A R I S T O T L E
The life · 384–322 BCE
Major events of his life.
Born in Stagira
Aristotle is born in Stagira, a small city on the coast of northern Greece. His father, Nicomachus, is physician to the king of Macedon — a court connection that will shape his life twice over.
Nicomachean Ethics · Books VIII–IX
No one would choose to live without friends.
Two full books of the Ethics — nearly a fifth of the whole — Aristotle gives to friendship. It is not an ornament on the good life; it is part of what the good life is made of. Without friends, he writes, no one would choose to live, though he had every other good (1155a 5).
He draws a distinction, as ever. There are three kinds of friendship. Some are friendships of use — the merchant and his client, bound only by what each gets from the other. Some are friendships of pleasure — the company we keep because it is amusing. Both dissolve the moment the use or the pleasure runs dry, because neither friend was ever loved for who he is.
The third kind is the friendship of virtue: the bond between two good people who wish each other well for the other's own sake. It is rare, and slow to form, and it is the only kind that lasts — for the thing it rests on, a person's character, does not change with the weather.
Why should a self-sufficient person need friends at all? Because a friend, in Aristotle's phrase, is another self (1166a 31), and we see our own life more clearly reflected in theirs. To live well is an activity — and an activity is steadier, and more fully human, when it is shared.
We are not angry with people we fear or respect, as long as we fear or respect them; you cannot be afraid of a person and also at the same time angry with him. ... We become just by performing just action, temperate by performing temperate actions, brave by performing brave action.
The eleven virtues of character
Every craft has its ἔργον. A flautist's is to play well, a carpenter's to build well. The good of the thing is doing its work — well.
The human ergon is activity of soul in accordance with virtue. Eleven virtues, each a mean — hover a case to see what it stands between.
- Courage ἀνδρεία
- Temperance σωφροσύνη
- Liberality ἐλευθεριότης
- Magnificence μεγαλοπρέπεια
- Magnanimity μεγαλοψυχία
- Ambition φιλοτιμία
- Patience πραότης
- Truthfulness ἀλήθεια
- Wittiness εὐτραπελία
- Friendliness φιλία
- Modesty αἰδώς
Eleven virtues, and each one an ἀρετή — a mean held steady between too much and too little. Not a state we possess, but a thing we do.
The mean is not arithmetic.
For one person, two loaves are too few and ten are too many: trainers do not, on that account, hand out six. Six is the mean only for the dish, not for the eater.
What the right amount is depends on who you are, what the situation is, what is at stake. This is why ethics cannot be the science Plato wanted it to be — a deduction from definitions. It is a craft of particulars, and the craftsman's name is φρόνησις.
Practical wisdom. The perception that finds the mean in the case in front of you. Not a rule. A perception of cases.
"The decision rests with perception."
— 1109b 23
Akrasia
Socrates thought it impossible — to see the good clearly is to do it.
Aristotle knew better. You see the good whole, and still — ἀκρασία — you do the other thing.
Nicomachean Ethics · Book X
And the highest life is contemplation.
Every virtue traced in these chapters — courage, justice, generosity, the practical wisdom that finds the mean — belongs to a life lived among other people. Together they make the best human life. In Book X, Aristotle reaches past it.
The activity nearest the divine, he says, is θεωρία — the mind at work on what is eternal and true, sought for no end beyond the understanding itself. It is the most continuous of our activities, the most self-sufficient, the most complete. So far as we can, we must make ourselves immortal — and live by the best thing in us. — 1177b 33
