Lessons of the Nicomachean Ethics

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by Dr. Michael Pakaluk
Professor, Catholic University of America
St. Vincent de Paul Lecture & Concert Series
September 23, 2022

 

Setting the Question

There is no book of classical literature which repays careful study as much as the Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle. By ‘careful study’ I mean a line-by-line examination of arguments and claims, placed in their context. These are placed in their context by the method of divisio textus practiced so well by St. Thomas, although we need not alway agree with St. Thomas’ divisions. If the original Greek can be consulted, all the better, as no translation is perfect and most are misleading to some degree when refined philosophical points are in play. Through such a study, one discovers that just about every paragraph in the Nicomachean Ethics is well-crafted — therefore, it cannot consist of ‘lecture notes,’ as has been claimed — with a tremendous economy of expression, and also of argument, in the sense that Aristotle typically supplies solely the premises, and no more, to derive the conclusion he wants. Also, that Aristotle’s judgment is unfailingly sober, sound, and truthful. Also, that he wields evidence of various sorts in appropriate ways — what we’d be disposed to say, what others who have good judgment typically think, what is obvious in our experience, how nature typically acts, what would be analogous in this domain to what holds in other domains. In brief, we’d see in Aristotle perhaps the best model for our own thought and writing, just as he was for St. John Henry Newman. Moreover, the subject matter of the Nicomachean Ethics cannot be rivaled for its depth and importance. I am aware that the study of God, metaphysics, and the principles of nature have a higher claim upon us, as knowledge, than any practical discipline. And yet some basic principles of these other disciplines run throughout the Nicomachean Ethics, nourishing it like a subterranean well, so that this one book, more than any other in the Aristotelian corpus certainly, can provide something close to a complete course in philosophy. And so St. Thomas apparently believed also, because (if I remember correctly from a study I once did of the matter) the Nicomachean Ethics is the most referenced book in his Summa after the Bible and St. Augustine.

Ethical refinement, like refined scholarship, is indeed a sort of beauty, and an expressive elegance.

However, a public lecture to a mixed audience is not the place for this kind of careful study, but rather the seminar rooms of a college, and, besides, in the space of one hour only the merest snippet could be examined. In this lecture, therefore, I propose to offer some general reflections on the Nicomachean Ethics.

I will not be discussing some philosophical “problem” from the ethics, some unresolved chestnut which is fun to think about and take opposite sides on. For example, what exactly is the failure identified as akrasia, lack of self-mastery, for a pagan such as Aristotle? He cannot construe is as a result of original sin. But then how can we fail to do what we know we should do? What intervenes, to keep us from doing what we are resolved to do?

Or, all things considered, is it more truthful to say for Aristotle that the virtues are unified, and that you cannot have one without having all of them, or that they are not unified? Is Aristotle’s solution satisfactory, that they become unified upon someone’s acquiring the virtue of phronesis (prudence)? How can he account for the phenomena, that in our acquaintances and in ourselves we see apparently mixtures of virtues and vices?

Or how does he systematize the virtues — what is his underlying anthropology? The medieval theory of the cardinal virtues regards a virtue as a perfection of a power and maps each such virtue onto a distinct motive power in man — practical reason, will, spiritedness, and appetite. Does Aristotle embrace the same schema? But if so why is he not more explicit about it? Where would a virtue like liberality fit in, and to what power should we attach it? How can we know that the list of virtues is complete without such a scheme?

Or of course, there is in addition the problem which occupies most undergraduate courses on the Ethics, where mainly books I and X are studied — Does Aristotle regard the best life as a life composed of all the main goods attainable in action, or rather as a focussing upon one sort of action, the highest, perhaps contemplative activity? Is his ideal life in the end that of a uomo universale, a renaissance man, or more like a monk who sacrifices everything to study the truth as completely as possible?

These questions are all fascinating and worthwhile. But this evening, I take a different approach, finding inspiration in a line from the Nicomachean Ethics 3, where Aristotle says, “our present inquiry is not undertaken for the sake of contemplating truth — we engage in it, not in order to know what virtue is, but rather so that we may ourselves become good” (II.2, 1103b26-28).

I shall put the matter this way. I have studied the Nicomachean Ethics for almost 40 years. We grant that it tells much about what virtue is and even what goodness in general is. We grant that the work has an elegance and beauty worthy of sheer contemplation. Yes, I have published several books and many scholarly articles on the treatise. And yet I have also come to regard it, when taken together with the Secunda Pars of the Summa Theologiae, as a practical guide to Christian living. I have raised multiple children and educated many students using Aristotle’s ethics, besides familiar ascetical works, as a reference point. What would I say, then, are its most important lessons for this project of our actually becoming good?

