Seeing Other People
Aristotle’s treatise on friendship begins with excellence, but it does so in order to encourage the great-souled pursuit of love paired with the belief that we ourselves might be loved in all of our particularity.
By M.M. Townsend
The treatise on friendship in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics is an undeniably beautiful paean to the possibility of love. It stands as one of the few sustained discussions in the philosopher’s corpus that can rival the riveting quality that Plato produces in his myths. Yet before he arrives at such heights, Aristotle spends much of the Ethics insulting his audience for their less-than-lovely qualities. The youth, he tells the young, take no profit from discussions of social and political philosophy, they are guided by their worst passions, their blood is too warm for really excellent friendship, they excel in math but are lousy at more important studies. This contrast between the beauty and the insults is a gambit, I think, made in love; and one that attempts to overcome the limitations of the very love of friendship Aristotle hopes to inspire.
I often read through this book with others, and when I follow strictly the order of how the insults are arranged (not an easy task if one is wary of insulting people in general), I’ve discovered that I’ve unwittingly set my audience up for an interesting sort of relaxation once the conversation finally turns past excellence to friendship. The surface of Aristotelian excellence, whereby we carefully pull ourselves habitually closer to the center of our better inclinations as the only stable foundation of real happiness, is at best obvious, and as such, boring. At worst, it seems impossible, off-putting, and unseen among mortal men. But in the context of friendly love, and the immediately recognizable complaints that arise when friendship is built on anything less than excellence, I’ve watched my readers carefully let down their guard against the many frustrations excellence would otherwise entail. For instance, the idea that temperance would ever be meaningfully difficult, or if meaningfully difficult, not super-human; or that one’s jokes might be usefully thought-through beforehand, seem a bit high-handed on Aristotle’s part—that is, until you start to consider what merits such things might have in someone you love; or how you could explain the nagging absence of love for someone you admire but fail to get along with. We all love to praise our friends, but we often realize, in the very moment of praising them under the stringency of Aristotle’s eye, that excellence might not precisely describe the relationship we have in mind.
This is one payoff, I think, of Aristotle’s friendly slander. As he reminds us in the Rhetoric, anger often arrives as response to a certain sort of belittling. In the Ethics’s case, our anger is riled at old age’s easy superiority at the foibles of youth. But youthful anger also gives rise to a desire for revenge; and in this case, the best revenge going is to fall in love with the beautiful more thoroughly than Aristotle claimed you, a young person, are yet capable of. That, indeed, will show him. But witnessing the splendid, careful particularity of his discussion of friendship is also when readers start to fall in love with Aristotle for his own sake. It’s how he helps you finally begin to trust that he does know what he’s talking about when he talks about the beautiful, the linchpin goal of both friendship and virtue. This hat-trick, I think, persuades you into a more loving appreciation of the pursuit of character, far more than merely offering you your personal solitary happiness.
But the beauty of Aristotle’s speeches here are covering over two very important omissions: the power and beauty of erotic love, and the strength of our attachment to what we believe to be our own. Much of our fellow-feeling for other humans comes from the latter, individually and politically, and unfortunately, such love is easily turned every which way by bad actors and demagogues; or indeed, held at gunpoint by our own commitment to loyalty at any cost. Likewise, Plato’s ability to speak to the higher claims of eros are, of course, legendary, and quite purposefully distracting—but not distracting enough to conceal entirely that what we erotically love is too often not good, full stop. I wonder if Aristotle’s audience let him get away with all that blame and no praise for eros, however, letting him prose away without acknowledging any affection for this awkwardly different sort of human love, that remains nevertheless supremely desirable. Of course, if you follow Aristotle’s advice over Plato’s on which sort of love should direct your days, you are less likely to resemble the unhappy Alcibiades, disappointed in love, in Socrates, and in political philosophy alike. But will this be enough for us, strange sorts of creatures as we are?
