Love and human limitation:

Aristotle on the need for friendship (NE 9.9, 1170a13-b19)

Nicholas Gooding

1. Introduction

If we consider why we need friends in order to live well, the easy answers
don’t seem to get to the heart of the matter. Our friends might help us when
we are in need; they might cooperate with us in some endeavor we could not
undertake, or not successfully, on our own; we might simply be lonely or
bored by ourselves and welcome the diversion of friendly company. But if we
have the sense that these kinds of considerations do not exhaust friendship’s
value, or that it would be somehow disheartening if they did, we might ask
ourselves: What value would I derive from friendship even if I had no such
needs?
This is the question Aristotle considers in book 9, chapter 9 of the
Nicomachean Ethics (NE 9.9),1 and to see it as a fruitful or illuminating
question to ask, we need not suppose that we are likely to achieve such a
degree of self-sufficiency (autarkeia) that we could get by without help from
our friends. The easy answers proceed by identifying some obvious good that
is independent of friendship—we all know that it is good to have support
when we need it, to have help with difficult projects, to avoid the discomfort
of loneliness and boredom—and that friendship is one means of bringing
about. Asking why a person who is so capable of autonomous action and
blessed with fortune that she needs no help to procure any goods, other than
that afforded by friendship as such, rules out such answers. As such, by
explaining why even the self-sufficient person must have friends, Aristotle
hopes to thereby explain why all of us, though we are not self-sufficient,
desire friendship (philia)2 as something choiceworthy (haireton) in itself.
It might seem that the reason such a self-sufficient person would need
friendship is simply that friendship is a basic, intrinsic good. What more is

1
Translations of Plato and Aristotle in what follows are my own, though they are informed
by Penner & Rowe (Lysis), Irwin 1999 and Reeve 2014 (NE), Reeve 1998 (Politics), and Inwood
and Woolf 2013 (Eudemian Ethics = EE) (whose emendations I have often followed in dealing
with the textual difficulties of the EE). See bibliography for full citations of Greek texts.
2
Importantly, philia and philos are much broader in scope than the English “friendship” and
“friend.” Philia includes not only what we would naturally call “friendship,” but virtually any
relationship that involves mutual goodwill and trust, including relationships among family
members, business partners, political allies and fellow citizens. (Fraisse 1984; see Konstan
1996 for an interesting dissent from the received wisdom.) With respect to NE 9.9, however,
“friendship” is less misleading than it might be in other contexts, since Aristotle is focused
exclusively on a sub-class of philia that corresponds to something we would call “friendship.”

1
there to say? Indeed, what more could one say? There is, after all, an apparent
dilemma faced by anyone setting out to explain the intrinsic value of
something. One natural idea is to relate it to some independent good, the
value of which is not in question. That is the strategy at work in the easy
answers above. But those easy answers do not seem to reach as far as
friendship’s intrinsic value. And, in general, an explanation of one value in
terms of another can seem inevitably to instrumentalize the former. But if,
avoiding this first horn, one tries to explain the supposed value, not by appeal
to a more fundamental value, but on some non-evaluative basis, then it might
seem that the explanation proffered could not really be explaining the value
of the thing at all.
As we shall see, Aristotle’s answer to the question of why even the self-
sufficient person will need friendship in order to live well does proceed by
relating friendship to another good. But the question itself does not rule out
such an answer; it only rules out answers that appeal to goods that the self-
sufficient person can otherwise procure or values that she can otherwise
realize. To ask whether such a person needs friendship is to ask whether,
given the character of happiness and the constraints of human nature, there
is some good that we can achieve only through friendship, and without which
we could not be happy.
But we need not conclude that the relationship between friendship
and this further good is instrumental. We might, instead, see Aristotle as
articulating the place of friendship in a web of other intrinsic values that we
are also committed to, showing how they fit together and complement one
another. In this way, we can, at the very least, dissolve a sense of tension or
conflict between them, and we may illuminate the nature of each in seeing
them as composing an inter-connected whole.
The good that friendship makes possible, according to Aristotle, is the
perfection of a certain aspect of rational activity. In a sense, this is
unsurprising for Aristotle to say, since he thinks that happiness consists in
rational activity. But, in another sense, it is surprising. Rational capacities
would seem to be capacities of an individual. We develop those capacities by
education and socialization, of course, but it is tempting to think (or to
suppose that Aristotle thought) that, once we have, their exercise is
individualistic. I will argue here that Aristotle believed instead that they are
fully or perfectly exercised only in relation to others and, in particular, in
relation to genuine friends.3

3
Aristotle famously argued that the highest form of friendship was found only among the
virtuous. However, following Cooper 1999a, I believe that we should not take that to imply
that people who are less than fully virtuous can only have friendships for the sake of pleasure
or utility. Those who are not perfectly virtuous can partake of genuine friendships—they can
respect one another for who they are and care about each other for the other’s own sake—
insofar as they can see one another as basically decent according to their own conception of
the good. As Aristotle tells us, even the non-virtuous can partake of friendship because

2
 The more specific aspect of rational activity that Aristotle sees as a
social achievement is self-awareness. By this I do not mean the way in which
we are “peripherally” (en parergōi, Met. 12.9, 1074b36) aware of ourselves
perceiving when we are perceiving (cf. DA 3.2), thinking when we are
thinking, or more generally acting when we are acting (NE 9.9, 1170a30-31).
But we all desire, he thinks, something more—the “naturally pleasant”
awareness of (the actualization of) our being as something good in itself.
This desire, on Aristotle’s view, can only be fully satisfied in relation
to others. Our cognitive activity thus stands in contrast to god’s, whose
activity is that of thought thinking itself. We best approach god’s condition
not by trying to do our best on our own, but through what Aristotle calls the
friends’ “co-perceiving” (sunaisthanesthai) of one another’s being, “which
comes about by living together and sharing in discussion and discursive
thought (dianoia)” (NE 9.9, 1170b10-12). In that way, we are able to achieve
the kind of self-awareness we all desire.4
In order to understand why Aristotle focuses on this particular aspect
of rational activity, we must bear in mind that, in asking why even the self-
sufficient person needs friendship in order to be happy, Aristotle is not asking
why such a person needs friendship in light of her peculiar characteristics
(say, because she values contemplation above all). Rather, he is asking, in
effect, why all of us need friendship no matter how self-sufficient we might
become and no matter what activities we take our happiness to consist in.
Aristotle thus seeks to base his account of friendship’s value on an
aspect common to all activities that one might identify with one’s happiness,5
and he takes this aspect to be self-awareness. To desire this more elevated
form of self-awareness is part of what it is to be a rational creature, and even
if one’s conception of happiness does not give pride of place to it, one’s
rational nature still manifests itself in the desire to enjoy the awareness of
one’s activity as good.
It is not that he can only argue in this way. Nothing rules out arguing
that each conception of happiness implies a need for friends, but a different

“everyone has something of the good” (EE 7.2, 1238b13-14). It is as with self-love: “the many”
exhibit self-love “insofar as they approve of themselves and take themselves to be decent”
(NE 9.4, 1166b3-4). Moreover, Aristotle frequently cites the love of parents for children as
exemplifying the attitudes characteristic of genuine friendship. For these reasons, I will
speak of “genuine friendship” and “character friendship” rather than “virtue friendship.”
4
In this respect, I am attempting to resuscitate an interpretive view that has fallen out of
favor. It was defended in one form by Stewart 1892, whose view is sharply criticized by
Cooper 1999b. In section 4, I respond to what I take to be Cooper’s central worries.
5
We might say, “no matter their conception of the good.” But not in the sense of an explicitly
endorsed philosophical theory of happiness. Not all such theories identify happiness with
some kind of activity. But, in the way people live their lives, we can see an operative
conception of the good, one that implicitly identifies their well-being with some activity or
activities (whether it’s feasting, philosophizing, etc.).

3
need in each case. But Aristotle does not opt for this piecemeal strategy. He
thinks there is a kind of unity to the value of friendship.
Thus, Aristotle is not only aiming to address a philosophical puzzle or
aporia, but to explain a pervasive feature of human life.6 We seem to get
pleasure out of shared activity with our friends7—pleasure, I mean, that we
would not get out of doing the same activity alone. Some of the time, no
doubt, that is because we would be lonely or bored doing it on our own. Some
of the time, we simply could not perform the activity, or not as well or as
easily, on our own. If that were all there were to it, then shared activity would
be valuable as a way of avoiding certain experiences that we find unpleasant
or would be valuable only instrumentally; it would not be worth choosing for
its own sake. But that does not seem to be all there is to it. We desire shared
activity with friends even when we are perfectly capable of enjoying solitary
activity. Aristotle’s suggestion is that this is because it enables us to enjoy a
more refined form of the self-awareness we all desire.
Part of the significance of the argument, then, stems from the fact that
it implies a view of self-awareness, and human rationality more generally, as
socially constituted—not because rationality is “conventional,” rather than
natural, but because human rational capacities are constitutively exercised in
relation to others, so that our nature itself is socially realized. It is a view
which, besides being philosophically interesting in its own right, should also
enrich our understanding of Aristotle’s ethics as a whole.
Given that Aristotle sees a life devoted to reason as maximally self-
sufficient and divine; and given that the value of friendship and community
requires a commitment to others that renders us in some ways more
vulnerable and less self-sufficient, since it places more of what we value
outside of our direct control; it might have seemed that our nature as rational
animals, on the one hand, and our nature as social or political animals, on
the other, place conflicting demands on us—with these two aspects of our
nature corresponding to competing conceptions of the good life. It is often
thought that this reflects a deep tension in Aristotle’s ethical thought (cf.
Brown 2014). But if I am right that human rationality, in its fullest or most
perfect form, is an essentially social capacity, we might come to see the choice
between the political life and the contemplative life as being much less stark
than we have tended to assume.
The argument also has a further and somewhat independent interest.
As the contrast with divine thought makes clear, Aristotle agrees, in a sense,
with a view that Plato has Socrates defend in the Lysis: The value of

6
Aristotle’s aporetic method is philosophically important not only because it might enable
us to dissolve our puzzlement (say, about akrasia, or the possibility of generation and
destruction), but because, by doing so, we learn something substantive (say, about human
motivation, or the nature of primary substances). (Cf. Reeve 2002: 38-45.)
7
For the idea that shared activity is characteristic of genuine friendship, see NE 8.5, 1157b20-
23; 9.12, 1172a1-8.

