c. 340 BC 2026
This is an AI modernization of Nicomachean Ethics into contemporary English. The original is available from Standard Ebooks. Also available as an epub.
Aristotle was born in 384 BC in Stagira, in the north of Greece, came to Athens at seventeen to study with Plato, and stayed at the Academy for twenty years. He left after Plato died, spent some time tutoring the young Alexander of Macedon, and came back to Athens to start a school of his own, the Lyceum. He wrote on almost everything: logic, rhetoric, physics, weather, the parts of animals, the constitutions of Greek cities, poetry, dreams. He died in 322 BC, a year after leaving Athens for the last time.
This book reads like lecture notes because it probably is. It starts abruptly, doubles back, repeats itself, refers to arguments it has not made yet, and occasionally stops mid-thought. The books Aristotle polished for readers are all lost; what survived is the working material of the school. Knowing that in advance is worth a good deal, because the texture is not the reader's fault and it is not the translation's either. The title comes from the name Nicomachus, which belonged to both his father and his son.
Three of its key words are false friends in English. Happiness, in Book One, is not a mood and not a feeling you could have on a Tuesday afternoon; it is a whole life going well, an activity rather than a state, and Aristotle says flatly that one swallow does not make a spring. Virtue is not primness. The word means something closer to being good at the job of being a person, and his list includes courage, generosity, proper anger and being good company, with a long stretch on the man who is witty rather than either a buffoon or a bore. The mean is not moderation for its own sake and it is not a midpoint you calculate. Courage sits between cowardice and recklessness, and where it sits depends on who you are and what is in front of you. His own version: anyone can get angry, that is easy, but to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right reason and in the right way is not easy.
The other thing usually left out of accounts of this book is how much of it is about friendship. Books Eight and Nine, about a fifth of the whole, are on what friends are for, the three reasons people have them, why the best kind is rare and slow, whether a happy man needs any, and what to do when a friend changes and you no longer like him.
This edition is the complete ten books, modernized from F. H. Peters' 1893 English translation rather than from the Greek. Aristotle's teacher and his successor are both in this collection: Plato's Dialogues, and the Characters of Theophrastus, who took over the Lyceum when he left it.
Every art and every inquiry, and likewise every action and every choice, seems to aim at some good; and so it has been well said that the good is that at which everything aims.
But notice a difference among these aims, or ends. Sometimes what we are after is the activity itself; sometimes it is a result over and above the activity. And wherever there is an end beyond the act, the result is better than the activity that produces it.
Now since there are many kinds of action and many arts and sciences, there are many ends too: health is the end of medicine, a ship of shipbuilding, victory of the art of war, wealth of household management.
But often several of these are grouped under one master art or science — bridle-making and the other equipment trades under horsemanship; horsemanship, along with everything else a soldier does, under the art of war; and so on. In every such case the end of the master art is more desirable than the ends of the arts beneath it, since those are pursued for its sake. And this holds equally whether the end in question is the activity itself or something beyond it, as in the cases just mentioned.
Suppose, then, that there is some end of our actions that we want for its own sake, choosing everything else as a means to it — and suppose we do not choose everything for the sake of something further, since then the chain would run on forever and desire would be empty and pointless. Clearly this end would be the good, the best of all things. And surely, from a practical standpoint, knowing it matters enormously: like archers with a definite mark to shoot at, we will be far more likely to hit what we want.
If this is right, we must try to sketch, at least roughly, what this good is — and first of all, which of the arts or sciences it belongs to.
It would seem to belong to the supreme science, the one that most of all deserves to be called the master science.
Politics looks like the answer. It is Politics that prescribes which sciences a state needs, which ones each citizen is to study, and how far; and we see even the most prestigious arts — household management, rhetoric, the art of war — placed under its authority.
Since Politics makes use of the other practical sciences, and since it further lays down what people are to do and what they are to refrain from doing, its end must embrace the ends of all the rest; so its end must be the proper good of man.
For even though this good is the same for a single person and for a state, the good of the state seems the grander and more complete thing, both to achieve and to preserve. It is a fine thing to secure it for one person; but to secure it for a whole people, and for whole states, is nobler and more divine.
This, then, is what the present inquiry aims at — and it is a kind of political inquiry.
We must be satisfied with as much precision as our subject allows; the same exactness should no more be expected in every kind of reasoning than in every kind of craftsmanship.
Now the noble and the just — the things Politics deals with — vary so much, and are so uncertain, that some people conclude they exist only by convention, not by nature.
There is a similar uncertainty about good things, because good things often do people harm: men have been ruined by wealth before now, and have lost their lives through courage.
Since our subject and our starting materials are like this, we must be content to indicate the truth roughly and in outline. When we are dealing with things that admit of no fixed and unchanging rules, and reasoning from premises that are only probable, we must settle for conclusions that are only probable too.
The reader, for his part, should take each of my statements in the same spirit. It is the mark of an educated mind to expect, in each kind of inquiry, only as much exactness as the subject allows: it is just as absurd to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician as to demand rigorous proof from an orator.
Now each of us judges well what he knows, and that is what earns the name "a good judge" — a good judge of some special field when he has been educated in that field, a good judge without qualification when he has had a broad education. Hence a young man is not a fit student of Politics: he lacks experience of the business of life, and that experience is precisely the data and subject matter of Politics.
Besides, since he tends to be swept along by his feelings, the study will do him no good; for its aim is not knowledge but practice.
And here it makes no difference whether a man is young in years or merely young in character. The young man's disqualification is not a matter of time; it comes from living by feeling and chasing every desire as it arises. For people like that, knowledge turns out useless in practice — just as it does for those we call weak-willed. But for those who order their desires and their actions by reason, knowledge of these matters will be a great benefit.
So much, then, by way of preface: about the student, about the spirit in which what we say must be received, and about what we propose to do.
To resume: since all knowledge and every choice aims at some good, what is this good that we say Politics aims at — what is the highest of all the goods that action can achieve?
As far as its name goes, nearly everyone agrees. Ordinary people and cultivated people alike call it happiness, and they take "living well" and "doing well" to mean the same thing as "being happy."
But they disagree about what happiness actually is, and the many do not give the same account of it as the wise.
The many take it to be something obvious and tangible — pleasure, or wealth, or fame. One man says this, another says that; often the same man says different things at different times: when he is sick, it is health; when he is poor, it is wealth. And when people feel the sting of their own ignorance, they admire most whoever says something grand that sails over their heads.
Some philosophers, on the other hand, have held that beyond all these particular good things there is an "absolute" good, which is the cause of the goodness in all the rest.
It would hardly be worthwhile to review every opinion ever held; we will confine ourselves to those that are most widespread, or that seem to have some reason on their side.
But we must not overlook the distinction between arguments that proceed from first principles and arguments that work up toward them. Plato was right to keep raising this question and asking which way the road runs — from the starting points or toward them — just as on a racecourse you may run from the judges to the far post, or back again.
Well: we must start from what is known.
But "what is known" means two things: what is known to us, which is one thing, and what is known absolutely, which is another.
I think it is safe to say that we must start from what is known to us.
And this is why nothing but a good moral upbringing can prepare a man to study the noble and the just — in a word, to study Politics. For here the undemonstrated fact is the starting point, and if the fact is sufficiently clear to a man, he will not need the reason why on top of it. Now the man with a good upbringing either already has the starting points of action or will easily accept them when they are pointed out. As for the man who neither has them nor will accept them, let him hear Hesiod:
Best of all is the man who sees the truth himself; good, too, is the one who listens to wise advice; but the man who neither sees it for himself nor takes another's words to heart — he is of no use at all.
Let us pick up the discussion at the point where we digressed.
It seems that people take their notions of the good, or happiness, from the lives actually lived — and not unreasonably. The many, the least refined, suppose it to be pleasure, which is why the life they aim at is the life of enjoyment.
For the most conspicuous kinds of life are three: this life of enjoyment, the life of the statesman, and, third, the life of contemplation.
The mass of men show themselves utterly slavish by preferring a life fit for cattle; but their view gets a hearing, because many of the people in high places share the tastes of Sardanapalus.
Cultivated men with a practical bent prefer honor; for honor, I suppose we may say, is the aim of the statesman's life.
But honor seems too shallow to be the good we are seeking. It appears to depend on the people who give it rather than on the man who receives it, while we have a hunch that the good is something peculiarly a man's own — something that can scarcely be taken away from him.
Moreover, men seem to pursue honor in order to reassure themselves of their own worth: at any rate, they want to be honored by sensible people, by people who know them, and on the ground of their virtue — their excellence. So plainly, in their own view at least, virtue is better than honor; and perhaps we should take virtue, rather than honor, to be the end of the statesman's life.
But even virtue looks too incomplete to be our answer. A man could possess virtue and yet be asleep, or inactive his whole life long; worse, he could meet with the greatest disasters and misfortunes. And no one would call such a man happy — except to defend a thesis for argument's sake. But we need not dwell on this now; it is discussed well enough in the popular writings.
The third kind of life is the life of contemplation. We will deal with it further on.
As for the moneymaking life, it is something forced and unnatural; and wealth is obviously not the good we are searching for, since it is merely useful — a means to something else. One would sooner take the earlier candidates — pleasure, honor, virtue — for ends, since they are prized for their own sake. But not even they are the end, though a great deal of breath has been wasted trying to show that they are.
Setting these views aside, we now have to examine the "universal good" and state the difficulties it raises — not a pleasant task, given our friendship for the authors of the doctrine of Ideas. But we venture to think this is the right course: for the sake of truth we ought to sacrifice even what is nearest to us, especially since we call ourselves philosophers. Both are dear to us, but it is a sacred duty to give the preference to truth.
First, then: the very men who put forward this theory did not posit a common Idea for things of which one is prior to the other — which is why they held no common Idea of numbers. But the predicate "good" is applied to substances, and also to qualities and relations. Now what exists independently — what we call substance — is logically prior to what is relative; for the relative is a kind of offshoot, an accident of a thing or substance. So by their own principles there cannot be one common Idea covering all these goods.
Second, "good" is used in as many different senses as "is" or "being." We apply it to substances, or independent existences — God, reason; to qualities — the virtues; to quantity — the moderate or due amount; to relatives — the useful; to time — the opportune moment; to place — the right habitation; and so on. Clearly, then, the word "good" cannot stand for one and the same notion in all these applications; if it did, it could not be applied in all the categories, but in one only.
Third, if the notion were one, then — since there is one science for all the things that come under one Idea — there would be one science of all goods. But in fact there are many sciences even for goods within a single category. The science of the opportune moment in war is strategy; in disease, medicine. The science of the due amount in food is medicine; in exercise, gymnastics.
Fourth, one might ask what they even mean by this "absolute." In "absolute man" and "man," the word "man" has one and the same sense; as far as manhood goes, there is no difference between them. And if that is so, neither will there be any difference in goodness between "absolute good" and "good."
Fifth, they do not make the good any more good by making it eternal: a white thing that lasts a long while is no whiter than one that lasts a day.
There seems to be more plausibility in the doctrine of the Pythagoreans, who place the One in their column of goods rather than reducing all goods to unity; and even Speusippus seems to follow them here.
But these points can wait for another occasion. To what I have said, however, someone may object that the Platonists do not talk this way about all goods indiscriminately. Goods that are pursued and welcomed for their own sake, they hold, are called good by reference to one common Form, while things that tend to produce or preserve these goods, or to ward off their opposites, are called good only as means to them, in a different sense.
Evidently, then, goods will fall into two classes: things good in themselves, and things good as means to the former. So let us separate the goods-in-themselves from the merely useful, and ask whether the first class is called good by reference to one common Idea.
Now what kind of things would one call "good in themselves"?
Surely the things we pursue even apart from their consequences — wisdom, say, and sight, and certain pleasures and certain honors. For although we sometimes pursue these as means, no one could refuse to rank them among the things that are good in themselves.
If these are excluded, nothing is good in itself except the Idea — and then the Form will be empty and meaningless.
If, however, these things do belong among the goods-in-themselves, then it will have to be shown that the goodness of all of them answers to one and the same account, the way "white" means the same thing applied to snow and applied to white lead.
But in fact we have to give a separate and different account of the goodness of honor and wisdom and pleasure.
"Good," then, is not a term applied to all these things alike, in one sense, by reference to one common Idea or Form.
But then how do they all come to be called good? Surely not by a mere accident of naming. Perhaps because they all proceed from one source, or all contribute to one end; or perhaps rather by some analogy — just as we call reason the eye of the soul, because reason stands to the soul as the eye stands to the body, and so on.
But we may drop these questions for now; working them out in detail belongs more properly to another branch of philosophy.
And for the same reason we may drop any further consideration of the Idea. For even granting that this term "good," applied to so many different things, has one and the same meaning throughout — or that there exists an absolute good apart from all the particulars — it is evident that this good would not be anything a man can act on or attain. And it is a good of exactly that kind we are now seeking.
It might be thought, perhaps, that the universal good would still be worth knowing with a view to the goods that are attainable and achievable: with it as a pattern, the argument runs, we shall more readily discern our own good, and discerning it, achieve it.
There is certainly some plausibility in this argument, but it seems at odds with how the sciences actually work. All of them aim at some good and strive to fill their gaps, yet they leave the knowledge of this universal good alone. And it is hardly likely that every practitioner of every art and science would fail to know — would not even look for — something that would help them so much.
Indeed, I am at a loss to see how the weaver or the carpenter would be furthered in his own craft by knowing this absolute good, or how contemplating the pure Form would make anyone better at healing the sick or commanding an army. For it seems to me the doctor does not even seek health in this abstract way: he seeks the health of man — or rather of some particular man. For it is individuals he has to heal.
Leaving these matters, then, let us return once more to the question: what can this good be that we are searching for?
It seems to be different in different actions and different arts — one thing in medicine, another in war, and so on. What, then, is the good in each of these? Surely that for the sake of which everything else is done. In medicine that is health; in war, victory; in building, a house — a different thing in each case, but always, in whatever we do and whatever we choose, it is the end. For it is always for the sake of the end that everything else is done.
If, then, there is one end of everything man does, this end will be the good achievable by action — or if there are several, then these.
By this route the argument comes around to the same point as before; and this point we must now try to state more clearly.
We see that there are many ends. But some of them are chosen only as means — wealth, flutes, instruments generally. So plainly not all ends are final.
But the best of all things must, we conceive, be something final.
If there is only one final end, then, this will be what we are seeking; if there are several, the most final of them.
Now what is pursued as an end in itself is more final than what is pursued as a means to something else; and what is never chosen as a means is more final than the things chosen both as ends in themselves and as means; in short, that is strictly final which is always chosen as an end in itself and never as a means.
Happiness, more than anything else, seems to answer to this description. Happiness we always choose for itself and never for the sake of anything else; while honor and pleasure and reason and every virtue we choose partly for themselves — for apart from any result, we would still choose each of them — but partly for the sake of happiness, on the supposition that they will help make us happy. Whereas no one chooses happiness for the sake of these things, or as a means to anything else at all.
We seem to be led to the same conclusion if we start from the notion of self-sufficiency.
The final good is thought to be self-sufficient. And by self-sufficient we do not mean sufficient for a man on his own, leading a solitary life; we take account of parents, children, wife — in short, friends and fellow citizens generally, since man is by nature a social being. Some limit has to be set here, of course; extend the circle to ancestors and descendants and friends of friends, and it never comes to a stop. But that question can wait. For now, let us take "self-sufficient" to mean: what by itself makes life desirable and lacking in nothing. And happiness is believed to be exactly that.
Further, happiness is believed to be the most desirable thing in the world — and not merely as one good thing among others. If it were merely one among others, then plainly the addition of even the least of other goods would make it more desirable; for the addition makes a surplus of good, and of two goods the greater is always the more desirable.
Happiness, then, appears to be something final and self-sufficient — the end of everything man does.
But perhaps the reader will say that while no one disputes that happiness is the best thing in the world, a still more precise definition of it is wanted.
The best way to get one, I think, is to ask: what is the function of man? For just as the goodness and excellence of a piper or a sculptor, or the practitioner of any art — of anyone, in general, who has a function or business to perform — lies in that function, so man's good would seem to lie in his function, if he has one.
But can we really suppose that while a carpenter and a cobbler each have a function and a business of their own, man himself has no business, no function assigned him by nature? Surely not. Just as his separate parts — eye, hand, foot — plainly each have their own function, so we must suppose that man too has some function over and above all these.
What, then, is it?
Merely being alive he evidently shares even with the plants, and we are looking for what is peculiar to him. So we must set aside the life of mere nutrition and growth.
Next comes the life of the senses; but this too he plainly shares with horses and cattle and animals of every kind.
There remains, then, the life of action — the life of his rational nature, which has two sides: one rational in the sense of obeying reason, the other rational in the sense of having and exercising reason.
But since this phrase is still ambiguous, let us be clear that we mean the life that consists in the active exercise of these powers; for that seems the truer sense of the term.
The function of man, then, is an activity of his soul: on one side obeying reason, on the other having and using it.
Now the function of a man in any line of work and the function of a good man in that line are generically the same — a harper and a good harper, for instance — and this holds in every case without exception; the good man simply adds his superior excellence at the work. A harper's function is to play the harp; a good harper's, to play it well.
(Man's function, then, being as we say a kind of life — namely an activity of the soul, and actions of various kinds carried out with reason — the good man's function is to do all this well and nobly. And the function of anything is done well when it is done in accordance with that thing's proper excellence.)
If this is so, the result is that the good of man is an activity of the soul in accordance with virtue — or, if there is more than one virtue, in accordance with the best and most complete of them.
But we must add: over a full span of years. One swallow does not make a spring, nor does one fine day; and in the same way one day, or any short stretch of time, does not make a man blessed or happy.
Let this stand, then, as our rough outline of the good. For this, I think, is the proper method: first sketch the outline, then fill in the details. And once the outline is fairly drawn, it would seem that anyone can carry on the work and fit in the particulars that time reveals to us or helps us find. That, indeed, is how the arts and sciences have grown; filling in the gaps takes no extraordinary genius.
We must remember, however, what was said above, and not demand the same degree of accuracy in every branch of study, but in each case only as much as the subject matter allows and as suits that kind of inquiry. The carpenter and the geometer both look for the right angle, but in different ways: the carpenter wants only as close an approximation as his work requires, while the geometer wants to know what a right angle is and what its special character is — his aim is the truth. We must follow the same course everywhere else, so that side issues do not end up taking more of our time than the real business at hand.
Nor must we demand the reason why in every case alike. Sometimes it is enough that the undemonstrated fact be fairly pointed out, as with the starting points, or first principles, of a science. The undemonstrated fact always forms the first step of a science; and these starting points are reached in different ways — some by induction, some by perception, some by a kind of training. In each case we must try to grasp them in the proper way, and take pains to define them clearly; for they carry great weight in everything that follows. The start, I think, is more than half the race; and once our starting point is found, it clears up a good number of our difficulties.
We should not be content, then, to test this starting point of ours only against our premises and our conclusion; we must also test it against what people actually say about happiness. For everything in experience chimes with a true principle, while a false one soon collides with the facts.
Now, good things have long been sorted into three classes: external goods on one side, and on the other goods of the soul and goods of the body. And goods of the soul are commonly held to be goods in the fullest sense — more truly good than any of the others.
But "actions and activities of the soul" surely count as goods "of the soul." So our account is confirmed by this opinion — an old one, and endorsed by everyone who occupies himself with philosophy.
Indeed, our account secures the support of this opinion simply by saying that certain actions and activities are the end; for that ranks the end among the goods of the soul, not among external goods.
Our account also agrees with the common saying that the happy man "lives well" and "does well"; for happiness, as we have described it, just is a kind of living well and doing well.
More than that: everything people look for in happiness seems to be contained in happiness as we define it.
Some hold that happiness is virtue, or some particular virtue; some say practical wisdom; others a kind of wisdom; others again say all or some of these, with pleasure added, either as an ingredient or as a necessary accompaniment; and some even work external prosperity into their account.
Now, some of these views are held by many people and have age on their side; others by a few, but those few carry weight. And it is likely that neither camp is entirely wrong — that each is right on at least one point, if not on most.
First, then, the view that happiness is virtue, or some kind of virtue, harmonizes with our account; for "activity in accordance with virtue" surely belongs to virtue.
But I think it makes no small difference whether we conceive the good as mere possession or as use — as a habit or as the active exercise of that habit. For the habit can be present and yet produce nothing good, as when a man is asleep or otherwise kept from his function; the activity cannot. It must show itself in acts, and in good acts. Just as at the Olympic games it is not the finest and strongest bodies that are crowned but those who compete — for the victors come from among these — so in life too, the prizes go to those who not only have the virtues but put them into action.
Further, the life of such men is pleasant in itself. Pleasure is a state of the soul, and each man finds his pleasure in whatever he is said to love: the lover of horses in horses, the lover of sights in sightseeing — and in the same way, the lover of justice in just acts, and generally the lover of virtue in virtuous acts.
Now with most men, the things they take pleasure in are perpetually at war with one another, because those things are not pleasant by nature. But those who love the noble take pleasure in what is naturally pleasant; and virtuous acts are naturally pleasant, so that such acts are pleasant both to these men and in themselves.
Their life, then, has no need of pleasure fastened onto it as an accessory; it carries its pleasure within itself.
Indeed — to add one more point — a man is not even good unless he takes pleasure in noble deeds. No one would call a man just who did not enjoy acting justly, or generous who took no pleasure in acts of generosity; and so on down the list.
If this is so, then virtuous acts are pleasant in themselves. But they are also good and noble, and each of these in the highest degree — if the good man's judgment about them is right, and his judgment is as we have said.
Happiness, then, is at once the best and noblest and pleasantest thing in the world; and these three do not come apart, as the inscription at Delos would have it:
Noblest is what is most just; best of all is health; but pleasantest is to win your heart's desire.
For all of them together belong to the best activities; and it is these activities — or the one among them that is best of all — that we identify with happiness.
And yet happiness plainly needs external goods too, as we said. For it is impossible, or at least not easy, to act nobly without some equipment of fortune. Many things can be done only with instruments, so to speak — friends, wealth, political influence. And there are some things whose absence takes the bloom off our happiness: good birth, good children, personal beauty. A man is not very likely to be happy if he is downright ugly, or of low birth, or alone in the world and childless — and perhaps less likely still if his children or friends are worthless, or if he had good ones and lost them.
As we said, then, happiness seems to require this kind of prosperity as well; which is why some identify happiness with good fortune, just as others identify it with virtue.
This raises a further question: is happiness attained by learning, or by forming habits, or by some other kind of training? Or does it come by some divine dispensation — or even by chance?
Well, if the Gods give any gifts to men, happiness is likely to be among them — likelier, indeed, than anything else, in proportion as it is better than everything else that is human.
But this belongs more properly to another inquiry. Even if happiness is not heaven-sent, though — even if it comes through virtue or some kind of learning or training — it still seems to be one of the most divine things there is; for the prize and end of virtue is evidently something supremely good, something divine and blessed.
Again, if it is acquired in this way, it will be open to many; for then everyone not crippled for virtue will be able to win it by study and care.
And if it is better that men come to happiness this way rather than by chance, it is reasonable to suppose things really are so — since in nature everything is arranged as well as it can possibly be, and likewise in art, and in every kind of causation, above all in the highest kind. To hand over the greatest and noblest of things to chance would be far too jarring a note.
But our definition itself clears up the difficulty. Happiness was defined as an activity of the soul in accordance with virtue — or, if there is more than one virtue, in accordance with the best and most complete of them. Of the remaining goods — the goods other than happiness itself — some must be present as necessary conditions, while others are aids, useful instruments of happiness. And this agrees with what we said at the start. We laid it down that the end of Politics is the best of ends; but the chief business of Politics is to make the citizens people of a certain character — good, and apt to do what is noble. It is no accident, then, that we call no ox or horse or any other animal happy; for none of them can share in activity of this kind.
For the same reason, no child is happy either: his age keeps him, as yet, from doing such things. When we do call a child happy, it is because we hope he will do them. For, as we said, happiness requires not only complete virtue but also a full term of years for its exercise. Our circumstances are subject to many turns and to every sort of chance, and it is possible that the most prosperous man alive will meet with great disasters in his old age, as the tales of Troy tell of Priam; and a man who has been dealt fortune like that, and has come to a miserable end, no one calls happy.
Are we, then, to call no man happy while he lives? Must we look to the end, as Solon said, and call no man happy until he is dead?
And if we do grant that, do we mean that a man actually is happy once he is dead? Surely that is absurd — especially for us, who say that happiness is a kind of activity, a kind of life.
But suppose we do not call the dead man happy, and suppose Solon meant not that, but only that when a man is dead you can at last pronounce him happy safely, as being now out of reach of evil and misfortune. Even this can be disputed. For people think that good and evil can, in some fashion, touch a dead man — just as they can touch a living man without his being aware of them — honors paid to him, for instance, and disgraces, and the successes and misfortunes of his children and descendants generally.
But this raises difficulties of its own. A man may have lived happily into old age and ended as he lived, and yet all sorts of reversals may come upon his descendants — some of them may be good people who meet the fortune they deserve, others the opposite. And clearly the descendants may stand at any degree of remove from their ancestor. It would be strange if the dead man changed along with all this, becoming happy and miserable by turns; but it would also be strange if the fortunes of his line did not reach the ancestors at all, even for some limited time.
But let us go back to our earlier question; its solution may clear up this difficulty too.
Suppose Solon's saying means that we should look to the end and only then call a man happy — not as being happy now, but as having been happy once.
Surely it is strange that at the very time when he is happy we should refuse to say of him what is true. We decline to call the living happy because their fortunes may change, and because we take happiness to be something enduring and hard to shake, while the wheel of fortune keeps turning for one and the same man. Obviously, the argument runs, if we track a man's fortunes, we shall call him happy and then miserable over and over, making the happy man "a sort of chameleon, one who rests on no sound foundation."
Our reply is that tracking fortune like this cannot be right. For our good and ill do not lie in fortune. Human life needs good fortune added to it, as we said; but it is virtuous activity that constitutes a man's happiness, as the contrary activity constitutes his misery.
In fact, the difficulty we have been discussing turns into further confirmation of our account. For nothing human is as stable as activity in accordance with virtue; such activities seem more lasting even than the sciences. And the highest of them are the most lasting of all, because the happy spend their lives in them most fully and most continuously — which seems to be exactly why we do not forget how to do them.
The happy man, then, as we define him, will have the permanence we are looking for, and will keep his character all through life. For he will always, or with the least possible interruption, be occupied in virtuous deeds and virtuous thinking; and whatever his fortune, he will bear it in the noblest fashion and carry himself fittingly always and in everything, since he is truly good — "foursquare, without a flaw."
But fortune deals out many things, some great, some small. The small ones, good or bad, plainly carry no weight in the scale. The great ones, when they come in numbers, will make life happier if they are good — for they add a grace of their own to life, and the use a man makes of them is itself noble and good; but if they are evil, they crush and maim happiness, for they bring pain and get in the way of many activities.
And yet even here nobility shines through — when a man bears many great misfortunes with calm, not because he feels nothing, but out of nobility and greatness of soul. And if it is a man's activities that set the character of his life, as we said, then no happy man can become miserable; for he will never do what is hateful and base. The truly good and sensible man, we hold, bears whatever fortune sends with dignity, and always makes the best of his circumstances — as a good general makes the most warlike use of the army he has, and a good shoemaker makes the best shoe that can be made from the leather he is given, and so on through all the crafts.
If this is so, the happy man will never become miserable — though neither will he be truly happy if he meets the fate of Priam.
Nor, on the other hand, is he shifting and changeable. He will not be dislodged from his happiness easily, or by ordinary misfortunes, but only by many heavy ones; and after such blows he will not recover his happiness quickly, but — if at all — only over a long and complete stretch of time, in which he wins his way to great and noble things.
We shall meet every objection, then, if we say that the happy man is "one whose activity accords with complete virtue, and who is adequately furnished with external goods, not for some chance stretch of time but for a full term of years" — adding, perhaps, "and who will go on living so, and will die as he lived." For the future is hidden from us, and happiness we take to be an end, something in every way final and complete.
If this is so, then those among the living who have these things, and will keep them, we shall call blessed — but blessed as men are blessed.
So much for that question. Turning now to the fortunes of a man's descendants, and of his friends generally: the doctrine that none of it touches the dead at all seems too cold, and too much at odds with what people believe. But the things that happen to descendants and friends are many and various — some come home more, some less — and to work through them one by one would be a long business, indeed an endless one. It will be enough to speak in general terms, in outline only.
Now, just as some of a man's own misfortunes have a certain weight and pull on his life while others sit more lightly, so it is with what happens to any of his friends. And it always makes far more difference whether those whom an event touches are alive or dead — far more than it matters, in a tragedy, whether the terrible crime is committed on the stage or is merely presupposed to have happened before the play begins. So we must take this difference into our reckoning — and still more, perhaps, the standing doubt whether the dead share in any good or evil at all. For it appears that even if something does get through to them, good or bad, it is something faint and slight, either in itself or to them; or if not that, then at least of a size and kind that cannot make happy those who are not, nor take happiness from those who are.
The conclusion, then, seems to be this: the good fortune of friends, and likewise their misfortune, does affect the dead in some measure — but not in such a way, or to such a degree, as to make the happy unhappy, or anything of that kind.
These points settled, we may next ask whether happiness belongs among the goods we praise, or rather among those we revere; for it is plainly not a mere capacity, but a good actually possessed.