Loneliness wants both the species of excellence and the particularity of erotic longing, and it is uncompromising in its want—at least until the human in question is tempted to compromise.
The human trouble is that, as Kierkegaard’s youthful aesthete from Either/Or insists, goodness too often slides past our gaze without piquing our interest. Even Aristotelian excellence (I say it with love) can be bland. This can be seen by noticing how the good friend of someone else, as you note him from across the room without much other knowledge, is a sort of obvious possessor of excellence even from afar. To have close friends to whom one is visibly attached announces the presence of not one or two but likely a great many of the virtues. It is almost enough to know this about someone, in order to like them. But then what is it, what is that thing that we could like? And who is it, after all, that sits beneath the surface of this excellent love?
Both the love of one’s own and the erotic, the two sorts of dangerous love that Aristotle would prefer to conceal, are based on a funny sort of particularity, most definitely not bland, whereby some single thing (excellent or not) becomes the quixotic focus of our attention and desire. Virtue is, of course, in the particulars; but it is also visible of itself as a certain kind of thing, with the species tell of the visible shining that arises from each highly particularized mean. Erotic love, by contrast, always begins to be noticed by its tragic attachment to someone in particular, rather than to someone else, often no less worthy. The suddenness of the particularity of holding someone else’s hand, and the remarkable belief—not wholly true, not wholly false—that you know someone after you’ve kissed them, is a paradoxical metaphysical certainty to have, but nevertheless a tempting one. Not that one, we say, not that one, but this. Of course, the next temptation is to substitute the image of what we’d like to love, in place of the particularity of what incited love in the first place. This is yet another of beauty’s cankers. But even this seeming, this magnetic imagery, continues to point us toward something more real, as was the genius and credit of Plato to notice.
For strangely enough, both eros and the love of one’s own satisfy the same kind of thing we desire from the love of God: that there would be someone to love us in all our particularity. “If I were God,” says one unrequited lover to another in Éric Rohmer’s A Winter’s Tale, “I would cherish you particularly.” Of course, God does this already, for everyone, but it remains remarkably difficult to hold on to this belief that He would be so willing. Why my particularity, one wonders, in all its mess; and yet there it is, God’s love, for you. Perhaps this is a reason why this kind of love is so dangerous to look for from other merely human beings. Yet eros remains a tantalizingly visible manifestation of this elusive quality of particularity—a sign-post for the wary; an ever-so-satisfying place for our love to direct itself, if a fundamentally dangerous one. But, then, however; if nevertheless in addition to God if we still want to love a human being, which human being shall we love? And whom would it be excellent to kiss?
The depth of this problem can be seen in the phenomenology of loneliness, the uncanny presence of a lack; where an absence, a non-being, suddenly becomes the most obviously present thing in the world. Surely a friend, one would think, is what could help, what could be the easiest solution to the cavernous problem of the absent. But once we are inspired to the love of excellence, either from Aristotle or any other author, no longer will any human being simply do. The presence of falling short of excellence in a friend, alas, is far worse than any ordinary loneliness. And the trouble remains that excellence is a necessary but not sufficient condition for what ails the soul in its solitary situation. Loneliness is almost but not quite the presence of the lack of another’s excellence. Rather it is the sharpness of the absence of someone-in-particular: the paradox that one wants what one knows not, but no one and nothing else will do. There’s a human honesty worth holding on to in the immediacy of this uncompromising sensation, even in its sharpest moments, because it contains a rare and remarkably noble blend of eros and philos, of friendship and desire. Loneliness wants both the species of excellence and the particularity of erotic longing, and it is uncompromising in its want—at least until the human in question is tempted to compromise: and not always but often quite disastrously.
Our human loves criss-cross each other like ships in the night, and at no time, it might seem, could we collect all the abilities required to love well, or to escape the absence of each other.