I want to say as a sidelight that this remark about the nature of moral philosophy, that it was practical of necessity, deeply affected my course of studies in philosophy. When I was a graduate student, it was common — it still is — to present moral philosophy as a consideration of and choice among various “methods” of ethics. Perhaps Cicero in De Finibus was the first to examine ethics in this way. In any case his De Officiis is a very different project. In the modern era Henry Sidgwick wrote the first treatise along these lines, which then influenced C. D. Broad and others. This project views theories of ethics as like theories in science. The data would be our considered judgments about right and wrong. Of course there is a difficulty about picking out these judgments from the start, especially in a polarized society such as ours. Precisely which judgments are the ‘data’? But if that problem gets settled, then the correct theory would be the theory that predicts these judgments best. If a theory on grounds of elegance or simplicity looks very appealing to us, presumably we should be prepared to modify our initially divergent judgments, so that they converge with what the theory says we should do. Those who adopt this “methods of ethics” approach sometime pick out something which they call “commonsense morality” — really, conventional morality — and regard it as embodying some kind of informal theory. Sidgwick was famous for arguing that the commonsense morality of Victorian England, when looked at carefully, and when it was compelled to be consistent, ending up being the same thing as utilitarianism.

One problem with this approach is that science is speculative merely and cannot give us any oughts. At best a “method of ethics” can predict what some class of persons would say that we should do. Another problem is that it makes thinking about ethics a different endeavor from formulating ethical judgments ourselves. What another person approves of or disapproves of, for all we know, lacks any implicit commitments. For all we know, it is unprincipled. Emotivism looks like the theory which best explains unmoored reactions of approval or disapproval. Once this discontinuity between theorizing and emoting is accepted, then why not simply by pass the step of theorizing. Instead of taking the intermediary step of formulating some model which predicts these reactions, why not just side from a start with the group we admire, and bypass the theorizing? In the methods of ethics approach, which has dominated our universities, we see the beginnings of wokeness, and the mob mentality of contemporary ethical posturing. Ethics becomes a matter of siding with a favored group and favored authorities.

But this is a digression. Instead of the “methods of ethics,” it seemed to me that ethics had to be a matter of a more thorough prosecution of what we were already engaged in. If ethics was a matter of following laws, then systematic ethics had to be a matter of uncovering pre-political laws and basic laws, which we presupposed already. If it was a matter of goods, it had to be a matter of clarifying the most basic goods, and identifying subordinate goods in relation to it. Ethics had to be the formulation of definitions, classifications, principles and inferences, which we were already making use of. But then this is what Aristotle seemed to be doing in his Ethics. This seemed the only pathway forward.

 

Lessons I Have Not Learned

But before giving you a handful of lessons which I myself have taken from Aristotle’s Ethics, I want to mention a few which I have not taken.

The first is that I definitely have not drawn from Aristotle the idea that happiness is ‘human flourishing.’ I hope that my saying this shocks and scandalizes you, because that is my intent. I understand that it is common for people to hold themselves out as experts in Aristotelian or classical ethics to say, knowingly, that ‘of course Aristotle understood happiness as flourishing, and we should use this language also.’

I want to debunk this misguided claim. Yes, I agree, happiness is something objective, in the sense that someone can believe himself happy, but be wrong about that. Merely thinking we are happy, or feeling happy, does not make us happy. Also, I agree that happiness is something stable, rather than fluctuating, and therefore it cannot be a feeling, as feelings are transient. For both of these reasons, when psychologists say they are studying happiness — did you know that there is a burgeoning ‘science of happiness’? — and, for their data, rely on self-reports that someone feels content or satisfied, they are not studying happiness.

I accept, moreover, that happiness is something general across the human race. It is universal. It has to take basically the same form in every human being.

No doubt the idea that happiness is ‘human flourishing’ appeals to students of Aristotle because flourishing, like Aristotelian happiness, is objective, stable, and universal.

And yet the term ‘flourishing’ is a bad choice for other significant reasons. First, it brings in the wrong analogy. Plants flourish; to flourish means to flower. The term comes from Latin, flōrēre. This is vegetative language, which connotes a spontaneous reaching of the height of the powers of distinctively vegetative life. But happiness for Aristotle is and must be a deliberative achievement. It is an attainment; it is not something spontaneous. Moreover, Aristotelian happiness pertains to actions, not powers. It stands for a certain kind of success, an extreme of success, not an extreme of talent or power. We don’t count a plant as a success because it flourished. Furthermore, for Aristotle, this success must be procreative and thus. if a plant analogy were appropriate at all, it would need to be an analogy involving fruitfulness rather than flowering. We might just say along these lines that a happy life is bountifully fruitful life.

