from The Raft of Medusa, 1819 by Theodore Géricault.
In the ninth book of Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle assesses the nature of friendship and its essential place within the eudaimonic life. Primary and paramount to the “good life” of “the happy man” is the activity of contemplation: “Happiness in the highest sense is the contemplative life.” Given man as a social being, or “political creature,” and his teleological end being the “contemplation of worthy actions and [those of] his own,” the cultivation of character finds its fullest expression in the symbiotic bond of true friendship among virtuous others, for several reasons.
If happiness “lies in living and being active,” and one may “contemplate [his] neighbors” with greater veracity than he can his own conduct, it is in participating in the “company of the good” that the eudaimonic man gives and receives the joy which constitutes his and others’ existential aim. One is to his friend as he is to himself, in that each finds in the other the aspiration towards the good which he seeks – “Whatever it is for whose sake they value life, in that they wish to occupy themselves in friendship,” states Aristotle.
The embodiment of the good through the cultivation and exercise of virtue is of central importance to companionship; that is, “the essence of friendship is living together.” As two individuals might in sharing a physical space, friends arrange each other’s mental furniture, as it were. Attending to the good one loves in the other, with whom he strives, it might also be found for himself; honing attention and action amongst themselves as fellow travelers toward that eudaimonic end, friends are “augmented,” becoming “better too by their activities and by improving each other.”
Bibliography
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics. In Ethics: History, Theory, and Contemporary Issues. Edited by Steven M. Cahn and Peter J. Markie. OUP, 2020.