4
friendship is relative to human limitation or imperfection, our failure to enjoy
divine self-sufficiency. In the Lysis, Socrates argued on this basis that, since
what we really desire is such perfect self-sufficiency, we value friendship only
as a means of approaching it and do not really value our friends in
themselves. And I think it is tempting to suppose, with Plato, that, if
something is valuable because it enables us to overcome some limitation, its
value must be merely instrumental. But it is here that Aristotle disagrees.
On Aristotle’s view, the value of or need for friendship is relative to
human limitation, but to a limitation that derives from the conditions that
make possible our way of life—in particular, to certain constitutive features
of “perception” (aisthēsis) and (human) “thought” (noēsis). As such, they are
not limitations we could coherently strive to overcome. To imagine them
away is to imagine away our human nature; but that is just to imagine away
the background conditions in terms of which it makes sense to ask whether
or not something is valuable for us.8 The comparison with god, as Aristotle
says in the Eudemian Ethics, is thus apt to mislead us in this context (EE 7.12,
1245b12-19). The question of whether we would value our friends even if we
achieved self-sufficiency may involve a significant degree of idealization—
perhaps the practical constraints of human life make it unlikely that we will
ever be so self-sufficient as to have none of the extrinsic or instrumental sorts
of needs for friends I described above—but it still must be a recognizably
human form of self-sufficiency.

2. Understanding the aporia

To understand Aristotle’s argument, we must first consider the puzzle or

aporia to which it is a response. Like many Aristotelian aporiai, it derives
from an apparent contradiction between what seems manifestly to be the
case and a Platonic view supported by an apparently compelling argument
(here, that the happy person, being self-sufficient, will have no need of
friends). But it might seem surprising that Aristotle does not simply dismiss
the Platonic position as being based on an unrealizable notion of “self-
sufficiency” (autarkeia). Seeing why he does not reveals an unexpected
agreement between Aristotle and Plato and makes possible a more refined

8
In this way, I believe that we can resist Hitz 2011’s conclusion—which is “counterintuitive,”
as she acknowledges—that Aristotle believed “that as a person grows in contemplative
excellence, he outgrows his dependence on others and so his need for friends” (4; cf. 26).
This is true up to a certain point, since such a person will need fewer friends for the sake of
utility and pleasure, but my claim here is that we cannot coherently see ourselves as aiming
at a condition of solitary self-sufficiency. A prima facie textual worry about Hitz’s claim is
that when Aristotle is considering, immediately after the argument of NE 9.9, how many
friends we should aim to have, he seems to suggest that the “proper measure” is set by the
number with whom one can genuinely share life (NE 9.10, 1170b29-1171a20). Aristotle clearly
thinks that this number is fairly small (“we should be content to find a few such friends,”
1171a20), but it is not zero.

5
understanding of Aristotle’s puzzle. This, in turn, will enable us to identify
some demands that must be met by a satisfying response to it.
Aristotle begins NE 9.9 by presenting an aporia: On the one hand,
“they say that blessedly happy people (makarioi) have no need of friends”
since they are self-sufficient (autarkēs) (1169b2-4). But it seems “absurd”
(atopos) to think that the happy person will be friendless (1169b8, b16).
But we might wonder why Aristotle should think that there is a
genuine puzzle raised by the fact that the happy person is self-sufficient, or,
at any rate, a puzzle he has not already addressed. Aristotle does maintain
that “the final good seems to be self-sufficient,” but not, it might seem, in the
sense required to get the aporia going:

But we are speaking not of what is sufficient for a person alone, living a
solitary life, but rather for parents and children and wife and, in general, for
friends and fellow citizens, since the human being is naturally political...And
we regard as self-sufficient that which by itself makes a life choiceworthy
and lacking in nothing. (NE 1.7, 1097b7-11, 14-16)

On this basis, Aristotle argues in NE 1.7-9 that happiness depends upon goods
which are not qualities of body or soul and which are thus, to some degree,
outside the agent’s control. At the limit, one needs simply not to be struck
down by catastrophe, as Priam was. But, more than that, one also needs the
fairly robust supply of external goods which are necessary for the fullest
possible exercise of virtue. For a life in which a virtuous person acts with
resources adequate to his grand or noble aims is more choiceworthy than a
life in which one makes do, however virtuously, with a bad lot.
We might say that the self-sufficiency criterion for the human good
thus implies significant constraints on the self-sufficiency of the happy
person. This may seem to prevent the argument that the happy person won’t
need friends from getting off the ground: For one, we need friends in order
to secure the external goods we need for comfortable living. Secondly, friends
themselves are external goods—indeed, “the greatest external good”
(1169b10); since the self-sufficiency of the happy person doesn’t imply that
she won’t need external goods, a fortiori it doesn’t imply that she won’t need
friends. Why doesn’t Aristotle dismiss the aporia on such grounds?
Aristotle does believe that it is only through mutually beneficial
relationships (philiai) with others that we can secure the external goods we
need to live comfortably (or at all).9 And yet Aristotle speaks in NE 9.9 as if
the blessedly happy person has no need of friendships that provide useful or
necessary things (1169b27). It is not that he has forgotten that the happy

9
It is only as a member of a political community that we “reach the limit of total self-
sufficiency” (Pol. 1.2, 1252b28-29; cf. Pol. 1.2, 1253a27-29). Thus, we need at least that form of
philia that makes such community possible, philia politikē, “which is formed on the basis of
utility above all else” (EE 7.10, 1242a6-7). As such, we need utility friendship.

6
person is still a human being and so “his nature is not self-sufficient” (NE 10.8,
1078b34-35). But he wants to explain here why genuine friendship—which
involves caring for another person for their own sake, not merely insofar as
it redounds to one’s own benefit—is necessary for happiness. (After all, there
is no question about how utility friendship contributes to one’s happiness; it
contributes useful things.) Employing the perspective of a person who is so
capable of autonomous action and blessed with fortune that she does not
need friends for procuring any goods other than that afforded by friendship
itself—however unlikely it would be to achieve such a degree of self-
sufficiency—has an important heuristic effect: It rules out answers that
would explain the good of friendship on the basis of instrumental benefits it
might provide; to ask why such a person would value friendship is to ask what
genuine friendship alone could contribute to a life well lived.
Aristotle likely intends to include the Socrates of Plato’s Lysis when
he says that those who argue that the happy person will be friendless do so
perhaps “because the many think that [only] useful people are friends”
(1169b23-28).10,11 Socrates argued that we value our friends (philoi) only
because we lack some good, and that therefore the good, self-sufficient
(hikanos) person will have no interest in friendship (Lysis 215b, 216e; cf. Symp.
204e). Socrates’ point was not merely that friendship involves the need for
one’s friend, but that we love others because of the desire for some other good
(or goods), which friendship may enable us to achieve.
If Aristotle’s interest were merely in responding to Plato’s Lysis, he
might have simply pointed out that Socrates was assuming that friendship
itself was not the external good the happy person needs; once we allow that
not all friendship is for the sake of utility, we close off the argument of the
Lysis. But Aristotle has a more substantive aim: to explain why friendship is

10
Not, of course, in the sense that Aristotle would count Plato among “the many,” but in the
sense that Socrates relies on Lysis’s acceptance of this “common opinion” in order to arrive
at the conclusion that the perfectly good will be friendless. Outside of the Lysis itself,
evidence for this common opinion can be found, e.g., in Thucydides II, 40.4-5; cf. Adkins
1963, Dover 1974: 276-278. It is closely related to the conception of justice as “helping friends
and harming enemies” (e.g., Republic 1, 332d); cf. Dover 1974: 180-184, Blundell 1989.
11
Hitz 2011 claims, “If this is meant to be an account of the Lysis, it is highly slanderous, since
the question that introduces the paradox there is about whether the good will be friends
with the good, and so it is raised especially for virtue friendship” (21). However (if we bear in
mind that Aristotle’s conception of virtue friendship is not merely friendship among the
virtuous, but friendship on the basis of virtue), it seems to me that it may be an apt diagnosis
of what goes wrong in the Lysis after all: Socrates argues that friendship among the truly,
perfectly good is impossible on the grounds that such people, already being good and happy,
have no need for the beneficial things friendship might offer, and therefore have no further
need of friendship. That argument makes sense only if one is thinking that one needs
friendship only insofar as it is a means of procuring such benefits. Thus, although it is
concerned with friendship among the virtuous, the argument of the Lysis assumes that such
friendship would have to be on the basis of utility. (See, e.g., Lysis 210c8-9: “no one loves
anyone else so far as that person is useless (ἄχρηστος).”)

7
good, and why it is good in such a way that one must possess it in order to be
happy. Thus, Aristotle does not want to simply assume that friendship is an
intrinsic or final good.12
Moreover, even if we do simply assume that friendship is a final good,
that by itself won’t show that it is necessary for happiness. Say, for instance,
that reading a great work of literature is an activity that is good in itself, at
least for someone who is in position to appreciate it. That might explain why
such a person engaged in such an activity; but it would not justify the claim
that they had to do so in order to be happy. There might, after all, be other
intrinsically good activities that they’d be as well or better off engaged in. To
show that something is necessary for happiness, one would need to show that
it is either among the essential constituents of happiness or a necessary
condition for the realization of such a constituent.

The idealized perspective of the maximally self-sufficient agent thus forces

Aristotle to focus on what good genuine friendship as such contributes to a
life well lived. However, it is not merely a heuristic. If we consider Aristotle’s
views of the self-sufficiency of the human good more carefully, we see, I
believe, a surprising point of agreement with Plato.
Consider how the argument of the Lysis proceeds, after Socrates gets
Lysis to accept that the perfectly good will be friendless. That might have
seemed depressing enough. But Socrates goes on to argue on this basis that
even those of us—all of us, I take it—who are “neither good nor bad” do not
genuinely love (philein) their supposed friends in themselves. Given that
friendship is relative to a need or lack, what the neither-good-nor-bad really
want is to achieve goodness and self-sufficiency. The good itself is the “first
friend” (prōton philon), that “for the sake of which we say that all the rest are
beloved (phila) too.” “[All] the other things that we have called friends for the
sake of that thing,” Socrates goes on, “may be deceiving us, like so many
phantoms (eidōla) of it” (219d1-4). To determine what we truly value, we must
consider what we would still value if we had no such lack or need—if we were
in the condition of perfection we really desire, rather than the imperfect
condition in which we actually find ourselves.