Whatever we praise, we seem to praise as being of a certain quality and as standing in a certain relation to something. We praise the just man and the courageous man, and the good man generally, and virtue itself, because of the actions and the works they produce; and we praise the strong man and the swift runner and the rest because each has a certain natural gift, standing in a certain relation to something good and admirable.
This becomes obvious when we consider the praises offered to the Gods: the Gods are made ridiculous by being measured against our standard — and that happens because, as we said, praise always involves reference to something else.
If praise, then, belongs to things of that sort, it is clear that for the best things what is due is not praise but something greater and better — as, indeed, our usage shows. The Gods we call blessed and happy, and "blessed" is what we call the most godlike men.
So too with good things: no one praises happiness the way he praises justice; we call it blessed, as something better and more divine than the goods we praise.
Eudoxus is thought to have argued well on these lines when he pleaded the case for pleasure's claim to first prize. The fact that pleasure, though a good, is not praised shows — he maintained — that it stands above the goods that are praised, as God and the good stand above them; for these are the standards by which we judge everything else. Praise we give to virtue, since virtue makes us apt to do what is noble; encomiums we compose for its works, whether of body or of soul.
But refining these distinctions belongs more properly to those who have made a study of encomiums. For us it is plain from what has been said: happiness belongs among the goods that we revere and count as final.
And this seems to follow, further, from the fact that happiness is a first principle or starting point. It is for its sake that we do everything else we do; and the principle and cause of all goods we hold to be something divine and worthy of reverence.
Since happiness is an activity of the soul in accordance with virtue — or, if there is more than one virtue, in accordance with the best and most complete of them — we should now examine virtue; for that will probably throw light on our inquiry about happiness.
And indeed the true statesman seems to be occupied with virtue above all; for he wants to make the citizens good and obedient to the laws. We have examples in the lawgivers of Crete and Sparta, and any others who have been like them. And if this inquiry belongs to Politics, then plainly pursuing it fits the plan we laid down at the start.
The virtue we are to examine is, of course, human virtue; for it was the good of man and the happiness of man that we set out to find. And by human virtue we mean virtue not of the body but of the soul; for happiness, on our account, is an activity of the soul.
If this is so, then evidently the statesman must know something about the soul, just as the man who is to heal the eye, or the whole body, must know something about them — all the more so as Politics is a higher and better science than medicine. And the better sort of physicians take great pains to know about the body.
As statesmen, then — as students of Politics — we must inquire into the soul; but we must inquire with our own purpose in view, and go only as far as that purpose requires. To push into finer detail would be more labor than our undertaking needs.
Now, certain doctrines about the soul are stated well enough in our published discussions, and we shall use them.
Two parts of the soul are distinguished: an irrational part and a rational part.
Whether these are separated the way the parts of the body are, or the parts of anything divisible — or whether they are two only in thought, and in fact inseparable, like the concave and the convex in the curve of a circle — makes no difference for our present purpose.
Of the irrational part, one division seems to be common to everything that lives, plants included: I mean the part that causes nutrition and growth. For we must credit everything that takes nourishment with a faculty of this kind — in the embryo as in the full-grown creature, since it is more reasonable to suppose the faculty is the same than that it changes.
The virtue of this faculty, then, plainly belongs to man in common with other living things; it is not specifically human.
This is confirmed by the fact that in sleep this part of the soul is thought to be most active, while the good man and the bad are indistinguishable when they are asleep — whence the saying that for half their lives the happy differ not at all from the miserable. And this is just what we should expect; for sleep is the soul's holiday from the very functions that make it called good or bad — except insofar as some of what goes on in the body filters through, which is why the dreams of good men are better than other people's.
But enough of this. We may dismiss the nutritive part, since by nature it has no share in human virtue.
There seems, however, to be another principle in the soul that is irrational and yet in some way partakes of reason. In the self-restrained man and the weak-willed man alike, we praise the reason — the rational part — for it exhorts them rightly and urges them toward what is best. But there is plainly something else in them besides reason, something that fights against reason and pulls the other way. Just as a paralyzed limb, when you will to move it to the right, swings instead to the left, so it is with the soul: the weak-willed man's impulses run counter to his reason. The difference is only that in the body we see the disobedient member, while in the soul we do not. But we must hold, I think, that in the soul too there is something besides reason, which opposes it and runs against it. (In what sense it is distinct from reason does not matter here.)
Yet this something partakes of reason too, as we said. In the self-restrained man, at least, it obeys reason; and in the self-controlled and courageous man it is more obedient still, for in him it is in complete harmony with reason.
The irrational part, then, turns out to be twofold. There is the vegetative faculty, which has no share of reason at all; and there is the faculty of appetite — of desire in general — which does share in reason after a fashion, in that it listens to reason and submits to its rule. It is "rational" in the sense in which we say a man listens to reason when he heeds his father or his friends — not in the sense in which we speak of reasoning out mathematical truths. And that the irrational part is somehow open to reason is attested by all our advising, all our rebuking and exhorting.
If we choose to say that this part, too, has reason, then the rational part will likewise have two divisions: one that has reason in the strict sense, in itself; and one that listens to reason as a man listens to his father.
Now, on this division of the soul's faculties the division of virtue is based. For we speak of intellectual virtues and moral virtues: wisdom, understanding, and practical wisdom we call intellectual; generosity and self-control we call moral. When we are describing a man's moral character we do not say that he is wise or intelligent, but that he is gentle or self-controlled. Yet we praise the wise man too for his habit of mind; and habits that deserve praise are what we call virtues.
Virtue, then, is of two kinds, intellectual and moral. Intellectual virtue owes its birth and growth mainly to teaching, and so it needs time and experience. Moral virtue is the product of habit — which is why its Greek name, êthikê, is a slight variation on ethos, the word for habit.
From this one thing is immediately plain: none of the moral virtues is implanted in us by nature, for nothing that exists by nature can be trained to behave otherwise. A stone naturally falls downward, and you could not train it to rise — not if you threw it up ten thousand times. You could not train fire to burn downward. Nothing that naturally behaves one way can be habituated into behaving another.
The virtues, then, come neither by nature nor against nature. Nature gives us the capacity to acquire them, and training develops that capacity.
Again, wherever nature gives us something, we get the power first and put it to use afterward. The senses show this clearly: we did not acquire sight by repeatedly seeing, or hearing by repeatedly hearing. On the contrary, we had the powers first and then used them; we did not get them by using them. But the virtues we acquire by first doing the acts — just as with the crafts. We learn a craft by doing the very thing we will do once we have learned it: we become builders by building, and lyre-players by playing the lyre. And so by doing just acts we become just, and by doing self-controlled and courageous acts we become self-controlled and courageous.
What happens in cities attests to this. Legislators make their citizens good by training them — at least, that is every legislator's wish; those who fail at it miss their mark, and this is what separates a good constitution from a bad one.
Again, every virtue is produced, and every vice too, by the same acts — and here also the crafts run parallel. Playing the lyre produces good lyre-players and bad ones alike; so with builders and all the rest: build well and you become a good builder, build badly and you become a bad one. If it were otherwise, nobody would need a teacher; we would all simply be born good or bad at our trades. And it is exactly the same with the virtues. By how we act in our dealings with other people, we become just or unjust; by how we act in the face of danger, training ourselves to feel fear or confidence, we become courageous or cowardly. So too with our appetites and with anger: by behaving one way or the other in the situations that engage these feelings, some of us become self-controlled and even-tempered, others self-indulgent and hot-tempered. In a word: acts of a certain kind produce habits of the same kind.
Hence we must make sure our acts are of the right kind, for as the acts vary, so does the character that results. It makes no small difference, then, whether a person is trained from youth in this way or in that — it makes a great difference; or rather, it makes all the difference.
But our present inquiry does not aim, as our others do, at theory alone. We are not asking what virtue is merely in order to know; we are asking in order to become good — otherwise the inquiry would profit us nothing. So we must examine acts and ask what kind they should be; for, as we said, it is the acts that determine the character that results.
First, then, that our acts must accord with right reason is common ground, and we shall take it for granted here, postponing for later the question of what right reason is and how it relates to the other virtues.
But let one thing be understood before we go on: all reasoning about practical matters can be given in outline only, not with scientific exactness. As we said at the start, the precision to demand depends on the subject in hand, and in matters of conduct and questions of what is useful there are no fixed laws — any more than in questions of health.
And if our general account is inexact, our reasoning about particular cases is more inexact still. Particular cases fall under no science and no book of rules; the agent must always look at the occasion itself and judge what it requires, just as in medicine or in navigation.
Still, though this is so, we must try to give what help we can.
First, then, observe that in matters of this kind, falling short and going too far are equally fatal. This is plain — to illustrate what we cannot see by what we can — in the case of strength and health. Too much exercise destroys strength, and so does too little; too much food and drink ruins health, and so does too little — while the fitting amount produces, increases, and preserves them. It is just the same with self-control and courage and the other virtues. The man who runs from everything, fears everything, and never makes a stand becomes a coward; the man who fears nothing at all and will walk into anything becomes foolhardy. Likewise the man who takes his fill of every pleasure and abstains from none becomes self-indulgent, while the man who shuns every pleasure — a "boor," as we say — ends up insensible, dead to enjoyment. Self-control and courage, then, are destroyed by excess and by deficiency, and preserved by the mean.
But habits are not only produced, preserved, and destroyed by the same occasions and the same means; they also show themselves in the same circumstances. This is how it works with something as palpable as strength. Strength is produced by taking plenty of nourishment and doing plenty of hard work — and it is the strong man who is most capable of doing exactly that. So it is with the virtues: by abstaining from pleasures we become self-controlled, and once we have become self-controlled we are best able to abstain. And so with courage: by habituating ourselves to make light of danger and to stand up to it, we become courageous; and once we have become courageous, we are best able to face danger.
The pleasure or pain that accompanies a man's acts should be taken as the test of his formed character.
The man who abstains from bodily pleasures and enjoys the abstaining is self-controlled; the man who abstains but resents it is self-indulgent. The man who faces danger with pleasure — or at least without pain — is courageous; the man to whom it is painful is a coward.
For moral virtue is deeply concerned with pleasures and pains. It is pleasure that moves us to do what is base, and pain that moves us to shrink from what is noble. That is why, as Plato says, we need to be trained from childhood to feel pleasure and pain at the right objects. This is what sound education means.
Another reason virtue has to do with pleasure and pain is that it has to do with actions and feelings — and every feeling and every action is accompanied by pleasure or pain.
Punishment attests to it as well, for punishment works through pleasure and pain. It is a kind of cure, and a cure works by administering the opposite of the disease.
Again, as we said before, every state of character is essentially bound up with the very things that form it, for better or for worse; and it is through pleasures and pains that characters go bad — through pursuing and avoiding the wrong ones, or at the wrong time, or in the wrong manner, or going wrong in whatever other way can be distinguished.
Hence some people go so far as to define the virtues as states of impassivity — a kind of calm freedom from feeling. But they go wrong in stating it absolutely, without adding "in the right or wrong manner, at the right or wrong time," and so on.
We may lay it down, then, that moral virtue makes us do what is best in matters of pleasure and pain, and vice the contrary. The following considerations will throw further light on the point.
There are three kinds of things that move us to choose, and three that move us to avoid: on one side the noble, the useful, and the pleasant; on the other their opposites — the shameful, the harmful, and the painful. About all of these the good man tends to go right and the bad man to go wrong, but especially about pleasure. For pleasure we share with the animals, and it accompanies everything we pursue or choose; even the noble and the useful appear pleasant to us.
Again, the feeling of pleasure has been bred into all of us from infancy by our upbringing; it is so ingrained in our life that it can scarcely be scrubbed out. And we all, more or less, make pleasure our measuring stick in judging actions. For this reason too, then, our whole inquiry must deal with these matters; for feeling pleasure and pain in the right way or the wrong way has no small influence on our acts.
Again, it is harder to fight pleasure than to fight anger — and Heraclitus says fighting anger is hard. But virtue, like craft, is always concerned with the harder case, for success is worth more when the task is harder. For this reason also, both virtue and the science of the state must always concern themselves with pleasures and pains; for the man who handles them rightly will be good, and the man who handles them badly will be bad.
Let this stand as established, then: virtue has to do with pleasures and pains; the acts that produce it also develop it — and, done differently, destroy it; and it shows itself in the very acts that produced it.
But here someone may ask what we mean by saying that men can become just and self-controlled only by doing just and self-controlled acts. Surely, the objection runs, if their acts are just and self-controlled, they are already just and self-controlled — just as people who do what is grammatical and musical are already grammarians and musicians.
We may answer, first, that this is not quite true even of the crafts. A man may write something correctly by chance, or because someone else prompted him; he is not a grammarian until he not only writes correctly but writes as a grammarian would — that is, from his own knowledge of grammar.
But second, the virtues are not parallel to the crafts on this point anyway. What a craft produces has its excellence in itself, so it is enough if the product comes out with a certain quality. But with the virtues, an act does not count as done justly or with self-control merely because the act itself is of a certain sort. The doer must also be in a certain state of mind when he does it: first, he must know what he is doing; second, he must choose the act, and choose it for its own sake; and third, the act must flow from a formed and stable character. Of these conditions, only one — the knowledge — matters for possessing a craft. But for possessing the virtues, knowledge counts for little or nothing, while the other conditions, which come only from repeatedly doing what is just and self-controlled, count not a little but for everything.
An act, then, is called just or self-controlled when it is the sort of act the just or self-controlled man would do. But the man who does it is not thereby just or self-controlled — not unless he also does it in the spirit of the just or self-controlled man.
It is right, then, to say that a man becomes just by doing what is just, and self-controlled by doing what is self-controlled; and without doing these things, no one has any chance of ever becoming good.
But most men, instead of doing them, take refuge in theory. They imagine they are philosophizing, and that philosophizing will make them good — like a sick man who listens attentively to everything his doctor says and then follows none of his orders. That kind of philosophizing will no more produce a healthy soul than that kind of treatment will produce a healthy body.
We must ask next what virtue actually is.
A quality of the soul is one of three things: (1) a feeling, (2) a capacity, or (3) a habit — a settled state of character. Virtue, then, must be one of these three. By feelings I mean appetite, anger, fear, confidence, envy, joy, love, hate, longing, emulation, pity — in general, whatever is accompanied by pleasure or pain. By a capacity I mean that in virtue of which we are said to be capable of these feelings — capable, for instance, of being angered or pained or moved to pity. And by a habit I mean that in virtue of which we are well or badly disposed in the matter of our feelings: in the matter of anger, for instance, we are badly disposed if we run too violent or too slack, and well disposed if we keep to the moderate course. And so with the rest.
Now, the virtues are not feelings, and neither are the vices. (1) We are not called good or bad on account of our feelings, but we are called so on account of our virtues and vices. (2) We are neither praised nor blamed for our feelings — a man is not praised for being afraid, nor blamed simply for being angry, but only for being angry in a particular way — whereas we are praised and blamed for our virtues and vices. (3) We can be angered or frightened without any deliberate choice, but the virtues are a kind of deliberate choice, or at least are impossible without it. And (4) with respect to our feelings we are said to be moved, but with respect to our virtues and vices we are not said to be moved; we are said to be disposed this way or that.
For these same reasons they are not capacities either. We are not called good or bad merely for being capable of feeling, nor are we praised or blamed for it. And besides, nature gives us our capacities, and nature does not make us good or bad — but that point we have already dealt with.
If, then, the virtues are neither feelings nor capacities, only one possibility remains: they are habits.
We have found, then, the genus to which virtue belongs. But we want to know not merely that virtue is a habit, but what kind of habit it is.
We may safely say this much: the virtue of a thing both puts the thing itself in good condition and makes it perform its function well. The virtue of the eye, for instance, makes both the eye and its work good; it is by the eye's virtue that we see well. In the same way the proper virtue of a horse makes it what a horse should be — good at running, at carrying its rider, at standing firm against a charge.
If this holds in every case, then the proper virtue of man will be the habit that makes a man good and makes him perform his function well.
How this comes about we have already said; but the same conclusion can be reached another way, by asking what the nature of this virtue is.
Now take any quantity, continuous or discrete: it is possible to take a larger amount, a smaller amount, or an equal amount — and each either in relation to the thing itself or relative to our own needs.
By an equal or fair amount I mean a mean amount — one that lies between excess and deficiency.
By the absolute mean — the mean of the thing itself — I mean the point equally distant from both extremes; and that is one and the same for everybody.
By the mean relative to us I mean the amount that is neither too much nor too little for us; and that is not one and the same for everybody.
For instance, if ten is too large and two is too small, then six is the mean of the thing itself — the arithmetic mean — for six exceeds one extreme by exactly as much as it is exceeded by the other. That is the mean by arithmetical proportion.
But the mean relative to us cannot be found that way. If ten pounds of food is too much for a given man to eat, and two pounds too little, it does not follow that the trainer will order him six; for six may itself be too much for this particular man, or too little — too little for Milo the wrestler, too much for the beginner. The same holds in running and wrestling.
So we may say generally that a master of any art avoids what is too much and what is too little; he searches out the mean and chooses it — not the absolute mean, but the mean relative to us.
Every art or science, then, perfects its work in this way: it looks to the mean and brings its work up to that standard. That is why people say of a good piece of work that nothing could be added to it and nothing taken away — meaning that excess or deficiency destroys its goodness, while the mean preserves it. And good artists, as we say, do in fact keep their eyes fixed on the mean in everything they do. Now if this is so, and if virtue, like nature, is more exact and better than any art, it follows that virtue too must aim at the mean. I mean moral virtue; for it is moral virtue that deals with feelings and actions, and it is these that admit of excess, deficiency, and the mean. It is possible to feel fear, confidence, desire, anger, pity — pleasure and pain generally — too much or too little, and both are wrong. But to feel them at the right times, about the right things, toward the right people, for the right end, and in the right way — that is the mean and the best course, and that is the mark of virtue. In the same way our outward actions also admit of excess, deficiency, and the due amount.
Virtue, then, deals with feelings and with actions, where excess is wrong and deficiency is blamed, while the mean amount is praised and hits the mark — and both being praised and being right belong to virtue.
Virtue, then, is a kind of mean state, since it aims at the mean.
Again, there are many ways of going wrong — for evil belongs to the unlimited, as the Pythagoreans pictured it, and good to the limited — but only one way of going right. That is why the one is easy and the other hard: easy to miss the target, hard to hit it. And this is one more reason why excess and deficiency belong to vice, and hitting the mean belongs to virtue:
Good men are good in one way; bad men are bad in every way.
Virtue, then, is a habit of choice, lying in the mean relative to us, determined by reason — that is, by the reason by which the man of practical wisdom would determine it. And it is a mean, first, because it lies in the middle between two vices, one of excess and one of deficiency; and second, because while the vices fall short of or overshoot the due amount in feeling and in action, virtue finds the mean and chooses it.
In its essence, therefore — by the definition of what it is — virtue is a mean; but measured by what is best and right, it is an extreme.
Not every action or feeling admits of a mean, however. Some have names that already imply badness: among feelings, spite, shamelessness, envy; among actions, adultery, theft, murder. All of these are blamed because they are bad in themselves, not because of their excess or deficiency. With these it is impossible ever to go right; they are always wrong. Right and wrong in such things does not depend on doing them with the right person, at the right time, in the right manner — with adultery, say — the mere doing of any of them is wrong.
It would be equally absurd to look for a mean, an excess, and a deficiency in unjust or cowardly or self-indulgent conduct; for then there would be a mean of excess and a mean of deficiency, an excess of excess and a deficiency of deficiency.
The fact is this: just as there is no excess or deficiency of self-control or courage — because the mean is there, in a sense, an extreme — so in these kinds of conduct there is no mean, no excess, no deficiency: however they are done, they are wrong. For, to put it generally, there is no mean of excess or deficiency, and no excess or deficiency of the mean.
But it is not enough to state all this in general terms; we must go on and apply it to the particulars — the several virtues and vices. For in reasoning about conduct, general statements are too vague and carry less truth than particular ones. Conduct deals with particular cases, and it is against these that our statements must be found to hold good.
Let us take the particulars, then, from the following table.
In the feelings of fear and confidence, the mean is courage. Of those who exceed, the man who exceeds in fearlessness has no name — as happens often in this table — while the man who exceeds in confidence is foolhardy, and the man who exceeds in fear and falls short in confidence is a coward.
In certain pleasures, and to a lesser extent in certain pains, the mean is self-control, and the excess is self-indulgence. People who fall short in the matter of these pleasures hardly exist, so they too have received no name; let us put them down as "insensible."
In giving and taking money, the mean is generosity; the excess and deficiency are extravagance and stinginess. These two vices exceed and fall short in opposite ways: the extravagant man exceeds in spending but falls short in taking, while the stingy man exceeds in taking but falls short in spending. (For the present we are only giving an outline or summary — nothing more; these points will be treated in detail later.)
Besides these there are other dispositions in the matter of money. There is a mean called magnificence — for the magnificent man is not the same as the generous man: he deals with large sums, the generous man with small — an excess called vulgarity or bad taste, and a deficiency called cheapness. These vices differ from the ones opposed to generosity; how they differ will be explained later.
With respect to honor and disgrace, the mean is greatness of soul; the excess may be called vanity, and the deficiency smallness of soul.
And just as we said that generosity is related to magnificence, differing only in that it deals with small sums, so here there is a virtue related to greatness of soul, differing only in that it is concerned with small honors instead of great ones. A man may desire honor as much as he ought, or more, or less: the man who carries the desire to excess is called ambitious, the man who lacks it unambitious, while the man with the due amount has no name. Nor are there abstract names for the characters, except "ambition" for the ambitious man's. Because of this, the men at the extremes both lay claim to the middle ground. Indeed, in everyday speech the man in the middle is sometimes called ambitious and sometimes unambitious; and sometimes the ambitious man is praised, sometimes the unambitious. Why this is so we will explain later; for now let us carry out our plan and run through the remaining types of character.
In the matter of anger, too, there is excess, deficiency, and the mean. The characters here scarcely have recognized names; but since we call the man in the middle gentle, let us call the mean gentleness. Of those at the extremes, let the man who exceeds be called wrathful and his vice wrathfulness, and the man who falls short wrathless and his character wrathlessness.
Besides these there are three other means, resembling one another and yet different. All of them have to do with our dealings with one another in word and action, but they differ in this: one concerns the truthfulness of those dealings, the other two their pleasantness — one of the two, pleasantness in amusement, the other, pleasantness in all the business of life. We must speak of these as well, so that we may see more plainly how in every case the mean is praiseworthy, while the extremes are neither right nor praiseworthy, but blamable.
Here too names are mostly lacking, and we must try, as elsewhere, to coin them ourselves, to keep the argument clear and easy to follow.
In the matter of truth, then, let us call the man who observes the mean truthful, and the mean truthfulness. Pretence that exaggerates is boasting, and the man a boaster; pretence that understates is irony, and the man ironical.
With regard to pleasantness in amusement, the man who observes the mean is witty, and his character wittiness; the excess is buffoonery, and the man a buffoon; the man who falls short is a boor, and his character boorishness.
With regard to pleasantness in the other affairs of life, the man who makes himself pleasant in the right way is friendly, and his mean state is friendliness; the man who overdoes it is obsequious if he has no ulterior motive, and a flatterer if he is angling for his own advantage; the man who falls short and makes himself disagreeable at every turn is a quarrelsome and sour sort of fellow.
There are also ways of observing the mean in mere emotions, and in our conduct with regard to them. Shame, for instance, is not a virtue, and yet the modest man is praised. For here too we speak of one man as observing the mean and another as exceeding it — like the bashful man, whom the least thing makes shy — while the man who is deficient in the feeling, or lacks it altogether, is shameless; the man who observes the mean is modest.
Righteous indignation, again, hits the mean between envy and spite. These have to do with the pleasure and pain we feel at what happens to our neighbors. The righteously indignant man is pained by the sight of undeserved prosperity; the envious man goes beyond him and is pained by the sight of anyone prospering; while the spiteful man, so far from being pained, actually rejoices in his neighbors' misfortunes.
But there will be another opportunity to discuss these matters.
As for justice, the term is used in more senses than one; so after settling the questions above, we will distinguish its various senses and show how each kind of justice is a mean.
And then we will treat the intellectual virtues in the same way.
There are, then, as we said, three kinds of disposition: two kinds of vice, one marked by excess and the other by deficiency, and one kind of virtue, the observance of the mean. Now each is in a way opposed to each; for the extreme dispositions are opposed both to the mean and to one another, while the mean is opposed to both extremes. Just as the equal is greater when compared with the less, and less when compared with the greater, so the mean dispositions are excessive compared with the deficient ones, and deficient compared with the excessive ones, in feeling and in action alike. The brave man looks foolhardy next to the coward, and cowardly next to the foolhardy man; the self-controlled man looks self-indulgent next to the insensible man, and insensible next to the self-indulgent man; the generous man looks extravagant beside the stingy man, and stingy beside the extravagant man.
And so each extreme character tries to shove the middle character away from the middle, representing him as belonging to the opposite extreme: the coward calls the brave man foolhardy, the foolhardy man calls him a coward, and so on in the other cases.
But though mean and extremes are opposed to one another in this way, the extremes are strictly contrary to each other rather than to the mean; for they lie farther from each other than from the mean, just as the greater lies farther from the less, and the less from the greater, than either lies from the equal.
Sometimes, moreover, an extreme bears a certain resemblance to the mean — foolhardiness to courage, extravagance to generosity — whereas between the extremes there is the greatest possible unlikeness.
And "things as far removed from each other as possible" is the accepted definition of contraries; so the farther apart things are, the more contrary they are.
Compared with the mean, however, it is sometimes the deficiency that is more opposed and sometimes the excess. Foolhardiness, an excess, is not so opposed to courage as cowardice, a deficiency, is; but insensibility, a deficiency of feeling, is not so opposed to self-control as self-indulgence, an excess, is.
There are two reasons for this. One is drawn from the nature of the thing itself: since one extreme is in fact nearer to the mean and more like it, we naturally do not set it against the mean so strongly as the other. Foolhardiness seems nearer to courage and more like it, cowardice more unlike; so it is cowardice we call the opposite of courage — for what lies farther from the mean seems more contrary to it.
That, then, is the one reason, drawn from the thing itself. The other lies in ourselves, and it is this: whatever we are more prone to by nature appears more opposed to the mean. Our natural inclination runs toward indulgence in pleasure, and so we slip more easily into self-indulgence than into disciplined habits. The directions in which we tend to run to lengths, then, are the ones we speak of as more opposed to the mean; and thus self-indulgence, the excess, is more opposed to self-control than the deficiency is.
We have now explained sufficiently that moral virtue is a mean, and in what sense: first, that it lies in the middle between two vices, one of excess and one of deficiency; and second, that it aims at the mean in feeling and in action.
And this is why it is a hard thing to be good; for finding the middle — the mean — in each case is hard, just as finding the center of a circle is not something everyone can do, but only the man who knows how.
So too anyone can get angry — that is easy — and anyone can give money away or spend it. But to do these things to the right person, to the right extent, at the right time, for the right end, and in the right way — that is not something everyone can do, and it is by no means easy. That is why doing it well is rare and praiseworthy and noble.
The man who aims at the mean, then, should first of all steer away from the extreme that is more opposed to it, as Calypso advises Odysseus:
Keep your ship clear of that smoke and surf.
For of the two extremes one is more dangerous, the other less. Since hitting the mean precisely is hard, we must, as the proverb has it, take to the oars when we cannot sail, and choose the lesser of two evils; and we shall do that best in the way just described.
Second, we must each consider what we ourselves are most prone to — for different natures incline toward different things — and we can learn this from the pleasure and pain we feel. Then we must drag ourselves in the opposite direction; for by pulling well away from the wrong side we shall arrive at the middle, just as we straighten a bent stick by bending it back the other way.
But in everything we must be most on our guard against pleasant things — against pleasure — for we can scarcely judge her impartially. We should treat her, then, as the old counselors of Troy proposed to treat Helen, and repeat their saying in every case: if we send her away, we shall be less likely to go wrong.
This, in outline, is the course by which we shall best be able to hit the mean.
It is a hard task, we must admit, above all in the particular case. It is not easy to determine, for instance, how one ought to be angry, and with whom, and on what grounds, and for how long; for public opinion sometimes praises those who fall short and calls them gentle, and sometimes calls a harsh temper manly.
In fact a slight slip from the mean, whether toward excess or toward deficiency, is not blamed — only a considerable one; for that no one can mistake. But how far and to what extent a man must go wrong to earn blame is hardly possible to fix by reasoning; nothing that falls within the scope of perception can be so fixed. Such things lie in the region of particulars, and the judgment lies with perception.
This much, then, is plain: the middle character is in all cases to be praised, but we ought to lean sometimes toward excess and sometimes toward deficiency; for that is how we shall most easily hit the mean and get things right.
Virtue, as we have seen, has to do with feelings and actions. Now, praise and blame attach only to what is voluntary; what is involuntary gets pardon, and sometimes even pity.
So anyone investigating the nature of virtue needs to draw a clear line between the voluntary and the involuntary — and lawmakers will find the distinction useful too, when they hand out rewards and punishments.
The general view is that an act is involuntary when it is done under compulsion or through ignorance.
"Done under compulsion" means the cause is outside the person, who contributes nothing to it — as when someone is carried off by a whirlwind, or by men too strong to resist.
But there is a real question about acts done to avoid a greater evil, or to gain some noble end. Suppose a tyrant orders you to do something disgraceful while he holds your parents or your children in his power: do it and they live, refuse and they die. Whether such acts are voluntary or involuntary is a matter of genuine dispute.