So ‘flourishing,’ although correct in some respects, must ultimately be rejected as bringing in an inept and misleading analogy.

But, secondly, it fails to bring out the root meanings of Aristotle’s word. As you probably know, the term in Aristotle is eudaimonia. (There is an alternative term too, but which is usually used as an adjective not a substantive — makarios, blessed. Makarios maps most closely onto the Latin, beatitudo; while eudaimonia maps roughly onto Latin felicitas, although its etymology is different.) What eudaimonia meant originally is not entirely clear, but the word contains the notion of being well-off, eu, and the notion of a divinity, a daimon, eu-daimon. These when combined mean either that some divinity has deigned to bless you, or that you’ve happened to become blessed, like some divinity, or perhaps both of these ideas at once.

On either reading, the sense is that someone who enjoys eudaimonia has been elevated as if beyond his natural position by some kind of divine intervention. Since only that which is human is under our control, whether someone attains to eudaimonia, then, is not strictly under our control. It requires some degree of, let us call it, good fortune, felicity. This is why Aristotle discusses such things as whether eudaimonia is a gift of the gods, and whether we can’t really say that someone is eudaimon until he is dead. And this is why some interpreters like to say that Aristotle embraces a concept of what Bernard Williams called ‘moral luck.’

So there is a close connection between eudaimonia and what in Greek is called eutuchia, good luck, coming off well. And this is exactly what is connoted by our term, ‘happiness.’ A ‘hap’ is what takes place by chance or by luck. It’s from an Old Norse word of the same meaning. We speak of what ‘happens’, of a ‘mishap,’ ‘haphazard,’ ‘hapless.’ We use ‘perhaps’ all the time, but it means, precisely, ‘by means of multiple haps’, that is, what is perhaps the case is something that has non-zero probability.

If you are as impressed as I am by the fact that some of us die young of disease, others are obliged to die young in battle, and the extreme misfortunes of a Priam or a Job can afflict anyone — if you agree that grace (that is, a divine ‘gift’), and not simply willpower and human contrivance, is essential for acting well — and if you’ve read Thomas Aquinas on the beatific vision, when he insists that only God can elevate a soul to the condition of enjoying the contemplation of God — then, knowing the root meaning of eudaimonia, you may be disposed after all to think as I do that ‘happiness’ remains the best equivalent in English of Aristotle’s meaning.

There are other connotations as well of Aristotelian eudaimonia, which we need not cover here, but taken all together it means, let us say, a state of blessedness, involving a divine action which lifts a human being to a god-like state, involving some kind of good luck or providence, which is matched on our part by success or attainment, over a complete or choice-worthy life, in which the best human powers, as perfected by virtue, are consistently actualized.

Flourishing does not match this conception and carries the risk of misleading us. Remember that the merely flourishing fig tree was cursed.

Another lesson which I did not learn from the Ethics is the common view that the doctrine of the mean applies to all things, including opinions, so that truth is in the mean, say, within some Overton Window of acceptable opinion.

It is a silly view, when made explicit, and yet most people seem to be deeply attached to it, that in any matter of thought, especially matters of policy or political prudence, one can establish a range, in which truth will fall between “extreme” views. Often these extremes are said to be to “the right” and to “the left,” as in the division of the 1789 French Assembly into the King’s supporters on the right and those who would overthrow him to the left. People, then, will complain that, “ecclesial and theological matters cannot be divided up into Right and Left like politics.” But in saying this they misdiagnose the problem. It’s not that we are disposed to take the French Assembly, or politics, as the model of all disputes. It’s rather that we’re disposed to take disputes as falling on a continuum with extremes, always, and therefore the truth has to be in the middle, which we can then describes ex post as neither right nor left.

But of course typically the truth is at an extreme, in the sense that it implies the falsehood of all alternative views. For example, that we should never prefer one person over another based on the color of his skin — that we should not ‘discriminate’ on the basis of race — is not intermediate between anything. It rules out every instance of its contrary, without exception. That abortion is never to be done is neither extreme nor intermediate, but true. We don’t get closer to the truth or find a more balanced practical view by mixing exceptions in with the general rule — although of course out of political expediency it may be necessary to settle, for the time being, for a rule with exceptions.