When young, we do not start off lonely, Aristotle notes, because of the warmth of the readiness of our youthful goodwill. The youth are hot-hearted, they love easily, even changing the object of their love in a single day; but there’s a time limit to this persuadability of feeling. Eventually, we grow cold, literally, as Aristotle contends, as we age, and greed, advantage, and stinginess often become the most trenchant manifestation of unlovely human wanting. But if youthfully we lack the ability to judge whom would be excellent to love, and when older we lack the desire even for friends, let alone for lovers, what is humanity to do? Our human loves criss-cross each other like ships in the night, and at no time, it might seem, could we collect all the abilities required to love well, or to escape the absence of each other.
Searching for happiness in the Ethics, Aristotle insultingly claims that the youth only choose friends for the pleasures they give—or rather, he notes that they seem so to do. In this gap between seeming and being lies our hope. Looking for persuasion in the Rhetoric, Aristotle remarks that the old or old at heart are so chilled by their search for the smallest advantage, that they “love like people who are going to hate, and hate like people who are going to love.” But the young prefer to perform beautiful deeds rather than advantageous ones, since they live for character rather than for gain. This is the root of their desire for friends, a desire they have (and at last he is plain-spoken) more than people at any other age. In this desire, they are even great-souled, he remarks, since thinking oneself worthy of good friends, of real love, is to consider oneself worthy of greatness. This is not the great-souledness of career, talent, ability, or even the bravery that outfaces fortune, but the kind of great-heartedness required to do two things: not only to consider oneself as worthy of love, but also to imagine into being the hope to love with all your heart the very thing you might love as nothing less than good. And to imagine all this, impossibly, in the very human person you can’t help but wish you might through all hazards find, seek, and love.
Of the two unrequited lovers in Rohmer’s A Winter’s Tale, one is in despair and one is not. On the way back from seeing Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale, en français, they get into a discussion about possibility and faith. The play was not plausible, complains the first one. Je n’aime pas ce qui est semblable, responds the other; I don’t like what’s plausible. I am more religious than you, she continues, despite her lack of profession of faith, because I hope when you do not. At this the first lover is annoyed; he wants to convince her that her hope for her earlier love to come back to her, past all accident and probability, is misplaced, imprudent, absurd. Indeed, he wants to convince her to choose the more prudent path (himself), rather than what desire and impossible hope would recommend. But if it’s improbable that you would come across the lost one, he argues, why should you look for him at all? Because if I do, she says, if I find him, it will be une joie tellement grande, a joy so great, I’ll gladly give my life for it.
The hope for this sort of joy is why Aristotle speaks so beautifully of friendship to the youth, and to anyone who might be persuaded by his rhetoric into love with the beautiful: not because the youth are incapable of friendship, or that their failure to anticipate the dangers of eros might capsize their hope of calmer friendships forever. He does it because they are more likely than any other audience to be alive to the grander scale of all possible human longings, to everything involved in being human on the cusp of the divine. The young have not yet learned to be humbled by necessity, or to think of people as less than one might hope they would or could be. In this way, youthfulness cannot help but continue to hope for the impossible confluence of friendship, eros, and one’s own, even in the moment it first becomes conscious of the undeniable flaws of each. In the inspiration of this great-souled hope, just for a moment, I think, Aristotle points beyond himself, past pagan despair to something more: because the love required to be in love with love as love of the good and beautiful at once is of a different order than any merely excellent love, however virtuous. It is as close as he comes, you might say, to Platonism.
The fractured-ness of our experience is obvious. It does not take special insight to see the contrasts and gaps between various human loves. The harder part is not to allow the dichotomies between our yearnings to form the easy excuse for the wrong sort of compromise, for despair, and most of all, for despair of the particularity of love that would be like God’s love for us, and our love for God. Therefore hope, however improbable, must always be justified. For who else would we love? There is no one else; and no one, I hope, but you.
Mary Townsend is a professor of philosophy at St. John’s University, Queens, New York. She has written on culture and philosophy for The Atlantic, The Hedgehog Review, and Plough Quarterly, as well as a book on Plato’s Republic.