Throwing cargo overboard in a storm is a similar case. No one dumps his property over the side for nothing; but any sensible person will do it to save his own life and the lives of the crew.
Acts of this kind, then, are mixed — but they come closer to being voluntary. For they are wanted and chosen at the moment they are done, and the end of an act is whatever the agent has in view at the time. So in applying the terms voluntary and involuntary, we must look at the agent's state of mind at the moment of action. And at that moment he does will the act; for in cases like these the cause that sets his limbs moving lies inside him — and where the cause lies in the agent, it is up to him to act or not to act.
Such acts, then, are voluntary — though in themselves, apart from the circumstances, we may grant they are involuntary, since no one would choose anything of the kind for its own sake.
In fact, people are sometimes praised for actions of this sort — for enduring something disgraceful or painful in order to secure some great and noble result. In the opposite case they are blamed; for no decent person would endure utter disgrace with no noble result in view, or only a trivial one.
In some cases we do not praise, but we do pardon: when someone is driven to do wrong by pressure too strong for human nature, pressure no one could withstand. Though there are some cases, I think, where the plea of compulsion cannot be allowed — where a man ought to accept death in its most painful form rather than do the deed. The circumstances that supposedly "compelled" Alcmaeon, in Euripides' play, to kill his mother look simply absurd.
It is sometimes hard to decide whether we should do this deed to avoid that evil, or endure that evil rather than do this deed; and it is harder still to stand by our decision. For usually the evil we want to avoid is painful, while the deed we are being pushed toward is disgraceful — and that is why we are blamed or praised, according to whether we let ourselves be compelled or not.
What kinds of acts, then, should be called compulsory?
Our answer, I think, must be this. First: when the cause lies outside and the agent contributes nothing, the act is compulsory without qualification — and therefore involuntary. Second: when an act that would never be done voluntarily for its own sake is chosen now, in preference to a given alternative, and the cause lies in the agent — such an act is "involuntary in itself," in the abstract, but "voluntary here and now, in preference to this alternative." And an act of this second kind is closer to being voluntary; for acts belong to the realm of particulars, and the particular thing done here is done voluntarily.
It is hardly possible, though, to lay down rules for which of two alternatives should be preferred; the particular cases differ too much.
Someone might argue that acts whose motive is something pleasant or something noble are compulsory too — for here also, the claim goes, something outside us constrains us.
But if that were true, every act would be compulsory; for pleasure and the noble are the motives of every act of every human being.
Again, acting under compulsion, against one's will, is painful; but acting for the sake of something pleasant or noble brings pleasure. And it is absurd to blame things outside us instead of our own readiness to be caught by their lures — absurd to claim our noble acts as our own while charging our disgraceful ones to "the pleasant things outside us."
Compulsory, then, it appears, means this: the cause is external, and the person compelled contributes nothing.
What is done through ignorance is always "not-voluntary," but it is "involuntary" only when the agent is pained afterwards — sorry when he discovers what he has done. For when a man who acted through ignorance feels no distress at the deed, you cannot say he did it voluntarily, since he did not know what he was doing; but you cannot say he did it involuntarily or unwillingly either, since he is not sorry.
So a man who has acted through ignorance and is sorry afterwards is held to have acted involuntarily, unwillingly; if he is not sorry, we may say — to mark the difference — that he acted "not-voluntarily." Since the case is different, it is better to have a different name for it.
Acting through ignorance, moreover, seems to be a different thing from acting in ignorance. A man who is drunk or in a rage is not thought to act through ignorance but through drunkenness or rage — yet he acts not knowingly, but in ignorance.
Every vicious man, to be sure, is ignorant of what he ought to do and ought not to do, and it is exactly this kind of error that makes men unjust and bad in general. But the word "involuntary" does not properly apply where a man is merely ignorant of what is right. The ignorance that makes an act involuntary is not ignorance of the principles that should guide our choices — that is vice; not, I say, ignorance of the universal, for that we blame — but ignorance of the particulars: the persons and things the act affects. These are the grounds for pity and pardon; a man who is ignorant of any of these particulars acts involuntarily.
It may be worth spelling out, then, what these particulars are and how many. They are: first, who is acting; second, what he is doing; third, the object or person the act affects; sometimes also the instrument — what he is doing it with; the purpose — what he is doing it for, say, to protect someone; and the manner — gently, for instance, or violently.
Now, no one short of a madman could be ignorant of all of these. Obviously a man cannot be ignorant of who is acting — how could he not know himself?
But a man can be ignorant of what he is doing. Someone who has said something will plead that the words slipped out before he knew it, or that he did not know the subject was forbidden — as Aeschylus pleaded about the Mysteries. Or a man might plead that in discharging the weapon he only meant to demonstrate how it worked, as the defendant did in the catapult case. Again, a man might mistake his own son for an enemy, as Merope does; or a sharp spear for a blunted practice one; or a heavy stone for a pumice-stone. One might kill a man with a drug meant to save him, or land a hard blow when one only meant to touch — as boxers do when they spar with open hands.
Since ignorance is possible about all these circumstances, a man who is ignorant of any of them is held to have acted involuntarily — above all when he is ignorant of the most important ones; and the most important seem to be the persons affected and the result.
Beyond this, though, the agent must be grieved and sorry for what he has done, if an act committed in this kind of ignorance is to count as involuntary and not merely not-voluntary.
But now, having found that an act is involuntary when done under compulsion or through ignorance, we may conclude that a voluntary act is one the doer originates himself, with knowledge of the particular circumstances.
For I venture to say it is wrong to call acts done from anger or desire involuntary.
In the first place, if that were right, we could no longer say that any of the other animals act voluntarily — nor even children.
Again, what does the claim mean? That none of the acts we do from desire or anger is voluntary? Or that the noble ones are voluntary and the disgraceful ones involuntary? Taken the second way, it is surely ridiculous, since the cause of both is one and the same. Taken the first way, it is absurd too, I think: absurd to say that we ought to desire a thing and, in the same breath, that pursuing it is involuntary. And in fact there are things we ought to be angry at, and things we ought to desire — health, for instance, and learning.
Again, what is done unwillingly seems to be painful, while what is done from desire is pleasant.
Again, as far as involuntariness goes, what is the difference between wrong done by calculation and wrong done in anger? Both are to be avoided; but the unreasoning passions seem to belong to a man just as much as his reason does, so acts done from the impulse of anger or desire are the man's own acts too. To call them involuntary, then, would be too absurd.
Now that we have distinguished the voluntary from the involuntary, our next task is to discuss choice. For choice seems to be bound up with virtue most intimately of all, and to be a surer test of character than actions themselves.
Choosing is evidently a kind of willing, but the two terms are not identical: willing is the wider one. Children and the other animals have will, but not choice; and acts done on the spur of the moment are called voluntary, but not chosen.
Those who say that choice is appetite, or anger, or wish, or some sort of opinion do not seem to describe it correctly.
In the first place, choice is not shared by irrational creatures; appetite and anger are.
Again, the weak-willed man acts from appetite and not from choice; the self-restrained man acts from choice and not from appetite.
Again, appetite can run contrary to choice; but one appetite cannot run contrary to another appetite.
Again, the object of appetite — or of aversion — is the pleasant or the painful; but the object of choice, as such, is neither.
Still less can choice be anger; for acts done in anger seem to be, of all acts, the least chosen.
Nor is choice the same as wish, though the two look very alike. We cannot choose the impossible — a man who said he did would be thought a fool — but we can wish for the impossible, to escape death, for example.
Again, we may wish for things that could never come about through our own doing — that a particular actor or athlete should win, say — but we never choose such things; we choose only what we think our own action can bring about.
Again, strictly speaking we wish for the end and choose the means. We wish to be healthy, but we choose the things that will make us healthy; we wish to be happy, and we admit the wish, but it would not be correct to say we choose to be happy. For, in a word, choice deals with what is in our power.
Nor can choice be opinion. For one thing, anything at all can be a matter of opinion — the unalterable and the impossible no less than what is in our power. For another, we sort opinions by whether they are true or false, not by whether they are good or bad, which is how we sort choices.
Choice, then, is not the same as opinion in general — and no one, in fact, claims it is.
But neither is it identical with some particular kind of opinion. For it is our choosing good or evil that makes us morally good or bad; holding certain opinions does not.
Again, we choose to take or avoid something good or evil; we opine what a thing is, or what it is good for, or in what way — but we cannot opine to take or to avoid.
Again, we commend a choice for being right or correct, an opinion for being true.
Again, we choose a thing when we know well that it is good; we can hold an opinion about a thing we know nothing about.
Again, it seems the people best at choosing are not always the best at forming opinions: some have excellent judgment but, through depravity, fail to choose what they ought.
It may be said that choice must be preceded or accompanied by an opinion or judgment. But that makes no difference; our question is not that, but whether the two are identical.
What, then, is choice, since it is none of these?
It seems, as we said, that what is chosen is willed, but what is willed is not always chosen.
The missing mark, I think, is "after previous deliberation." For choice implies calculation and reasoning. The name itself seems to point the same way: something is chosen before other things — picked out in preference to them.
Now for deliberation. Do we deliberate about everything — is anything whatever a possible subject of deliberation — or are there some things about which deliberation is impossible?
By "a matter for deliberation" we should mean, I think, not what a fool or a madman might deliberate about, but what a rational being would.
Now, no one deliberates about things eternal and unalterable — the system of the heavenly bodies, say, or the incommensurability of the side and the diagonal of a square.
Again, no one deliberates about things that change but always change in the same way, whether the cause is necessity or nature or anything else — the solstices, for instance, and the sunrise; nor about things wholly irregular, like drought and rain; nor about matters of chance, like finding a treasure.
Again, even human affairs are not all matters for deliberation: what constitution would be best for Scythia is a question no Spartan would deliberate about.
The reason we deliberate about none of these things is that none of them can be brought about by us.
What we deliberate about is conduct — the things within our own control. And these are all that is left; for besides nature, necessity, and chance, the only remaining cause of change is reason and human agency in general. Though we should add that each person deliberates about what he himself can do.
One further limit: where knowledge is exact and complete, there is no room for deliberation. Take writing: there is no doubt about how the letters should be formed.
We deliberate, then, about things our own agency brings about — but not about all of them equally. We deliberate about medicine and moneymaking; about navigation more than about gymnastics, since navigation has not yet been worked up into so exact a system; and so on — more about matters of art than matters of science, because there is more doubt about them.
Matters of deliberation, then, are matters where there are rules that generally hold good but where the outcome cannot be predicted — where there is an element of uncertainty. In important matters we call in advisers, distrusting our own judgment.
We deliberate not about ends but about means. A doctor does not deliberate whether he shall heal, nor an orator whether he shall persuade, nor a statesman whether he shall produce a good system of laws — no one in any profession deliberates about his end. Rather, having set the end before us, we consider how and by what means it can be reached. If it can be reached by several means, we consider which is easiest and best; if by only one, we consider how it is to be reached by that means, and how that means itself is to be secured, and so on — until we come to the first link in the chain of causes, which is the last thing we discover.
For in deliberating we seem to inquire and analyze in just this way, as we analyze a geometrical figure in order to learn how to construct it. (Not all inquiry is deliberation — mathematical inquiry is not — but all deliberation is inquiry.) And what comes last in the analysis comes first in the construction.
If we run into an impossibility, we drop the plan — if the scheme needs money, say, and no money can be raised. But if the thing looks possible, we set to work. By "possible" I mean what can be done by us; and what our friends can do, we can in a sense do ourselves, since it is we who set our friends to work.
Sometimes we are working out what instruments we need, sometimes how to use them; and so throughout: sometimes what agency will produce the effect, sometimes how, or through whom, that agency is to be set going.
It appears, then — as we said before — that a man originates his own acts; that he deliberates about what he can do himself; and that what he does, he does for the sake of something else. For he cannot deliberate about the end, only about the means to it; nor, again, can he deliberate about particular facts — whether this is a loaf, or whether it is properly baked. Those are matters of immediate perception. And if a man goes on deliberating forever, he will never reach a conclusion.
The object of deliberation and the object of choice are the same, except that the object of choice is already fixed and settled: when we say "this is chosen," we mean it has been selected after deliberation. For we always stop the inquiry into how to do a thing once we have traced the chain of causes back to ourselves — to the commanding part of ourselves; for that is the part that chooses.
The old constitutions Homer describes illustrate the point: there the kings announce to the people what they have chosen.
Since, then, a thing is said to be chosen when, being in our power, it is desired after deliberation, we may define choice as deliberate desire for something in our own power. For we first deliberate, then make our decision, and then desire in accordance with the deliberation.
Let this stand, then, as our outline account of choice — of what it is, and of what it deals with, namely means to ends.
Wish, we have already said, is for the end. But here opinion splits: some hold that what we wish for is the good; others, that it is whatever seems good.
Each side runs into trouble. Those who say the object of wish is the good must admit that when a man chooses badly, what he wishes for is not an object of wish at all — for if it were, it would have to be good, and in fact it may be bad. Those who say the object of wish is whatever seems good must admit that nothing is an object of wish by nature; each man simply wishes for what seems good to him — and different things, even contrary things, seem good to different people.
Since neither answer quite satisfies us, perhaps we had better say this: the good, plainly and without qualification, is the real object of wish; but for each man, the object of wish is what seems good to him. The good man, then, wishes for what is really worth wishing for; what the bad man wishes for might be anything at all. It is just the same with the body: people in sound condition find healthy the things that really are healthy, while the sick find other things healthy — and likewise with what tastes bitter or sweet, what feels hot or heavy, and so on. For the good man judges each case correctly: in each case, what is true is what seems true to him.
Every trained capacity has its own special form of the noble and the pleasant, and perhaps nothing marks the good man so much as this: his power to discern these in each case, being himself, so to speak, their standard and measure.
What misleads most people is pleasure. It seems to be a good thing even when it is not. So they choose the pleasant as if it were good, and shun pain as if it were evil.
We have seen that we wish for the end, while we deliberate about and choose the means to it.
Actions concerned with means, then, will be guided by choice, and so will be voluntary.
But the acts in which the virtues show themselves are concerned with means.
Therefore virtue is in our power — and so, equally, is vice. For where it is in our power to act, it is in our power not to act; where we can say no, we can say yes. If doing a deed is noble and lies with us, then not doing it, which is disgraceful, also lies with us; and if refraining is noble and lies with us, then doing it, which is disgraceful, lies with us too. But if doing and not doing noble or base deeds lies with us, and if this, as we found, is exactly what it is to be good or bad, then it follows that it lies with us to be decent men or worthless ones.
"No one is wicked by his own will, and no one is blessed against it"
is partly false and partly true. No one, certainly, is blessed against his will; but vice is voluntary.
If we deny this, we must quarrel with what we just established, and contend that a man is not the source and parent of his actions as he is of his children.
But if those statements stand, and we cannot trace our acts back to any sources other than ones within ourselves, then whatever has its source in us depends on us and is voluntary.
Everyday life bears witness to this, and so do the lawgivers. They correct and punish those who do evil — except where the act was done under compulsion, or through ignorance the agent was not responsible for — and they honor those who do noble deeds, plainly meaning to encourage the one and discourage the other. But no one encourages us to do what is not in our power and not voluntary: there would be no point in persuading a man not to feel heat or pain or hunger, since he will feel them all the same.
I say "ignorance the agent was not responsible for," because the law punishes the ignorance itself when the agent appears responsible for it. For an offense committed while drunk, the penalty is doubled: the source of the offense lies in the man himself, for he could have avoided getting drunk, and the drunkenness was the cause of his ignorance. Again, ignorance of any point of law that a man ought to know, and easily could know, does not save him from punishment. And so in other cases: where the ignorance seems to come from negligence, the offender is punished, since it lay with him to remove that ignorance — he could have taken the trouble.
But, someone may object, it was the man's character not to take the trouble.
We reply that men make themselves responsible for acquiring such a character, by living carelessly — for becoming unjust through repeated acts of wrongdoing, or self-indulgent through spending their days drinking and the like. It is repeated acts of a particular kind that produce a particular character.
You can see this in the way men train for any contest or performance: they practice, continually.
Not to know, then, that repeated acts of a given kind produce the corresponding character or habit is to show a complete want of sense.
Moreover, it is absurd to say that a man who acts unjustly does not wish to be unjust, or that a man who behaves self-indulgently does not wish to be self-indulgent.
If a man knowingly does the acts that must make him unjust, he is unjust voluntarily. It does not follow that if he wishes it, he can stop being unjust and become just — any more than a sick man can become well just by wishing it. He may be voluntarily sick, through living without restraint and disobeying his doctors. There was a time when it was open to him not to be sick; but once he has thrown his health away, that option is gone. When you have thrown a stone, you can no longer call it back — yet the throwing was in your power, for the start of its flight depended on you.
Just so, the unjust or the self-indulgent man was free at the beginning not to acquire this character, and therefore he is unjust or self-indulgent voluntarily; but now that he has acquired it, he is no longer free to put it off.
And it is not only vices of soul that are voluntary; bodily defects are sometimes voluntary too, and then we censure them. Nobody censures natural ugliness, but we do censure the ugliness that comes from negligence and want of exercise. So too with weakness and disability: no one would reproach a man born blind, or blinded by illness or a blow — we would sooner pity him; but everyone would censure a man who had blinded himself with heavy drinking or some other excess.
So among the defects of the body, it is those that depend on us that are censured, and those that do not depend on us that are not. And if that is so, then in other fields as well, the vices that get blamed must be the ones that depend on us.
Some people may still object.
"All men," they may say, "desire what appears good to them, but they have no control over how things appear. A man's character, whatever it is, decides what the end will look like to him."
I answer: if each man is in some way responsible for his own habits and character, then he must in some way be responsible for how things appear to him as well.
But suppose he is not. Then no man is responsible for, or the cause of, his own wrongdoing; he does evil through ignorance of the end, imagining that this is the way to secure the greatest good. On this view, aiming at the true end is not something we choose: a man must be born with a kind of eyesight, so to speak, if he is to judge rightly and choose what is really good. The truly wellborn man is the one whom nature has richly endowed with this gift — for it is the greatest and finest of gifts, one we cannot acquire or learn from anyone else but must keep all our lives just as nature gave it, and to be born well and nobly endowed in this respect would be wellborn in the truest and fullest sense.
Now, granting all that — how will virtue be any more voluntary than vice?
For whether it is nature or something else that fixes how the end appears, it is fixed the same way for both alike, for the good man and the bad; and both alike refer everything they do to it.
So take either horn. Say that it is not nature alone that decides how the end appears to each man, but that the man himself contributes something; or say that the end is fixed by nature, but virtue is voluntary because the good man voluntarily takes the steps toward it. Either way, vice will be exactly as voluntary as virtue; for the bad man's own self is just as active as the good man's — in choosing the particular acts, at least, if not in setting the end.
If, then, the virtues are voluntary, as everyone allows (for we do in fact help to make our own character, and by being of a certain character we give a certain cast to the end as we see it), then the vices must be voluntary too. Everything we have said applies equally to them.
We have now described in outline the nature of the virtues in general: they are modes of observing the mean; they are habits — trained states of character; they show themselves in the very acts that produce them; they depend on us and are voluntary; and they follow the guidance of right reason. But our particular acts are not voluntary in the same sense our habits are. We are masters of our acts from beginning to end, so long as we know the particular circumstances; but of our habits we are masters only of the beginnings — their growth creeps forward step by step, imperceptibly, like the growth of a disease. Still, since it lay with us to use our powers this way or not, the characters that result are on that account voluntary.
Now let us take up the virtues one by one and say what each is, what its field is, and how it operates there; in doing so we shall also see how many there are. And first, courage.
We have already said that courage is observance of the mean with respect to feelings of fear and confidence.
Now, fear is plainly excited by fearful things, and these are, roughly speaking, evils; which is why fear is sometimes defined as "expectation of evil."
Fear, then, is excited by evil of every kind — disgrace, poverty, disease, friendlessness, death — but not every kind gives scope for courage. Some things we actually ought to fear; fearing them is noble and not fearing them is base. Disgrace is one: the man who fears disgrace is honorable, a man with a proper sense of shame, while the man who does not fear it is shameless (though some stretch the word "courageous" to cover him, since he does bear a certain resemblance to the courageous man — courage also being a kind of fearlessness). Poverty, on the other hand, we probably ought not to fear, nor disease, nor in general the things that do not come from vice and do not depend on us. But being fearless about these is still not courage in the strict sense — though here too the term gets applied by resemblance. There are men, for instance, who are cowards in the dangers of war and yet free and bold in spending money.
Nor, on the other side, is a man a coward for fearing violence to his children or his wife, or for dreading envy and things of that kind; nor is he courageous for staying calm at the prospect of a whipping.
In what terrors, then, does the courageous man show his quality? Surely in the greatest, for no one is better able to endure what is terrible. And of all things the most terrible is death; for death is our limit, and once a man is dead it seems there is no longer anything, good or evil, for him.
Yet even death, it seems, does not give scope for courage on every occasion — not death by drowning, say, or by disease.
On what occasions, then? Surely the noblest; and those are the occasions of war, for they carry the greatest and the noblest danger.
The honors paid to courage in free states and by monarchs confirm this.
Strictly speaking, then, the courageous man is the one who fearlessly faces an honorable death, and all the sudden emergencies that threaten death — and such emergencies come mostly in war.
Of course the courageous man is fearless in illness too, and at sea — but not in the sailors' way. The sailors, because of their experience, stay hopeful while the landsmen have already despaired of their lives and shudder at the thought of such a death.
Besides, the occasions that especially call out courage are those where a man can show his prowess, or where death is noble; and in these deaths there is neither nobility nor any room for prowess.
The same things do not frighten all men alike; yet we do speak of some terrors as beyond human power to face. Such things frighten every man in his senses. But the terrors a man can face differ in size — some are greater, some less fearful — and the same goes for the things that inspire confidence. Now, the courageous man keeps his presence of mind, so far as a man can. He will fear these fearful things, yes; but he will endure them as he ought and as reason bids, for the sake of the noble — for that is the end and aim of virtue.
But it is possible to fear these things too much or too little, and possible, too, to take as fearful what really is not. So men go wrong sometimes by fearing the wrong things, sometimes by fearing in the wrong manner or at the wrong time, and so on.
And all of this applies equally to the things that inspire confidence.
The man, then, who endures and fears what he ought, from the right motive, in the right manner, and at the right time — and who feels confidence the same way — is courageous.
For the courageous man governs both his feeling and his action by the merits of each case, as reason bids.
Now, the end of every exercise of a habit is the same as the end of the habit itself.
To the courageous man, courage is essentially a noble thing.
Therefore its end is noble too; for everything takes its character from its end.
It is for the sake of the noble, then, that the courageous man endures and acts courageously in each particular case.
As for the characters that run to excess: the man who exceeds in fearlessness has no name (this often happens, as we said before) — but a man would have to be a maniac, or numb to pain, to fear nothing at all, not even earthquakes and breaking waves, as they say is true of the Celts.
The man who is overconfident in the face of fearful things is called foolhardy. But the foolhardy man is generally thought to be really a braggart, putting on a courage he does not have. What he wants is to seem, in the presence of danger, what the courageous man actually is; so he imitates him where he can. That is why your foolhardy man is usually a coward underneath: he blusters as long as it is safe, and turns tail when real danger comes.
The man who fears too much is a coward: he fears what he ought not, and as he ought not, and so through the whole list.
He is deficient in confidence as well; but what shows most is his excess of fear in the presence of pain.
The coward is also despondent, for he is frightened of everything. The courageous man is just the opposite: confidence implies hopefulness.
So the coward, the foolhardy man, and the courageous man all show their characters in the same circumstances, but behave differently in them. The first two exceed or fall short, while the courageous man holds the mean and behaves as he ought; and the foolhardy are headlong and eager before the danger comes but fall away in its presence, while the courageous are keen in the act and quiet beforehand.
Courage, then, as we have said, is observance of the mean with regard to things that excite confidence or fear, in the circumstances we have specified; and it chooses its course and holds its post because doing so is noble, or because failing to is disgraceful.
But to seek death as a refuge from poverty, or from love, or from anything painful, is not the act of a brave man but of a coward. It is softness to run from hardship; and a man who dies this way accepts death not because it is noble, but simply to escape an evil.
Courage proper, then, is something of this sort.
But besides it there are five other things that go by the name of courage.
First, "civic courage" — the kind that most resembles the real thing.
Citizens often seem to face danger because of the legal pains and penalties on one side and the honors on the other; and this is why the most courageous peoples seem to be found in those states where cowards are disgraced and brave men honored.
This, too, is the courage that inspires Homer's characters — Diomede, for instance, and Hector.
Polydamas will be the first to taunt me,
says Hector; and Diomede likewise:
Hector one day will speak among his people and say, "The son of Tydeus, at my hand—"
This courage is most like the one we described above because its impulse is a virtuous one: a sense of honor, a desire for something noble (glory), and an aversion to reproach, which is disgraceful.
We might, perhaps, put in the same class men who are forced to fight by their officers; but they are a grade lower, because what drives them is not a sense of honor but fear, and what they are running from is not disgrace but pain. For those in authority compel them in Hector's own fashion:
Whoever I catch skulking away from the fight will have no hope of saving his carcass from the dogs.
Commanders do the same thing when they order their men to stand and flog them if they run, or when they draw them up with a ditch at their backs: all of these, I mean, are using compulsion.
But a man ought to be courageous not because he is compelled to be, but because it is noble.
Second, experience of some particular business is sometimes taken for a kind of courage; this, in fact, is the basis of Socrates' notion that courage is knowledge.
Different people show this sort of courage in different fields, but professional soldiers show it above all in war. War is full of false alarms, and the regulars have seen through them many times; so they look courageous simply because the other troops do not understand the real state of the case.
Again, their experience makes the regulars more effective both in attack and in defense: they are skilled in handling their weapons, and they carry the kind of arms best suited for both purposes. So they fight with the advantage of armed men over unarmed, of trained men over untrained; for in athletic contests too it is not the bravest men who fight best, but the strongest and best conditioned.
But these regulars turn coward whenever the danger climbs too high and they find themselves outmatched in numbers and equipment. Then they are the first to run, while the citizen troops stand their ground and are cut to pieces — as happened at the temple of Hermes. For the citizens held it shameful to run, and preferred death to saving their lives on those terms; but the regulars had faced the danger in the first place only because they fancied themselves the stronger side, and when they learned the truth they ran, fearing death more than disgrace. And that is not what we mean by courageous.
Third, people sometimes count rage as part of what "courage" means.
Men who in sheer rage turn like wild beasts on those who have wounded them are taken for courageous, because the courageous man is also full of rage; for rage, more than anything, is eager to rush at danger. Hence Homer's phrases: "put might into his rage," "roused his wrath and rage," "fierce wrath breathed through his nostrils," "his blood boiled." All these expressions seem to signal rage waking up and bursting out.
Now the truly courageous man acts because it is noble to act, with rage backing him up. Beasts act from pain — from blows, or from fear; in a wood or a marsh they do not attack a man. So beasts are not courageous: it is pain and rage that drive them to rush at danger, without foreseeing any of the terrors involved. If that counted as courage, then hungry donkeys would have to be called courageous — beat them all you like, they will not stop eating. (Adulterers, for that matter, are driven by lust to do plenty of daring things.)
Being driven at danger by pain or rage, then, is not courage proper. Still, this kind — the kind whose impulse is rage — seems to be the most natural, and when deliberate purpose and the right motive are added to it, it becomes real courage.
Again, anger is a painful state, and revenge is pleasant; but those who fight from these motives — to escape the pain or to win the pleasure — may fight well, yet they are not courageous. They do not act because it is noble to act so, or as reason directs; they are driven by their feelings. Still, they bear some resemblance to the courageous man.
Fourth, the confident optimist is not properly called courageous either. He is confident in danger because he has won often and beaten many opponents. He and the courageous man resemble each other, since both are confident; but the courageous man is confident for the reasons already given, while the optimist is confident because he thinks he is the better man and will win without taking a scratch. (People behave the same way when they are drunk — drink makes optimists.) But when he finds out otherwise, he runs; whereas the mark of the courageous man, as we saw, is to face what is terrible to a human being, seeing the danger plainly, because facing it is noble and flinching from it is base.
And so it seems to take greater courage — this is the common view — to be fearless and cool in sudden danger than in danger that has been foreseen; for there the response must come more directly from formed character, since it depends less on preparation. When we can see what is coming, we can choose to meet it by calculation and reasoning; when it is upon us suddenly, we choose according to what we are.
Fifth, those who are unaware of their danger sometimes appear courageous. They are not far removed from the optimists just described, but they are inferior in that they need have no opinion of themselves at all, which the optimist must have. So while the optimist holds his ground for a time, these people — whose boldness rested on a false belief — run the moment they see or suspect that the case is otherwise; as the Argives did when they engaged the Spartans thinking they were Sicyonians.
We have now described what the courageous man is like, and what those who pass for courageous are like.
But there is one more point to notice.
Courage, as we said, is concerned with feelings both of confidence and of fear; but not equally with both — more with occasions of fear. It is the man who keeps cool and behaves as he ought when things are frightening who is called courageous, rather than the man who does so when things look encouraging.
That is why, as we said, men are called courageous for enduring what is painful.
Courage therefore brings pain, and is justly praised; for it is harder to endure what is painful than to hold back from what is pleasant.
Not that the end of courage is unpleasant — I do not mean that. But it seems to be hidden from view by the circumstances that surround it, as happens in athletic contests too. Boxers have a pleasant end in view, the thing they are striving for — the crown and the honors; but the blows they take are grievous to flesh and blood, and painful, and so is all the training they endure. And since the painful parts are many while the end is small, the pleasantness of the end is hardly visible.