Aristotle is clear in contrast that the doctrine of the mean applies only in domains in which there is some kind of ‘matter,’ we might call it, which constitutes a gradation or scale, which needs to be matched to some standard, and which can fail to match it, therefore, by being excessive or by falling short. This is a very simple point. If I am cutting a board to a desired length, assuming I measure correctly, I can cut it too long, for that measurement, or too short, or just right. As there are countless ways of going wrong but just one, rather refined way of getting it right, then to hit the standard, which is in a mean, is very difficult. Just ask any golfer sizing up a ten foot putt, or a pool player attempting to pocket a ball across the table. The mean comes into play when there is some extensive quantity which needs to match a separate standard — when, powers, affections, or exertions, which have the character of ‘affect,’ are in play, and placed against a definite rule. But opinions about the world are not like this: they either correspond to it or not.

Of course there are weak minded people who do not like to assert that anything holds ‘always’ or ‘never’ without exception. Historically, as we know, the best treatment for this sort of mental weakness was thought to be a bracing and rigorous study of Euclid, which imparts confidence in drawing remote but necessary conclusions from simple premises. But I don’t need to tell you that!

Another lesson I have not drawn from Aristotle’s Ethics is the idea that ethical judgments are ultimately inscrutable and, as it is called, ‘particularist,’ — never capable of being assessed except from the point of view of a putative reasonable observer of good character. On this view, an ethical judgment is true if a reasonable and decent person would affirm it, or do it. Sometimes Aristotelian ethics is said to constitute its own, distinctive ‘method’ of ethics, called ‘virtue ethics,’ on the grounds that it presumes that neither law nor general welfare are in the end decisive for decent action, but rather, most basically, traits of character. According to ‘virtue ethics,’ to say that something is right or wrong in particular circumstances just is to say that someone with the relevant good-making character trait would do that action in those circumstances. And what this is can hardly be known except by someone who already has that trait. But who such a person is, in turn, can hardly be identified except by someone like him.

You can see that so-called ‘virtue ethics’ on this sort of account is fundamentally circular in its justification. Goodness is conceived of as fully internal to a certain way of life. On this view, too, an ethical law is at best an inductive generalization of many individual observations of what good actors have done on multiple, similar occasions. It has no separate, prior binding force.

This sort of view appeals to philosophers because of its sophistication. It also looks like it can account for the difficulties in ethical persuasion and argument. It is furthermore appealing because it construes virtue in a way familiar to philosophers, that is, in the way that good judgment in academic work needs to be construed. Only an authority in music can discern the best musicianship, and only an authority in scholarship can discern the best scholarship. However, Aristotle clearly does not accept this sort of account, at least not for the whole of ethics. I think he probably does accept it for refined judgments, and for best practices in complex or subtle matters — for what Aquinas in his treatise on law calls precepts of natural law which are available only to the wise. Ethical refinement, like refined scholarship, is indeed a sort of beauty, and an expressive elegance.

But such a view is not sustainable for basic ethical judgments like that between virtue and vice. It’s obvious who stands firm and who breaks ranks in a phalanx. Also, Aristotle famously says that there are actions which from their very names, that is, the ‘description under which they are done’ (as Anscombe would call it), are known to be bad. He gives as examples, among emotional reactions, to exult in the success of bad men, to lack shame over wrongdoing, and to envy others for their well being. Among actions, he says that sexual relations with a married woman not your wife, taking by stealth what belongs to another, and slaughtering innocents are all ruled out from the start. — Note that these three correspond to the first three commandments on the second tablet against murder, theft, and adultery. — Therefore, everyone who uses language at all, who can grasp these descriptions, can see that we are neither to feel nor to act in these ways; and, because the relevant descriptions are related to kinds, everyone can see that actions of certain kinds are forbidden. Therefore, a lawlike precept which says that actions of a certain kind are not to be done is correct. It is correct even antecedently of that precept’s being expressed in human positive law. Thus Aristotle is committed to something like a natural law knowable to all, which maps out very basic differences between virtue and vice. (He also expresses such a commitment in the Rhetoric. And scholars have shown that there are many other passages in the Ethics which cite or implicitly rely upon lawlike precepts which apparently should guide virtuous action and are not merely generalizations of that sort of action.)

 

Lessons I Have Learned

I will turn now to three important, practical lessons which I have learned from Aristotle’s Ethics.