12
Given that it is character friendship under discussion, we know that one’s friend must
(seem to oneself to) be good. But, as Aristotle says, someone “must not only be good without
qualification, but also good for you if he will indeed be a friend to you. For one is good
without qualification by being good [i.e., virtuous], but he is a friend by being good for
another” (EE 7.2, 1238a3-5, emphasis mine). It may be in NE 9.9 that we get an explanation
of why, in character friendship, “both harmonize, so that what is good without qualification
is good for another” (1238a6-7)—not in that their friendship is useful or beneficial, but in
that it is choiceworthy in its own right for each.

8
 What I would like to suggest is that Aristotle, in a sense, accepts
something very much like Plato’s demand.13 As is made clear when he returns
to the self-sufficiency of the happy life in NE 10.7-8, Aristotle thinks of self-
sufficiency as a continuum: An activity is more self-sufficient (and therefore
has a better claim on constituting happiness) to the degree that its
choiceworthiness is not increased by the addition of external goods (NE 10.7,
1177a27-b1; 10.8, 1178a25-b5).14 Thus, for instance, contemplation is more self-
sufficient than practically virtuous action because the latter tends to be made
more choiceworthy the more resources one has (up to a point)—a grand act
of generosity is more “fine” or “noble” (kalon) than a more meager one. By
contrast, “the wise person is able, and more able the wiser he is, to study even
by himself” (1177a32-34). This might suggest that, at the extreme end of the
self-sufficiency continuum—which is what we are really aiming at—we
would find ourselves in a condition of solitary contemplative activity, like a
god. Aristotle aims, in NE 9.9, to dispel any such appearance.
A similar point emerges if we consider a closely related criterion for
the human good. A good is “final” or “perfect” (teleion) to the degree that it
is chosen purely for its own sake. Unlike contemplation, we often engage in
practical activity in order to get ourselves out of an unfortunate condition
that, all else being equal, we’d prefer not to be in (NE 10.7, 1177b1-21)15—no
one, unless they were a “complete murderer,” would choose to start a war for
the sake of displaying courage (1177b9-10). In a similar vein, the value of
justice in distribution enters the picture only because we must make do in a
condition of some scarcity; justice in retribution, only because people wrong
others; and so on. Aristotle is clear that courageous and just actions are
chosen for their own sake; but the fact that they are also chosen for the sake
of getting of a mess we’d rather avoid means, he believes, that they are less
choiceworthy than contemplation. As such, to determine whether friendship

13
In associating this demand with Plato, rather than merely with the character of Socrates, I
do not mean to suggest that we should see Socrates as a mere mouthpiece for Plato’s own
views. In fact, in both the Lysis and Symposium (which makes a parallel point regarding the
impossibility of erōs among the self-sufficient), there is good reason to suspect that Plato is
doing something more interesting, something that emerges from the interplay between the
distinct perspectives of different characters in the dramatic setting. Nonetheless, I do think
we can attribute the philosophical demand concerning the self-sufficiency of the human
good to Plato himself, though I do not have space to pursue that here.
14
Brown 2014 argues that there are, in fact, two “incompatible” notions of self-sufficiency in
Aristotle’s ethics: “Political self-sufficiency” (which is at work in NE 1.7) and “solitary self-
sufficiency” (which is at work in NE 10.7-8, and is associated with contemplation and
particularly god-like). It is an illuminating discussion of the difficulties with reconciling NE
1.7 (and Politics 1.2) with NE 10.7-8, but I think that we can interpret the sense of “self-
sufficiency” at work in NE 1.7 in light of the discussion in NE 10.7-8 in such a way that we
dissolve the apparent tension.
15
We might make sense of this idea by exploiting Aristotle’s distinction between what is
choiceworthy as such (haplōs) and what is choiceworthy in a particular situation (cf. NE 3.1).

9
is perfectly choiceworthy, Aristotle seeks to show that it would be
choiceworthy even if one were in the most desirable condition imaginable.
However, as I mentioned above, Aristotle intends not only to explain
the value of friendship for such idealized agents, but to thereby identify a
reason that all of us value friendship as a final good. In recapitulating the
argument of NE 9.9, he suggests that it explains why, “Whatever being (to
einai) is [in the view of] each, or that for the sake of which they choose to
live, that is what they choose to pursue together with friends” (NE 9.12, 1172a1-
3). (Aristotle goes to cite examples as various as drinking and feasting,
exercising, hunting and philosophizing together.) This suggests a certain
constraint on Aristotle’s answer. Though the aporia arises in an especially
stark form for those engaged in the contemplative life, since it has a special
claim to self-sufficiency and finality, the response cannot depend on unique
features of that way of life.

I have argued that Aristotle’s sympathy with Plato regarding the conditions
that must be met by an account of why the happy person needs friends runs
deeper than we might have expected. But, in order to understand Aristotle’s
response, we must see where that sympathy runs out. Aristotle agrees that
the idealized perspective of the maximally self-sufficient agent is one from
which certain values emerge especially perspicuously, but it must still be a
recognizably human perspective. Aristotle thus relies on a distinction
between merely practical limitations—which derive from the contingent
circumstances of human life and which we must set aside in considering why
we value friendship in its own right—and constitutive limitations—which
derive from the nature of human activity as such and which thus cannot be
coherently set aside. We must be careful not to press the comparison
between the good person and god so far that we are imagining away the
conditions that make possible our way of life (EE 7.12, 1245b12-19).
Thus, on the view that I will defend in what follows, Aristotle’s
disagreement with the Lysis is not with the idea that friendship is relative to
our imperfection. Its value does depend upon our inability to perfectly realize
and exercise our rational capacities on our own. But he believes he can resist
Plato’s conclusion that the happy person would not need friends because
friendship’s value does not depend upon a merely contingent limitation that
we could coherently strive to overcome. We therefore cannot see ourselves
as aiming at a condition of solitary self-sufficiency.

3. Self-awareness and the choiceworthiness of life (1170a16-b5)

We are now in a position to identify some important constraints that a

response to the aporia must meet. Aristotle’s aim is to show that, whatever
activity you value most in life, you will need friendship in order to live well
(by your own lights). It might be thought that Aristotle could achieve this

10
aim simply by showing that friendship is a distinct intrinsic good. But, even
granting that friendship is a distinct intrinsic good, this by itself does not
show that one must have friends in order to be happy. Instead, Aristotle must
(1) identify some essential aspect of any activity that one might identify with
living well, and (2) argue that this aspect of the activity is only fully realizable
through friendship. I will argue in this section that this essential aspect of
human activity is self-awareness.
My focus will be on the last, and most involved, of a series of three
arguments that Aristotle offers in response to the aporia (1170a13-1170b19)—
one that he singles out as being “more naturalistic” or “more scientific”
(phusikōteron, 1170a13-14).16 But it is worth briefly considering this argument’s
relationship to the two preliminary arguments. Both seem to employ the
strategy I’ve just described: The first (1169b28-1170a4) suggests that there is
some difficulty with “observing” our own actions, which we can overcome
through friendship; the second (1170a4-11) points out that it is difficult to act
continuously on one’s own, but with friends it is easier and more pleasant.
Both of the preliminary arguments can thus be seen as explaining the
need for friendship in terms of a meaningful limitation on human self-
sufficiency: It is only in virtue of the fact we are not able, on our own, either
to “observe” our own actions, or to continuously enjoy the activities we value,
that friendship has the value that it does. But I think that we can immediately
see a difficulty with the preliminary arguments. They do not give us reason
to see these limitations as anything but contingent limitations that we should
strive to overcome.17 And this means that they do not suffice for a wholly
satisfying response to the aporia—they seem to leave open the Socratic view
according to which we are aiming at a condition of solitary self-sufficiency
and value friendship only as a means of approaching such a condition.
This suggests a further constraint on Aristotle’s response. The failure
of self-sufficiency on which the value of friendship depends must not be a

16
Aristotle often refers to an argument as “naturalistic” (physikos, cf. 1147a24) when it is based
on fundamental truths from outside of ethics proper, rather than only on appearances and
common opinions. As we can see in Aristotle’s response to the puzzle of akrasia in NE 7.3,
the “naturalistic” perspective need not be seen as superseding the previous arguments;
instead, it may bring out their basis in facts about human nature. This, I believe, is what we
find in NE 9.9 as well.
17
In the first argument, Aristotle does not tell us what that difficulty is with “observing” one’s
own actions, nor how observing a friend enables us to overcome it. But one might be
tempted, as the author of the Magna Moralia was, to think of things like simple biases (MM
2.15, 1213a15-20): We are apt to recognize shortcomings in others that we overlook in
ourselves, (or, thinking of another familiar psychological tendency, to recognize virtues in
others where we find fault with ourselves). Perhaps friendship helps us to correct such biases.
But then it would appear that friendship’s value is relative to a cognitive limitation that we
should strive, as far as we can, to overcome. It seems perfectly coherent (if rather optimistic)
to imagine myself exhibiting the kind of self-awareness that, Aristotle suggests, makes my
action pleasant “by nature” without its being colored by these kinds of biases.

11
contingent failure that we could coherently strive to overcome, but be due to
the essential nature of whatever activities happiness might be thought to
consist in. My contention is that the final, scientific argument is meant to
meet this demand. By drawing on his account of the capacities which define
human life, Aristotle is able to ground friendship’s value in constitutive
features of human activity.

The final argument divides into two parts. Aristotle first explains why living
is good and pleasant by nature, and therefore choiceworthy for the subject
(1170a16-b5). In the second part (1170b5-14), Aristotle sets out to explain, on
the basis of this account of why life is choiceworthy, why sharing life with a
friend is similarly choiceworthy for the excellent person. I believe that we can
see the two parts as attempting to meet the two conditions I described above:
The first part identifies an aspect of any contender for the activity that
constitutes human happiness; the second explains how this valuable aspect
of human activity is fully realizable only in relation to a friend.
My aim in this section is to offer an interpretation of the first part of
the argument. It will help to begin by offering an overview of what I take to
be the basic idea; I will then turn to some of the thornier issues of
interpretation, as a proper understanding of them is essential to seeing how
(or whether) Aristotle is able to successfully resolve the aporia.
Human life is defined by the “capacity of perception or thought”
(1170a17).18 Because of this, when “we are engaged in activity” (energoumen),
we “perceive” that we are (a31); or, equivalently, when we are “fully” living
(i.e., not merely alive, but actually exercising our distinctive capacities), “we
perceive that we are living” or “...that we are” (a33-b1). (Aristotle treats
“being,” “living,” and “engaging in activity” as interchangeable in this
argument.19) For the excellent person above all, and for others to a lesser
degree and in a derivative way, living is “good in itself” (1170a20-22); his
awareness of himself living will therefore be pleasant by nature for him.
Aristotle sums up the argument by saying, “one’s own being is choiceworthy
because of the perception of oneself as good” (1170b8-9).