If courage is like this, then death and wounds will be painful to the courageous man, and against his will; but he endures them because enduring is noble and refusing is base.
And the more completely a man possesses every virtue, and the happier he is, the more his death will cost him. Life is worth more to a man of his sort than to anyone else, and he knows he is giving up the very best of things — and that is painful. But he is no less courageous for feeling the pain; we may even say he is more courageous, because in spite of it he chooses noble conduct in battle over all those goods.
So we see that the rule that exercising a virtue is pleasant does not hold for every virtue — except so far as the end is attained.
Still, there is perhaps no reason why men of this character should not make less efficient soldiers than men who are not courageous at all but have nothing good to lose; for such men are reckless of risk, and will sell their lives for a small price.
Here let us close our account of courage. From what we have said, it will not be hard to gather an outline of its nature.
After courage, let us speak of self-control; for these two seem to be the virtues of the irrational parts of our nature.
We have already said that self-control is the observance of the mean with regard to pleasures (it is not concerned with pains so much, nor in the same way); and self-indulgence shows itself in the same field.
Let us now determine what kind of pleasures these are.
First, let us accept as established the distinction between pleasures of the body and pleasures of the soul — the pleasure of gratified ambition, say, or of the love of learning. When a lover of honor or of learning delights in the thing he loves, it is not his body that is affected but his mind. Now men are not called either self-controlled or self-indulgent for their behavior toward these pleasures, nor toward any other pleasures that are not bodily. People who are fond of gossip and storytelling, and fritter their days away on trifles, we call idle chatterers, but not self-indulgent; nor do we apply that term to those who take the loss of money or friends harder than they should.
Self-control, then, will be concerned with the pleasures of the body — but not even with all of these. Those who delight in what the eye takes in — colors, shapes, painting — are not called either self-controlled or self-indulgent; and yet it would seem possible to delight in these things as one ought, or more or less than one ought.
The same holds for hearing: no one is ever called self-indulgent for taking excessive delight in music or the theater, or self-controlled for enjoying them properly.
Nor do we apply these terms to those who delight in smells, except incidentally. We do not call people self-indulgent for delighting in the smell of fruit or roses or incense, but rather for delighting in the smell of perfumes and rich dishes; for the self-indulgent man delights in these smells because they remind him of the things he craves.
You may see other people, too, enjoying the smell of food when they are hungry; but delighting in such smells constantly is the mark of the self-indulgent man alone, since he alone is constantly craving what they promise.
The lower animals, moreover, get no pleasure through these senses, except incidentally. It is not the scent of the hare that delights a dog, but the eating of it; the scent only made the announcement. The lion rejoices not in the lowing of the ox but in devouring him; the lowing merely told him the ox was near, and so he appears to delight in the sound itself. Likewise, it is not the sight of a stag or a wild goat that pleases him, but the prospect of a meal.
Self-control and self-indulgence, then, have to do with the kinds of pleasure that we share with the lower animals — which is why these pleasures look slavish and brutish. I mean the pleasures of touch and taste.
Even taste seems to play only a small part here, or perhaps no part at all. The function of taste is to discriminate flavors, as wine-tasters do, and cooks seasoning their dishes; but it is by no means this fine discrimination that gives the delight — not to the self-indulgent, at any rate — but the actual enjoyment, and the medium of that is always the sense of touch, in eating and drinking alike, and in sex.
Hence the gourmand who wished his throat were longer than a crane's: what he meant was that his pleasure came through the touch.
The sense involved in self-indulgence, then, is the most common and widespread of all the senses; and so self-indulgence would seem to deserve its place as the most censured of the vices, since it attaches not to our human nature but to our animal nature.
To fix one's delight on things of this kind, and to love them above everything else, is brutish.
And further, even the more manly pleasures of touch lie outside the sphere of self-indulgence — the pleasure a gymnast takes in a rubdown and a warm bath; for the self-indulgent man does not cultivate the sense of touch over his whole body, but only in certain parts.
Now, some of our desires or appetites appear to be common to the race, others individual and acquired.
The desire for food is natural, or common to the race: every man in want of it desires food or drink, or sometimes both — and sexual intercourse too, as Homer says, when he is young and vigorous.
But not everyone desires to satisfy these wants in this or that particular way, and not everyone desires the same things; so desire of that kind appears to be peculiarly our own — individual.
Of course it is also partly natural: different things please different people, and yet there are some things all men like better than others.
First, then, in the matter of the natural or common desires few people go wrong, and only in one direction — excess. To eat or drink whatever is set in front of you until you can hold no more is to exceed the natural measure in point of quantity, since natural appetite is simply for the filling of the want. That is why such people are called "belly-mad": they fill their bellies past the mark.
It is only thoroughly slavish natures that acquire this vice.
Second, with regard to the individual pleasures — those that attend the gratification of our individual desires — many people go wrong, and in many ways.
People are called "fond of" this or that because they delight in the wrong things, or to an unusual degree, or in the wrong fashion; and the self-indulgent exceed in all these ways at once. They delight in some things they ought not to delight in, since those things are hateful; and where delight is legitimate, they delight more than is right and more than most people do.
Plainly, then, excess in these pleasures is self-indulgence, and a thing to be blamed.
But with the corresponding pains the case is not the same as it was with courage. A man is not called self-controlled for bearing them and self-indulgent for failing to. Rather, the self-indulgent man is called self-indulgent because he is pained more than he ought to be at not getting certain pleasant things — his pleasure causing his pain — and the self-controlled man is called self-controlled because going without these pleasant things, or abstaining from them, does not pain him.
The self-indulgent man, then, desires all pleasant things, or the most intensely pleasant of them, and is led by his desire to choose them ahead of everything else. And so he is constantly in pain — pained at missing them, pained by craving them; for all appetite involves pain. It seems a strange arrangement, being pained for the sake of pleasure.
People who fall short in the matter of pleasure, and delight in these things less than they ought, are hardly found at all; such insensibility is scarcely human. Even the lower animals discriminate among kinds of food, and delight in some and not in others; and a being to whom nothing was pleasant, and to whom one thing was no different from another, would be a long way from being a man. He has no name, because he does not exist.
But the self-controlled man holds the mean in these things. He takes no pleasure in what the self-indulgent man most delights in — he is rather disgusted by it — nor, in general, in the wrong things, nor very much in any of them. When they are absent he is not pained, and he does not desire them — or desires them only moderately: not more than he ought, not at the wrong time, and so on. But things that are pleasant and at the same time conduce to health and good condition he will desire moderately and in the right way; and other pleasant things too, provided they are not harmful, or incompatible with what is noble, or beyond his means. A man who cares for such pleasures on any other terms cares for them more than they are worth; and the self-controlled man is not like that — he is guided by right reason.
Self-indulgence seems to be more voluntary than cowardice.
For self-indulgence is driven by pleasure, cowardice by pain; and pleasure is something we choose, pain something we avoid. Moreover, pain unhinges us — it upsets the nature of the sufferer — while pleasure does nothing of the sort. Self-indulgence, therefore, is the more voluntary of the two.
For these reasons it is also the more blameworthy, and for another reason besides: it is easier to train oneself to behave rightly toward pleasure, since the occasions for it come up constantly in our lives and the training carries no risk; with occasions of fear the reverse is true.
Again, the settled character we call cowardice would seem to be more voluntary than the particular acts that display it. Being a coward is not itself painful; but the occasions that expose cowardice drive men out of their senses with the fear of pain, so that they throw away their weapons and disgrace themselves completely — which is why the particular acts are even thought to be compulsory. With the self-indulgent man it is the other way around: the particular acts are voluntary, for they are done with appetite and desire, but the character itself is less so; for no one desires to be self-indulgent.
The name we give to self-indulgence we apply also to the faults of children, for the two have a certain resemblance. Which of them is named after the other makes no difference for our present purpose; but plainly the later is named after the earlier.
And the metaphor, I think, is not a bad one. What needs "chastening," or correction, is whatever inclines toward base things and has great powers of growth; and nowhere are those two marks so strong as in appetite and in childhood. Children, like the self-indulgent, live by their appetites, and the desire for pleasant things is most pronounced in them. If this element is not made submissive and obedient to the governing principle, it will run to great lengths; for in an irrational being the desire for pleasant things is insatiable and will feed itself from any source, and every gratification of appetite strengthens the natural tendency — and if the gratifications are great and intense, they push reason out altogether. The gratifications of appetite, therefore, should be moderate and few; and appetite should never be set against reason — this is what we mean by calling it submissive and "chastened" — but should be ruled by reason, as a child should be ruled by his tutor.
And so the self-controlled man's appetites should be in harmony with his reason; for the aim of both is the noble. The self-controlled man desires what he ought, as he ought, and when he ought — and this, again, is exactly what reason prescribes.
This, then, may stand as our account of self-control.
Generosity, which we will take up next, seems to be moderation in the matter of wealth. What we praise in a generous man is not his conduct in war, nor in the situations where self-control is praised, nor in passing judgment, but his conduct in the giving and taking of wealth — and above all in the giving. By "wealth" we mean everything whose value can be measured in money.
Extravagance and stinginess are the excess and the deficiency in the matter of wealth.
Stinginess always means caring about money more than one should. Extravagance, on the other hand, sometimes stands for a whole bundle of vices at once. Weak-willed people who blow their money on wild living get called extravagant, and so the extravagant are held to be thoroughly worthless characters, since they combine several vices in one.
But we should note that this is not the proper use of the term. The word itself — asotos, literally "a lost man" — is meant to pick out a man with one particular vice: wasting his own substance. He is "lost" because he is being destroyed by his own fault, and wasting what you live on is a kind of self-destruction, since your life depends on it. This, then, is what we will take "extravagance" properly to mean.
Now, anything that has a use can be used well or badly.
Riches are simply an abundance of useful things.
But each thing is best used by the man who has the virtue that deals with that thing.
Therefore riches will be best used by the man who has the virtue that deals with wealth — that is, the generous man.
The ways of using wealth are spending and giving; taking and keeping are rather ways of acquiring it. So it is more distinctive of the generous man to give to the right people than to take from the right sources and refuse the wrong ones. For it is more distinctive of virtue to do good than to have good done to you, and to act nobly than merely to avoid acting basely; and clearly doing good and acting nobly go with the giving, while receiving good and not acting basely go with the taking.
Again, our gratitude goes to the man who gives, not to the man who declines to take — and so does our praise.
Again, it is easier not to take than to give; we are more reluctant to part with what is our own than to take what belongs to someone else.
Again, it is the givers who are commonly called generous. Those who merely abstain from taking are praised not so much for generosity as for justice, and those who take are not praised at all.
Again, of all virtuous characters the generous man is perhaps the best loved, because he is useful — and his usefulness lies in his giving.
Now, virtuous acts, as we said, are noble and are done for the sake of the noble. The generous man, then, like the others, will give for the sake of the noble, and give rightly: to the right people, to the right extent, and at the right time — in short, his giving will have every mark of right giving.
Moreover, he will give with pleasure, or at least without pain; for virtuous acts are always pleasant or painless — certainly they are never painful.
The man who gives to the wrong people, or gives from some motive other than love of the noble, is not generous; he must be called something else.
Nor is the man generous who gives with a pained heart; that shows he would rather have the money than the noble act — which is not how the generous man feels.
Nor will the generous man take from the wrong sources; that kind of taking does not fit a man who sets no store by wealth.
Nor is he quick to ask favors; a man in the habit of doing good to others is not usually in a hurry to have good done to him.
But from the right sources he will take — from his own property, for instance — not because there is anything noble in taking, but simply because he cannot give without it. For the same reason he will not neglect his property, since he means to use it to help people. And he will refuse to give to just anyone who comes along, precisely so that he has something left to give to the right people, at the right times, and where giving is noble.
It is very characteristic of the generous man to overshoot in giving, leaving too little for himself; disregard of self is part of the character.
In calling a man generous we must take his means into account. What makes a gift generous is not the size of the sum but the settled character of the giver, and that character scales the gift to the giver's fortune. So it is entirely possible that the man who gives the smaller amount is the more generous man, if he gives it out of less.
Those who inherit a fortune seem to be more generous than those who made one. For one thing, they have never known want; for another, everyone is especially fond of what they made themselves — look at parents, or poets.
It is not easy for a generous man to be rich. He is not inclined to take or to keep, but very inclined to spend, and he values money not for its own sake but only for the sake of giving it away.
Hence the complaint people bring against fortune, that the men who most deserve wealth have the least of it. But this is natural enough: you cannot have wealth without taking trouble over it, any more than you can have anything else.
Still, the generous man will not give to the wrong people or at the wrong times. If he did, he would no longer be practicing generosity, and having spent that way he would not have enough left for the occasions that matter. For, as we said, the generous man is the one who spends in proportion to his fortune and on the proper objects; the man who overshoots that measure is extravagant. This is why kings are not called extravagant: it is not easy for them to outrun their possessions with their gifts and expenses.
Generosity, then, being moderation in the giving and taking of wealth, the generous man will give and spend the proper amounts on the proper objects, in small matters and great alike, and do it with pleasure; and he will also take the proper amounts from the proper sources. For since the virtue is moderation in both giving and taking, the man who has it will do both rightly. Right taking goes together with right giving; any other kind of taking is contrary to it. The givings and takings that go together are found in the same person; those that are contrary to each other obviously are not.
If it happens that the generous man spends something in a way that is contrary to what is right and noble, he will be pained — but moderately and in due measure; for it is characteristic of virtue to feel pleasure and pain on the right occasions and in due measure.
The generous man is also easy to deal with in money matters. He is not hard to cheat, since he does not value wealth, and he is more likely to be annoyed at having failed to spend where he ought than pained at having spent where he ought not — the sort of man Simonides would not approve of.
The extravagant man goes wrong on these points too: he is neither pleased nor pained on the right occasions or in the right way. But this will become clearer as we go on.
We have already said that extravagance and stinginess are each an excess and a deficiency at once, and in two things: giving and taking (spending counts under giving). Extravagance exceeds in giving and in not taking, and falls short in taking; stinginess falls short in giving and exceeds in taking — in small things, we should add.
Now, the two sides of extravagance are not often combined in one person. It is not easy to keep giving forever while never taking: private citizens soon run through their means, and it is private citizens who generally get the name.
The extravagant man of this pure type — the one who combines both elements — should be considered a good deal better than a stingy man. He is easily cured, both by age and by running out of money, and he can be brought round to the middle course. For he has the essentials of the generous character: he gives and he does not take; he simply does neither well nor as he ought. If he can be trained to that, or changed in any other way, he will be generous — he will give to the right people and refuse to take from the wrong sources. This is why he is generally felt to be no bad character: going too far in giving and in not taking is the mark not of a vicious or ignoble nature, but of a foolish one.
The extravagant man of this sort, then, seems much better than the stingy man — for the reasons just given, and also because he does good to many people, while the stingy man does good to no one, not even himself.
But most extravagant men, as we said, not only give wrongly but take from the wrong sources, and in that respect they are stingy. They become grasping because they want to spend and cannot easily do it — their supplies run out fast — and so they are forced to draw from elsewhere. And since they care nothing for the noble, they take quite recklessly, from any source at all; they long to give, and it does not matter a whit to them how the money goes or where it comes from.
That is why their gifts are not generous. They are not noble, not given for the sake of the noble, not given in the right way. Sometimes such men make rich the very people who ought to be poor: they will give nothing to a man of sober character, and a great deal to flatterers or to anyone who supplies them some other pleasure. Hence most of them are dissolute as well: being quick to part with money, they lavish it on wild living, and since they do not shape their lives toward the noble, they slide easily into the pursuit of pleasure.
The extravagant man, then, if he finds no guidance, ends up here; but with training he can be brought to the moderate and right course.
Stinginess, by contrast, is incurable — old age, and every kind of decline, seems to make men stingy.
It also runs deeper in human nature than extravagance: most men are fonder of money than of giving.
And it reaches far and comes in many forms, for there are, it seems, many ways of being stingy.
It has two parts — falling short in giving and going too far in taking — but it does not always appear whole; sometimes the parts come separately, one man exceeding in taking while another falls short in giving. All those who go by names like the tightwad, the skinflint, the miser fall short in giving, but they do not covet other people's goods or want to take them.
Some are driven to this by a kind of honesty — a wish to steer clear of disgrace. Some of them seem to save (or at least say they save) precisely so that they will never be forced to do anything disgraceful; the "cheeseparer" belongs here, along with his kind, so named for the extreme lengths to which he carries his refusal to give.
Others keep their hands off their neighbors' goods only out of fear, reckoning that it is no easy thing to take other people's property without having your own taken in turn; so they settle for neither taking nor giving.
Others again go to such excess in taking that they will make any gain they can, from anywhere at all — those who ply degrading trades, brothel-keepers and the like, and loan sharks who lend small sums at steep rates. All of these make money from the wrong sources and beyond the right amount.
What these last have in common is plainly the pursuit of base gain: every one of them puts up with disgrace for the sake of gain, and a small gain at that. For the men who make improper gains improperly on a grand scale are not called stingy — tyrants who sack cities and strip temples are called wicked, impious, unjust instead. But the dice-sharper, the man who steals clothes at the baths, the common thief — these count among the stingy, for they all make base gains. Both the thief and the sharper ply their trade for gain and endure disgrace for it: the thief runs the gravest dangers for his haul, and the sharper makes his profit off his friends — the very people he ought to be giving to. Both, then, wanting to make gain in the wrong ways, are seekers of base gain; and all money-making of this sort is stingy.
Stinginess is rightly named as the opposite of generosity. It is a worse evil than extravagance, and men more often go wrong in this direction than in the extravagance we described.
Let this stand, then, as our account of generosity and of the vices opposed to it.
Our next task, it seems, is to examine magnificence, for this too appears to be a virtue concerned with wealth.
But it does not, like generosity, cover the whole field of money dealings — only those involving large outlays; and there it goes beyond generosity in sheer scale. For as the name itself suggests (megaloprepeia — "greatness that fits"), magnificence is suitable expenditure on a grand scale. But grandeur is relative: what it is suitable to spend when you are fitting out a warship is not what it is suitable to spend when you are heading a sacred embassy.
What is suitable, then, is relative to the person, the occasion, and the business at hand. And the man who spends fittingly on trivial or middling occasions is not called magnificent — the man who can say, with the poet,
To many a wandering beggar did I give —
but rather the man who spends fittingly on great ones. The magnificent man is generous; but a man may be generous without being magnificent.
The deficiency of this quality is called cheapness; the excess is called vulgarity, bad taste, and so on. The mark of the excess is not spending too much on the proper objects, but making a show — spending on the wrong objects and in the wrong style. We will come to these presently.
The magnificent man is like a skilled artist: he can see what an occasion calls for, and he can spend great sums with taste. For as we said at the outset, a habit — a settled state of character — takes its stamp from the acts it issues in and the things it produces. The magnificent man's outlays, then, must be great and suitable.
And what he produces must be of the same kind, for only so will the expense be at once great and suited to the result.
The result, then, must be worthy of the expenditure, and the expenditure worthy of the result — or even beyond it.
Moreover, the magnificent man's motive in spending this way will be love of the noble; for that is common to all the virtues.
Further, he will spend gladly and with a free hand, since minute reckoning of costs is cheap. He will ask how the work can be made most beautiful and most fitting, not what it will cost and how it can be done most cheaply.
So the magnificent man must be generous as well. The generous man, too, will spend the right amount in the right manner; but it is in the "great" of great and right that magnificence goes beyond generosity, which deals with the same field — I mean in the actual size of the sum spent. And further, where the sum spent is the same, the magnificent man's outlay will produce the more magnificent result.
For the excellence of a possession is not the same as the excellence of a work. As a possession, the most prized thing is what is worth most — gold, say; as a work, what is great and beautiful, for the sight of such a work stirs admiration, and what is magnificent is always admirable. Excellence of work on a great scale — that is magnificence.
Now, there is a class of expenditures we call honorable in a special sense: expenditure on the worship of the gods — offerings, temples, sacrifices — and likewise everything spent on the worship of heroes, and again every public service undertaken from noble ambition, as when a man decides to equip a chorus or a warship, or to give a public feast, in handsome style.
But in every case, as we have said, we must look at the spender — who he is and what he has — for the outlay should be proportionate to the circumstances, and should suit not only the result but the man behind it.
Hence a poor man cannot be magnificent. He lacks the means to spend great sums suitably, and if he tries he is a fool, for he spends out of proportion and in the wrong way, and an act must be done in the right way to be virtuous. Such spending befits those who have the means — earned by their own efforts, or through ancestors or connections — and who have birth, reputation, and the rest; for all these things carry a certain greatness and standing with them.
The magnificent man, then, is properly a man of this sort, and magnificence shows itself most properly in expenditures of the kind we named, for these are the greatest and most honorable. But it can also appear on private occasions — the kind that come once in a lifetime, like a wedding; or the kind that concern the whole city or its leading men, like receiving foreign guests and sending them on their way, or giving them presents and returning theirs. For the magnificent man lavishes money not on himself but on public objects, and gifts to strangers have something in common with offerings to the gods.
A magnificent man will also build his house in a style that matches his wealth, for even a fine house is a kind of public ornament. And he will spend more readily on things that last, since these are the noblest. And on each occasion he will spend what suits it — for what suits the gods is not what suits men, nor a temple what suits a tomb.
And since every expenditure can be great of its kind — great outlay on a great occasion being the most magnificent, and after that what is great for the particular occasion, whatever it is — and since the greatness of the result is not the same as the greatness of the expense (the most beautiful ball or the most beautiful flask that can be had is a magnificent present for a child, though its price is small and cheap), it follows that it is the mark of the magnificent man to do magnificently whatever he does, of whatever kind — for work of that sort is not easily surpassed — and to produce a result worthy of the expense.
Such, then, is the magnificent man. The man of excess — the vulgar man, as we call him — exceeds, as we said, by spending improperly. He spends great sums on small occasions and makes an unseemly show of it: entertaining his club members with a wedding feast; bringing his chorus onstage in purple, when he is producing a comedy, as they did at Mesara. And he will do all this not from any love of the noble and beautiful, but to parade his wealth, hoping to be admired for it — spending little where he ought to spend much, and much where he ought to spend little.
The cheap man, on the other hand, will fall short on every occasion. Even when he is spending very large sums, he will ruin the beauty of the whole by penny-pinching over a trifle — never doing anything without hesitating over it, forever calculating how it can be done for the least possible cost, groaning even at that, and convinced that everything he does is on a needlessly grand scale.
Both these characters, then, are vicious; but they do not bring disgrace, since they neither harm anyone else nor are especially offensive in themselves.
Greatness of soul, as its very name says, has to do with great things. Let us first pin down what those things are.
It will make no difference whether we examine the quality itself or the man who has it.
By a great-souled man we mean one who claims much and deserves much. The man who claims much without deserving it is a fool, and a man who possesses virtue is never a fool. So the man we have just described is the great-souled man.
The man who deserves little and claims little is modest and sensible, but not great-souled; for greatness of soul implies greatness, just as beauty implies stature. Small men may be trim and well proportioned, but they cannot be called beautiful.
The man who claims much without deserving it is vain — though not everyone who claims more than he deserves is vain.
The man who claims less than he deserves shows smallness of soul, whether his deserts are great or moderate, or small and he claims still less. And the fault seems greatest in the man whose deserts are great; for what would he do if he deserved less than he does?
The great-souled man, then, stands at an extreme in the greatness of what he deserves, but at the mean in how he carries himself; for he claims exactly what he deserves, while all the others claim too much or too little.
Now if he deserves much and claims much — and most of all deserves and claims the greatest things — there will be one thing above all that concerns him. For desert is measured in external goods. And the greatest of external goods, we may fairly say, is the one we render to the gods as their due, the one that people in high positions want most, and the one set as the prize for the noblest deeds. The thing that fits this description is honor — safely the greatest of all external goods. Honor and dishonor, therefore, are the field in which the great-souled man behaves as he ought.
Indeed we can see, without any argument, that honor is what great-souled men care about; honor is what they claim, above everything else, and what they deserve.
The small-souled man falls short, whether you measure his claims against his own deserts or against what the great-souled man claims for himself.
The vain or conceited man exceeds what is due to himself, though he does not out-claim the great-souled man.
But the great-souled man, since he deserves the greatest things, must be a perfectly good man; for the better man always deserves the greater things, and the best man the greatest. The truly great-souled man, therefore, must be good. In fact, greatness in every virtue would seem to be built into being great-souled.
It would be equally out of character for the great-souled man to run away swinging his arms and for him to commit an injustice. For what could he love enough to do something shameful for it, when nothing counts for much in his eyes?
Survey him point by point and you will find that the idea of a great-souled man who is not a good man is completely absurd. If he were not good, he could not even be worthy of honor; for honor is the prize of virtue, and it is paid to the good as their due.
Greatness of soul, then, seems to be a kind of crown of the virtues: it makes them greater, and it cannot exist without them. That is why true greatness of soul is a hard thing; it is impossible without the union of all the virtues.
The great-souled man, then, shows his character above all in the matter of honor and dishonor. At great honor from good men he will be moderately pleased, as merely getting his due — or even less than his due, since no honor can measure up to complete virtue. Still, he will accept it, since they have nothing greater to give him. But honor from ordinary people, on trivial grounds, he will flatly despise; that is not what he deserves. Dishonor he will likewise shrug off; he will never have earned it.
But though it is chiefly in the matter of honor, as we have said, that the great-souled man shows himself, he will also hold the mean in his feelings about wealth and power and every kind of good and bad fortune, whatever happens to him. He will be neither much elated by prosperity nor much cast down by adversity — after all, not even honor strikes him as a very great thing. Power and wealth are desirable for honor's sake (at least, those who have them want to be honored for them); so the man who thinks lightly of honor must think lightly of these too.
And so great-souled men seem to look down on everything.
Now the gifts of fortune are also commonly thought to contribute to greatness of soul. The well born are thought worthy of honor, and so are the powerful and the wealthy; they are in a position of superiority, and whatever is superior in some good thing is always held in greater honor. So these things do, in a sense, make people more great-souled, since such people are honored by some. But strictly, only the good man is worthy of honor — though the man who has goodness and good fortune together is commonly thought worthier still. Those who have these goods without virtue have no just claim to great things and are not properly called great-souled; neither is possible without complete virtue.
Instead, people who have these goods easily become arrogant and insolent. Without virtue it is not easy to carry the gifts of fortune gracefully; and so, unable to carry them, and thinking themselves better than everyone else, such people look down on others while doing whatever happens to please them. They imitate the great-souled man without really being like him, and they imitate him where they can: they do not show virtue in their actions, but they do look down on people. The great-souled man never looks down on anyone unjustly — his estimates are accurate — while most people who do it have no relevant grounds at all.
The great-souled man is not one to run into petty dangers, and he does not love danger, since there are few things he values much. But he is ready to face a great danger, and when he does, he does not spare his life; life is not worth keeping at every cost.
It is his nature to confer benefits, but he is ashamed to receive them; conferring is what a superior does, receiving is what an inferior does. And when he has received a favor, he tends to repay it with a greater one — that way his creditor becomes his debtor, and ends up on the receiving side.
Such men also seem to remember the benefits they have given better than those they have received (for the recipient of a benefit is the inferior of the benefactor, and this man wants to be the superior); they like being reminded of the one, and dislike being reminded of the other. That is why we read that Thetis would not mention to Zeus the services she had done him, and why the Spartans, negotiating with the Athenians, brought up the benefits Sparta had received rather than the ones she had conferred.
It is characteristic of him, again, never to ask favors, or only reluctantly, but to be ready to grant them; to be lofty toward the powerful and the fortunate, but unassuming toward people of middle rank. To assert superiority over the great is difficult and dignified; to assert it over the humble is easy. A haughty manner among the great is perfectly good breeding; among the lowly it is brutal — like showing off your strength on a cripple.
Another mark of him: he does not rush in wherever honor is on offer, or go where others hold first place. He stays aloof and holds back, except where there is great honor to be won or a great work to be done — not many things, but great and notable ones.
Again, he must be open in his hatreds and open in his loves (concealing your feelings — caring less for truth than for what people will think — is cowardly), and open in word and deed. His sense of his own superiority makes him outspoken, and he is truthful, except insofar as he takes an ironic tone with the masses. And he cannot shape his life to suit someone else, unless it is a friend; that is servile — which is why all flatterers and hangers-on of great men are slavish by nature, and why men of low nature become flatterers.
He is not easily moved to admiration; nothing is great to him.
He readily forgets injuries. Brooding on the past, especially on past wrongs, is not in his character; he prefers to overlook them.
He is no gossip. He will not talk about himself or about others, for he does not care to be praised, or to have others blamed (though he is not quick to hand out praise either). So he is not given to speaking ill of people, not even his enemies — except deliberately, to insult them.
When something happens that cannot be helped, or that matters little, he is the last man alive to complain or beg for help; that is how a man behaves who thinks such things very important.
He would rather own beautiful things that bring no profit than useful things that pay; that is the mark of a man whose resources are within himself.
Further, the character of the great-souled man seems to call for a slow step, a deep voice, and measured speech. A man is not likely to hurry when few things deeply interest him, or to get worked up when nothing strikes him as very important — and hurry and excitement are what produce a shrill voice and rapid movements.
This, then, is the great-souled man.
The man who falls short of this quality is small-souled; the man who overshoots it is vain or conceited.