The first is the distinction between moral and intellectual virtues. Aristotle draws the distinction in a rather unassuming way at the beginning of Book II. Except for his criticism of Socrates’ intellectualism — the view that virtue is knowledge, and that to know how to define a virtue is the same as having that virtue — and except for the fact that his treatment of the intellectual virtues in book VI is extremely abbreviated — it’s as if he hardly cares about them — you might not know that the distinction is of supreme importance for him. But it is.

As in so many matters, one gets a clearer grasp of what Aristotle was up to by seeing how his views are taken up by St. Thomas Aquinas and indeed by the tradition generally. In that tradition, as you know, and as I mentioned, there are four cardinal virtues, and all of them are moral virtues. Not a one is an intellectual virtue. (By the way, they were originally called ‘cardinal’ virtues by St. Ambrose, from the Latin cardo, for ‘hinge,’ not because all other virtues hinge upon them, but because he conceived of these virtues as like a hinged door, which opened up the only true path to the contemplative life.)

By a ‘moral’ virtue I mean a virtue which modifies our character, not our thoughts, and which shapes our motivation, making it right, rather than making our thoughts true. Often even the way in which virtue is explained hides the fact that there are virtues like this. Virtues for Aristotle as you probably know are relative to the function or ergon of a kind of thing. So, a knife is the kind of thing which is for cutting, that’s its ergon, the ergon of a knife is to cut, and the virtue of a knife, like that of any other kind of thing, is that which enables it to carry out its ergon well. What enables a knife to cut well is sharpness, having a sharp edge. The sharpness, as St. Thomas says, is as if a superadded being, to the being which something has simply through its being a knife. (Yes, to take away matter can be to add being, just as to remove marble can be to make a statue.) When a knife is made sharp, it is made such that it is able to carry out its ergon well. From instances like this we might generalize and say that, in general, a virtue is any stable trait which enables a thing of such-and-such a kind to carry out its ergon well. For example, clarity is a virtue of the lens of an eye. A good soundboard is a virtue of a piano. Health is the virtue of a body. Strength the virtue of a muscle. And so on.

Intellectual virtues make someone only good at something, or qua playing some role; they make someone good at medicine, a good doctor, or a good scholar, or a good virologist. They do not make someone a good man.

The problem is, that such a definition picks out virtues only in inanimate things, which do not have ‘active’ powers. And in human beings, it picks out only intellectual virtues, not moral virtues. Someone with the intellectual virtue of medicine, who has been trained in medicine and can practice it well, we grant is thereby ‘enabled’ to act well in medical matters. But such training won’t, as it were, vouchsafe for his good medical conduct — he might, while remaining good at medicine, become a Nazi doctor, or do abortions, or overprescribe medicine, or practice defensive medicine unethically. Plato considered precisely this problem in the Gorgias: how can the sophists be teaching virtue, if what they teach can be used for bad as well as for good? His intuition was that genuine virtue cannot be put to use for bad.

Intellectual virtues make someone only good at something, or qua playing some role; they make someone good at medicine, a good doctor, or a good scholar, or a good virologist. They do not make someone a good man. For that, the virtue, the stable trait, must modify motivation in matters pertaining to the human good, which involves general reasonability. Therefore, a moral virtue must be defined in this way — as a stable trait of character which is such as to render someone reliable at doing, and wanting to do, actions which are expressive of the human ergon. For example, in the field of battle, a courageous man is not simply someone who is able to hold his place in a phalanx (I suppose everyone who can control his arms and legs, and who can describe what standing firm is, is ‘able’ to stand firm), but rather it is someone who wants to stand firm and can be counted on to stand firm — who would be severely upset if he by some incapacity he could not take his place in the battle.

Aristotle of course did not think of ‘the heart’ as a center of motivation, but we would say a courageous man must have a good and loyal heart, who loves his country, loves his compatriots next to him, and loves honor.

Intellectual virtue is imparted by instruction, Aristotle says. It is the only type of virtue which can be imparted in the classroom, qua classroom. One must say ‘qua classroom’ because some moral virtues can indeed be imparted through such things as insistence on academic honesty, attendance, focus and attention in class, and politeness — together with swift and sure punishments for infractions. Generally moral virtue is imparted through already existing loves, such as for parents; by good models whom one loves and admires; by friends we have affection for, who are ‘a good influence’ not bad, as we say. These influences are transitive: parents love a school, for instance, so children who love the parents love the school which their parents love, and as a consequence the teachers in the school (who are united with the ‘mission’ of the school), through the same love, and so on, and that is how a school shapes character. It should do so suaviter, sweetly, as Boethius and St. Thomas would say, and as Newman would approve, through ‘personal influence,’ not in the manner of a seminary or military academy.