18
It might seem surprising that Aristotle focuses in NE 9.9 specifically on perception and
thought, saying that “living is defined...for human beings as the capacity of perception or
thought” (τὸ δὲ ζῆν ὁρίζονται τοῖς ζῴοις δυνάμει αἰσθήσεως, ἀνθρώποις δ'αἰσθήσεως ἢ
νοήσεως, 1170a16-17)—what of all the other distinctive capacities of the human soul? Frede
1995 argues, quite compellingly I think, that Aristotle thought that all human cognitive states
involve some combination of input from perception and thought. If we adopt this view, then
we might suppose that, in speaking of perception and thought, Aristotle means to include
human cognitive activity generally, not only αἴσθησις and νόησις strictly speaking.
19
Cf. DA 415b13: “For living things, their being is living,” i.e., for any living thing, their essence
is their specific form of life. The identity between “living” and “being active” is licensed by
the fact that it is “fully” living that is at issue (not merely being alive), and a thing is most
fully what it is in actually exercising (not just possessing) the capacities characteristic of it.

12
 As is made clear by Aristotle’s subsequent summary of the argument
(NE 9.12), in speaking of the perception of oneself as good, Aristotle means
the perception of one’s “being” (to einai) as good according to “what being is
for [i.e., in the view of] each” (1172a1-2), or the perception of one’s living as
good according to “the end for the sake of which one chooses to live” (1172a2).
It is an awareness, as one might put it, of oneself really living, in terms set by
one’s own view of what it is to live well. To perceive one’s being (or one’s
living, or oneself) as good, then, is to be aware of oneself as engaged in
activities which, by one’s own lights, are genuinely worth doing, indeed
which make life worth living.
What I would like to argue is that, on Aristotle’s view, this kind of self-
awareness is integral to the excellent functioning of human beings, insofar as
we are rational animals. There is, as Segvic 2011 rightly pointed out, “an
element of irreducible subjectivity in Aristotle’s account of what the good life
for human beings consists in” (181). Moreover, it is an essential aspect of all
the activities that people see as constituting happiness; even for those who
do not explicitly identify living well with rational activity, their rational
nature still reveals itself in the desire to enjoy this awareness of their activity
as good. To justify this suggestion, I want to bring out, first, why we should
see such self-awareness as a manifestation of our nature as rational beings,
and, second, why I take it to be an ineliminable aspect of any activity that
might be plausibly seen as choiceworthy to oneself.
Throughout the argument, Aristotle stresses repeatedly the fact that
the “excellent” (spoudaios) person’s awareness of her own activity will be
pleasant “by nature” and “in itself.” Given Aristotle’s arguments against
hedonism, this emphasis on pleasure might seem surprising. But a “natural
pleasure” is, one might say, how the good shows up in the subjective
experience of an excellent subject; to find something naturally pleasant is to
experience it as “fine” or “beautiful” (kalon),20 i.e., good in itself as opposed
to useful.21 In NE 9.9, Aristotle applies this idea to the perception of one’s
own activity (1170a8-10): The natural pleasure the excellent person takes in
her self-awareness reflects the excellence of the thing perceived and the
perceiver (which, in this case, coincide). Other people will enjoy pleasant
self-awareness insofar as the activity they are engaged in is valuable
according to their own view of the good (cf. NE 9.4, 1166b2-4).
In general, the capacity to perceive something as good in itself or
“fine” (kalon) is not a capacity that we have merely in virtue of possessing the
faculty of “perception” (aisthēsis) in the strict or narrow sense, but depends
also on our rational capacities (cf. Pol. 1.2, 1253a16-18). Even confining
ourselves to perceptible objects, being kalon is not itself a perceptible quality,

20
NE 10.4, 1174b15-25. See Bostock 1988; Aufderheide 2016.
21
The fine is contrasted with the useful or beneficial at, e.g., NE 3.7, 1116a12-15; 4.2, 1123a24-
26; 8.12, 1162b36-1163a1.

13
but the result of the way in which those qualities are organized or structured;
the ability to perceive it as beautiful involves the ability to take in this order,
and that ability is one we have in virtue of also possessing reason.22
Seeing an action as good depends on reason in a further sense.
Aristotle maintains that a virtuous action must be done for its own sake
(1105a32) or for the sake of the “fine” (1116a12-15; 1123a24-26; 1168b29-34) (cf.
Lear 2006). The ability to see one’s action as good will thus depend upon
what one takes as the object of rational desire (boulēsis). This is why non-
rational animals and pre-rational children cannot seem good to themselves
(EE 7.6, 1240b30-34). Enjoying the perception of one’s activity as good is thus
a manifestation of our nature as rational, and not only perceptive, beings.23
That Aristotle speaks of “perception” of one’s activity—rather than,
say reflection or thought about it—reflects a concern not with something else
one does in addition to the activities that one values (e.g., one might
remember the symposium fondly, anticipate the next one with pleasure,
reflect on how well one is living by attending so many symposia), but an
aspect of those activities themselves. When I act, I act with the awareness of
what I am doing, and (at least some of the time) with an awareness of it as
something good or worth doing. This is part of what it is to act, as can be
seen in the fact that making sense of the action of another person normally
involves seeing it as a manifestation of such awareness.
Aristotle suggests that the pleasant perception of one’s living as good
is part of what makes it good (1170b9). There’s no question of this being an
expression of subjectivism—living well is not simply a matter of believing
that you are—but Aristotle is highlighting the fact that the goodness of the
activity of a rational animal depends upon the way in which the subject sees
her activity. To act virtuously, one must perform the action for its own sake—
but that is a condition that can only be met if the agent sees her action in a

22
Cf. Metaphysics 1072a26-1072b1 and 1078b1, where he connects “beauty” (to kalon) with
order, intelligibility, unity, and being; it is this idea that licenses the identity of the primary
object of thought with the primary object of desire in Met. 12.7. For the application of these
ideas to the value of self-awareness, see EE 7.12, 1244b23ff. (For Aristotle’s fairly restrictive
view of perceptible qualities, see, e.g., DA 2.6 and 3.1.
23
I suspect, therefore, that Aristotle does not think that the perception of one’s activity as
good is a case of perception strictly speaking (which we might refer to as “sense-perception”).
Perceiving something as good depends as well on how we judge or conceptualize or
represent the information given to us in sense-perception. That he would also use
“perception” (aisthēsis) to refer to the way in which we experience the things that we
perceive on the basis of how we conceptualize them seems to me a natural extension of the
strict sense. Alternatively, it could be that Aristotle thinks that our perceptual capacities
themselves are re-shaped by reason, i.e., that once we develop the ability to reason and think,
we are able to deploy concepts (including evaluative concepts) in perception itself, giving us
new discriminative capacities which are properly forms of perception. (Cf. Moss 2012;
Aufderheide 2016; against this, see Morrison 2013). But it does not matter for my purposes
which of these interpretations is correct; in either case, enjoying the perception of one’s
activity as good is a manifestation of our nature as rational, and not only perceptive, beings.

14
certain light and does it for that reason (cf. Lear 2006). As such, a rational
being cannot be living well independently of whether she sees her activities
or projects as the kinds of things which are worth doing. There is a kind of
reflexivity built into human happiness: Without seeing herself as engaged in
something valuable, a rational creature would not be truly so engaged.24

The first part of the argument identifies a certain aspect of any activity that
might be plausibly thought to constitute happiness. Insofar as we can make
sense of the idea of subtracting that element from the activity—not very far,
if what I have said so far is right—it would mean that the activity was no
longer choiceworthy to oneself as a rational being. But to see why this might
be an aspect of activity which is only fully realizable in relation to friends, we
must first consider in more detail what Aristotle says about self-awareness
and the reflexive nature of perception and thought.
Aristotle begins the first part of his argument by pointing out that,
though human life is defined in terms of the capacity (dunamis) for
perception and thought, “fully” (kuriōs) living is to be found in the actual
exercise (energeia) of those capacities (1170a16-19). The use of the dunamis-
energeia distinction here is not just a way of making a common-sense point
using technical Aristotelian jargon.25 In insisting that human life is defined
in terms of capacity or potentiality (dunamis), Aristotle alludes to the fact
that human beings—however capable they are of loftier activities than other
animals—are after all still animals; considered in themselves, they merely
possess the potential to perceive and think.26 The development and exercise
of these potentialities depends, as we shall see, “on something else,” (EE
1245b18-19). God, by contrast, just is the activity or actuality (energeia) of
thought, and is therefore completely self-sufficient, dependent on nothing
external to its activity (Met. 12.9, 1174b28-30).
On my view, the contrast between human and divine cognitive
activity is crucial to understanding the thrust of Aristotle’s argument,27 so we

24
The goodness of one’s life may depend on the capacity for self-awareness in a further sense.
As Aristotle tells us in the Eudemian Ethics, wishing to perceive oneself just is wishing to
exhibit those qualities that makes a life good and choiceworthy (1245a4-5). Given that one
must live with “perception” of one’s life, one wants to enjoy the naturally pleasant self-
perception that derives from seeing one’s life as, say, being organized around projects that
one thinks of as good or meaningful (cf. NE 10.4, 1175a10-20). The fact that, in living as a
human being, you “perceive” yourself living affects not just how you view your life, but how
you live it.
25
Namely, that we would not find living choiceworthy if it meant merely being alive, but not
actually exercising our distinctively human capacities (EE 1.5, 1216a1-5; Protrepticus 44.9-12).
26
I suspect that this follows from the fact that we, unlike god, are not pure, immaterial form,
but “composite” creatures (cf. Met. 1075a5-10)—only a pure form could be pure actuality. If
so, then it really is a very fundamental fact about us.
27
In their commentary on NE 9.9, Gauthier and Jolif 1959 fault Aristotle for failing to appeal
to this distinction between human and divine self-sufficiency; they therefore prefer the