Now these two do not seem to be bad men — they do no harm — but they are in error.
The small-souled man deserves good things and robs himself of what he deserves. He seems the worse for not claiming them, and for misjudging himself; if he judged rightly, he would desire what he deserves, since it is good. Not that such people seem to be fools — rather, too retiring. But a misjudgment of this kind really does seem to make them worse; for men strive for what they think they deserve, and these men shrink back from noble deeds and undertakings, thinking themselves unworthy of them, just as they shrink from external goods.
Vain men, on the other hand, are fools as well as ignorant of themselves, and they make it obvious. They take on honorable offices they are unfit for, and are promptly exposed as incapable. They dress in fine clothes and put on fine airs and all the rest of it; they want the whole world to know their good fortune; they talk about themselves, as if that were the road to honor.
But smallness of soul is more opposed to greatness of soul than vanity is; it is both commoner and worse.
Greatness of soul, then, as we have said, has to do with honor on the grand scale.
But it appears (as we said at the outset) that there is also a virtue concerned with honor which stands to greatness of soul as generosity stands to magnificence. Both this virtue and generosity have nothing to do with great things; they make us behave properly in matters of moderate or trifling importance. Just as in the taking and giving of money it is possible to hit the mean, and also to exceed it or fall short of it, so in the desire for honor it is possible to go too far or not far enough — or, again, to desire honor from the right source and in the right manner.
We call a man ambitious as a term of reproach, meaning that he desires honor more than he ought and from the wrong sources; and we call a man unambitious as a term of reproach, meaning that he does not want to be honored even for noble deeds.
But sometimes we call a man ambitious as a term of praise, meaning that he is manly and loves noble things; and sometimes we call a man unambitious as a term of praise, meaning that he is moderate and sensible (as we said at the outset).
Plainly, then, "fond of" a thing is said in several senses, and the term "fond of honor" does not always mean the same: as praise it means fonder than most men are, as reproach it means fonder than is right. And since there is no recognized name for the observance of the mean, the extremes fight, so to speak, over what looks like an empty seat. But wherever there is excess and deficiency there is also a mean; and honor is in fact desired more than is right, and less; therefore it can also be desired to the right degree. This character, then, is praised — it is observance of the mean in the matter of honor — though it has no recognized name. Compared with ambition it looks like lack of ambition; compared with lack of ambition it looks like ambition; compared with both at once it looks, in a way, like both at once. We can see the same thing happening with the other virtues. But in this case the extreme characters seem to be opposed to one another, rather than to the middle character, because the character who observes the mean has no recognized name.
Gentleness is the observance of the mean with respect to anger. But note that we have no recognized name for the mean here, and scarcely any recognized names for the extremes. So the term gentleness — which strictly leans toward the deficiency in anger (itself nameless) — gets applied to the mean.
The excess may be called wrathfulness; for the emotion involved is wrath, or anger, though the things that provoke it are many and various.
The man who is angry on the right occasions and with the right persons, and also in the right manner, at the right season, and for the right length of time, is praised. Let us call him gentle, then, since gentleness is used as a term of praise. For the man we call gentle wants to keep his balance — not to be carried off by his emotions, but to be angry only in the manner, on the occasions, and for the length of time that reason prescribes. If he errs, he seems to err on the side of deficiency: he is slow to take revenge and quick to forgive.
The deficiency, though — call it wrathlessness or what you will — is blamed. People who are not angered by what ought to anger them seem to be fools, and so do those who are not angry in the way, at the time, and with the persons they ought to be. Such a man seems to feel nothing and to be pained by nothing, and, never being angered, to lack the spirit to defend himself. And to let yourself be insulted, or to stand quietly by while your friends are insulted, is slavish.
It is possible to exceed on every point: to be angry with people one ought not to be angry with, at things one ought not to be angry at, more than one ought, more quickly, and for longer. Not that all these errors show up in the same person — that would be impossible; for evil destroys itself, and if it appears complete, it becomes unbearable.
So we find that wrathful men get angry fast, with the wrong people and at the wrong things, and more than they ought; but they get over it just as fast, and that is the best point in their character. The reason is that they do not hold their anger in: their quick temper makes them retaliate at once, so that what is in them comes out into the open — and then they are done with it.
People called choleric are excessively quick-tempered, flaring up at anything and on any occasion; hence the name, which in Greek suggests boiling over.
Sulky men are hard to appease, and their anger lasts a long time, because they keep it in. For the moment we retaliate, we are relieved: vengeance ends our anger, replacing pain with pleasure. But the sulky man gets no such relief; he carries the weight of his wrath around with him. No one even tries to talk him out of it, since he does not show it, and it takes a long time to digest one's anger inside oneself. Such men are a great trial to themselves and to their closest friends.
Lastly, hard is the name we give to those who are offended by things that ought not to offend them, and more than they ought, and for longer — and who will not be appeased without vengeance or punishment.
Of the two extremes, the excess is the more opposed to gentleness. It is commoner (human beings incline more naturally to vengeance), and a hard-tempered person is worse to live with than one who is too easygoing.
What we said some time ago is made abundantly clear by what we have just been saying: it is not easy to define how, with whom, at what, and for how long one ought to be angry — how far one may rightly go, and at what point the fault begins. The man who strays a little from the right course is not blamed, whether toward excess or toward deficiency; sometimes we praise those who fall short and call them gentle, and sometimes we call the harsh-tempered manly, as men fit to rule. But how large and what kind of error makes a man blamable can hardly be defined; it depends on the particular circumstances of each case, and only immediate perception can decide it.
But this much at least is clear: the habit that observes the mean is to be praised — the habit that makes us angry with the right persons, at the right things, in the right manner, and so on — while all the habits of excess and deficiency deserve censure: slight censure if the error is trifling, graver if it is considerable, severe if it is great.
It is evident, therefore, that we must strive for the habit that observes the mean.
Let this stand, then, as our account of the habits that have to do with anger.
In social life — living alongside others, sharing their conversation and their common business — some people show themselves obsequious: to please you they praise everything, never object to anything, and think their whole duty is to avoid giving pain to anyone they meet. Those who take the opposite line, who object to everything and never stop for a moment to think what pain they may cause, are called quarrelsome and sour.
It is plain enough that both these habits deserve blame, and that the habit which takes the middle course between them deserves praise — the habit that makes a man go along with what he should, in the right way, and likewise refuse to go along. This type of character has no recognized name, but it looks most like friendliness. For the man who shows this moderation is just the sort of man we mean when we speak of an upright friend — except that a friend also feels affection. The difference from friendship is that this quality involves no emotion, no affection for the people we deal with. The man who has it goes along when he should, not because he loves or hates, but because that is his character. He will behave the same way toward people he knows and people he does not, toward intimates and strangers — only, in each case, as is fitting; for we do not owe strangers the same consideration we owe our intimates, or the same care not to pain them.
We have already said in general terms that such a man will behave as he ought with others; but we must add that, while he tries to add to their pleasure and to avoid giving them pain, he always steers by what is noble and fitting. The pleasures and pains of social life seem to be his particular field. Whenever he finds it would not be noble — or would be positively harmful to himself — to help along one of these pleasures, he will refuse to go along and will choose to give pain instead. And if a pleasure would bring discredit on the man producing it, and no small discredit, or would do him some injury, while opposing it costs only a little pain, he will not go along with it; he will set his face against it. He will behave differently in the company of important people and of ordinary people, of close friends and of mere acquaintances, and so on, giving each his due — preferring, other things being equal, to promote pleasure, and reluctant to give pain, but letting the consequences govern his conduct when the consequences are serious: by consequences I mean what is noble and fitting. So for the sake of a great pleasure later, he will inflict a small pain now.
The man who hits the mean here, then, is something of this sort, but he has no recognized name.
The man who always makes himself pleasant, if he aims simply at pleasing and has nothing further in view, is obsequious; but if he does it to get some profit for himself, in money or in what money buys, he is a flatterer.
And the man who sets his face against everything is, as we have said, quarrelsome and sour.
Here the extremes seem to be opposed to one another rather than to the mean, because the mean has no name.
The mean that lies between boasting and irony — this virtue, too, lacks a name — shows itself in almost the same field.
It will be worth examining these qualities as well; for we shall know more about human character when we have gone through each of its forms, and we shall be more fully convinced that the virtues are ways of observing the mean when we have surveyed them all and found that this holds of every one.
We have spoken of the characters that social life displays where pleasure and pain are concerned; let us now speak in the same way of those who show themselves truthful or untruthful — in what they say, in what they do, and in the claims they put forward.
First of all, then, the boaster seems fond of claiming the things people admire when he does not have them, or not to the degree he pretends; the ironical man, on the other side, disclaims what he has, or plays it down; while the man who observes the mean — the man who is "always himself" — is truthful in word and deed, admitting the plain facts about himself and neither inflating nor shrinking them.
Now each of these lines of conduct can be pursued with some further object in view, or with none.
When a man has nothing further in view, he speaks and acts and lives according to his character.
But falsehood is in itself vile and blamable, and truth is noble and praiseworthy in itself.
And so the truthful man, who observes the mean, deserves praise, while both the untruthful characters deserve blame — the boaster more than the ironical man.
Let us speak of each of them, then, and first of the truthful character.
Remember that we are not talking about the man who tells the truth in business dealings, or in matters that fall under justice and injustice — those belong to another virtue. The man we mean is the one who, where nothing so weighty is at stake, is truthful in his speech and in his life because that is his character.
Such a man would seem to be a good man. For he who loves truth, and tells it where nothing hangs on it, will tell it all the more surely where serious interests are involved; he will shun falsehood there as something base, having already shunned it elsewhere for its own sake — and such a man deserves praise.
He leans toward understating the truth rather than overstating it, and this seems the more fitting course, since all exaggeration is offensive.
The man who claims more than he has with nothing further in view — the boaster proper — seems not to be a good character (a good man would take no pleasure in falsehood), but he seems silly rather than bad.
Of boasters who do have a further object, the one whose object is reputation or honor is not censured very severely (no more than the boaster proper is); but the one whose object is money, or the means of making money, is held in greater disgrace.
Notice, though, what marks off the boaster proper from the other kinds of boasters: not his ability to boast, but his preference for boasting. He is a boaster by habit, because that is his character — just as there is, on one side, the liar proper, who delights in the falsehood itself, and on the other the liar who lies out of desire for honor or gain.
Those who boast for reputation claim the things that win a man praise or get him counted happy; those whose motive is gain claim the things that benefit others and whose absence can escape detection — skill in magic, say, or in medicine. And so it is usually things of this sort that men claim and boast of, since they meet both conditions.
Ironical people, on the other hand, with their way of talking themselves down, seem the more refined characters; for their motive seems to be not love of gain but a wish to avoid parade. And what they disclaim is, notably, exactly what people admire — Socrates was an instance of this.
But those who disclaim small advantages they obviously possess are called affected humbugs, and are the more easily despised. And sometimes this self-deprecation is barely distinguishable from boasting — dressing like a Spartan, for instance; for there is something boastful in extreme depreciation just as in exaggeration.
Those who use irony in moderation, and are ironical about matters not too obvious and plain, come across as men of refinement.
Finally, the boaster seems to be the special opposite of the truthful man; for he is worse than the ironical man.
Again, since relaxation has its place in our life, and one form of relaxation is amusing conversation, it seems that here too there is a proper way of mixing with others — that there are things it is right to say, and a right way of saying them; and the same holds for listening. And here also it will make a difference what sort of people you are speaking in front of, or listening to.
Plainly, in these matters too, one can go beyond the mean or fall short of it.
Now those who go to excess in ridicule seem to be buffoons and vulgar fellows, straining for a laugh at any cost, and more set on raising the laugh than on keeping their jokes elegant and painless to their target. While those who will never say anything funny themselves, and scowl at those who do, are considered boorish and morose. But those who joke gracefully are called witty — men of ready wit, as it were quick and versatile men.
For a man's character seems to reveal itself in these playful sallies, and so we judge his moral makeup by them, just as we judge his body by its movements.
But because ridiculous things are everywhere, and most people take more delight in fun and joking than they should, the buffoon is often called witty because he delights his audience. That there is a difference between the two, and no small one, is plain from what we have said.
One element of the character that observes the mean here is tact. The man of tact will say, and listen to, only the sort of thing that suits an honest man and a gentleman; for there are things it is quite becoming for such a man to say and to hear by way of jest, and the jesting of a gentleman differs from that of a slavish nature, the jesting of an educated man from that of an uneducated one.
You can see this in the difference between the old comedy and the new: the earlier writers got their laughs from obscenity, the later ones from innuendo — and as decency goes, that is no small difference.
Can we define good jesting, then, as making jokes that befit a gentleman? Or jokes that do not pain the hearer — or that even give him pleasure? Surely that last is hopelessly indefinite, for different things are hateful and pleasant to different people.
But the things he will listen to will be of the same sort as the things he will say: the jokes a man can listen to, we think, he can make himself.
So there are jokes he will not make — though we cannot define them exactly; for to make a joke of a man is to vilify him in a way, and the law forbids certain kinds of vilification, and perhaps ought to forbid certain kinds of jesting too.
The refined and gentlemanly man, therefore, will regulate his wit accordingly, being as it were a law to himself.
Such, then, is the character of the man who observes the mean, whether we call him a man of tact or a man of ready wit.
The buffoon, on the other hand, cannot resist an opening for a joke; if he can just raise a laugh, he will spare neither himself nor anyone else, and will say things no man of refinement would say — some of which he would not even listen to.
The boor, lastly, is wholly useless in this kind of company: he contributes nothing and takes everything badly. And yet relaxation and amusement seem to be necessary ingredients in our life.
The ways of observing the mean in social life that we have described, then, are three in number, and all have to do with conversation or shared activity of some kind. They differ in that one is concerned with truth, while the other two are concerned with what is pleasant; and of the two concerned with pleasure, one has its field in our amusements, the other in all the rest of social life.
Shame — the modesty of our earlier list — cannot properly be called a virtue, for it is more like a feeling or emotion than a habit. At any rate, it is defined as a kind of fear of disgrace, and it works much like the fear that danger excites: men blush when they are ashamed, while the fear of death turns them pale. Both, then, seem to be in a way physical, and that is held to be the mark of a feeling or emotion rather than of a habit.
Again, this feeling does not suit every time of life, but only youth. We think it proper for young people to be ready to feel shame because, living as they do by their emotions, they often go wrong, and shame holds them back from wrong actions.
And so we praise young men who are ready to feel shame, but no one would praise an older man for being apt to be ashamed; for we think he ought not to do anything that could make him ashamed of himself in the first place.
Indeed, shame is not the mark of a good man, since it is what vile acts occasion — and such acts should simply not be done. (Nor does it matter that some acts are really shameful and others shameful only in public opinion; neither kind should be done, and so a man ought not to be feeling shame.) It is the mark of a worthless man to be the sort who would do something shameful.
And if a man's character is such that he would be ashamed if he did one of these shameful acts, it is absurd for him to imagine that this makes him a good man; for shame attaches only to voluntary acts, and a good man will never voluntarily do vile acts.
At most, shame would be good conditionally: if he were to do the act, a good man would be ashamed. But there is nothing conditional about the virtues.
Again, granted that it is bad to be shameless — to feel no shame at doing shameful things — it does not follow that it is good to do them and be ashamed of it.
Self-restraint, in the same way, is not a virtue either, but something between virtue and vice.
But we will explain this point about self-restraint later; let us now treat of justice.
We come now to justice and injustice. We have to ask what sorts of acts they are concerned with, in what sense justice observes the mean, and what the extremes are between which the just lies. And in this inquiry we will follow the same method as before.
We see that when people speak of justice, they all mean the sort of habit or character that makes a man apt to do just things — that makes him act justly and wish for what is just. And by injustice they mean, in the same way, the character that makes a man act unjustly and wish for what is unjust. Let us set this down, then, as our outline to work from.
Notice that we can start this way with justice, because a habit — a trained state of character — differs in one respect from a science or a faculty. Both members of a pair of opposites fall under one and the same science or faculty: medicine deals with sickness as well as health. But a habit that produces one result does not also produce the opposite result. Health produces only healthy performances, never unhealthy ones; we say a man walks healthily when he walks the way a healthy man walks.
Not that the two opposites are unconnected. In the first place, a habit is often known from its opposite habit, and often from its causes and results. If we know what good condition is, we can learn from it what bad condition is; and from the things that produce good condition we can infer what good condition itself is, and the other way around. If good condition is firmness of flesh, for instance, then bad condition must be flabbiness of flesh, and whatever tends to produce firmness of flesh tends to produce good condition.
In the second place, if one of a pair of opposite terms has more than one sense, then as a general rule the other has more than one sense too. So if "just" has several senses, "unjust" will have several as well.
And in fact it seems that both "justice" and "injustice" do have several senses. But because the different things covered by the common name are so closely related, the difference escapes notice. It does not strike us the way it does when the things are far apart — different in outward appearance, say. Everyone sees at once, for instance, that the kleis that lies under an animal's neck — the collarbone — is a different thing from the kleis we fasten the door with — the key — though the Greek word is the same.
Let us ask, then, in how many different senses a man is called unjust.
First, the man who breaks the laws is considered unjust; and second, so is the man who takes more than his share — the unfair man.
Plainly, then, the just man will be (1) the law-abiding man and (2) the fair man.
And a just thing will be (1) what is lawful and (2) what is fair; an unjust thing will be (1) what is unlawful and (2) what is unfair.
Now since the unjust man, in the second sense of the word, takes more than his share, his sphere of action will be goods — not all goods, but the ones good and bad fortune deal in: things that are always good in themselves, but not always good for us. These are what we humans pray for and chase after. We ought to do otherwise — pray that what is good in itself may also be good for us, and choose what is actually good for us.
But the unjust man does not always take more than his share. Sometimes he takes less — less, that is, of things that are bad in themselves. Since the lesser evil counts in a way as a good, though, and since grasping for more means grasping for more good, he is still said to take more than his share. In any case he is unfair; that is the wider term, and it covers both.
We found that the lawbreaker is unjust and the law-abiding man just. It follows that whatever is lawful is just in one sense of the word. And this is in fact how we talk; for whatever the legislator prescribes is lawful, and we call every such prescription just.
Now, the laws pronounce on all manner of things, aiming at the common interest of all, or of the best men, or of those who hold power in the state (a position determined by personal excellence or by some other such standard). So in one sense we apply the term just to whatever tends to produce and preserve the happiness of the political community, and the parts of that happiness. The law commands us to do the acts of a brave man — not to desert our post, not to run, not to throw away our weapons; and the acts of a self-controlled man — not to commit adultery or outrage; and the acts of a gentle man — not to strike or insult our neighbors; and so on through all the other virtues and vices, enjoining some acts and forbidding others — rightly, when the law is a good one, less rightly when it is a hasty improvisation.
Justice in this sense, then, is complete virtue — with this addition, that it is shown toward others. That is why it is often called the chief of the virtues, greater than any other; why the poet says "neither evening star nor morning star is so wonderful"; and why the saying has become a proverb: "Justice sums up all virtues in itself."
It is complete virtue, first, because it is the exercise of complete virtue. And it is complete because the man who has it can use his virtue in dealing with his neighbors, and not merely in his own affairs. Plenty of people manage to be virtuous at home and fail the moment they deal with their neighbors.
This is why people approve the saying of Bias: "Office will show the man." The man who holds office stands, by that very fact, in relation to others and has dealings with them.
This is also why justice, alone among the virtues, is thought to be "another's good": it implies this relation to others. What justice aims at is someone else's interest — the interest of a ruler, or of our fellow citizens.
The worst man, then, is the one who exercises his vice both toward himself and toward his friends. And the best man is not the one who exercises his virtue in his own affairs only, but the one who exercises it toward others — for that is the hard thing to do.
Justice in this sense, then, is not a part of virtue but the whole of it; and the injustice opposed to it is not a part of vice but the whole of it.
How virtue differs from justice in this sense is plain from what we have said. They are one and the same character, differently viewed: seen in relation to others, that character is justice; seen simply as a certain kind of character, it is virtue.
But what we are looking for is the justice that is a part of virtue — for we maintain there is such a thing — and likewise the corresponding injustice, the one that is a part of vice.
That the word is used this way is easy to show. In the case of the other kinds of badness, the man who displays them acts unjustly, in one sense of the word, but he does not take more than his share. When a man throws away his shield out of cowardice, or reviles someone out of bad temper, or refuses to help a man with money out of stinginess, he takes nothing extra. But when a man does take more than his share, he often displays none of those vices — certainly not all of them — and yet he does display some kind of badness, since we blame him for it: namely injustice, in the second sense of the word.
So there is another sense of "injustice," in which it names a part of that whole injustice which is coextensive with badness; and another sense of "unjust," in which it applies to only a part of the things called unjust in the broad sense of "contrary to law."
Again, suppose one man commits adultery for gain and makes money by it, while another does it out of appetite, spending money and losing by it. The second man would be called not grasping but self-indulgent; the first would be called not self-indulgent but unjust, in the narrow sense. Clearly, then, it is because of the gain that he is called unjust.
Once more: every other unjust act is referred back to some particular vice. If a man commits adultery, we refer the act to self-indulgence; if he deserts his comrade in arms, to cowardice; if he strikes someone, to anger. But when a man makes an unjust gain, the act is referred to no other vice than injustice.
It is plain, then, that besides the injustice which is coextensive with vice there is a second kind of injustice — a particular vice. It bears the same name as the first because the same general notion underlies both definitions: both show themselves in our dealings with others. But the second is limited to things like honor, wealth, and security (perhaps a single name could be found to cover the whole class), and its motive is the pleasure of gain; while the sphere of the first is everything the good man's action covers.
We have established, then, that there is more than one kind of justice — that besides the kind identical with complete virtue there is another kind — and we now have to find what it is and what it is like.
We have already distinguished two senses of "unjust" — (1) the unlawful and (2) the unfair — and two senses of "just" — (1) the lawful and (2) the fair.
The injustice we have already dealt with corresponds to the unlawful.
But the unfair is not the same as the unlawful; they differ as part from whole. Everything unfair is unlawful, but not everything unlawful is unfair. So the unjust and injustice that correspond to the unfair are not the same as those that correspond to the unlawful, but differ from them as a part from the whole: this injustice is a part of complete injustice, and this justice a part of complete justice. It is justice and injustice in this limited sense, then — and the just and the unjust in this limited sense — that we must now discuss.
So let us set aside the justice that coincides with complete virtue, which is the exercise of complete virtue toward others, and the corresponding injustice, the exercise of complete vice.
It is also easy to see how the just and the unjust corresponding to them are to be defined — the lawful and the unlawful. The great bulk of lawful acts, we may say, are the acts the law commands with a view to complete virtue; for the law orders us to live out all the virtues and forbids us to live out any of the vices.
And the acts that tend to produce complete virtue are those lawful acts prescribed with a view to educating a man as a citizen. As for the education of the individual as such — the education that makes him simply a good man — we may set aside for now the question whether it belongs to the science of the state or to some other; for possibly being a good man is not the same as being a good citizen of any state whatever.
Now, of justice as a part of virtue — particular justice — and of the just in the corresponding sense, one kind is shown in the distribution of honor, wealth, and the other things that get divided among the members of the political community; for there one man's share can be fair or unfair compared with another's. The other kind is corrective: it sets things right in private transactions.
This corrective kind is subdivided in turn, for private transactions are of two sorts: (1) voluntary and (2) involuntary.
Voluntary transactions, or contracts, are things like selling, buying, lending at interest, pledging, lending without interest, depositing, and hiring. They are called voluntary because the parties enter into them of their own free will.
Involuntary transactions are of two kinds. Some involve secrecy: theft, adultery, poisoning, procuring, luring away slaves, assassination, false witness. Others involve open violence: assault, imprisonment, murder, robbery, rape, maiming, slander, insult.
The unjust man, in this limited sense of the word, is unfair, we say, and the unjust thing is unfair.
Now, plainly there is a mean lying between the unfair on one side and the unfair on the other. And this is the fair, or equal; for in any act that admits of a too much and a too little, there is also a fair amount.
If the unjust is the unfair, then, the just is the fair — which everyone in fact admits without further argument.
And since the fair or equal is a mean between two extremes, it follows that the just is a mean.
But equality — fairness — implies at least two terms.
It follows that the just is at once a mean quantity and a fair amount, relative to something and to certain persons. As a mean, it lies between certain other quantities, a more and a less; as an equal or fair amount, it involves two shares; and as a just amount, it involves certain persons.
The just, then, implies at least four terms: two persons for whom it is just, and two things.
And the same "equality" — the same ratio — must hold between the persons as between the things: as the things are to one another, so must the persons be. For if the persons are not equal, their shares will not be equal; and this is exactly where disputes and accusations come from — when equals receive unequal shares, or unequals receive equal shares.
The point is plain, too, from the common phrase "according to merit." Everyone agrees that just distribution must go by merit or worth of some kind; what they do not agree on is the standard of worth. In democratic states the standard is free birth; in oligarchic states, wealth, or in some, noble birth; in the true aristocratic state, virtue or personal merit.
The just, then, is something proportionate. For proportion is not a property of abstract numbers only but of anything that can be counted; proportion means equality of ratios, and it requires at least four terms.
That a discrete proportion requires four terms is obvious at once. But a continuous proportion requires four terms too, for it uses one term as two and repeats it. For instance: a is to b as b is to c. The term b is repeated; counting b twice over, we find the terms of the proportion are four in number.
The just, then, requires at least four terms, and the ratio between the two pairs must be the same: the persons must stand to one another in the same ratio as the things.
Let us say, then: as a is to b, so c is to d — or, rearranging the terms, as a is to c, so b is to d.
The sums of the new pairs will then stand to one another in the original ratio: a plus c is to b plus d as a is to b, or as c is to d.
But these pairs are exactly the pairs the distribution joins together; and if the things are assigned in this way, the assignment is just.
This joining of a to c and of b to d, then, is the just in distribution; and the just in this sense is a mean quantity, while the unjust is what breaks the proportion. For the proportionate is a mean, and the just, as we said, is proportionate.
Mathematicians call this kind of proportion a geometrical proportion; for it is when four terms are in geometrical proportion that the sum of the first and third stands to the sum of the second and fourth in the original ratio of the first to the second, or the third to the fourth.
But this proportion, as it applies in justice, cannot be a continuous one; for no single term can stand for both a person and a thing.
The just in this sense, then, is the proportionate, and the unjust is the disproportionate. In the unjust case one quantity becomes more, or too much, and the other less, or too little. And this is what we actually see in practice: the man who wrongs another gets too much of the good in question, and the man who is wronged gets too little. With evil it runs the other way; for the lesser evil, compared with the greater, counts as a good — the lesser evil is more desirable than the greater, what is desirable is good, and what is more desirable is a greater good.
This, then, is one form of the just.
It remains to treat the other form: corrective justice, the just in the way of redress, whose sphere is private transactions, voluntary and involuntary alike.
This differs in kind from the form we have just discussed.
For the just in the distribution of a common stock of goods always follows the proportion described above — even when it is a common fund being divided, the amounts the several partners take must stand in the same ratio as the amounts they put in — and the unjust in the corresponding sense is what violates this proportion.
But the just in private transactions, though it too is a sort of equality (and the unjust a sort of inequality), follows not geometrical proportion but arithmetical.
For here it makes no difference whether a good man has defrauded a bad man or a bad man a good one, or whether the man who committed adultery is good or bad. The law looks only to the difference the injury makes; it treats the parties as equals, and asks only whether one has done a wrong and the other suffered it — whether one inflicted damage and the other received it.
The unjust here, then, is something unequal, and the judge tries to make it equal. For even when one man strikes and another is struck, or one kills and another is killed, the doing and the suffering are divided unequally; the judge tries to restore equality by the penalty or loss he lays on the offender, subtracting it from his gain.
For in such cases, though the terms do not always quite fit, we generally speak of the doer's "gain" — the striker's, say — and the sufferer's "loss"; at any rate, once the court has assessed the injury, what the doer gets is called his "loss" or penalty, and what the sufferer gets is called his "gain."
The equal or fair, then, is a mean between more, or too much, and less, or too little. But gain and loss are each a more and a less in opposite ways: gain is more good and less evil, and loss the opposite.
And in the mean between them lies, as we found, the equal or fair — which we say is just.
Corrective justice, then, the just in the way of redress, is the mean between loss and gain. That is why, when disputes arise, men go to the judge; and going to the judge is going to justice, for the judge is meant to be, as it were, living justice. Men look for the middle from a judge — they ask that he be moderate, that he observe the mean — and some even call judges "mediators" (mesidioi, middle-men), meaning that if they hit the mean, they will hit the just.
The just, then, must be a sort of mean, if the judge is a "mediator."
What the judge does is restore equality. It is as if he found a line divided into two unequal parts, and cut off from the greater part the amount by which it exceeds the half, and added that amount to the lesser.
When the whole has been divided evenly, the parties say they "have their own" — each has now received an equal, fair amount.
And the equal or fair amount here is the arithmetic mean between the more, or too much, and the less, or too little. That, by the way, is why it is called dikaion (just): because the division is in half — dicha — as if the word were dichaion; and the dikastes (judge) is a dichastes, a halver.
For if you cut a part off one of two equal lines and add it to the other, the second line now exceeds the first by two such parts. (Had you only cut the part off the first without adding it to the second, the second would exceed it by just one part.) The second exceeds the mean by one part, and the mean exceeds the shortened first line by one part.
This tells us how much to take from the man who has more, or too much, and how much to add to the man who has less, or too little: to the latter's portion we must add the amount by which it falls short of the mean, and from the former's portion we must take away the amount by which it exceeds the mean.