Someone who is aware of this force of manners, of associates, and of ‘persons of prestige’ for the acquisition of moral virtue will structure his own life and the lives of those he loves, insofar as he has responsibility, accordingly. You know that most of Plato’s Republic is attuned to such a principle. The music we listen to; what we become familiar with, and instinctively find congenial or disgusting, through how we are raised in early childhood; the stories we hear and the literature we read. The pedagogies of both Maria Montessori and John Senior start from a basic grasp of this distinctive nature of moral virtue.

So many ills in our society are based on a failure to grasp this distinction. We think that we can persuade those under our care to be good. We concede that young adults have never been so immature in character, and yet we discount the character of their professors and their peers in college, thinking it a great success if they are admitted to institutions which have at best academic excellence.

We think, more widely, that systems of ‘compliance’ in financial regulation and the professions can do the work of virtue. Macroenomic models still represent human movements as if a matter solely of the equilibria or disequilibria found in physical systems. In the Church, while I do not deny the need for reform, and I affirm the importance of ressourcement, we have been too quick to jettison centuries of accretion of originally pagan practices, which were incorporated precisely because they could capture the heart. And we fail to think correctly about models (to wit, altar girls), and the formative role of beauty in art, music, and architectural form. Of course a stable family with a strong father simply is the natural and best means for the acquisition of moral virtue.

We concede that young adults have never been so immature in character, and yet we discount the character of their professors and their peers in college, thinking it a great success if they are admitted to institutions which have at best academic excellence.

This common misunderstanding shows up in all kinds of ways, even by people with the best judgment. For example, an editorial by the staff of Our Sunday Visitor last week included this line: “President Biden would do well to remember that all of us are united by one unassailable truth: that we are all sons and daughters of the Father, the author of all life.” Or course what President Biden wishes and strives for in the political realm has nothing to do with what he remembers, recalls, or would do well to remember or recall. His corruption has nothing to do with any so intellectual as ‘keeping in mind.’ Rather, as Aristotle said, it is corrupt character which corrupts the intellectual principle.

So this is the first lesson, that the virtue that counts, the really important sort of virtue, is not acquired at all through instruction or persuasion. Yes, it’s not acquired, at all, by these means, although no doubt instruction plays a role in strengthening moral virtue and giving guidance for those who have responsibility over others.

A second lesson involves the forms of friendship. Aristotle’s entire treatment of friendship provides a thoughtful counterbalance if not remedy to the background individualism, the oft lamented focus on putative personal autonomy, which is a note of our culture. But I want to focus on one item in particular, his understanding of so-called ‘useful friendship.’

As you probably know, Aristotle says that there are three forms of friendship, based on similarity in goodness, or complementary usefulness, or a sharing of pleasant experiences. The word he uses, rendered ‘form,’ is eidos, which means a species. As he is clear that there is no genus under which all three forms fall, these forms are a bit like the categories. They are in some schematic way like one another, and one form is prior, and the others are secondary and in some way dependent upon the first, but tellingly there is no generic term which is predicated in the same way of each of them. Thus there is an irreducible and potentially maddening multiplicity about them.

I don’t think it is appreciated what it means to say that they differ in form. Let’s say roughly that we recognize that they are alike, but that there will be reasons, which appear equally good, for any one form, for saying that it is the same kind of thing as, and a different kind of thing from, any other — and we will continue to be perplexed by that.

We might pause for a moment and ask whether C.S. Lewis holds the same thing about his four loves. Love is an easier case than friendship, because it does not involve reciprocation. We can analyze simply one person’s love of something or someone else. His four loves you will recall are storge, eros, philia, and agape. From an Aristotelian point of view, three of these, storge, philia, and agape are all similar in kind. Storge is affection for what is good considered under the aspect of familiar, oikeion. Agape is philia of God with man shared by God with man, also based on shared goodness. Eros is the odd man out. Platonic eros is a confusion, from Aristotle’s point of view, between storge, as when the soul yearns to return to its home among the forms, and love for pleasure, as towards a youth with a beautiful body. On the other hand, Christian eros, or romanticism, the tradition of courtly love, which Lewis rightly drew attention to, is a genuine creation of Christianity not contemplated by Aristotle. Such affect, when sound and not corrupted, must be a form of philia based on goodness, marked by the willingness to prove one’s love by wagering all for the sake of beauty.