15
should consider some relevant features of that contrast. There is an
important connection between the facts (1) that god is absolutely self-
sufficient; (2) that god just is the activity of thinking (rather than possessing
the capacity for thinking);28 and (3) that god “thinks itself...[i.e., god’s]
thinking is a thinking of thinking” (or “an understanding of understanding”)
(Met. 12.9, 1174b33-35). If god’s thought was of something else—something
independent of its intellectual activity—then god’s thought would depend on
that other thing and god would fail to be absolutely self-sufficient.
To see why, consider, first, that thought or understanding (nous29), in
the strict Aristotelian sense, is neither true or false; it either “grasps”
(thinganō) its object, or fails to be genuine thought or understanding at all.
But whether or not it does so—thus, whether it manages to be an instance of
thought—depends of course on what the object of thought is like. (E.g.,
whether an attempt to understand the essence of an oak tree grasps its object
depends upon what the oak essence is; if it didn’t so depend, it wouldn’t
count as being of the oak essence at all.) In cases where it is of something
external to it, thinking therefore depends on the nature of that external
object, and so is not absolutely self-sufficient. Moreover, as we shall see
momentarily, Aristotle believes that, when thought is of something else, its
object must ultimately be responsible for the actualization of thinking. Thus,
if god were to think of objects independent of it, god would merely possess
the capacity for thought and (again) would not be absolutely self-sufficient.
It is important for my interpretation of the argument that human
cognitive capacities, by contrast, are necessarily actualized by their object.
This is clearest in the case of perception, since we are actually perceiving
when a perceptible object acts on the perceptual organ in such a way as to
“receive” the object’s perceptible form (e.g., its color) (DA 2.5; 2.12, 424a18ff.);
what actualizes our perceptual capacity is also what the perception is of.
Thinking, by contrast, does not require its object to be presently
acting on it; once one has acquired some body of knowledge, one is able to
“actualize his knowledge through himself” (DA 3.4, 429b7). Nonetheless,

Eudemian version. Perhaps it is a fault, but it seems to me merely a fault of presentation. We

can make the best sense of the argument by seeing it as implicitly relying on this contrast.
28
It is important to recognize the strangeness of this idea. God is not the subject that engages
in thought; god just is the activity of thought. But it is very difficult to refrain entirely from
speaking in terms that suggest that god is distinct from god’s activity; the distinction
between agent and action is arguably built into ordinary language.
29
It is hard to settle on a fully satisfying translation of noein and its cognates. “Understand”
has the advantage of being a “factive” verb—you don’t count as understanding something if
you are wrong about it; and so it seems more natural in the context of the claim that nous
cannot fail to grasp its object. But it has a disadvantage in that it is very hard to hear a claim
like “Janum understands Kant” as a claim about an activity she engages in, rather than a state
or an ability she has. Since the fact that noein is an activity is so important to the argument
here, I have opted generally for “think,” but it’s important to bear in mind that it is
translating a factive verb.

16
there is a sense in which the actualization of thought ultimately depends on
its object (DA 3.4, 429a14ff.): In order to come to acquire the kind of
successful apprehension of independent objects that makes actual thinking
possible, one must be causally affected by the object of thought.30
(Otherwise, to borrow a memorable image from McDowell, thought would
get no traction, would be a “frictionless spinning in the void” (1994: 67).) That
might seem mysterious, but in light of Aristotle’s explanation of how we
inductively arrive at thought of essences, we might suppose that we are
affected by the universal or the intelligible form insofar as it is instantiated
by particular entities in the natural world (Po.An. 2.19).
And yet, in NE 9.9, Aristotle focuses on an aspect of human perception
and thought which is akin to god’s activity of thought thinking itself.
Perception and thought essentially contain a reflexive dimension: “if we are
perceiving, [we perceive] that we are perceiving, and, if we are thinking, that
we are thinking” (1179a29-32).31 Because perception and thought are
inherently reflexive, and because acting itself necessarily involves and
depends upon perception or thought,32 when we are engaged in activity
(energoumen), we perceive that we are (1170a31).33
As we saw, when the first-order activity is seen to be good in itself,
one’s awareness of the activity will be pleasant by nature. One might say that
the good person’s pleasant self-awareness involves the bare awareness of
what she is doing that comes from the reflexive character of perception as
such, plus a certain way of thinking about it that shapes her experience. Given
what I said earlier, that is a somewhat misleading simplification—since what

30
So that the object of thought would be responsible for the movement from first potentiality
to first actuality; but once one possesses the first actuality (i.e., one understands something,
but is not presently thinking about it), one can move to second actuality—i.e., be actually,
presently thinking—through oneself.
31
On perceiving that we perceive, see DA 3.2. On thought thinking itself, see DA 3.4, 430a2ff.;
Met. 12.7, 1072b18ff.; 12.9, 1075a1ff. The proper interpretation of DA 3.2 has been the object of
much scholarly controversy—there is disagreement even about what phenomenon Aristotle
intends to pick out with the phrase. Some think he has in mind the mere fact that perception
is a conscious activity (see, e.g., Kosman 2014a; Caston 2002); others think he has something
more cognitively rich in view, perhaps something like “apperception” (e.g., Johansen 2006).
See also Gregoric 2007 for a detailed discussion of the relationship between perceiving that
we perceive and “the common sense.” But I do not think that anything that I say here
depends on how we resolve those interpretive questions.
32
E.g., while we are walking (cf. 1170a30), and in order to be capable of walking, we are always
also perceiving—perceiving, e.g., the hardness and resistance of the ground, the air on our
skin, our visible surroundings moving relative to us, etc. This might be why Aristotle takes
perception as the psychologically fundamental capacity of the part of the soul that is also
responsible for locomotion in DA 2: In order to exercise the capacity for locomotion, animals
must be exercising the capacity for perception, but not vice versa.
33
Some have claimed that this argument involves a problematic substitution of co-referential
terms in an opaque context. I think that this worry can be dealt with, but I do not have space
to argue the point here.

17
she is doing depends upon that way of thinking about it—but a harmless one
if we keep in mind that, strictly speaking, we cannot divide the good person’s
pleasant self-awareness into two independent elements.
We are left with a picture of human perception and thought which
enables our enjoyment of something like god’s pleasant self-awareness—but,
importantly, only something like. While god’s thought is, in itself and in the
first instance, of (god’s own) thinking, human cognitive capacities like
“knowledge (epistēmē), perception, belief, and discursive thought (dianoia)
are always of something else, while [each is] of itself peripherally (en
parergōi)” (Met. 12.9, 1074b35-36).34 As such, we “are not the objects [of our
knowledge or perception] in our own right but rather by participation in the
capacities involved in knowing and perceiving” (EE 1245a5-8); in perceiving
something else, we also become the “peripheral” object of our perception.
The nature of “perceiving that we are,” both explains why living is
choiceworthy for us (when we can see our living as good), but also establishes
a certain constitutive limitation on our self-awareness. Aristotle is able to
explain why even the self-sufficient person needs friends by arguing that
friendship enables us, in a sense, to bypass this constitutive limitation and to
thereby approach a more god-like form of self-awareness.

4. The friend as another self and the good of “co-perception”

It is not until 1170b6—more than two-thirds of the way through the

argument—that Aristotle reintroduces the friend, and then it is only a few
very quick steps to his conclusion that the happy person must share his life
with a friend: The first part of the argument showed us that one’s own being
is choiceworthy because of the naturally pleasant perception of oneself; since
the friend is “another self,” the friend’s being will be choiceworthy for oneself
in a similar way; and so (Aristotle concludes) “one must co-perceive

34
One might wonder if it is significant that nous (thought, understanding) is missing from
this list. This is something Aristotle says in raising a certain puzzle for his account of god as
thought thinking itself. The puzzle, I take it, is this: It seems like thought is constitutively of
something else; how could god simply think thinking, without the first-order thinking being
of something else? His response is that when the object of thought does not have matter,
“the object of thought does not differ from the thinking...and the activity of thinking will be
one with its object” (1075a1-5; cf. DA 3.4, 430a3-9). It’s possible to interpret Aristotle’s
response in such a way that he means to be revising the suggestion that human cognitive
capacities are always directed at something else, so that, in human nous, too, thinking is not
of something else at all, but of itself. I favor an interpretation according to which he means
only to suggest that this can help us to see how god’s thought can be constitutively of itself—
not because it serves my purposes here (though it does), but because we don’t want to
undermine the idea that human thought is about the mind-independent world.

18
(sunaisthanesthai) his friend’s being,35 and this will come about by living
together and sharing in conversation and thought (dianoia)” (1170b10-12).
Since Aristotle was unlikely to offer a patently question-begging
argument, I suspect that he is not simply assuming that the happy person has
friends and “then applying to him the consequences that flow from the fact
that a friend is another self” (Cooper 1999b: 339). Rather, he is asking: “If one
were related to someone as ‘another self,’ is there some distinctive good that
one would achieve, without which one could not be happy?”
In a sense, it is clear what that good is supposed to be—the “co-
perception” of your friend’s being. But, if this is to constitute an answer to
the aporia, we also need some account of why that good is necessary for
happiness. We need to ask how the “co-perception” of the friend’s being
remedies something that would be lacking in the maximally self-sufficient
person’s individual, virtuous activity. It seems to me that this is the central
interpretive difficulty of the passage.
To bring out the motivation for my view, it is worth explaining why I
do not think a certain, attractively simple reading of the passage could meet
this demand to explain why one needs friends in order to be happy. On that
prima facie reading, Aristotle’s argument is simply that it is choiceworthy to
live with a character friend because it is good and pleasant by nature to
perceive what is good in itself as good, and (in living together) you can
perceive the being of your character friend as good. Such a view faces both a
significant philosophical problem and a significant interpretive problem.
The difficulty with this view is not, as some have suggested, that it
could not explain why one needed to engage in shared activity with a genuine
friend, but merely to keep him in one’s line of sight; nor is the problem that
it could not explain why one needed to share activity with friends, rather than
a virtuous stranger (cf. Cooper 199b). Both of these worries can be plausibly
addressed by considering the conditions that have to be met in order to
perceive the rational or ethical being of another person—which is what one
is “most of all” (NE 9.4, 1166a22-23)36—and not their mere existence or certain
facts about them (NE 9.12, 1171b30-32; cf. Kosman 2014b: 181)).