To draw the picture: let AA′, BB′, and CC′ be three equal lines. From AA′ cut off the segment AE; and to CC′ add the segment D, equal to AE. Then the whole line DCC′ exceeds EA′ by CD plus CZ (each equal to AE, or CD), and it exceeds BB′ by CD.
And this holds not only in geometry but in the arts as well; they could not exist unless the material being worked on received an impression matching, in kind and quantity and quality, the work the artist puts in.
These terms "loss" and "gain," by the way, are borrowed from voluntary exchange. In voluntary exchange, ending up with more than your own is called gaining, and ending up with less than you started with is called losing — in buying and selling, I mean, and in the other transactions where the law gives free play. And when the result for each party is neither more nor less but exactly the amount he started with, then they say they "have their own," and are neither losers nor gainers. The just, then, is a mean between a gain and a loss, neither of which was intended, and consists in having after the transaction the equivalent of what you had before it.
Some people go further and think that justice is simply reciprocity — that whatever a man has done to another should be done to him in return. That was the teaching of the Pythagoreans; their whole definition of the just came down to this: what you did, you suffer.
But simple reciprocity does not fit either distributive justice or corrective justice — though people try to read it into the rule of Rhadamanthus: "To suffer what you have done is justice." In many cases the two come apart. If a man holding public office strikes someone, he ought not to be struck back; but if someone strikes an officer, he ought not merely to be struck in return — he ought to be punished on top of it.
Further, it makes a great difference whether what was done to the other man was done with his consent or against it.
And yet, in the exchange of services, reciprocity of a kind is exactly the rule of justice that holds society together — not simple reciprocity, though, but proportionate reciprocity: not equal repaid with equal, but repayment in proportion. The very existence of a state depends on proportionate return. When men have been done evil, they look to return it — if a man cannot repay an injury, we count his condition slavish. And when men have been done good, they look to repay that too; for without repayment there is no exchange of services, and it is the exchange of services that binds us together in society.
This is why we set up a temple of the Graces — the spirits of grace and gratitude — where everyone can see it: to remind people to repay what they have received. For that is the special mark of grace: to return the kindness of those who have been kind to us, and then to take the lead in kindness ourselves.
Proportionate exchange is produced by what we may call cross-conjunction — a crosswise pairing.
For instance: let A stand for a builder, B for a shoemaker, C for a house, and D for shoes.
The builder must take some of the shoemaker's work, and give the shoemaker his own work in exchange.
Now, the result we want will follow if the exchange takes place after proportionate equality has first been established between the goods.
If it is not, there is no equality, and the dealing collapses; for there is no reason why the work of the one should not be worth more than the work of the other. Their products, then, must first be brought to an equality — appraised by some common standard of value.
And this holds for every other art and profession just as much as for building and shoemaking. None of them could survive if what the customer receives did not correspond, in quantity and in quality, to what the producer supplies.
For exchange does not happen between two physicians. It happens between a physician and a farmer — in general, between people of different professions whose work is of unequal worth. These unequal parties, then, have to be reduced to equality, measured by a common standard.
So everything to be exchanged — every good, every service — must somehow be reducible to a common measure.
This is what money was invented for. It serves as a medium of exchange; with it we can measure everything, and so we can measure how much one kind of work is worth against another — how many shoes, for instance, are equivalent to a house, or to a given quantity of food.
What we need, then, is for a certain number of shoes to stand to a house (or to a measure of grain) in the same ratio that a builder (or a farmer) stands to a shoemaker. Unless this adjustment is made, no dealing or exchange of services can happen at all; and it cannot be made unless the goods can somehow be made equal.
We need, in short, one common measure of value, as we said before.
And in truth that measure is demand — our need of one another's services — which is what holds the members of a society together in the first place. If men had no needs, or no needs in common, there would either be no exchange, or a very different sort of exchange from the one we know.
But money has been introduced by convention as a sort of representative of demand. That is why the Greek word for it is nomisma: its value comes not from nature but from law — nomos — and it lies with us to change it or to withdraw it from use.
Exchange, then, will take place once the wares have been equated — once prices have adjusted them — so that the quantity of the shoemaker's work stands to the quantity of the farmer's work in the same ratio that farmer stands to shoemaker. But this adjustment must be made not at the moment of exchange (for then one of the two parties would pocket both advantages), but while each still holds his own wares. Do it then, and the two are put on an equal footing and can deal with each other, because this kind of equality can be established between them.
If A stands for a farmer and C for a certain quantity of his work (or his grain), then B will stand for a shoemaker and D for the quantity of shoemaker's work that is valued as equal to C.
If people could not reciprocate in this way, there would be no exchange of services at all.
That it is need which forms, as it were, the common bond holding society together is plain from this: people do not exchange unless they need one another's services — both parties, or at least one of them. That is why, when one people has something others need — wine, say — the others offer to export grain in return; and this grain must then be made equal in value to the wine.
But even if we happen to need nothing at the moment, money is a sort of guarantee that we will be able to make an exchange at any future time when we do need something; for whoever brings money must always be able to take goods away in exchange.
Money, it is true, is subject to the same conditions as everything else: its value does not always stay the same. Still, it tends to be more constant than the value of anything else.
Everything, then, must be assessed in money; for this is what lets men exchange their services at all times, and so makes society possible.
Money, as a standard, reduces things to a common measure so that equal amounts of each can be taken. For there would be no society without exchange, no exchange without equality, and no equality without a common measure.
Strictly speaking, of course, no truly common measure can be found for things so wildly different. But our needs supply a standard that is accurate enough for practical purposes.
There must, then, be some one common unit, and it must be fixed by convention — which is why we call it money, nomisma, from nomos. Money makes all things commensurable, for everything is valued in money. For instance: let A stand for a house, B for ten minae (a sum of money), and C for a bed. Let A equal half of B — taking a house to be worth five minae — and let C, the bed, equal one tenth of B. Then we see at once how many beds equal one house: five.
Clearly this is how all exchange must have worked before money came into use; for it makes no difference whether you give five beds for a house, or the price of five beds.
So much for what is unjust and what is just. Now that these are settled, we can see that just conduct is a mean between doing injustice and suffering it: the one is having too much, the other having too little, of one's due.
We can see, too, that the virtue justice is a kind of observance of the mean — but not in quite the same way as the virtues discussed so far. It does aim at a mean; but here both extremes fall under a single vice, injustice.
Justice, then, is the habit in virtue of which the just man is said to be disposed to do deliberately what is just: that is, in dealings between himself and another (or between two other parties), to apportion things so that he does not grab more of what is desirable for himself and leave his neighbor less — and the reverse with what is burdensome — but so that each gets his fair share, meaning his proportionate share; and likewise when he is judging between two other parties.
Injustice, on the contrary, is the character that chooses what is unjust — a disproportionate amount: too much or too little of what is advantageous or disadvantageous, as the case may be.
That is why injustice is both an excess and a deficiency: it chooses both. In a man's own affairs, it chooses an excess of what is (as a general rule) advantageous and a deficiency of what is disadvantageous; in the affairs of others, it makes a similarly disproportionate assignment, though which way the proportion gets violated will depend on circumstances.
And of the two sides of an unjust deed, to suffer the injustice is a lesser evil than to do it.
Let this stand, then, as our account, in general terms, of the nature of justice and injustice, and of what is just and what is unjust.
But since a man can do an unjust act without yet being an unjust man, we may ask: are there acts of injustice such that a single one stamps the doer at once as unjust in this or that way — as a thief, say, or an adulterer, or a robber?
Perhaps the answer is that the difference does not lie in the acts at all. A man might commit adultery knowing perfectly well what he was doing, and yet act not from deliberate choice but from a moment's passion. In that case he acts unjustly, but he is not an unjust man — not a thief, though he committed a theft; not an adulterer, though he committed adultery; and so on down the line.
We have already explained how reciprocity is related to what is just. But we must not lose sight of what we are actually looking for: justice in the simple, unqualified sense — and that is political justice, justice between citizens. This kind of justice exists among men who share a common life in order to supply their needs, men who are free and on a footing of equality, whether absolute equality or proportionate.
Where men are not on this footing, there is no political justice between them — only something that can be called justice by a stretch, metaphorically. For the term "just" strictly applies only where men have law to appeal to; and the existence of law implies the existence of injustice, since the administration of law is precisely the sorting of the just from the unjust.
And where there is injustice, there is unjust dealing (though not every unjust act implies an unjust man) — that is, taking too much of the goods of life and too little of its burdens. This is why we do not allow an individual man to rule over us, but rather reason — that is, law; for an individual is prone to take more for himself and turn tyrant.
The magistrate's job is to guard what is just, and if what is just, then what is equal and fair. And if he is a just man, it seems he gets no profit out of his office — he does not take a larger share of the good things of life, except where a larger share is proportionate to his worth. He works, in other words, for the benefit of others; which is why justice is sometimes called "another's good," as we remarked before. So some salary must be given him, and this he receives in the form of honor and privilege. It is when magistrates are not content with these that they make themselves tyrants.
What is just between master and slave, or between father and child, is not the same as political justice, though it resembles it. There can be no injustice, strictly speaking, toward what is part of oneself — and a man's property, and his children until they reach a certain age and set up for themselves, are as it were a part of him. No one deliberately chooses to injure himself; and so a man cannot be unjust toward himself.
Here, then, there is no political justice or injustice. That, we found, is a matter of law, and it exists between people whose situation implies law — people who share equally, or fairly, in ruling and being ruled.
The term "just," therefore, applies more properly to a man's relations with his wife than to his relations with his children and his property. This is household justice; but even it is not the same as justice between citizens.
Now, political justice is partly natural and partly conventional. Natural justice is what has the same force everywhere and does not depend on our accepting or rejecting it. Conventional justice is what could originally have been settled one way or another indifferently, but once settled is indifferent no longer — for instance, that a prisoner's ransom be one mina, or that a sacrifice be a goat rather than two sheep; and, again, all the rules made for particular occasions, like the sacrifice decreed in honor of Brasidas at Amphipolis, and everything that has the character of a decree.
Now, some people think all justice is conventional, on this reasoning: what is natural never varies and has the same force everywhere — fire burns both here and in Persia — while what is just plainly does vary.
But this is not quite right, though there is something in it. Among the gods, perhaps, it is not true at all; but among us, part of what is just is natural, even though all of it is subject to change. All of it can change — and yet, I repeat, part is natural and part is not.
Nor is it hard to tell, among things that can be otherwise than they are, which are natural and which rest instead on law and convention — even though both kinds vary. The same distinction holds in other fields. The right hand, we say, is naturally the stronger; yet in any given man the left may become just as strong.
So with justice: the conventional part, the part prescribed with a view to some particular purpose, varies the way measures vary. Measures for wine and grain are not the same everywhere — they run larger where dealers buy and smaller where they sell. Likewise, what is just not by nature but by human ordinance is not the same everywhere, any more than constitutions are the same everywhere — though there is only one constitution that is by nature the best everywhere.
Each of the terms "just" and "lawful," in its several senses, stands for a universal that covers many particulars: the acts are many, but the notion is one, applying to them all alike.
Notice, too, that "what is unjust" is different from "an act of injustice," and "what is just" from "an act of justice." A thing is unjust by nature or by ordinance; but this same thing, once done, is called an act of injustice — before it was done, it was merely unjust. The same holds for an act of justice; though here Greek usage prefers dikaiopragema as the general term for a just act, and reserves dikaioma for the correcting of an act of injustice. But the several species of just and unjust acts — their nature, their number, the ground they cover — we must postpone for the present.
Now that we know what is just and what is unjust, we can say this: a man acts unjustly or justly when he does these things voluntarily. When he does them involuntarily, he acts neither unjustly nor justly, strictly speaking, but only "accidentally" — he does something that happens to be just or unjust. For whether a deed counts as an act of injustice (or of justice) depends on whether it is voluntary or involuntary. If it is voluntary, the doer is blamed, and only then does the deed become an act of injustice. Something unjust may be done, then, without there being any act of injustice at all — if the voluntariness is missing.
By a voluntary act I mean, as I explained before, anything within the doer's control that is done knowingly — knowing the person, the instrument, and the result: whom he is striking, what he is striking with, and what the blow will do — with no accident and no compulsion intervening at any point. If someone else seizes your hand and strikes a third person with it, that is no voluntary act of yours: it was not in your control. Again, the man you strike may be your father, while you know only that he is a man, or one of the company, but not that he is your father. The same distinction applies to the result, and, in a word, to the whole act. What is done in ignorance, then — or done not in ignorance but outside our control, or under compulsion — is involuntary. (There are also many natural processes, like growing old and dying, in which we knowingly take part, actively or passively, and which are neither voluntary nor involuntary.)
An accidentally unjust act is just as possible as an accidentally just one. A man might return a deposit unwillingly, out of fear of the consequences: we cannot say he did what is just, or acted justly, except accidentally. And likewise a man who is forcibly prevented, against his will, from returning a deposit acts unjustly, or does what is unjust, only accidentally.
Voluntary acts divide in turn into those done from choice and those done without choice — that is, those done with previous deliberation and those done without it.
Now, there are three ways in which we may hurt our neighbor.
First, a hurt done in ignorance is generally called a mistake, when there is a misconception about the person affected, or the thing done, or the instrument, or the result: I did not think I would hit at all, or not with this instrument, or not this person, or not with this effect — but something followed other than what I had in mind. I meant a prick, not a wound; or I did not mean to wound this man; or not to deal a wound of this kind.
But we can draw the line more precisely. When the hurt comes about contrary to all reasonable expectation, it is a misadventure. When it is not contrary to reasonable expectation but still involves no vicious intent, it is a mistake. For a man makes a mistake when the origin of the trouble lies in himself — he set the train of events in motion; he meets with misadventure when it comes from outside.
Second, when the doer acts knowingly but without previous deliberation, it is an act of injustice — as when a man is driven by anger, or by any of the other passions that human beings are naturally and unavoidably subject to. In doing such hurts and committing such wrongs, the doer acts unjustly, and the acts are acts of injustice; but they do not stamp him as an unjust or wicked man, for the hurt was not done out of wickedness.
But third, when the hurt is done from choice, the doer is unjust and wicked.
This is why acts done in anger are rightly judged not to be done with malice aforethought: it was the man who gave the provocation who started it, not the man who struck in a passion.
In cases of this last kind, moreover, what people dispute is usually not whether the deed was done, but where the justice of the case lies; for it is the appearance of injustice that stirs the striker's anger. This is different from disputes about contracts. There the question is one of fact, and one of the two parties must be a vicious character — unless his memory is simply at fault. But here they agree about the facts and differ about which side is in the right (whereas the deliberate aggressor knows perfectly well where the right lies): the one thinks he has been wronged; the other thinks not.
But if a man hurts another from choice, he acts unjustly; and acts of injustice of this kind — violations of what is proportionate and fair — stamp the doer as an unjust character.
In the same way, a man is a just character when he acts justly from choice; but he is said merely to act justly whenever he voluntarily does what is just.
Of involuntary injuries, finally, some are pardonable and some are not. Wrongs committed not only in ignorance but because of ignorance are pardonable. Wrongs committed in ignorance, but not because of it — because of some passion neither natural nor human — are not.
But we may still wonder whether we have really said enough about what it is to do injustice and to suffer it. Start with those strange lines of Euripides:
A: I killed my mother — that is the whole of my story. B: But tell me: did both of you will the deed, or neither?
The question they raise is this: is it actually possible to suffer injustice — to be wronged — voluntarily? Or is being wronged always involuntary, in the way that doing wrong is always voluntary?
And is it always one or the other? Doing injustice is always voluntary; is suffering it always involuntary, or is it sometimes voluntary and sometimes not? The same question comes up on the positive side, with having justice done to you. Doing justice is always voluntary, just as doing injustice is; so you might expect the active and the passive to match up in both cases — that being wronged and having justice done to you would each be always voluntary or always involuntary. But it would surely be absurd to claim that having justice done to you is always voluntary; some people have justice done to them and certainly do not will it.
We can also put the question in a more general form: whenever a man has something unjust done to him, is he wronged? Or does suffering injustice, like doing it, require some further conditions?
Both what I do and what I have done to me can be just "accidentally," as we saw; and the same goes for unjust. Doing something unjust is not the same as doing injustice, and suffering something unjust is not the same as being wronged — and likewise for doing justice and having justice done to you. For to be wronged, there must be someone doing the wrong; to have justice done to you, someone doing the justice.
Now, if doing injustice means simply hurting a man voluntarily, and "voluntarily" means with knowledge of the person, the instrument, and the manner, then the weak-willed man, who voluntarily hurts himself, would voluntarily suffer injustice — and it would be possible for a man to wrong himself, which is itself one of the questions in dispute.
Again, a man might, through weakness of will, voluntarily let himself be hurt by another man acting voluntarily; so here too a man would be voluntarily wronged.
I think, rather, that the definition is faulty. To "hurting with knowledge of the person, the instrument, and the manner" we must add: "against his wish." On that definition, a man can voluntarily be hurt and suffer what is unjust, but no one can voluntarily be wronged. For no one wishes to be hurt — not even the weak-willed man, who acts contrary to his own wish. No one wishes for what he does not think good, and what the weak-willed man does is not what he thinks he ought to do. And the man who gives away what is his, as Glaucus in Homer gives to Diomede —
gold armor for bronze, a hundred oxen's worth for nine —
is not wronged; for the giving rests with him, but being wronged does not rest with oneself: there has to be someone doing the wrong.
Clearly, then, suffering injustice cannot be voluntary.
Two questions remain of those we set out to discuss: (1) when an unfairly large share is assigned, who does the injustice — the man who assigns it or the man who receives it? and (2) is it possible to do injustice to yourself?
Take the first. If it is the assigner and not the receiver who does the injustice, then a man who knowingly and voluntarily gives another too much and himself too little does injustice to himself. And this is exactly what moderate people are often thought to do; the equitable man is inclined to take less than his due. But the case is not so simple. Perhaps he took a larger share of some other good — of reputation, say, or of the noble itself.
Besides, the difficulty dissolves under our definition of doing injustice: nothing is done to this man against his wish, so no injustice is done to him — at most, harm.
It is also plain that it is the man who makes the unjust award who does injustice, and not always the man who gets more than his share. A man does not do injustice whenever what he does can be called unjust, but only when he voluntarily does what is unjust — and that can be said only of the one in whom the action originates, which here is the distributor, not the receiver.
Again, "do" has many senses. In a certain sense an inanimate tool "kills"; so does my hand; so does my slave, acting under my orders. These can be said to do what is unjust, but not to act unjustly or to commit an act of injustice.
Again, if a judge gives an unjust judgment unknowingly, he does not commit injustice in the sense of violating what is legally just, and his judgment is not unjust in that sense — though in a certain sense it is unjust; for what is just according to law and what is just in the primary sense are different things. But if he gives unjust judgment knowingly, then he himself is grasping at more than his share — a share of favor with one party, or of revenge on the other. A judge who gives unjust judgment on those grounds takes more than his due exactly as if he split the unjust award itself; even in that case, a judge who awards a piece of land takes his cut not in land but in money.
Men imagine that since acting unjustly is in their power, being just must be easy. It is not. To sleep with your neighbor's wife, to strike your neighbor, to pass certain coins from your hand to his — all easy, and always in your power. But to do these acts as the expression of a certain character is not easy, and not always in your power.
In the same way men think that knowing what is just and what is unjust takes no great wisdom, since anyone can look up what the law prescribes (though what the law prescribes is only accidentally just, not essentially). But to know how such acts must be done, and how such distributions must be made, in order to be just — that is a harder matter than knowing what is good for health, and even that is no easy matter. It is easy enough to know what honey is, and wine, and hellebore, and cautery, and the knife; but to know how they must be applied, and to whom, and when, in order to produce health — that is so far from easy that to have this knowledge is to be a doctor.
For the same reason, some people think the just man is as capable of acting unjustly as justly — indeed more capable than another of performing the acts themselves, of sleeping with a woman or landing a blow — just as the courageous man is more capable than another of throwing away his shield, turning his back, and running for it. But playing the coward and acting unjustly do not consist merely in doing such acts (though the doer might be said to act unjustly "accidentally"); they consist in doing them in a certain frame of mind — just as practicing medicine and healing do not consist simply in cutting or not cutting, in giving a drug or withholding it, but in doing so in a particular fashion.
Lastly, justice presupposes persons who share in the things that are, generally speaking, good, but who can have too much of them or too little. For some beings — the gods, perhaps — no amount of such things is too much; for others — the incurably vicious — no amount does any good, everything hurts them; but for the rest of us they are useful within limits. Justice, therefore, is an essentially human affair.
Next we must speak of equity and the equitable, and ask how equity is related to justice and the equitable to the just. On inspection, they seem neither simply identical nor different in kind. Sometimes we praise what is equitable and the equitable man — we even borrow the word as a general term of praise meaning "good," as if the more equitable a thing is, the better it is. At other times we stop and find it strange that the equitable should deserve praise if it is something other than the just. For if they differ, then either the just is not good or the equitable is not; and if both are good, they are the same thing.
These are the reflections that create the difficulty about equity. And in a way they are all correct, and not really in conflict. For the equitable, though better than one kind of just, is itself just; it is not better than the just as if it were something different in kind. The just and the equitable, then, are the same in kind, and both are good, though the equitable is the better.
What obscures the matter is this: the equitable is just, but it is not the legally just — it is a correction of it.
The reason is that every law speaks in general terms, while there are some matters about which it is impossible to speak correctly in general terms. Where one must speak generally but cannot do so correctly, the law takes the case that holds for the most part — fully aware that it does not hold for every case.
And the law is no less correct for that. The defect lies not in the law, nor in the lawgiver, but in the nature of the subject matter; it is built into the very conditions of human action.
So when the law lays down a general rule and a case then arises that the rule does not fit, it is right — where the legislator has fallen short and erred by speaking without qualification — to correct the omission: to say what the lawgiver himself would say if he were standing there, and what he would have written into the law if he had known of the case.
The equitable, then, is just, and better than the just in one sense of the word — not better than absolute justice, but better than the error that comes of stating things without qualification. And this is the very essence of the equitable: it is an amendment of the law where the law fails through the generality of its language.
The reason the law cannot cover every case is that some matters simply cannot be caught in a law, and so require a special decree. For what is variable needs a variable standard — like the leaden rule used in Lesbian masonry. That rule has no fixed shape of its own; it bends to fit the contour of each stone. Just so, the decree bends to fit the case.
We have found, then, what the equitable is: it is just, and it is better than what is just in a certain sense of the word. And from this it is easy to see what the equitable man is. He is the man disposed to choose such a course and follow it — who does not press his rights to the last penny at other people's expense, but is ready to take less than his due even with the law on his side. This is the equitable man, and the character is equity: a kind of justice, not some different character altogether.
The foregoing discussion lets us answer the question whether it is possible for a man to act unjustly toward himself.
Justice in one sense of the word, we found, covers those exercises of the several virtues which the law prescribes. For example, the law does not order a man to kill himself, and what the law does not order it forbids. Further, when a man voluntarily and without provocation hurts another contrary to law — "voluntarily" meaning with knowledge of the person and the instrument — he acts unjustly. Now, the man who kills himself in a fit of rage does this voluntarily, against right reason, and does what the law forbids; therefore he acts unjustly.
But unjustly toward whom? Toward the state, surely, not toward himself: he suffers voluntarily, and no one can be wronged voluntarily. And this is in fact the ground on which the state punishes it — a particular loss of civic standing is pronounced upon the man who destroys himself, as one who has acted unjustly toward the state.
Again, take "unjust" in the other sense, in which it names not badness in general but one particular form of vice. In this sense too it is impossible to act unjustly toward yourself. (This sense, we found, differs from the first: the unjust man here is bad in the way the coward is bad — as having one specific vice, not a wholly vicious character; and in calling his act unjust we are not charging him with complete badness.) For if a man could wrong himself, the same thing could be taken from and given to the same person at the same time — which is impossible. In fact, the just and the unjust always require more than one person.
Further, an act of injustice must be voluntary and deliberate, and it must come first — the man who merely pays back the hurt he received is not held to act unjustly. But the man who hurts himself inflicts and suffers the very same hurt at the very same moment.
Again, if a man could wrong himself, it would be possible to be wronged voluntarily.
Further, no one acts unjustly without committing some particular act of injustice; and no man commits adultery with his own wife, or breaks into his own house, or steals his own property.
But the whole question of wronging oneself is settled, without going into detail, by our answer to the question whether a man can be wronged voluntarily.
(It is plain that suffering injustice and doing it are both bad — the one is having less, the other having more, than the mean amount, which plays the role here that health plays in medicine or good condition in athletic training. Still, doing injustice is the worse of the two. Doing injustice is blamable and implies vice — either complete, fully formed vice, what we call vice without qualification, or something well on the way to it; for a voluntary act of injustice does not always imply an unjust character. But having injustice done to you implies no vice and no injustice in you at all.
In itself, then, being wronged is the lesser evil, though accidentally it can be the greater. Science does not bother with such accidents: it calls pleurisy a worse ailment than a stumble, even though the stumble might on occasion turn out worse — if, say, stumbling made you fall and the enemy caught or killed you.)
Though we cannot speak strictly of justice between a man and himself, we can speak of it metaphorically, in virtue of a certain resemblance — justice not between a man and himself but between certain parts of him. Not justice in every sense, though: only the kind that holds between master and slave, or husband and wife. For that is the sort of relation in which the rational part of the soul stands to the irrational part.
And it is just this division into parts that makes people fancy there is such a thing as injustice toward oneself: one part of a man can have something done to it by another part against its desires, and so people suppose there is a kind of justice between these parts, as between ruler and ruled.
Let this, then, conclude our examination of justice and the other moral virtues.
We said earlier that what we should choose is neither too much nor too little but "the mean," and that the mean is what "right reason" prescribes. Now we have to explain what that means.
Every virtue we have discussed implies — as every habit of mind implies — some target that the rational man keeps his eye on as he tightens or slackens his effort. In other words, there must be some standard that fixes the various forms of moderation we have been describing, the states that we say lie between excess and deficiency and accord with right reason. All of this is quite true — but it is not precise enough. In any occupation that can be reduced to rational principles, it is perfectly true to say that we must strain ourselves neither too much nor too little, but "in moderation," "as right reason orders." Yet by itself that tells you almost nothing. A man would hardly learn how to treat a patient by being told to treat him as the art of medicine prescribes, and as someone versed in that art would treat him.
So too with the habits and characters of the soul: it is not enough that the rule we have laid down is correct. We need to know precisely what this right reason is, and what standard it gives us.
The virtues of the soul, you will remember, we divided into two classes, calling one moral and the other intellectual. The moral virtues we have already discussed in detail; let us now examine the other class, the intellectual virtues — after a few preliminary remarks about the soul.
We said before that the soul consists of two parts, the rational and the irrational. Let us now divide the rational part in the same way, and assume that it contains two rational faculties: one by which we know the things that rest on invariable principles — things that cannot be otherwise — and one by which we know the things that vary. For generically different objects must answer to generically different faculties, if, as we hold, our faculties are able to know their objects through some kind of likeness or kinship with them.
Call the first the scientific or demonstrative faculty, and the second the calculative or deliberative faculty; for deliberating and calculating are the same thing, and no one deliberates about what cannot be otherwise. So one division of the rational faculty may fairly be called the calculative.
Our problem, then, is to find what each of these faculties is in its full development, its best state; for that will be its virtue.
And its virtue will refer directly to its proper function.
Now, three things in us guide action and the grasp of truth: sense, reason, and desire.
The first of these originates no action. We can see that from the fact that the animals have sense but take no part in action.
Take the other two, and you find two modes of reasoning — affirmation and denial, assent and dissent — and two corresponding modes of desire — pursuit and avoidance, attraction and repulsion.
Now, moral virtue is a habit of choice, and choice is deliberate desire — desire that follows on deliberation.
It follows that if choice is to be everything it should be, the reasoning must be true and the desire right, and the very same things the reasoning affirms, the desire must pursue.
This, then, is the kind of reasoning — and the kind of truth — that has to do with action.
Speculative reasoning, which has to do with neither action nor production, is good or bad simply as it is true or false; for the function of the intellect as such is always the grasp of truth. But the function of the practical intellect is truth in agreement with right desire.
Choice, then, is the cause of action — not the final cause, the end it aims at, but the efficient cause, the source that sets it going — and the source of choice, in turn, is desire together with reasoning about means. So choice necessarily involves, on one side, the faculty of reason in exercise, and on the other a certain moral character, a certain state of the desires; for right action and its contrary are alike impossible without both reasoning and character.
Reasoning by itself, however, sets nothing in motion. Only reasoning that aims at an end and issues in action does that — what we may call practical reasoning. (Practical reasoning governs production too; for whenever you make something, you make it with a further object in view. The thing you make is not desired as an end in itself, but only as a means to, or condition of, something else. But the thing you do is an end in itself, for doing well — right action — is the end, and that is what desire aims at.)
Choice, then, may be called either reason that desires, or desire that reasons; and this power of originating action is what a man essentially is.
No past event can be chosen: no one chooses to have sacked Troy. We deliberate not about what is past but about what is to come and can be otherwise; the past cannot be undone. So Agathon is right when he says:
One power even God must go without — to make undone what has once been done.
We have found, then, that both divisions of the reason — both intellectual faculties — have the attainment of truth as their function; and the developed state in which each best attains truth will be its virtue.
Let us describe these virtues, then, starting fresh from the beginning.