When Lewis speaks of philia, he has in mind only a tiny sub-class of Aristotelian philia, what Aristotle calls hetairike philia, the distinct bonding among young men of roughly the same age, especially youths, as in Plato’s Lysis. No doubt this type of philia is phenomenologically salient for us, because it serves to mark us off from others. Friends in this sense typically withdraw from crowds and groups to be just by themselves. They might even as famously in the Bloomsbury Circle count their bonds for each other as more solemn than ties to their country.

But as I said what makes Lewis’s task easier, and, an Aristotelian might say, what leads him to go astray, is that he does not consider reciprocation as essential to love.This is in fact what leads him to posit a fundamental distinction between need-love and gift-love, as he calls it. Gift love makes a virtue of non-reciprocation. Thereby he falls into the trap of making a fundamental distinction between egoism and altruism. This really is the lesson I take from Aristotle involving the forms of friendship, namely, that if one considers philia, as Aristotle does, as any reciprocal wishing of good which in fact serves as a ‘unitive and binding force’ among human beings (to use the language of Pseudo-Dionysius), and if one dismisses unreciprocated love as a degenerate case (as a mathematician might say), then no useful distinction along the lines of egoism and altruism can be drawn. All such attempts are misguided; they fail to do justice to the phenomena; and they tend to be based on a misguided Cartesian understanding of the human subject.

Such an outlook is disastrous in a commercial republic, such as ours, especially when bonds of civil society, and civic friendship, have been eroded by bad personal habits encouraged largely by developments in technology, such as the television and now the smart phone. It is disastrous because the predominant social bonds which remain are precisely the useful friendship seen in business transactions and relationships. Here is one vision. There is such a thing as “the system of natural liberties,” as James Wilson and other Founders called it, following Adam Smith and philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment. The role of republican government (small “r”) is to understand and respect this system, to guide it when necessary, and to regulate it in such a way as to allow for its flourishing. One chief expression of this system will be in the free business relationships among property-holding persons in a society in which the institution of private property is recognized.

Of course this vision of society historically was underwritten by a classical view of the origin of human sociability, which held that human beings gathered together to live in villages and towns (in poleis, misleading rendered ‘cities’ in our translations) because they wished to trade goods in markets to meet their basic material needs. Human beings unlike animals do not come into the world supplied with clothing, something shielding the flesh on their feet, so that they can walk on limestone, dedicated naturally occurring sources of food, and instincts to find or make necessary shelter. The market or free economy is a natural institution for meeting these needs. Such is the view in Aristotle Politics I, Plato Republic, Bellarmine, De Laicis, St. Thomas, De Regno, and Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations.

On an Aristotelian view of philia, the ‘unitive and binding force’ among men, the market is a realm of the useful form of philia, which has the advantage that it can be formed quickly and requires only minimal virtue — honesty, and trustworthiness in market contracts — but of course the disadvantage that it is relatively unstable and liable to be shifting constantly. It also has the advantage like the other forms of philia that it is as it were focally related to the central case so that it can easily lead to the primary form of philia. That is its tendency, if conditions are propitious for it.

If we understand that we are dealing with a distinct form of friendship, then we will find the curious mixture of self-interest and service to others in market relationships fascinating, but we will not be tempted to forget about this mixture, or deny it, or fail to respect its own principles, so to speak. Yes, no one exchanges goods with another unless its to his own benefit, and yet the other will not agree to the exchange unless you first succeed in meeting that other person’s needs. Thus you must be as attentive to the other as you are to yourself, and your own interests, and perhaps, as a matter of psychology, more attentive. A professor who in the classroom was monetizing his time, calculating his income, or thinking about how much he was himself gaining in knowledge of a subject, while imparting that subject to his students, would be a poor professor. And likewise a chef, servant, carpenter, car mechanic, vintner, or anyone else. (By the way, if you have studied Republic I, you will see that Plato was disposed to assimilate virtue to knowledge there, precisely because it had the good of another as its object.)

But here is a common if not the prevailing error today — that business relationships are self-interested, therefore they must be motivated by ‘greed’ (people say this not understanding what greed really is), while government action is altruistic, motivated by the common good. On this view, there is no system of natural liberty: business activity becomes good only through being regulated!

I simplify, but not very much. Yes, I am outlining something like an instinctive way of looking at things, an ill-considered reaction. But it surely underlies the broad movement of our society over time towards increasing government regulation, an ever-increasing size of government, and eventually, it is certain, a loss of our natural liberties.

I will give one last important lesson I’ve taken from the Ethics, and this is the reality and importance of the virtue of magnanimity.