35
Strictly speaking, Aristotle says that “one must co-perceive that the friend is...”
(συναισθάνεσθαι ἄρα δεῖ καὶ τοῦ φίλου ὅτι ἔστιν). But given the argument so far, it is clear
that Aristotle does not have in mind merely being aware of the fact that one’s friend exists.
Thus, I think Irwin’s translation of the underlined phrase gets the sense right, though it is
less literal. (I am less convinced, however, by his understanding of συναισθάνεσθαι.)
36
Perceiving the rational being of my friend may require sharing in the activities that we
both think constitute living well because, for instance, I do not perceive a friend’s
contemplative activity as good by watching him read Aristotle in the corner; I do so by
discussing Aristotle’s philosophy with him. And perhaps only perceiving the activity of a
friend is pleasant and choiceworthy for me, in the same way that perceiving my own activity
is, because I stand in the same “epistemic relation” to her activity as I do to my own (Whiting
2012; cf. EE 1237b8-1238a3). (I have some worries about Whiting’s reading—I am not
persuaded that the mere fact I stand in the same “epistemic” relation to my friend’s activity

19
 The real philosophical difficulty is that, understood in this way, the
argument cannot satisfactorily resolve the aporia, since showing that
something is good does not by itself show that the happy person needs it.
Even if we grant that intrinsically good perceptual experiences are necessary
for happiness; and that perceptual experience is good insofar as one is
perceiving something “fine” (kalon) or excellent; and that, in the activities of
friendship, one perceives the being of a friend as “fine”—it is still not enough.
It would be a radically overdemanding picture of what is necessary for
happiness that required one to engage with every “fine” or “beautiful”
potential object of perception or contemplation.37 In fact, no argument about
how excellent or fine an object of contemplation a friend is will do the trick.
No matter how fine one’s friend, god is a better object of contemplation. If
the value of perceiving a friend is explained in terms of how worthy an object
of contemplation she is, it cannot explain why the happy, self-sufficient
person shouldn’t spend her time contemplating the divine intellect instead.
The prima facie interpretation faces this difficulty because it construes
the perception of one’s friend as another thing one does, alongside (say)
doing philosophy with her. As far as the value of friendship goes, sharing in
those activities simply makes possible the perception of the friend’s being. If
we think of the matter that way, then it seems hopeless; considered as its own
independent activity, there seems to be no possible reason to give as to why
even the maximally self-sufficient person must engage in that activity in
order to be happy. We must find a way of showing how the perception of the
friend’s being is somehow integral to the activities that (on one’s own view)
constitute happiness or flourishing.
Moreover, it should be a meaningful constraint on our interpretation
that it make sense of Aristotle’s emphasis on the reflexive character of human
perception and thought—it had better emerge that the abstract, technical
material about the nature of perception is doing real argumentative work.38

or being as I do to my own could explain why it is distinctively pleasant and good to perceive
her being as good. But I will not pursue those worries here.)
37
Whiting 2012 gets around this difficulty by offering a somewhat deflationary reading of the
aporia, according to which Aristotle does not intend to argue that the happy person needs
friends at all, but only that she will value them. However, at least in the Nicomachean version
of the argument, that does not seem to be how Aristotle sees the matter. He concludes his
argument by saying, “...then a friend will be among the choiceworthy things. What is
choiceworthy for [the blessedly happy person] he must possess, or he will be lacking (endeēs)
in this respect. Anyone who will be happy, then, must possess excellent friends.” (1170b14-
19). Moreover, if the happy person does value friendship because it contributes something to
her living well which she would not otherwise enjoy, then, since happiness is complete and
self-sufficient, she will need to have friendship in order to be happy. (Whiting’s paper
concerns the Eudemian version of the argument, so perhaps she could fall back on the claim
that they have different conclusions, though that does not seem especially plausible to me.)
38
After all, Aristotle devotes almost four times as much of his discussion to this abstract and
technical material than to the account of friendship’s value which is somehow based on it.
But this is not a constraint, it seems to me, that is met by most interpretations of the passage.

20
But the prima facie interpretation makes it seem like nothing more than a
very convoluted explanation of why it is pleasant for the happy person to live.
We can satisfy these demands with the interpretation I have
suggested. Insofar as we are rational animals, we all desire to live with the
awareness of our activity as good. But the nature of “perceiving that we
perceive” gives rise to a certain limitation on human self-awareness: In
perceiving, I am aware of myself—but only “peripherally”; what I directly
perceive is necessarily something independent of me. In order to
approximate divine self-awareness, I would need to somehow perceive my
being realized in something external. In the shared activity of friendship, I
am able to perceive the activity of the being of my friend; and the activity of
a friend is in some sense “my own” being actualized. “So it is necessarily the
case that to perceive a friend is, in a way, to perceive oneself” (EE 7.12,
1245a35-36).39 But what might this mean?
Elsewhere, Aristotle clearly expresses the idea that one source of love
for another is found in the fact that one can see in them the actualization of
one’s own being. Aristotle suggests that a benefactor seems to love his
beneficiary more than vice versa because the beneficiary’s improved
condition “indicates” (mēnuei) his own being “in its actualization (energeia)”
(NE 9.7, 1168a9), in the way that the craftsman loves his work (ergon) because
it represents the culmination of his productive activity. “The reason for this
is that being (to einai) is choiceworthy and loveable for all, and we are insofar
as we are actualized, since [we are] insofar as we live and act” (a6-7). The
craftsman loves his work and the benefactor loves his beneficiary because
they are able to see in them an external realization of their own activity—
which is to say, of themselves insofar as they are actualized.40

(Treatments of the Eudemian version of the argument tend to do much better in this respect;
cf. Kosman 2014b, McCabe 2012, and Whiting 2012.)
39
Here, I disagree with Kosman’s suggested translation of the line, which involves a slight
emendation (2014b: 178). The Greek of the OCT reads: τὸ οὖν τοῦ φίλου αἰσθάνεσθαι τὸ
αὑτοῦ πως ἀνάγκη αἰσθάνεσθαι εἶναι. Kosman suggests reading τὸ αὐτόν for τὸ αὑτοῦ, giving:
“One’s friend’s perceiving is necessarily, in a way, one’s own perceiving.”
40
Aristotle tells a similar story about the love of parents for their children (NE 8.12, esp.
1161b27-29). It might seem like a peculiarly narcissistic view, and perhaps it is, but it is
important not to misconstrue it: Aristotle is only saying that a beneficiary can take a personal
pride in the well-being of his benefactor, and that this (apparently) explains a certain
asymmetry in their love. Aristotle is not saying that it is appropriate to see another person
merely as a vessel for your own virtuous action; nor is he here identifying a decent person’s
motivation in helping others. Aristotle simply takes it for granted that a decent person will
help a friend for their friend’s sake. (It might seem like Aristotle denies this in NE 9.8, when
he suggests that, by giving up money, honor, or even his life for his friends or fellow citizens,
the virtuous person gains what is “fine,” and so “he awards himself the greater good”
(1169a28-29). But I think his point must be understood in its dialectical context: Aristotle is
employing the language of competitive goods not because that is his preferred way of
thinking about virtue, but because those are the terms in which his imagined opponent puts

21
 Living together as friends, and sharing in activities which the friends
find intrinsically choiceworthy, realizes this value in a more perfect way.41 In
such a case, the object of my perception is not something which merely
“indicates” actualization (in the way the product represents the culmination
of the craftsman’s productive activity); the object of my perception is my
friend’s activity itself, which is, in a sense, “my own” (cf. 1169b30-1170a4).
However, production and practical actions (praxeis) like benefitting
someone in need are both done for the sake of some end apart from the
action itself (though practical action is done also for its own sake), and this
is essential to the account of how something else “indicates” the action. (It is
the end achieved that indicates it.) We need a different story to show how
one can perceive the most perfect actualization of one’s being—activity
undertaken purely for its own sake—realized in something outside of oneself.
Perhaps the most obvious possibility is the one the author of the
Magna Moralia seems to have thought of.42 He explains that the friend is
“another self” in that he is a kind of “mirror” of oneself (MM 1213a20-24); and
most readers, I think, take it that the idea is that the friend is a kind of double
or doppelganger of oneself, at least when it comes to what really matters (cf.
McCabe 2012). One can thus look to the friend, the argument goes, in order
to gain knowledge of oneself. This view strikes me as unattractive in itself,
and, anyway, it would seem to face an insuperable difficulty: In order to learn
something about myself by learning about my friend, she not only needs to
be (relevantly) similar to me; I also need to know that fact. But to know that,
presumably, I would need to know that I have some quality or set of qualities
that she also has. So, how am I supposed to learn in this way anything about
myself that I don’t already know?
The claim that a friend, as a kind of mirror of oneself, enables self-
awareness (rather than self-knowledge) does not face precisely this difficulty.
Still, the similarity itself cannot be carrying the weight. Everyone is similar to
everyone else in some respect. The similarity that matters here is similarity
in goodness or character. But once we see why it is this that matters, what
work is left to be done by the similarity? We get pleasure out of perception
when we recognize the object to be beautiful or good (NE 10.4, 1174b15-24).
“The musician enjoys beautiful melodies” (1170a10), to borrow Aristotle’s own
analogy. She does not need to be thinking: “for they are the melodies I would
play,” however much she might hope that to be true. If one derives pleasure
from observing the good activity of a friend that one would not derive from

his view—who thinks, roughly, that the virtuous person is a sucker for sacrificing (e.g.) his
wealth for others.)
41
Benefaction is, for friends, a second best, since it implies some inequality; the ideal
expression of friendship, when everything is going well for both, is living together and
sharing in those activities they most value (EE 1245b7-9).
42
I’m assuming, with the majority of scholars, that the Magna Moralia was not written by
Aristotle himself, but by a later Peripatetic.

22
the good activity of a stranger, it is not merely because your friends are
similar to you. (And I will suggest below some reasons for thinking that
difference is as important to friendship as similarity.)
I do not mean to downplay Aristotle’s emphasis on the fact that
genuine friends are similar in ethically relevant respects; if they are to share
the activities they value most in life, they had better at least have a shared
sense of the human good. But when Aristotle says that a friend is “another
self” and that her actions are “one’s own,” he does not mean merely that
friends are similar. As a number of commentators have argued, my friend is
another self in that we are collaborators in joint action.43 This can provide us
with the resources to understand how I can see my being in another. It is not
because she is my doppelganger, but because we have become what we are
together by sharing in the activities we take to constitute living well, so that
the actualization of each is a shared achievement.
Immediately prior to the “more naturalistic” argument, Aristotle tells
us that “good people’s life together allows the cultivation of excellence
(aretē)” (1170a11-12). He later explains: “By being active [together] and by
mutual correction, they seem to become even better. For they shape one
another according to what they approve of.” The friendship of base people,
by contrast, increases their viciousness, “since they share base pursuits...and
by becoming similar to one another, they become vicious” (NE 9.12, 1172a8-
13). These remarks might have seemed irrelevant to the question of why the
self-sufficient person—who has, ex hypothesi, already fully cultivated an
excellent character—needs friends. But, in fact, I think it shows us a way of
explaining the sense in which friends can see their own being in one another.
In light of Aristotle’s division of the human soul into its ethical and
intellectual dimensions, one might say that, for Aristotle, who one is—not as
a member of the human species, but as a particular person—is determined
by one’s character and one’s basic beliefs and commitments. My suggestion
is that, in genuine friendship, these are both a shared achievement, attained
through shared activity.
To see why this might be, consider friends who share an interest in
philosophy and, over the years, pass their time discussing it. Together they
might develop and refine their philosophical capacities—say, by helping one
another to see possibilities they did not recognize, and forcing one another
to clarify ideas or arguments which, on their own, they may have
complacently accepted in some inchoate, or even incoherent, form. Each can
then see their friend’s philosophical virtues and views as, in part, their own

43
This is perhaps the only important point of interpretation concerning which there is
something like scholarly consensus. See, e.g., Price 1989, Sherman 1987, Cooper 1999b,
Kosman 2014b, Hitz 2011, McCabe 2012, Whiting 2012, Perälä 2016. For the idea that shared
activity is characteristic of friendship, see NE 8.5, 1157b20-23; 9.12, 1172a1-8.