Assume that the ways in which the mind arrives at truth, by affirming or denying, are five in number: art, science, practical wisdom, wisdom, and intuitive reason. Conception and opinion are left off the list, because they can be mistaken.
What science is we can learn from the following considerations (we want a precise account here, and must not settle for metaphors). We all suppose that what we know scientifically cannot be otherwise; whereas of what can be otherwise, we cannot say, the moment it is out of sight, whether it still exists or not. The object of science, then, is necessary — and therefore eternal, for whatever is necessary by its own nature is eternal, and the eternal neither comes to be nor passes away.
Further, all science is held to be teachable, and what can be known scientifically can be learned. But all teaching starts from something already known, as we explained in the Analytics; for it proceeds either by induction or by syllogism. Induction leads the learner up to universal principles; syllogism starts from them. So there are principles from which syllogism starts that syllogism itself cannot reach — and which must therefore be reached by induction.
Science, then, may be defined as a habit of demonstration — with all the further qualifications listed in the Analytics. We must add those, because a man properly has scientific knowledge only when the principles behind his knowledge are accepted and known to him in a particular way; unless those principles are better known to him than the conclusions drawn from them, his knowledge is merely accidental.
Let that stand, then, as our account of science.
The variable — what can be otherwise — includes both what man makes and what man does; and making, or production, is different from doing, or action (here we follow the popular distinction). So the reasoned habit of acting is different from the reasoned habit of producing. Neither includes the other; for action is not production, and production is not action.
Now, the builder's skill is one of the arts, and can be described as a certain reasoned habit of producing; there is no art that is not a habit of this kind, and no habit of this kind that is not an art. An art, then, is the same thing as a habit of producing with correct reasoning.
And every art is concerned with bringing something into being — with contriving and calculating how to bring into being some thing that can either be or not be, and whose cause lies in the producer, not in the thing produced. For art has nothing to do with what is or comes to be by necessity, nor with the products of nature; those carry the cause of their coming-to-be within themselves.
Since production and action are different, art of course belongs with production, not with action. And in a certain sense art and chance work the same ground, as Agathon says:
Art waits on fortune, fortune waits on art.
Art, then, as we said, is a habit of production with correct reasoning; and its contrary — lack of art — is a habit of production with incorrect reasoning; and the field of both is the variable.
To find out what practical wisdom is, let us first ask who the people are that we call practically wise.
The mark of a man of practical wisdom seems to be that he can deliberate well about what is good and useful for himself — not in some particular department, such as what makes for health or strength, but about well-being, about living well as a whole.
Our usage confirms this: we apply the name to people who deliberate well in some particular field when they calculate well the means to some particular good end in matters that no art covers. So we may say generally that the man who can deliberate well is practically wise.
But no one deliberates about what cannot be altered, or about what is not in his power to do.
Now science, as we saw, involves demonstration; but things whose principles or causes are variable do not admit of demonstration — for everything that depends on such principles is variable too — and things that are fixed by necessity admit of no deliberation. It follows that practical wisdom can be neither a science nor an art: not a science, because the sphere of action is what can be altered; not an art, because production and action are generically different.
What remains is this: practical wisdom is a reasoned and true habit of mind that issues in action, in the field of human good and evil. For production has an end beyond itself, but action does not — good action, doing well, is itself the end.
This is why Pericles and men like him are considered practically wise: they are able to see what is good for themselves and for men in general; and that, we take it, is the character of those who can manage a household or a state.
This, too, is why the Greeks gave self-control its name, sophrosyne — the word suggests "that which preserves practical wisdom." And what self-control preserves is precisely this kind of judgment. For pleasure and pain do not destroy or distort every judgment — not, for instance, the judgment that the angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles — but only judgments about matters of practice. The principles of action are the ends for whose sake we act; and the man corrupted by pleasure or pain straightaway loses sight of the principle: he no longer sees that this is the end for whose sake, and as a means to which, each particular act should be chosen and done. For vice is a destroyer of principles.
Our conclusion, then: practical wisdom is a reasoned and true habit that issues in action, in the field of human good.
Moreover, art has its excellence — its perfect development — in something beyond itself; not so practical wisdom. Again, in art the man who errs on purpose is better than the man who errs against his will; in practical wisdom the deliberate error is worse, as it is in all the virtues. Plainly, then, practical wisdom is itself a virtue, and not an art.
And since the rational parts of the soul are two, practical wisdom will be the virtue of the second — the calculative part, the faculty of opinion; for opinion deals with what can be otherwise, and so does practical wisdom.
Yet it is something more than merely "a reasoned habit of grasping truth." We can see that from this: a merely reasoned habit can be forgotten and lost, but practical wisdom, once acquired, is never lost.
Science is a mode of judgment that deals with universal and necessary truths; and demonstrable truths depend on principles — since science proceeds by demonstration, every science has its principles. The principles on which scientific truths depend, then, cannot be the business of science itself, nor of art, nor of practical wisdom: for what is known scientifically can be demonstrated, while art and practical wisdom deal with what can be otherwise.
Nor are these principles the business of wisdom; for it is characteristic of the wise man to have demonstrative knowledge of certain things — and demonstration is not how principles are reached.
Now, the habits of mind by which we grasp truth without any admixture of error, whether about things invariable or things variable, are science, practical wisdom, wisdom, and intuitive reason. If none of the first three — practical wisdom, science, wisdom — can be the faculty that grasps first principles, only one conclusion is left: first principles are grasped by intuitive reason.
The word "wisdom" is sometimes applied, in the domain of the arts, to the consummate masters of a craft: Phidias is called wise as a master of sculpture, Polyclitus for his skill in portrait statues; and in this use it means nothing more than excellence of art, the artistic faculty brought to perfection.
But there are also men we consider wise not in one department, not in any particular thing — as Homer says in the Margites:
The gods gave him no skill with spade or plow, nor made him wise in anything at all —
but wise generally. In this general sense, then, wisdom will plainly be the most perfect of the sciences.
The wise man, then, must not only know what follows from the first principles of knowledge; he must also know the truth about the principles themselves. Wisdom, therefore, will be intuitive reason joined with demonstrative scientific knowledge — scientific knowledge of the noblest objects with its crowning perfection, so to speak, added to it. For it would be absurd to suppose that statesmanship, or practical wisdom, is the highest of our faculties — unless man is the best thing in the universe.
Now, "wholesome" and "good" mean one thing for men and another for fish, while "white" and "straight" mean the same thing always. In the same way, we must all allow that "wise" means one thing always, while "practically wise" means different things for different beings; for we call practically wise whatever sees clearly to its own affairs, and we judge it fit to be trusted with them. (This is why we sometimes apply the word even to animals — the ones that show foresight about their own lives.)
It is plain, too, that wisdom cannot be the same as statesmanship. If we call knowledge of our own advantage "wisdom," there will be many wisdoms; for there is no single knowledge of the good of all animals — each species has its own — any more than there is a single art of healing for every living thing.
It makes no difference that man may be superior to all the other animals; for there are things far more divine in their nature than man — to take the most conspicuous instance, the heavenly bodies.
After all this it is plain that wisdom is scientific, demonstrative knowledge joined with intuitive reason, about objects of the noblest nature.
And this is why people call Anaxagoras and Thales and men of that sort wise, but not practically wise — seeing that they are ignorant of their own advantage — and say that they know things that are extraordinary, wonderful, difficult, and divine, but useless, because it is no human good that they seek.
Practical wisdom, on the other hand, deals with human affairs, with matters that admit of deliberation. For the special function of the man of practical wisdom, as we conceive him, is to deliberate well; and no one deliberates about what cannot be otherwise, or about matters with no end in view — no achievable good. And the man who deliberates well, without qualification, is the man who can arrive, by reasoning and calculation, at the best thing attainable by man in action.
Nor does practical wisdom deal only in general propositions. It must know particular facts as well; for it issues in action, and the field of action is the field of particulars.
This is why some men who lack the theory are more effective in practice than others who have it — above all, men of wide experience. If you know that light meat is digestible and wholesome, but do not know which meats are light, you will not cure anyone; the man who only knows that chicken is light and wholesome will do better.
But practical wisdom is concerned with practice; so it needs knowledge of both kinds — general truths and particular facts — but especially the particular.
Here too, however, there must be a supreme form of the faculty; and to it we now turn.
Statesmanship and practical wisdom are in fact the same habit of mind, though they show themselves differently.
Of this faculty as applied to the state, the supreme form is the legislative; the form that deals with particular cases is called by the generic name, statesmanship. This latter is concerned with action and deliberation — for a decree bears directly on action, as the last link in the chain. And this is why only men engaged in this work are said to take part in politics: they alone act, the way craftsmen do.
But the faculty is most of all regarded as practical wisdom when it is applied to the individual, to one's own affairs; and it is this form that receives the generic name, practical wisdom — the others being household management, legislation, and statesmanship in the narrower sense, which divides in turn into the deliberative and the judicial.
Knowing one's own good, then, would seem to be one kind of knowledge — though a very various one. In the general opinion, the man who knows and minds his own affairs is practically wise, while statesmen are busybodies — as Euripides has it:
Call that wise? I could have lived carefree, one man in the ranks among the many, an equal share with every other man ... but those who reach too high, who do too much —
For men generally seek their own good, and suppose that this is what they ought to do; and from this opinion comes the notion that such men are the practically wise ones.
And yet, perhaps, a man cannot manage his own affairs well without managing a household — and even taking part in the management of a state.
Moreover, how a man ought to manage his own affairs is not obvious; it needs looking into. Here is the evidence: a young man may become expert in geometry or mathematics, and wise in such matters, but nobody thinks a young man can have practical wisdom. The reason is that practical wisdom deals with particular facts, and particular facts become familiar only through experience — which a young man cannot have, for experience is the fruit of years.
We might ask, while we are here, why a boy can be a mathematician but not wise, and no expert in nature either. Surely the answer is that mathematics is an abstract science, while the principles of wisdom and of natural science are drawn only from long experience. A young man can repeat the propositions of the latter, but he does not really believe them; whereas the meanings of mathematical terms he grasps without trouble.
Again, error in deliberation may lie either in the universal judgment or in the particular one: you may be wrong in judging that all water that weighs heavy is unwholesome, or wrong in judging that this water weighs heavy. But practical wisdom, for all its universal judgments, is plainly not science; for, as we said, it deals with the ultimate particular fact — the last link in the chain — since that is what can actually be done.
And so it stands, in a way, opposite to intuitive reason as well. Intuitive reason grasps the primary principles, for which no demonstration can be given; practical wisdom grasps the ultimate particular, which cannot be scientifically proved but is perceived — not by one of the special senses, but by the kind of perception by which, in mathematics, we see that this particular figure before us is a triangle; for there too our reasoning must come to a stop. Still, this faculty of grasping particulars is really perception rather than practical wisdom, though it is perception of another kind.
Inquiry and deliberation are not the same thing: deliberation is one particular kind of inquiry. But we need to pin down what good deliberation is — is it a kind of science, or opinion, or lucky guessing, or something else altogether?
It is not science; for we do not inquire into what we already know, and good deliberation is a kind of deliberation, and when we deliberate we are inquiring and calculating.
Nor is it lucky guessing. A lucky guess comes without calculation and in a flash, while deliberation takes time. Hence the common saying: be quick to carry out what you have decided, but slow to decide.
Shrewdness, again — quickness at hitting the mark — is not the same as good deliberation; shrewdness is a kind of lucky guessing.
Nor is good deliberation any sort of opinion.
But consider: when we deliberate badly we go wrong, and when we deliberate well we go right. So good deliberation is clearly some kind of correctness — but a correctness neither of science nor of opinion. Science does not admit of correctness, since it does not admit of error; and correctness of opinion is simply truth. Besides, whatever we hold an opinion about is already something settled.
Still, good deliberation is impossible without calculation.
The only option left, then, is that it is correctness of thinking; for thinking is not yet assertion. Opinion is not an inquiry but already a definite assertion, whereas a person deliberating — well or badly — is still inquiring and calculating.
But good deliberation is a certain correctness in deliberation; so we must first ask what deliberation is and what its field is.
Now, correctness comes in several kinds, and clearly not every kind of correctness in deliberating counts as deliberating well. A weak-willed man or a bad man may, by careful calculation, arrive at exactly the goal he has set himself; he will have deliberated correctly, though what he wins is a great evil. But to have deliberated well is thought to be a good thing; so it is only one particular kind of correctness in deliberation that is called good deliberation — the kind that arrives at what is good.
Further, one can reach what is good by a false syllogism: reach the right conclusion about what to do, but by the wrong route and on the wrong grounds, the middle term being false. So this too falls short of good deliberation — hitting the right conclusion, but not on the right grounds.
Again, one man may reach the right conclusion only slowly, another quickly. So we must add one more condition: good deliberation means coming to a right conclusion about what is useful and ought to be done, and coming to it in the right manner and at the right time.
Once more, we speak of deliberating well without qualification, and of deliberating well toward a particular kind of end. Good deliberation without qualification is what reaches right conclusions about the means to the end without qualification; a particular kind of good deliberation is what reaches right conclusions about the means to a particular kind of end. And so, since deliberating well is the mark of people of practical wisdom, good deliberation will be correctness in judging what is useful toward that end of which practical wisdom has a true conception.
Understanding — the faculty we credit when we call someone understanding, or a person of good understanding — is not the same as science in general, nor as opinion (if it were, everyone would have it). Nor is it identical with any particular science, the way medicine deals with health or geometry with magnitudes. For understanding is not concerned with what is eternal and unchangeable, nor with events of every kind, but only with the things a person might puzzle over and deliberate about. Its field, then, is the same as that of practical wisdom; but the two are not identical. Practical wisdom issues orders — its business is what should be done or not done — while understanding only judges. (Understanding and good understanding come to the same thing here; so do a man of understanding and a man of good understanding.)
Understanding is neither the possession of practical wisdom nor its acquisition. Rather, just as a student is said to show understanding when he puts to use the science he hears from his teacher, so in the sphere of practical wisdom a man shows understanding when he uses the opinions he hears from others to judge — and to judge fittingly; for judging "well" here means judging fittingly.
And it is from this use of the word in learning that its use for the faculty comes — the faculty we mean when we call a man understanding; for we often speak of a learner's understanding.
Judgment — what we mean when we speak of a considerate judge of others, or say that a man "has judgment" — is the correct discernment of what is equitable. Here is the sign: we think the equitable man above all shows consideration in his judgments, and we count it equitable to judge some things with consideration. And consideration — sympathetic judgment — is simply judgment that correctly discerns what is equitable; and correctly means truly.
Now all these formed faculties we have listed tend, naturally enough, toward the same point. We apply all of these terms — judgment, understanding, practical wisdom, intuitive reason — to the same people: we say that someone has, by a certain age, come to have judgment and reason, and is practically wise and understanding. For all four faculties deal with ultimate and particular facts; and it is by having discernment in the matters practical wisdom deals with that a person counts as understanding, or as a man of sound or considerate judgment — for the equitable is common ground in all our good dealings with others.
But what is to be done is always some particular thing, something ultimate. Knowing it, as we have seen, is the business of the man of practical wisdom; and understanding and judgment also concern things to be done — that is, ultimates.
And the intuitive reason — the last of the four — also deals with ultimates, in both senses of the word. Both first principles and ultimate particular facts are grasped by intuitive reason, not by demonstration. On one side, in demonstrations, reason grasps the unalterable first principles; on the other, in practical calculations, reason grasps the ultimate, alterable fact — the minor premise of the practical syllogism. These particular facts are our starting points for the end we aim at: the universal principle is drawn out of the particulars. Of these particulars, then, we must have a kind of perception — and this perception is intuitive reason.
That is why these faculties are thought to be natural gifts: nature never makes a man wise, but she does, we think, endow men with judgment, understanding, and reason. A sign of this is that we believe these powers keep pace with our time of life — that a certain age brings reason and judgment — as though nature were the cause.
(Intuitive reason, then, is both beginning and end; for demonstrations start from these ultimate truths and terminate in them.)
And on this account we ought to attend to the undemonstrated sayings and opinions of experienced and older people, and of people of practical wisdom, no less than to their demonstrations. Experience has given them an eye, and with it they see correctly.
We have now said, then, what practical wisdom is and what wisdom is, what each deals with, and that each is the virtue of a different part of the soul.
But here an objection may be raised. "What is the use of them?" someone may ask. Wisdom does not study any of the things that make a man happy, for it does not ask how anything comes about. Practical wisdom does — but why do we need it? Practical wisdom deals with what is just and noble and good for man, the very things it is the good man's part to do; but knowing them makes us no readier to do them, if — as we have said — the virtues are habits. It is just as with things called "healthy" or "sound," meaning not what produces health but what flows from a healthy state: knowing medicine or gymnastics makes us no more able to do such things.
"But suppose we say a man should have practical wisdom not in order to do these acts but in order to become able to do them — then it is of no use to those who are already good, nor even to those who are not. For it will not matter whether they have it themselves or take the advice of others who do. It will be enough to do here as we do about health: we wish to be healthy, but we do not go off and learn medicine.
"Again, it seems strange that practical wisdom, though inferior to wisdom, should nevertheless govern it — since in every field the practical faculty holds sway and issues orders."
We must now take up these points; so far we have only been stating the difficulties.
First, then, we may say that both practical wisdom and wisdom must be desirable in themselves, since each is the virtue of one of the parts of the soul — even if neither of them produced anything at all.
Next, they do produce something.
On one hand, wisdom produces happiness — not in the sense in which medicine produces health, but in the sense in which health produces health. Wisdom is a part of complete virtue, and so possessing it and exercising it make a man happy.
On the other hand, in the sphere of action, a man performs his function perfectly when he acts in accordance with both practical wisdom and moral virtue: virtue makes the end we aim at right, and practical wisdom makes the means to it right.
(The fourth part of the soul, the vegetative part or faculty of nutrition, has no such virtue; for nothing is in its power to do or not to do.)
As for the objection that practical wisdom makes us no readier to do what is noble and just, let us go a little deeper, beginning here.
We allow, on one hand, that some who do just acts are not yet just — those, for instance, who do what the laws command unwillingly, or in ignorance, or for some outside motive and not for the sake of the acts themselves (though they do what they ought, and everything a good man should do). And on the other hand, it seems that when a man does the several acts in a certain condition, he is good — namely, when he does them from choice, and for the sake of the acts themselves.
Now, virtue makes the choice right; but deciding what should be done to carry out the choice belongs not to virtue but to another power. Let us dwell on this point a moment and make it quite clear.
There is a power we call cleverness: the power to carry out the steps toward any proposed goal and so achieve it. If the goal is noble, the power deserves praise; if the goal is base, it is the power of a villain. That is why we call both the practically wise man and the villain clever.
Practical wisdom is not this power, but it does not exist without it. And this eye of the soul, as we may call it, does not reach its full development without moral virtue — as we said before, and as can be shown. All syllogisms about what is to be done have as their starting point "the end — the supreme good — is such-and-such" (whatever it may be; any definition of the good will do for the argument). But it is only to the good man that this appears as the good; for vice perverts us and makes us go wrong about the starting points of action. So it is plain, as we said, that it is impossible to be practically wise without being morally good.
This suggests a further look at moral virtue; for here the case is closely parallel. As practical wisdom stands to cleverness — not identical, but closely akin — so full virtue stands to natural virtue.
Everyone grants that in a certain sense the several types of character are given us by nature: justice, a tendency toward self-control, courage, and the rest show themselves from the moment of birth. Nevertheless we look for developed goodness as something different from this, and expect to find these same qualities in another form. Even children and animals have the natural dispositions, but without reason to guide them these are plainly harmful. This much, at least, seems clear: just as a strong-bodied creature that cannot see stumbles heavily when it moves, because it has no sight, so it is with natural virtue. But when it is lit by reason, it acts surpassingly well; and the natural virtue — which before only resembled virtue — will then be virtue fully developed.
We find, then, that just as the calculative part has two forms, cleverness and practical wisdom, so the moral qualities have two forms, natural virtue and full virtue — and full virtue is impossible without practical wisdom.
That is why some people say that all the virtues are forms of practical wisdom — why Socrates in particular held this view. His inquiry was partly right and partly wrong: wrong in thinking that all the virtues actually are forms of practical wisdom, right in saying that they are impossible without it.
Here is a confirmation: even now, everyone defining virtue will name its field and then add that it is a habit "in accordance with right reason" — and right means in accordance with practical wisdom. Everyone, it seems, has a sort of inkling that a settled character of this kind — one in accordance with practical wisdom — is virtue.
Only a slight change is needed in the expression. Virtue is not simply a habit in accordance with right reason, but a habit that implies right reason. And right reason in these matters is practical wisdom.
So where Socrates held that the virtues are forms of reason (for he held they are all modes of knowledge), we hold that they imply reason.
It is evident, then, from what has been said, that it is not possible to be good in the strict sense without practical wisdom, nor practically wise without moral virtue. And this lets us answer an objection that may be urged. "The virtues," someone may say, "are found apart from each other: a man strongly disposed by nature to one virtue is not equally drawn to all the others, so he will have acquired this one while he still lacks that one." We may answer that this can happen with the natural virtues, but not with the virtues that make a man good without qualification. For where the single virtue of practical wisdom is present, all the moral virtues are present with it.
And so it is plain, first, that even if it did not bear on practice, we would still need practical wisdom, because it is the virtue of a part of our nature; and second, that choice cannot be right without both practical wisdom and moral virtue — for virtue makes us desire the end, and practical wisdom makes us take the right means to it.
Nevertheless, practical wisdom is not the mistress of wisdom or of the better part of our nature, any more than medicine is the mistress of health. Practical wisdom does not employ wisdom in its service; it provides for wisdom's coming to be. It does not rule wisdom, but rules in wisdom's interest. To assert the contrary would be like asserting that statesmanship rules the gods, because it issues orders about everything in the city — including the worship of the gods.
Let us now make a fresh start and say this: the forms of moral character to avoid are three in number — vice, weakness of will, and brutishness. For two of these the opposites are obvious: the opposite of vice we call virtue, and the opposite of weakness of will we call self-restraint. But for the opposite of the brutish character, the best candidate is an excellence that is beyond us — the excellence of a hero or a god. So Homer has Priam say of Hector that he was surpassingly good:
He seemed no child of mortal man, But of a god.
If, then, superlative excellence turns men into gods, as the stories tell us, it is evident that the opposite of the brutish character must be some excellence of that order. For just as a brute has neither virtue nor vice, neither does a god: what belongs to a god is something higher than virtue, and what belongs to a brute is something different in kind from vice.
Now, a godlike man is rare — to borrow the phrase the Spartans use; when they admire a man intensely, they call him seios aner, "a divine man" — and the brutish character is just as rare among human beings. It is found most often among the barbarians; sometimes disease or bodily injury produces it; and, thirdly, we use the name as a term of abuse for people who carry vice to an extreme pitch.
We shall have to say something about this disposition further on, and vice we have already discussed. So let us now speak of weakness of will, softness, and love of luxury, and also of self-restraint and endurance — for we must treat these as names of states of character that are neither identical with virtue and vice nor different from them in kind.
Here we must follow our usual method: first set down the appearances — the current opinions about these conditions — then work through the puzzles they raise, and finally establish, if we can, the truth of all the common opinions on the subject, or, failing that, of most of them and the most important. For if the difficulties are resolved and the popular notions left standing, we shall have attained as much certainty as the subject allows.
What, then, is commonly thought? (1) That self-restraint and endurance are good and praiseworthy things, while weakness of will and softness are bad and blameworthy. (2) That the self-restrained man is simply the man who stands by his reasoned conclusions, and the weak-willed man the one who abandons them. (3) That the weak-willed man knows that an act is bad and is driven to it by passion anyway, while the self-restrained man knows his desires are bad and is held back from following them by reason. (4) That the man of self-control is self-restrained and enduring — though as to the converse, some hold that every self-restrained and enduring man is self-controlled, and others deny it; and while some say the self-indulgent man is weak-willed and the weak-willed man self-indulgent, using the terms interchangeably, others draw a distinction between them. (5) As for the man of practical wisdom, people sometimes say it is impossible for him to be weak-willed, and at other times say that some men who are practically wise, and clever too, are weak-willed. (6) Lastly, people are called weak-willed even about anger, honor, and gain.
These, then, are the things people say.
But an objection arises at once: in what sense can a man be judging rightly when he acts against his own judgment?
Some maintain that he cannot act that way if he really knows what is right. It would be strange, Socrates thought, if knowledge were actually in a man and something else mastered it and dragged it about like a slave. In fact Socrates fought the whole position root and branch: there is no such thing as weakness of will, he held; no one acts against what is best while judging it to be best — when a man acts that way, it is through ignorance.
Now this theory plainly contradicts experience. And if the passion that sways the weak-willed man really is due to ignorance, we must ask what kind of ignorance it is. For this much is clear: the man who acts against his better judgment does not think the act good before the passion is upon him.
There are others who agree with Socrates in part and disagree in part. They grant that nothing can prevail against knowledge, but they do not grant that men never act against what seems best; and so they say that when the weak-willed man gives in to pleasure, what he has is not knowledge but only opinion.
But if it really is opinion and not knowledge — if what opposes the desires is not a strong conviction but a weak one, like the belief of a man in doubt — then we excuse a man for not standing by it in the face of strong desires. But in fact we do not excuse vice, or anything else we call blameworthy.
Is it practical wisdom, then, that opposes desire in the cases where we blame a man for yielding? It is, after all, the strongest form of conviction. But surely that would be absurd: the same man would then be practically wise and weak-willed at once, and no one would say that a man of practical wisdom would voluntarily do the vilest acts. Besides, we have already shown that practical wisdom is essentially a capacity that issues in action — it deals with the last step, the thing to be done — and that it implies the possession of all the moral virtues.
Again: if a man cannot be self-restrained without having strong and bad desires, then the man of self-control will not be self-restrained, nor the self-restrained man self-controlled; for it is no part of the self-controlled character to have desires that are either violent or bad.
Yet in the self-restrained man the desires must be both strong and bad. If they were good, the habit that keeps him from following them would be bad, and self-restraint would not always be a good thing. If they were weak and not bad, resisting them would be nothing to respect; and if they were bad but weak, it would be nothing to admire.
Again: if self-restraint makes a man stand by any opinion whatsoever, it is a bad thing — as when it makes him stand by a false one. And if weakness of will makes a man abandon any opinion whatsoever, then there will be a good kind of weakness of will. Take Neoptolemus in Sophocles' Philoctetes: he deserves praise for failing to stick to the plan Odysseus had talked him into — and what stopped him was the pain he felt at telling a lie.
Again, the well-known argument of the sophists, fallacious as it is, creates a genuine difficulty. Wanting to establish a paradox — so that they will look clever if they pull it off — they build a syllogism that traps the hearer: his reason is fettered, since he is unwilling to rest in a conclusion that revolts him, but unable to move forward, since he cannot find the flaw in the argument. Thus it can be argued that folly combined with weakness of will is virtue: because of his weakness of will, a man does the opposite of what he judges to be good; but he judges that the good is bad and not to be done; the result is that he will do the good and not the bad.
Again, on this showing the man who pursues and does what is pleasant from conviction — who deliberately chooses these things — would seem to be better than the man who does so not on calculation but from weakness of will. For the first man is easier to cure: change his convictions and you change him. But the weak-willed man invites the proverb, "If water chokes you, what will you wash it down with?" If he were convinced that what he does is good, a change of conviction might stop him; but as it is, he is already convinced that something else is good — and he does this anyway.
Again, if weakness of will and self-restraint can show themselves in anything whatever, who is the man we call weak-willed simply? No one man unites all the various forms of it, yet there are people to whom we apply the term with no qualification at all.
Such, roughly, are the puzzles that arise. Some of them we must clear away, and some we must leave standing; for the solving of a puzzle is the discovery of the truth.
Our questions, then, are these: (1) Does the weak-willed man act with knowledge or not — and what does "knowledge" mean here? (2) What is the field in which self-restraint and weakness of will operate — all pleasures and pains, or certain definite classes of them? (3) Are the self-restrained man and the man of endurance the same or different? And so on with the other questions that belong to this inquiry.
(Though the proper starting point is to ask whether the self-restraint and the weakness of will we are discussing are marked off from other kinds by their field or by their manner — I mean, whether a man is weak-willed in this special sense merely because his reason loses control in certain matters, or because it loses control in a certain way, or on both grounds; and, connected with this, whether this weakness of will and this self-restraint can show themselves in everything. Our answer will be: the man who is called weak-willed simply, with no qualification, does not show his character in everything, but only in the matters where the self-indulgent man shows his. Nor is it simply an uncontrolled disposition toward those matters that makes him what he is — that would make weakness of will identical with self-indulgence — but a particular kind of uncontrolled disposition. For the self-indulgent man is carried along by his own deliberate choice, holding that the pleasure of the moment is always to be pursued; the weak-willed man thinks otherwise — and pursues it all the same.) Now to question (1).
As for the argument that it is true opinion, not knowledge, against which men act when they act weak-willedly — it makes no difference here. Some people who merely hold opinions are in no doubt whatever; they think they have exact knowledge.
If the reply is that those with mere opinion act against their judgment more readily because their belief is weak, we answer that knowledge and opinion do not differ in that way: some people believe their bare opinions as strongly as others believe what they really know. Heraclitus is proof enough of that.
But we use the word "know" in two different senses. A man who has knowledge he is not now using is said to know a thing, and so is a man who is now using it. It will make a difference, then, whether a man has knowledge of what he ought not to do without that knowledge being present to his mind, or has it actually present. Only the latter seems strange — acting against knowledge you are attending to; acting against knowledge you merely possess does not.