Magnanimity has had a bad rap. In the classical world — think of Cicero, De Officiis — it is a virtue which one would think can be possessed solely by aristocrats, governors, and military leaders. Ross’s widely used translation of the Nicomachean Ethics, in the chapter on the magnanimous man, can make him seem to be “a prig with the conceit and bad manners of a prig” (in that great phrase reported by W.F.R. Hardie). Ross’s choice of the word ‘pride’ or the phrase ‘proper pride’ to refer to this traits tend to underline the felt incompatibility of this trait with the foundational Christian virtue of humility.

St. Thomas treats of magnanimity as a potential part of courage, that is to say, a power like courage, but applied not to the test that requires the greatest risk and danger, namely, facing death on the battle field, but other matters of risk and difficulty. Magnificence is one such potential part, which makes one want to strive for successful attainment in the matter of relatively large expenditures for a noble and typically public purpose. Magnanimity is another, involving a striving for honor, which is itself one of the greatest external goods, and especially the greatest honors.

 I find it interesting, though, that St. Thomas emphasizes the role of standing firm in the operation of magnanimity. You may know that St. Thomas, following Aristotle, says that courage involves both boldness and fear; and its operation with respect to fear is shown in our standing firm when fear would propel us away. And this is how he picks out magnanimity: “magnanimity agrees with fortitude,” he says, “in confirming the mind about some difficult matter; but it falls short thereof, in that it confirms the mind about a matter wherein it is easier to stand firm.” Again, courage makes us stand firm when facing danger of death. Magnanimity makes us stand firm, so as to acquire great honor, when facing the danger of …. ? St. Thomas does not exactly say, but something like the danger of failing, or wasting our time, or looking like a laughing stock.

I believe that the discussions of Cicero, St. Thomas, and Aristotle are consistent — one could add Seneca as well, as well as Pope Francis, who once in a visit to a Jesuit school recommended magnanimity as an important Christian virtue — because I believe that there is a real, stable, recurring (and similar in its recurrence), character trait, which gets called ‘magnanimity’ or something else in other languages. And this point is important for students in the audience: we must read Aristotle’s ethics as commenting on a reality, and in view of what we can independently discern of this reality — Aristotle’s ethics is not a mere text to be decoded on its own terms, as a text, as if we were playing some kind of interpretive game — even if, when you begin to study Aristotle, it is likely that his text will be your best guide to that reality. You’ll have to hold onto it like someone holding onto a rope when he’s peering in a canyon. But you are to look at the canyon not the rope solely.

If we attach Aristotle’s discussion to the reality more than to the text, then we won’t be misled by the placement of his discussion of magnanimity, in book IV, separated from his discussion of courage. It’s a virtue closely connected with courage, a matter of the heart, a kind of manliness, really, and not something necessarily connected with one’s standing in society.

I might combine what I am saying about magnanimity with what I had just before said about the importance of useful friendship in a commercial republic, and add that magnanimity takes the form of entrepreneurship in a society such as ours, just as magnificence takes the form of philanthropy. But I prefer to point out how the reality which is magnanimity of necessity has a different expression, from the classical world, in a Christian society, in which we believe that the Holy One, the the Holy Mighty One, the Holy Eternal One took on flesh, washed feet, and died on our behalf. He thus changed what counts as great for us and what things are worth taking risks for — worth facing the danger of failing, appearing to waste our time, or appearing as a laughing stock. Any matter in which a Christian risks something significant upon the truth of the Christianity has now become a matter of magnanimity. For more guidance along these lines, I recommend to you Newman’s great sermon, “The Ventures of Faith.”

 

Conclusion

In conclusion, I want to draw your attention to Pope Benedict’s famous Regensburg Lecture, which remains valid today. Students here, who might have been toddlers when it was delivered on 12 September 2006, should make themselves familiar with it. Few of those who were adults then remember that it was about the “three stages of de-hellenization of theology” and the disaster implied by that historical devolution, for universities and for our civilization. Today, 16 years later, we can read the lecture and lament what it describes. Or we can take up the task of rehellenization, in the only way that we can, in our own lives, families, schools, and colleges. We should do so of course only because, and only to the extent that, we regard the hellenizing views as true. Truths about moral virtue, useful friendship, and magnanimity would be good places to begin. I have maintained that, among all sources one can choose as a guide in this task, for rehellenizing our culture, for truth serviceable for all of life, one can hardly find a better text for lifelong practice than Aristotle’s Ethics.

 

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