23
achievement, and they can take the kind of pride in the contributions of their
friend that they take in their own.
Aristotle identifies friends’ shared life with “sharing in discussion and
thought” (1170b11-12), but we need not see him as restricting his focus to
philosopher-friends. If we consider friends who enjoy sharing aesthetic
experiences, such as watching tragedies or listening to music, a parallel point
holds. In discussing tragedies or music, they may come to develop enriched
capacities for perceiving theatrical and musical beauty, capacities which are
therefore a shared achievement; when they are now able to appreciate what
they previously could not, the aesthetic experience itself can be seen as a joint
undertaking.44
What makes this possible is that, in trying to make sense of a shared
experience or a shared object of inquiry by “sharing in discussion and
thought,” I am confronted with a distinct perspective. When I do philosophy
or see a play, I bring, of course, my own preoccupations and preconceptions,
my own concerns and values; but when I discuss it with a friend, I am given
the opportunity to see from her perspective—to recognize what is brought
into view by her capacities, her preoccupations, her concerns. Importantly,
there is more at work here than the abstract idea of a distinct perspective.
That is not so much a distinct perspective, but an abstraction of my own
perspective, stripping away the features that I take to be merely accidental.
This is a risky enterprise—for how am I to know when I am projecting my
own idiosyncrasies into the abstraction? In the shared activity of friendship,
what enriches the activity is my understanding of a concrete perspective
different from my own that I both know well and take seriously.45
And it is not only the development of relevant virtues, and the
enriched activity that comes with it, that is a shared achievement. At least as
importantly, friends’ conception of the good, too, is worked out in concert.
Since friends share in the activities that they take to constitute living well,
genuine friendship must involve a shared understanding of the human good.
This reflects the fact that, as rational creatures, our living well involves doing
so on the basis of a conception of what is worth doing. But we should not
assume that Aristotle thinks that people first form (on their own) a “theory”
of the good, and then set out to realize it and share it with their friends.

44
On this point, see Kosman 2014b and McCabe 2012, who present illuminating accounts of
the sense in which perceptual experience might be, in some meaningful sense, shared.
45
Once we have become friends, “distance does not destroy friendship” (NE 1157b10-11). My
experience may continue to be shaped by my understanding of my friend, a shaping that is
only possible because of the foundation already laid by actually “sharing in discussion and
thought.” But, in another sense, this aspect of the value of friendship cannot survive without
the actual presence of my friend; without her there, I do not face the possibility of being
corrected in my complacent projections. As time goes on, it will be less and less clear whether
I have internalized a perspective different from my own, or whether I have domesticated that
perspective, rendered it no longer distinct from my own after all. And so Aristotle agrees
with those who “say that ‘Lack of conversation has dissolved many friendships’.” (1157b11-13)

24
Instead, it is developed by engaging in the activity with friends. If someone I
know well and respect shares with me an interest in studying Aristotle’s
philosophy, or if I can her bring her to see its interest, that will strengthen
my sense of its value; if I cannot, it will—and should—give me pause.
Genuine friendship thus manifests our nature as creatures that are at
once rational and political in a distinctive way. What makes humans uniquely
political is that human communities are structured not only by a shared
good, but by a shared conception of the good—often in the robust sense that
it is a shared achievement, something that we have arrived at it together (say,
by joint deliberation), rather than in the sense of simply being something we
happen to agree about.46 But in political community our shared good may
only be instrumentally related to the living well of each (EE 7.10, 1242a6-7).47
In genuine friendship, by contrast, we share in living well as such.
Thus, when friends engage in shared activity, it both (1) increases the
value of that activity, since the friends mutually cultivate their capacities and
virtues, and (2) deepens or enriches one’s sense of the value of the activity
itself. Thus the actualization of the being of each is a shared achievement. It
is in this sense that I can see my friend’s activity as my own.
Now, the idealized self-sufficient agents of NE 9.9 will not need friends
in order to develop a conception of the good and hone the capacities they
need in order to pursue the good thus conceived; they have, ex hypothesi,
already done both of those things. What Aristotle is saying in NE 9.9 is that
even these agents will need to share life with their friends in order to enjoy
the kind of perception of their own being that, without friends, is available
to them only “peripherally.” They are able to see the being of the friend as,
again, their own achievement, and to perceive it in a direct way which is not
possible with respect to themselves.48

46
Any political animal has a shared good, since it is distinctive of political animals to have
“some single task (ergon) they all do together” (HA 488a7-8), and an animal’s good is defined
in terms of its ergon. But what makes human beings “more political” than any other animal,
including other political animals, is that they possess the capacity for speech and rational
discussion (the logos-phonē contrast in the passage strongly suggests a concern with spoken
language, and not just individual rational capacity), which enables them “to make clear what
is just and unjust”—i.e., to get clear on what justice demands together, say through joint
deliberation (Pol. 1253a7-15. I would suggest that when Aristotle concludes by saying that “it
is community in these things that makes a household and polis,” he means a community in
the “perception of good and bad, just and unjust, and the rest” (1253a16-18; see also NE 9.6).
47
This is not to deny that the political community is for the sake of living well. But it may
only be so in establishing the necessary conditions for living well.
48
Does this mean that the self-sufficient person would not make new friends? Perhaps. But
this is not as implausible as it may first seem, given how much idealization is involved in the
conception of the self-sufficient person. None of us are likely to achieve that degree of self-
sufficiency—we may always be continuously involved in trying to better understand our
good and develop the capacities needed to achieve it—and Aristotle’s point in NE 9.9 is that,
even if we did, we’d still value the friends we have, for enabling a more “divine” form of self-

25
 There is one last complication. Aristotle concludes the argument by
saying that the good of friendship will come about by “co-perceiving”
(sunaisthanesthai) the friend’s being (1170b10), rather than “perceiving”
simpliciter. Though it is hard be certain,49 I believe that, in speaking of “co-
perception” Aristotle is emphasizing reciprocal character of the friends’
perception of each other’s being (Pakaluk 1998). I thus not only perceive my
friend’s being as good, but I also perceive her perceiving my being as good;
perceiving a friend is thus not merely like perceiving myself, but a (mediated)
way of doing so (cf. EE 7.12, 1245a35-36). Perhaps, being human rather than
divine, I only really understand what I am up to and its value in this way.

5. Instrumentalizing friendship?

It is natural for modern readers to wonder—about this argument, and about

the discussion of friendship more generally—whether Aristotle has really
made room for anything other than an instrumental value for friendship. The
need for friendship, after all, seems to have been explained in terms of its
bringing about some other value, that of self-awareness.50 What I would like
to argue is that the conclusion that Aristotle’s view implies that friendship’s
value is instrumental is at any rate not forced upon us.
Let us begin with one thing that is clear: On Aristotle’s view, we would
not value friendship if we were not limited in various ways, dependent both
on others and the wider world. If we were a radically different kind of
creature, without such limitations as we have and thus perfectly self-
sufficient, we would have no need for friends (EE 1245b12-19). As we saw,
Socrates concludes from the fact that a perfectly self-sufficient creature
would have no desire for friendship, and that we therefore only love others
because of our neediness, that we do not value friendship for its own sake.
But why should anything follow about us from the fact that a radically, almost

awareness. For we are political animals, and so our excellence of character and conception
of the good is a shared achievement.
49
Part of the difficulty is that there is very little to go on; Aristotle seems to have coined the
word (for this purpose?), and outside the context of this argument he uses it only in one
other case (HA 534b18-20), a usage that doesn’t seem to shed much light on what is going on
here. So, to some degree, we can only speculate. (See esp. Kosman 2014b; McCabe 2012).
50
It is worth registering that the distinction Aristotle himself was mainly concerned with
was between loving someone for who they essentially are as opposed to loving them because
of “accidental” (kata sumbebēkos) features that they have in relation to oneself, e.g., as a
source of pleasure or useful benefits to you. (In our argument, he is trying to argue that
loving someone for who they are is essential to one’s own happiness.) Modern readers have
been apt to read into Aristotle’s distinction a loosely Kantian one, but it is important to
recognize that this is not what Aristotle has in mind. Of course, there is nothing wrong with
asking our own questions about Aristotle’s philosophy. We can learn something in this
way—though what we learn might mainly concern what we think is required for something
to count as treating someone as an end rather than a means. But we need to be clear that
this is what we are doing, or we risk misconstruing what Aristotle was up to.

