Pangle’s project is, therefore, ambitious. He explains why friends get into fights, when friendships dissolve, why friendship is necessary, and what is its relationship to self-love. Friendships between peers are standard, but he also spends several chapters discussing what he calls friendships based on a superiority, such as between parents and children, rich and poor, rulers and subjects. This project unfolds in the course of an astonishingly complex account of friendship: not only does Aristotle discuss friendships based on virtuous character, he also describes relationships based on utility or pleasure as defective, but nevertheless genuine, friendships.

Thus, the books on friendship form a bridge to Aristotle’s argument in the final book of the Nicomachean Ethics that philosophical contemplation is the most perfect happiness. Instead, it is the friendships of philosophers that best exemplify virtue in friendship. She argues that Aristotle’s purpose in NE VIII and IX is to correct these misconceptions in a way that shows that true virtue and the best friendship arise among people who do not seek their happiness in either. According to Pangle, the decent people Aristotle addresses are likely to think that friendship is good because it is fulfilling to devote ourselves utterly to another person and because they think moral virtue involves precisely this readiness for self-sacrifice in the expectation of honor. Pangle thinks that the idea that virtue is most perfectly and easily realized in friendship, though true in its way, most likely rests on a confused understanding both of moral virtue and of the goodness of friends. not necessarily to everyone who will read or hear the argument, e.g.

In her study of the discussion of friendship in Books VIII and IX of the Nicomachean Ethics, Lorraine Smith Pangle argues that Aristotle begins with these high-minded hopes in order to show something quite different to those who are willing to think carefully (i.e. It is also in friendship that people feel most fulfilled, and so it is tempting to think that by studying friendship we can see how the life of moral virtue and happiness come together. From an Aristotelian point of view it is tempting to think that friendship can show us something important about moral virtue since it is in this context that generosity, courage, and selflessness come most easily.

Love and friendship book summary