneficence between friendsabove all.1245b9-13: So it is evident both that we ought to live together, and that every-

one wants that most of all, and that the happiest and best person approximatesmost nearly to this ideal. But the fact that this wasn’t evident from that story,53that was something that emerged for good reason from something that was tellingthe truth.1245b13-19: For the solution depends upon the integration of the analogy,

which is a true one. Because God is not such as to need friends, one might thinkthe same applies to someone who is like God too, even though on this story theperfect man won’t be thinking either; for that’s not the way God flourishes, buthe’s better than to think of anything else besides himself. And the explanation isthat for us, flourishing is extrinsic, but for God flourishing is intrinsic.1245b19-25: Looking and praying for lots of friends, and at the same time say-

ing that ‘no one who has lots of friends is a friend’—both these are correctly said.For supposing it were possible to have a shared life and shared feeling with lotsof people, as many as possible would be the top choice. But since that isextremely hard, the actualising of shared feeling has to be among fewer, so thatit’s not just difficult to acquire many friends (that requires experience), but it’s

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49 Punctuated with a comma not a colon after g°nesyai.50 Reading §ke¤nou with the manuscripts.51 There seems to be something wrong or elliptical here, but it is hard to see how to emend the

text. I have translated by treating eÔ as shorthand for ‘it is well’, with the complement being anaccusative and infinitive, though this does not seem good Greek. I think it is impossible to be surewhat it really means, but it must be something about the good life and oneself and one’s friend.

52 Reading gãr at 1245a5 with Collingwood53 Sc. the story spun at 1244b1-21 and recapitulated at 1244b31 and at 1245a27.

also difficult to use them when you have got them.1245b26-31: And sometimes we want our friend to be away and flourishing,

sometimes we want to take part in the same things, and wanting to be together isfriendly. For if it’s possible to be together and flourishing, that’s what everyonechooses; but if it isn’t possible together—like Heracles’s mother would perhapshave chosen for him to be a god rather than be with her and in serfdom to Eurys-theus.1245b31-33: And likewise what the Spartan said in the joke, when someone

ordered him to call upon the Dioscuri in a storm.1245b33-38: But it seems to be typical of one who cares to forbid you to take

part in difficult things, and typical of one you care for to want to take part, andboth these things follow for good reason. For nothing should be as painful to afriend as his friend is sweet to him. But it is thought that one should not choosewhat is one’s own.1245b38-1246a2: Hence they prevent them from taking part, on the grounds

that they are having a bad enough time themselves, lest they turn out to be look-ing to their own interests, and choosing to have a good time on account of theirfriend’s pain. Also there’s the fact that they are relieved not to have to bear theevils alone.1246a2-10: But since success and togetherness are choice-worthy, it’s clear

that being together accompanied by a lesser good is preferable in a way to beingapart accompanied by a greater good. But since it is unclear how much thetogetherness is worth, there are differences of opinion and (they) think that it isfriendly to take part in everything together, just as they say that shared dining ismore pleasant, though they get the same things.54 The others, on the other hand,don’t want that, since, if one takes the extreme case, they are agreeing on doingextremely badly together rather than extremely well apart.1246a10-12: There’s something similar to this in the case of misfortune. For

sometimes we want our friends not to be present and not to suffer pain, wheneverthey’re not in a position to do anything further. But sometimes it’s most pleasantfor them to be there.1246a13-19: There’s actually a good reason for this inconsistency. This occurs

because of the things we said before, and it is that on the one hand we completelyavoid looking at our friend when he is in pain or in some shameful condition,exactly as at ourselves,55 but then on the other hand seeing one’s friend is pleas-ant, like any other of the most pleasant things, for the reason given, even if he isnot in distress, if one is in distress oneself (?). So that whichever of these things ismore pleasant, that’s what tips the balance of wanting him to be there or not.1246a20-25: And this happens in the case of inferior people too, and occurs for

the same reason. For they are particularly jealous that their friends should not be

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54 This sentence seems to me to be corrupt since there should be a reference to ‘the one lot’thinking one way, as antecedent to the description of what the others think in the next sentence.

55 This probably means we don’t like looking at him just as we don’t like looking at ourselves, oralternatively we avoid looking at him as if indeed he were ourselves.

doing well or be, if they are doing badly themselves. That’s why they sometimeskill their beloved along with themselves. For one feels one’s own trouble more,just as one would if one recalled that one had once fared better, than if onethought one had always fared badly.56School of PhilosophyUniversity of East AngliaNorwich, UK NR4 7TJ

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ed. Proceedings of the 2006 Keeling Colloquium. Leiden: Brill.Mounce, H.O. 1997. ‘Philosophy, solipsism and thought’ Philosophical Quarterly 47: 1-18.Mounce, H.O. 2001. Tolstoy on Aesthetics: What is art? Aldershot: Ashgate.Osborne, C. 1983. ‘Aristotle De anima 3.2: How do we perceive that we see and hear?’ Classical

Quarterly 33: 401-411.Osborne, C. 1993. ‘A dangerous opponent of Democracy? Plato’s views in the Republic’ Omnibus

26: 8-10.Osborne, C. 1994. Eros Unveiled: Plato and the God of Love. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Sorabji, R. 2006. Self: ancient and modern insights about individuality, life and death. Oxford:

Oxford University Press.Stern-Gillet, S. 1995. Aristotle’s Philosophy of Friendship. Albany: SUNY Press.Vlastos, G. 1981. ‘The individual as object of love in Plato’ Platonic Studies. 2nd edn. Princeton:

Princeton University Press.Von Fragstein, A. 1974. Studien zur Ethik des Aristoteles. Amsterdam: B.R. Grüner.Whiting, J. forthcoming. ‘Keeling talk’ in R. Heinaman ed. Proceedings of the 2006 Keeling Collo-

quium. Leiden: Brill.Williams, B.A.O. 1981. ‘Persons, character and morality’ in Moral Luck. Cambridge: Cambridge

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56 That is, if one’s ‘other self’ continues and is happy, then one’s own loss feels worse.I am grateful for input from the audience at a conference on literature and other minds, in mem-

ory of Dick Beardsmore, in 2007. I would also like to thank MM McCabe for letting me see twodrafts of her forthcoming paper on the Eudemian Ethics passage, and Jen Whiting for a glimpse of herunpublished paper on the same text. I have also benefited from helpful comments and suggestionsfrom Ron Polansky and Larry Jost.