26
unimaginably different being would have no desire for friendship? Even
Socrates becomes uneasy about his thought-experiment. After considering
the possibility of desire in a world where nothing could be bad or painful for
us, Socrates second-guesses the whole line of reasoning: “Or is it ridiculous
to ask what will then be and what will not? Who knows?” (Lysis 221a) The
world of our experience, the world in which it makes sense to us to value
anything at all, is a world shaped by our limitations, our needs, the fact that
we are subject to forces outside our control.
Aristotle, I believe, recognized that the fact that an absolutely self-
sufficient being would not need friendship does not imply that friendship has
merely instrumental value to us. But one might still worry that Aristotle has
only identified an instrumental value of friendship, even if he has made room
for something more. I have said, after all, that the reason a self-sufficient
person needs friendship is that it enables a more perfect form of self-
awareness. Is Aristotle’s strategy doomed?
It would certainly be doomed if it were an attempt to answer an
analogue of the “immoralist challenge”—that is, to convince someone, who
did not already care about friendship, that they ought to start caring about it
so as to more fully realize their rational nature. But we should not see
Aristotle as setting out to convince the contemplative sociopath to start
making friends; in fact, the argument of NE 9.9 is not meant to explain the
motivation for caring about and benefitting other people at all. And that need
not be seen as any argumentative shortcoming—not all answers to the
question of why something is valuable need to be such as to rationally compel
someone who did not already value that thing to start doing so. The
argument is directed at us. It is as an attempt to explain the relationship
between two values we are already committed to, by arguing that the value
of friendship, far from being in conflict with that of rational self-sufficiency,
enables the realization of our rational nature: In being related to another as
a genuine friend—which involves caring about their well-being for their own
sake—there is a certain further good that you will get out of that relationship,
and it is a good without which one could not flourish.
I think that we can go a little farther in dispelling any lingering worry
about Aristotle instrumentalizing friendship. Even if some value is defined in
terms of its being directed at some further end, this does not imply that its
value must be merely instrumental.51 As Aristotle claims, courageous actions

51
In some cases, it is valuable for the sake of some end because it is valuable for its own sake,
and so the fact that it is valuable for the sake of some end does not imply that its value is
instrumental at all. This is true, I believe, of the relationship between doing virtuous actions
for their own sake and doing them for the sake of living well. However, this case is a
somewhat special one; the story works because living well is (partially) constituted by doing
virtuous actions for their own sake. Since I do not think the relationship between the
intrinsic value of friendship and the good of self-awareness can be seen in this way, I am
setting aside this way of dealing with the difficulty.

27
in war are choiceworthy for the sake of achieving peace, and also for their
own sake, as expressions of ethical virtue. It is, I think, a mistake to think that
the value of displays of courage can be simply divided into whatever intrinsic
value is to be found in the expression of virtue, plus whatever instrumental
value it has in connection with (hopefully) bringing about peace; for a display
of courage would not have the intrinsic value it does if it were not an effort
to bring about peace.52
Aristotle believes, however, that courageous action is not perfectly
choiceworthy as an end because we would prefer to simply be in a condition
of peace and leisure, without needing to achieve it by way of valiantly fending
off our enemies. We need not understand Aristotle’s view of friendship in this
way. To see why not, it will help to consider a different analogy.
As with courageous action, scientific inquiry is essentially directed
toward achieving something—say, understanding or knowledge of the
natural world—but is also satisfying in itself; as with courageous action, it is
a mistake to think that its value can be divided into whatever intrinsic value
the work has, plus the instrumental value of helping to bring about
understanding, since it would not have the intrinsic value it has if it weren’t
the effort to achieve understanding. But, here, I don’t think that we can
confidently say that we would prefer to enjoy the good of understanding
without needing to go by way of inquiry. This is not because we’d simply
rather have the good of understanding plus the satisfaction of hard work;
more importantly, we cannot coherently imagine ourselves understanding
the workings of the natural world without that understanding being the
achievement of inquiry. (This is connected with the fact that what we want
understanding of is something independent of us; it is through inquiry that
our thought or understanding manages to be about the natural world at all.)
This is so even if we accept, as Aristotle does, that it would be better
to be a being (like god) who did not need to inquire into anything, but could
simply contemplate. Even though one would enjoy the greatest possible good
if one were god, no one could wish for that good—for a person could not
become a god; he could only be replaced by one. One chooses goods “on the
condition that one remains what one is” (NE 1166a19-22; cf. NE 1159a5-12).
This is how we should see Aristotle’s picture of the relationship
between friendship and the achievement of a more refined understanding of

52
Once one is open to this possibility, one can see that it is a pervasive phenomenon. For
instance, something similar might be said about the value of a fulfilling livelihood. There
may well be intrinsic value in employing one’s skill as a carpenter in order to earn a living. If
one wins the lottery, one could take up woodworking as a hobby; but, only slightly
paradoxically, one might well feel like one had lost something—something, perhaps, about
one’s identity. (I do not mean that one would have come out worse overall, since what was
lost may well be compensated for by what was gained, say, in the ability to undertake projects
of one’s choosing, not being bound by the market, etc. But that does not affect the point that
something may have been lost.)

28
ourselves and our good. Friendship has the value it does for us because of the
way in which it makes the latter possible. It nonetheless possesses final
(teleion) value; it would not be better for us to realize the good of self-
awareness without friendship—not because we’d rather have both, but
because if “we” were able to do that, we would no longer be us at all.

6. Concluding Thoughts

Aristotle’s account of the need for friendship in NE 9.9 is interesting, in part,

because it illustrates a more general vision of what it would take to show that
something is of final value to human beings. Aristotle accepts, perhaps to our
surprise, Plato’s demand that in order to vindicate the value of friendship one
must explain why even the maximally self-sufficient person needs friends. He
also agrees with Plato that the value of friendship is relative to human
limitation or imperfection. But he saw that this does not imply that the self-
sufficient person will not need friends, because friendship’s value is relative
to limitations that arise from constitutive features of our way of life as
creatures capable of perception and thought. Even if Aristotle accepts a
significant degree of idealization in formulating the question, he maintains
(against Plato) that it must still be a recognizably human form of self-
sufficiency at issue.
The argument of NE 9.9 has a further philosophical interest insofar as,
in explaining why the self-sufficient need friends, Aristotle articulates a
conception of self-awareness, and rational activity more generally, as a social
achievement. Aristotle believed that the self-awareness we all desire as
rational animals comes about through friendship; only by engaging in shared
activity with friends, and being confronted with a distinct perspective on that
activity, do we really come to an awareness of what we are up to and its value.
In concluding, however, I would like to raise a question that, I think,
goes to the heart of Aristotle’s task in NE 9.9, and its place in his ethical
project more generally. That task is to explain why, even if we were to achieve
the complete cultivation of virtue and fully develop the true conception of
the good, we would still value friendship. Such an achievement would be, I
take it, highly unlikely—but Aristotle still thinks it is the right perspective
from which to consider this question.
This reflects, I think, a more general Aristotelian commitment, which
we might think of as the perfectionist cast to his thought. By this I mean that
Aristotle assumes, first of all, that there is (at least conceivably) such a thing
as a finally flourishing human being, one who has fully achieved virtue and
the (human) form of self-sufficiency that goes along with it, and arrived at
the correct conception of the human good; and, secondly, that if something
is of ultimate value for human beings, it must appear as valuable to such a
person. It is true that Aristotle means for his argument to show us something
about why all of us value friendship for its own sake, and not only why the

29
“blessedly happy” person would under such idealized conditions. But he
believes that he can only show that by showing that we would desire it even
if we became maximally self-sufficient.
Aristotle’s perfectionism shapes what he can say about friendship. In
particular, its ultimate value must be consistent with fundamental “concord”
(homonoia) between friends. Since friendship must be shown to be valuable
even once the friends have fully cultivated virtue and fully developed the
correct understanding of the human good, Aristotle can only allow for
relatively superficial differences between genuine friends. The value of
friendship cannot, for instance, depend on the possibility of the friends
learning from one another, since “it is not possible for friends who are self-
sufficient either to teach or learn. For if one is learning, one is not in the
proper condition, and if one is teaching [him], then one’s friend is not in the
proper condition—and [genuine] friendship entails being in the same
condition.” (EE 7.12, 1245a16-18)
But we might suspect that the way in which friends, through shared
activity, can reshape and deepen one another’s experience of the world and
understanding of themselves is more powerful the degree to which they
always elude or outstrip one another’s understanding; and that Aristotle’s
perfectionism therefore hobbles the full expression of the very value he has
identified. If I think I have my friend all figured out, the friendship is likely
to become stale, uninteresting. (The same might be said of one’s relationship
to oneself.) As Nehamas 2016 compellingly suggested, perhaps a genuine
friend remains always to be discovered—not so much because there are
hidden depths, but because there is always more to be fashioned. On such a
view, the value of friendship that Aristotle has identified emerges most fully
once we see that not only is the fashioning done in concert among friends,
but also that such joint work is never complete.
One way to try to motivate such a view would be with a competing
metaphysical picture of human agency—say, one according to which it is part
of the human essence that we are always in a continuous process of self-
making, of reconceiving ourselves and what we are doing in the world; or
with a competing metaethics—say, one according which we should not see
ourselves as homing in on the one true conception of what it is to live well
(not necessarily because there is no truth and falsity in this domain, but
because there may be incommensurably different ways of living, none of
which has a unique claim on being the way of living well for human beings).
But we may equally approach the topic (so to speak) from within Aristotle’s
philosophy—we might think that Aristotle himself, and precisely in his
criticisms of the Platonic conception of self-sufficiency, has given us the
resources to move away from this aspect of his perfectionism and carry
further his account of the good of shared activity and “co-perception.”
The framing of the question in NE 9.9 depends on a distinction
between merely practical limitations on human activity, which we are

30
permitted to set aside, and constitutive limitations due to the nature of that
activity itself, which we cannot. The question I would like to raise is how far
we can really press this distinction between merely practical limitations and
constitutive ones. Is our inability to achieve self-sufficiency a merely practical
limitation, in the sense suggested by the distinction? Or is it as much an
essential aspect of human life as anything?
Recall Aristotle’s view that, since the value of ethically virtuous
activity (courageous or just action, for instance) often depends on our being
in an unfortunate condition that we’d prefer to avoid altogether, such activity
is not perfectly “final” or “complete” (teleion), and a life devoted to it is less
choiceworthy than a life devoted to activity done in “leisure” (scholē) and
purely for its own sake. My point here might be put by saying: It is true that
the fact that we must make do in a condition of scarcity, and the fact that we
will need to face situations that terrify us, are not metaphysically necessary;
but such truths about human life are still too fundamental to imagine away.
Perhaps our inability to achieve self-sufficiency, in the sense of the perfect
cultivation of human excellence and the possession of an absolute
conception of the human good, is equally fundamental in shaping our
world—the world in which it makes sense to choose and value things at all.
I do not mean to suggest that we should reject as irrelevant all forms
of ethical idealism, nor that we are bound to simply accept human life as it
is, in all its imperfection. That would be to reject moral philosophy
altogether—and not just in the sense of what is done in the seminar room,
but as an integral dimension of moral discourse and reflection generally. For
better or worse, I do not have a criterion for determining what forms of
idealization are acceptable or indispensable in ethics. Aristotle thought that
he did—he thought that the idealization must be consistent with the human
essence, or the essential nature of human activity. I think that there is an
intuition that lies behind that criterion that we should hold onto: We must
be able to recognize ourselves in the ideal picture, and so we must not
imagine away conditions which fundamentally shape our sense of who or
what we are. But more goes into shaping that sense than our essence as
members of a certain natural kind.

31
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