Again, since reasoning of this kind involves two sorts of premises — a universal proposition for the major and a particular for the minor — nothing prevents a man from acting against his knowledge while having both, if he is using only the universal and not the particular; for it is the particular that gets acted on.
Again, there are different kinds of universal: one may concern the agent himself, another the thing. For instance, a man may reason, "dry food is good for every man, and I am a man," or "food of such-and-such a kind is dry" — but whether this food here is of that kind is something he may not know, or may know without the knowledge being awake in him.
These distinctions make an enormous difference — so much so that acting against knowledge in the one way seems not at all strange, while in the other way it does seem strange.
But there is yet another way of "having knowledge" besides those just mentioned. Within "having without using," we can see, there are different modes of having, so that a man may in one sense have knowledge and in another sense not have it — a man who is asleep, for instance, or mad, or drunk. And people in the grip of passion are in just such a state; for anger, sexual desire, and the like visibly alter the condition of the body, and in some cases actually produce madness. Clearly, then, we must say that the weak-willed man has knowledge in the same sort of way as the sleeping, the mad, and the drunk.
And saying the words of knowledge is no proof of really having it. Even in the grip of these passions, people recite demonstrations and verses of Empedocles — just as beginners string sentences together before they understand what they mean; the meaning has to grow into them, and that takes time. So we must suppose that the weak-willed say the words the way actors do.
Again, one may look for the cause of the phenomenon in a way proper to its own nature, as follows. There is (1) the universal judgment, and (2) the judgment about particular facts, which falls to sense-perception. When the two are joined into one, the soul must — in theoretical matters — affirm the conclusion, and in practical matters must carry it straight out into action. For instance, if you judge "everything sweet should be tasted" and "this thing before me is sweet" — a particular fact — then, if you have the power and are not prevented, you cannot help but act on the conclusion at once: taste it.
Now suppose there is on one side the universal judgment forbidding you to taste, and on the other side the universal "everything sweet is pleasant," with its particular "this thing before me is sweet" — and it is the particular judgment that is operative — and appetite happens to be present. The first chain of reasoning tells you to avoid the thing; appetite drives you toward it, for appetite can set each of the bodily parts in motion.
So it turns out that when people act weak-willedly, it is in a way under the influence of reason — of opinion, that is — but of opinion that is opposed to right reason not in itself, only incidentally. For it is the desire, not the opinion, that is opposed to right reason.
And this is why brutes cannot be weak-willed: they have no universal judgments, only images and memories of particular facts.
As for how the weak-willed man gets out of his ignorance and recovers his knowledge, the account is the same as for the man who is drunk or asleep; nothing about it is peculiar to this phenomenon, and for that account we must go to the students of natural science.
But since the last premise — the minor — is an opinion about something perceived, and is what determines action, this is the one the weak-willed man in his passion either does not have, or has only in the sense in which, as we explained, having means not knowing in the full sense but saying the words, as a drunk man recites the sayings of Empedocles.
And because the last term is not universal, and does not seem to be an object of knowledge in the way the universal is, even what Socrates was trying to establish seems to come out true. For when passion carries a man away, what it drags about is not what we regard as knowledge in the strict sense — nor is it such knowledge that gets perverted by passion — but only the knowledge of perception.
So much, then, for whether the weak-willed man knows or not, and in what sense it is possible to act weak-willedly with knowledge. We must next ask whether a man can be weak-willed simply, or only weak-willed in some particular respect — and, if the former, what the field is in which the character shows itself.
It is evident that it is in pleasures and pains that the self-restrained and the enduring, and the weak-willed and the soft, show what they are.
Of the sources of pleasure, some are necessary, and others are desirable in themselves but admit of excess. The necessary ones are the bodily processes — nutrition, the propagation of the species, and generally the bodily functions we said self-indulgence and self-control are concerned with. The others are not necessary but are desirable in themselves: victory, honor, wealth, and good and pleasant things of that kind.
Now, those who go to excess in this second class against their own better reason we do not call weak-willed simply, but with a qualifier: weak-willed about money, or gain, or honor, or anger — not simply, because they are different characters and get the name only by resemblance. (Compare the man who won at the last Olympic games: he was called Man, for that was his name; the word as applied to him meant almost, but not quite, what it ordinarily means.)
Here is the proof: weakness of will is blamed not merely as a mistake but as a kind of vice — either vice simply or some particular vice — but the people just described are not blamed that way.
Among the characters concerned with the bodily enjoyments, though — the ones we say self-control and self-indulgence deal with — take the man who goes to excess in pursuing what is pleasant and avoiding what is painful, in the matter of hunger and thirst, heat and cold, and everything that reaches us through touch or taste, and who does this not from deliberate choice but against his choice and his reasoning. Him we call weak-willed with no addition — not "weak-willed about this particular thing, say anger," but simply weak-willed.
A proof of this: people are also called soft in these latter matters, but not in any of the former — not about honor or gain.
And this is why we group the weak-willed man with the self-indulgent, and the self-restrained with the self-controlled — but none of those who are only metaphorically called self-restrained and weak-willed — because they are in a way concerned with the same pleasures and pains. They deal with the same matters, but they behave differently: the other three deliberately choose what they do; the weak-willed man does not.
And so a man who pursues excessive pleasure with no desire, or only a moderate one, and who runs from even slight pains, is more properly called self-indulgent than one who is driven to it by violent desires. For what would the first man do if the violent passions of youth were added — if going without his natural appetites were violent pain to him?
Now, some of our desires and pleasures belong to the class of the noble and good (for some of the things that please us are naturally desirable), others to the opposite class, and others lie in between, as we distinguished before — money, gain, victory, and honor falling in the first class. With regard to all of these, the first class and the intermediate alike, men are blamed not for being affected by them, or desiring them, or caring for them, but for doing so in certain ways and beyond the due amount. So we blame those who are moved by some good and noble object, or pursue it, past the bounds of reason — people who care too much about honor, say, or about their children or parents. These are noble objects, and men are praised for caring about them; but even here one can go too far — if, like Niobe, one were to fight against the gods themselves, or carry things as far as Satyrus, nicknamed Philopator, "father-lover," whose devotion to his father seemed to reach the pitch of outright folly.
In these matters, then, there is no room for vice or wickedness, for the reason given: each of these things is in itself desirable, and only the excess in them is bad and to be avoided.
Similarly, there is no room here for weakness of will in the strict sense — for weakness of will is not only to be avoided; it is positively blameworthy. But because the condition looks similar, we do use the term with a qualification, saying "weak-willed in this" or "in that" — just as we call a man a "bad doctor" or a "bad actor" whom we would never call bad flat-out. In those cases the term "badness" applies not simply but with a qualification, because each of these qualities is not strictly a vice but only analogous to one; and likewise here, it is plain, we must count as weakness of will (or self-restraint) in the strict sense only what shows itself in the matters that self-control and self-indulgence deal with, while what shows itself about anger gets the name only by metaphor. That is why we add the qualifier and call a man "weak-willed in anger," as "in honor" or "in gain."
Some things are pleasant by nature — some of them pleasant in themselves, others pleasant to particular kinds of animals or people. Other things are not naturally pleasant at all, but come to be pleasant in one of three ways: (1) through physical damage, (2) through habit, or (3) through an originally corrupt nature. And each of these three classes has a character type to match.
Take the third class first: the brutish characters. There is the creature in a woman's form that is said to tear open pregnant women and devour their unborn children; there are the peoples around the Black Sea who are said to delight in things like eating raw flesh or human flesh, or handing over their children to one another for the feast; and there are the things reported of Phalaris.
These are what we call brutish natures. In other cases the disposition comes from disease or madness — like the man who killed and ate his mother, or the slave who ate the liver of his fellow slave. These belong to the first class.
Other habits are either symptoms of a morbid state or the products of habituation, and so fall under the first class or the second: plucking out one's hair, for instance, or biting the nails, or eating cinders and earth, or unnatural sexual practices. These come sometimes from nature, sometimes from habit — as with those who have been abused from childhood.
Now, wherever nature is the cause of such morbid habits, no one would think of using the term "weakness of will" — any more than we would call women weak-willed for the part they play in reproduction. Nor would we use the term of those who have brought themselves into a morbid state by habitual indulgence.
Having habits of this kind, then, falls outside the boundaries of vice, just as brutishness does; and when a man who has such impulses masters them, or is mastered by them, that is not self-restraint or weakness of will in the strict sense, but only by a metaphor — just as the man who is mastered by his temper cannot strictly be called weak-willed. For even folly, cowardice, self-indulgence, and bad temper, whenever they run beyond a certain pitch, are themselves either brutish or morbid. A man so constituted by nature that he is frightened of everything, even the squeak of a mouse — his cowardice is brutish, inhuman; in the well-known case of the man who was terrified of a weasel, disease was the cause. So too with irrational human beings: those who lack reason by nature and live by their senses alone are brutish, like some races of remote barbarians, while those whose irrationality comes from disease (epilepsy, say) or insanity are morbidly irrational.
Again, a man may on occasion have one of these impulses without being mastered by it — if Phalaris, say, had felt the desire to eat a child's flesh, or some monstrous lust, and held himself back. And it is equally possible not merely to have the impulse but to be mastered by it.
To sum up, then: just as with vice there is one sort that is human and is called vice simply, and another sort that carries a qualifying label — "brutish" or "morbid" vice, not vice simply — in the same way there is plainly a brutish weakness of will and a morbid weakness of will, while only the kind that pairs with human self-indulgence is weakness of will simply.
We have now shown that weakness of will and self-restraint proper have to do only with the things that self-indulgence and self-control have to do with, and that in other matters there is a kind of weakness of will so called only metaphorically, and with a qualifying label.
The next point to consider is that weakness of will about anger is less disgraceful than weakness of will about appetite.
Anger, it seems, listens to reason a little, but mishears it — like a hasty servant who dashes off before you have finished speaking and so gets the errand wrong, or like a dog that barks the moment it hears a noise, without waiting to find out whether it is a friend. Just so anger, hot and hasty by nature, hears something — but not what reason actually orders — and rushes off to take revenge. For when reason or imagination announces an insult or a slight, anger draws the inference, so to speak, that the offender is to be treated as an enemy, and instantly boils over. Appetite, on the other hand, needs only for reason or the senses to announce "this is pleasant," and it rushes to enjoy it. So anger, in a way, obeys reason, and appetite does not. Appetite is therefore the more disgraceful; for the man who is weak-willed about anger gives in, in some sense, to reason, while the other gives in not to reason but to appetite.
Again, it is more excusable to follow impulses that are natural — even with our appetites, it is more pardonable to follow the ones common to all men, and the more common they are, the more pardonable. And anger and bad temper are more natural than the desire for excessive and unnecessary pleasures. Recall the man who defended himself for beating his father: "He beat his own father," he said, "and that father beat his; and this boy here" — pointing to his son — "will beat me when he is grown. It runs in the family." And there is the other story of the man being dragged out of the house by his son, who told him to stop at the doorway — for he had dragged his own father exactly that far, and no further.
Again, the more a man is given to calculated malice, the more unjust he is. Now the hot-tempered man is not given to calculated malice, and anger is not underhanded — it asserts itself in the open. Appetite is another matter: say of it what the poets say of Aphrodite, "craft-weaving daughter of Cyprus," or what Homer says of her embroidered belt,
whose charm steals away the reason even of the wise.
If, then, this weakness of will is the more unjust, it is also more disgraceful than weakness of will about anger; it is weakness of will simply, and a sort of vice.
Again, when a man commits a wanton outrage he feels no pain in the doing — rather pleasure — while a man who acts in anger always feels pain as he acts. If, then, the acts that most justly rouse our indignation are the more unjust, it follows that weakness of will about appetite is the more unjust; for outrage of that kind is never committed in anger.
Plainly, then, weakness of will about appetite is more disgraceful than weakness of will about anger, and self-restraint and weakness of will proper are concerned with bodily appetites and pleasures.
But now let us look at the differences among these bodily appetites and pleasures.
As we said at the outset, some are human and natural in kind and degree; others are marks of a brutish nature; others still are the result of injury or disease.
Now, self-control and self-indulgence have to do only with the first class. That is why we call animals neither self-controlled nor self-indulgent — except metaphorically, if some whole species stands out from the rest by its lewdness and wantonness and greed. For there is no choice or deliberate calculation in what animals do; they stand outside the rational order, like madmen.
Brutishness is less dangerous than vice, but more horrifying. For in the brutish man the noble part is not corrupted, as it is in a man who is vicious in the merely human way — it is absent altogether. So asking which is worse is like comparing the inanimate with the animate: the badness of a thing that lacks the governing principle is always less destructive, and here reason is the governing principle — and the brutish man lacks it. It is like comparing injustice with an unjust man: each, in its own way, is the worse. For a bad man will do ten thousand times the harm a brute will.
Now, with regard to the pleasures and pains of touch and taste, and the desires and aversions that go with them — the field we earlier marked out as belonging to self-indulgence and self-control — it is possible to be so disposed that you give in to temptations most people resist, or so disposed that you resist temptations most people give in to. Where pleasures are concerned, the first of these characters is the weak-willed man and the second the self-restrained; where pains are concerned, the first is soft and the second enduring. The character of most people lies between the two — leaning, perhaps, toward the worse.
Now some pleasures are necessary and others are not, and the necessary ones are necessary only in certain quantities — not too much and not too little; and the same holds of appetites and pains. The man who pursues pleasures beyond the pale of legitimate pleasure, or pursues any pleasure to excess, and does so by deliberate choice, for their own sake and not for any further consequence — that man is self-indulgent. Such a man is necessarily incapable of remorse, and therefore incurable; for the man who feels no remorse cannot be cured. At the opposite extreme is the man who falls short (while the man who hits the mean is self-controlled). The same goes for the man who runs away from bodily pains not because he is overcome in the moment, but by deliberate choice.
Of those who act without deliberate choice, one sort is driven by the pleasure itself, the other by the wish to escape the pain of unsatisfied desire; so we must distinguish these from one another.
But everyone would agree that a man who does something disgraceful with no desire, or only a mild one, is worse than one who does it under violent desire — that a man who strikes another in cold blood is worse than one who strikes in anger. For what would he do if passion had hold of him? That is why the self-indulgent man is worse than the weak-willed.
Of the characters we have described, then, we must mark off softness from self-indulgence.
The self-restrained character is the opposite of the weak-willed, and the enduring the opposite of the soft. For endurance means holding out, while self-restraint means overcoming — and holding out is a different thing from overcoming, as avoiding defeat is different from winning a victory. So self-restraint is the better of the two.
But the man who caves in where most men can and do hold out is soft and luxurious (for luxury, too, is a kind of softness) — the sort of man who lets his cloak trail on the ground rather than take the trouble to lift it, who plays the invalid without supposing himself wretched, though a wretched man is exactly what he is imitating.
It is the same with self-restraint and weakness of will. If a man gives way to pleasures or pains that are violent and excessive, we are not surprised; we are ready to forgive him, if he struggled — like Philoctetes bitten by the viper in Theodectes' play, or Cercyon in the Alope of Carcinus, or like people who try to hold in a laugh and burst out in one violent explosion, as happened to Xenophantus. What does surprise us is when a man gives way to, and cannot resist, what most people are able to hold out against — unless the cause is inherited constitution or disease, as softness is hereditary in the Scythian kings, and as the female is naturally softer than the male.
The man who is devoted to amusement is generally thought to be self-indulgent, but in fact he is soft. For amusement is relaxation, a rest from work; and the man devoted to amusement is one of those who take too much of it.
Weakness of will comes in two kinds: the impetuous and the weak. The weak deliberate, but under the influence of passion do not stand by the results of their deliberation; the impetuous are swept off by passion because they never deliberated at all. For — just as you cannot easily tickle a man who has just been tickling you — some people, when they see what is coming, forewarned, rouse themselves and their reason in advance, and so are able to resist the impulse, whether it is pleasant or painful. It is people of quick feeling, and people of a melancholic temperament, who are most prone to the impetuous kind of weakness of will: the first through the speed of their impressions, the second through their intensity, they do not wait to hear the voice of reason, but follow their imagination.
Again, the self-indulgent man, as we said, is not given to remorse, for he stands by his deliberate choice; but the weak-willed man is always apt to feel remorse. So the matter does not stand as it was put in one of the difficulties we listed: the self-indulgent man is incurable, the weak-willed man curable. For full-formed vice is like diseases such as dropsy or consumption, while weakness of will is like epilepsy: the one is chronic badness, the other comes in fits.
Indeed, we may say flatly that weakness of will and vice are different in kind; for the vicious man does not know the nature of his acts, and the weak-willed man does.
Among the weak-willed themselves, those who momentarily lose their reason are not as bad as those who keep their reason and disobey it; for the latter give way to a slighter impulse, and cannot, like the former, claim to have acted without deliberating. The weak-willed man is like someone who gets drunk quickly and on little wine — on less than it takes most men.
We have seen that weakness of will is not vice; and yet in a manner of speaking it perhaps is. The difference is that the vicious man acts by deliberate choice and the weak-willed man against it. But for all that, their acts look alike — as Demodocus said against the Milesians: "The Milesians are not fools, but they do just what fools would do." So the weak-willed man is not unjust, but he will act unjustly.
It is the mark of the weak-willed man to pursue bodily pleasures that are excessive and contrary to right reason without being convinced that they are good; the self-indulgent man is convinced they are good, because it is his character to pursue them. The first, then, can easily be brought to a better mind; the second cannot. For virtue preserves the principle — the starting point — while vice destroys it; and in conduct the motive, the end we act for, is the principle of action, holding the same place here that the hypotheses hold in mathematics. In mathematics, no reasoning or proof can teach us the starting points; and here, likewise, it is not reasoning but virtue — whether natural or acquired by training — that teaches us to hold right opinions about the principle of action. The man of this character is self-controlled; the man of the opposite character is self-indulgent.
But there is a class of men who are apt to be momentarily carried out of their right senses by passion — swayed by it far enough that they do not act according to reason, but not so far that it has become part of their nature to believe such pleasures should be pursued without limit. These are the weak-willed. They are better than the self-indulgent, and not absolutely bad; for the best part of their nature, the principle of right conduct, still survives in them.
Opposed to them is another class of men: those who stand by their resolutions and are not carried out of their senses by passion, at least. From all this it is plain that self-restraint is a good state of character and weakness of will a bad one.
Now, who is to be called self-restrained — the man who stands by reasoning of any kind and a choice of any kind, or only the man who stands by the right choice? And who is to be called weak-willed — the man who abandons any kind of choice and any kind of reasoning, or the man who abandons true reasoning and right choice? This was a difficulty we raised before. Is not the answer this: incidentally it may be any kind, but essentially it is true reasoning and right choice that the one stands by and the other abandons? For if you choose or pursue A for the sake of B, it is B that you pursue and choose essentially, and A only incidentally. And by "essentially" we mean "absolutely" or "simply." So in a certain sense it can be opinion of any kind; but speaking absolutely, it is true opinion that the one holds to and the other deserts.
But there is another class of people who are apt to stick to their opinions no matter what — the ones we call stubborn — because they resist persuasion and are not easily talked into changing their minds. These bear some resemblance to the self-restrained man, as the extravagant man resembles the generous one and the foolhardy man the courageous; but on many points they differ. What the self-restrained man refuses is to change his mind under pressure of passion and appetite; when occasion calls, he yields to reason readily enough. But it is precisely to reason that the stubborn man will not listen — and he is quite capable of conceiving a passion, and is often led around by his pleasures.
The opinionated, the ignorant, and the boorish are all stubborn — the opinionated from motives of pleasure and pain: they delight in the sense of victory when no argument can budge them, and are pained when their opinions are overruled, like decrees struck down. So they resemble the weak-willed man rather than the self-restrained.
Sometimes, too, people abandon their resolutions from something other than weakness of will — as Neoptolemus does in Sophocles' Philoctetes. Pleasure, it is true, was his motive for abandoning his resolution — but a noble pleasure; for telling the truth was a fine thing in his eyes, and Odysseus had persuaded him to lie. For not everyone who acts with pleasure as his motive is self-indulgent, or worthless, or weak-willed — only the man whose motive is a base pleasure.
Again, there is a character that takes too little delight in the pleasures of the body, and swerves from reason in that direction; and the self-restrained man stands between this character and the weak-willed. For the weak-willed swerve from reason through an excess, and these others through a deficiency, while the self-restrained man holds fast and is not pulled aside by either.
And if self-restraint is a good thing, both of the opposed characters must be bad — as in fact they evidently are. But since the second extreme shows itself rarely and in few people, weakness of will comes to be regarded as the only opposite of self-restraint, just as self-indulgence comes to be regarded as the only opposite of self-control.
We often apply names metaphorically, and so we come to speak — metaphorically — of the self-restraint of the self-controlled man. For both the self-restrained man and the self-controlled man are so made that they never do anything against reason for the sake of bodily pleasure; but the self-restrained man has bad desires and the self-controlled man has none; and the self-controlled man is so constituted that he takes no delight in anything contrary to reason, while the self-restrained man does take delight in such things — but is not carried away by them.
The weak-willed and the self-indulgent resemble each other too, though they are different: both pursue bodily pleasures, but the self-indulgent man pursues them on principle, and the weak-willed man does not.
The same man cannot be at once practically wise and weak-willed; for we have shown that a man cannot have practical wisdom without being morally good at the same time.
Besides, a man is not practically wise just because he knows; he must also be ready to act on what he knows. But the weak-willed man is not ready to act on his knowledge. (Nothing prevents a man who is clever at calculating means from being weak-willed — which is why people sometimes think a man can be practically wise and weak-willed at once: cleverness is related to practical wisdom in the way we explained earlier, resembling it as an intellectual power but differing from it because choice is absent.) Nor does the weak-willed man know in the way a man knows who is actually using his knowledge; he knows the way a man asleep or drunk knows.
He acts voluntarily — in a sense he knows what he is doing and why — and yet he is not a bad man, for his choice is good. He is only half bad. Nor are weak-willed men unjust, for they are not deliberately malicious: some of them are the kind who swerve from their deliberate resolutions; others, of the melancholic temperament, act without deliberating at all. The weak-willed man, then, is like a city that always passes excellent decrees and has good laws, but never enforces them — as Anaxandrides joked:
So willed the city that cares nothing for its laws.
The bad man, on the contrary, is like a city that enforces its laws, but its laws are bad.
Both weakness of will and self-restraint go beyond the average run of men: the self-restrained man is more steadfast than most men can manage, the weak-willed man less.
Of the kinds of weakness of will, the melancholic sort is more curable than that of the men who make resolutions and fail to keep them; and the kind that comes from habit is more curable than the kind rooted in nature. It is easier to change a habit than to change one's nature — indeed, the very reason habits are hard to change is that they are a kind of second nature, as Euenus says:
Train men long enough to what you will, and in the end it will be their nature.
We have now said what self-restraint and weakness of will are, and endurance and softness, and how these types of character stand to one another.
Pleasure and pain also fall within the province of the political philosopher, since it is his business to fix the end by reference to which we call each thing good or bad.
Besides, we are bound to discuss them. We said that moral virtue and vice have to do with pleasures and pains, and most people say that happiness involves pleasure — which is why the blessed man is called makarios, from chairein, "to rejoice."
Now (1) some people think no pleasure is good, either in itself or incidentally; good and pleasure, they say, are simply two different things. (2) Others think that some pleasures are good but most are bad. (3) Others again think that even if every pleasure is good, still the highest good cannot be pleasure.
(1) It is argued that pleasure cannot be good at all: (a) because every pleasure is a felt transition to a natural state, and a transition or process is never the same kind of thing as an end — the building of a house is one kind of thing, the house another; (b) because the self-controlled man avoids pleasures; (c) because the man of practical wisdom pursues the painless, not the pleasant; (d) because pleasures get in the way of thinking, and the more intense the pleasure the worse the interference — sexual pleasure, for instance: no one in the middle of that could think at all; (e) because there is no art of pleasure, yet every good thing has an art devoted to producing it; (f) because pleasure is what children and animals pursue.
(2) It is argued that not all pleasures are good, because some are base and disgraceful, and some are actually harmful — some pleasant things are unhealthy.
(3) It is argued that pleasure is not the highest good, because it is not an end but a process or transition.
These, then, are the current opinions on the subject.
But these arguments do not prove that pleasure is not good, or even that it is not the highest good. Here is why.
In the first place, "good" is used in two senses — good in itself and good for somebody — so natures and faculties will be called good in two senses, and so will motions and processes. When these are called bad, it sometimes means bad in themselves, though for particular persons not bad but desirable; sometimes not even desirable for particular persons except now and then, for a little while, though not desirable in themselves. And some of them are not even pleasures at all, though they look like it — I mean the ones that involve pain and are taken as medicine, like the pleasures of the sick.
In the second place, since "good" applies both to activities and to faculties, the activities that restore us to our natural state are only incidentally pleasant.
But in the satisfaction of the animal appetites, what is active is not the part of our nature that feels the want, but the part that is in its normal state. For there are pleasures that involve no previous pain or appetite at all — the pleasures of philosophic study, for instance — where our nature is conscious of no want.
This is confirmed by the fact that while a natural want is being filled we do not delight in the same things as when it has been filled. Once the want is filled, we delight in things pleasant in themselves; while it is filling, in their opposites — in sharp and bitter things, none of which is pleasant by nature or pleasant in itself. So the pleasures these things give are not real pleasures either; for pleasures stand to one another as the things that produce them do.
Again, it does not follow, as some maintain, that there must be something better than pleasure, on the ground that the end is better than the process toward it. Pleasure is not a transition, and it does not even always involve one. It is an activity, and itself an end. Further, pleasure comes not from becoming something but from doing something. And lastly, the end is not always different from the process: that holds only where something is being brought to the completion of its nature.
For these reasons it is not right to call pleasure a felt transition. Call it rather an activity of our nature in its natural state, and in place of "felt" write "unimpeded."
Some people, it is true, think pleasure must be a transition precisely because it is good in the full sense — they suppose that activity is a transition. But activity is in fact something different.
To say that pleasures are bad because some pleasant things are unhealthy is like saying that health is bad because some healthy things are bad for moneymaking. Both are bad in that one respect, but that does not make them bad; even philosophic study is sometimes bad for your health.
As for pleasure being an obstacle to thinking: neither practical wisdom nor any other faculty is hindered by the pleasure proper to its own exercise — only by alien pleasures. The pleasure we take in study and learning makes us study and learn all the more.
That there is no art devoted to producing pleasure is only natural, for art never produces an activity; it only makes activity possible. (Though perfumery and cookery are usually counted arts of pleasure.)
As for the arguments that the self-controlled man avoids pleasure, that the man of practical wisdom pursues the painless life, and that children and animals pursue pleasure — one answer meets them all. We have already explained in what sense all pleasures are good in themselves and in what sense they are not. The pleasures that children and animals pursue, and whose corresponding pains the man of practical wisdom seeks to escape, are the pleasures that involve appetite and pain — that is, the bodily pleasures (for those are of this kind) — and the excesses of them, the deliberate pursuit of which is exactly what makes a man self-indulgent. These, then, are the pleasures the self-controlled man avoids. But he has pleasures of his own.
Everyone agrees that pain is a bad thing and to be avoided: partly bad in itself, partly bad as somehow impeding activity. But the opposite of what is to be avoided — opposite in the very respect in which it is to be avoided and bad — is good. It follows that pleasure is a good thing. Speusippus tried to dodge this argument with an analogy: the greater, he said, is opposed both to the equal and to the less. But the dodge fails, for no one would say that pleasure is essentially a bad thing.
Moreover, there is no reason why a certain kind of pleasure should not be the highest good, even though some pleasures are bad — just as a certain kind of knowledge might be, though some kinds are bad. Indeed, perhaps we ought to put it more strongly: since every faculty admits of unimpeded activity, then whether happiness is the activity of all our faculties or of some one of them, that activity must be most desirable when it is unimpeded. But unimpeded activity is pleasure. So a certain kind of pleasure will be the highest good, even if most pleasures should turn out to be bad in themselves.
And this is why all men suppose the happy life is a pleasant one and weave pleasure into happiness — reasonably enough, for no activity is complete if it is impeded, and happiness we count among complete things. That is why the happy man needs the goods of the body and external goods and good fortune as well: so that his activity may not be impeded. As for those who say that a man on the rack, overwhelmed by misfortune, is happy so long as he is good — whether they know it or not, they are talking nonsense.
Because fortune is a necessary condition, some people take good fortune to be the same thing as happiness. It is not. Good fortune in excess actually becomes an impediment, and then perhaps no longer deserves the name; for good fortune is defined by its relation to happiness.
Again, the fact that all animals and all men pursue pleasure is some sign that it is in some way the highest good:
A saying never wholly dies that many peoples share.
But since neither the nature of man nor the best development of his faculties is the same for all, or is thought to be, the pleasure men pursue is not always the same either — though all pursue pleasure. Yet perhaps they are in fact pursuing not the pleasure they think they pursue, and would say they pursue, but one and the same pleasure for all; for every being has something divine implanted in it by nature.
But the bodily pleasures have taken over the very name of pleasure, because they are the ones most often reached and the ones everybody shares. Being the only pleasures men know, they are supposed to be the only pleasures there are.
And it is plain that unless pleasure — that is, unimpeded activity — is good, we can no longer say that the happy man lives a pleasant life. Why should he need pleasure if it is not good? He might just as well live a painful life; for pain is neither bad nor good, if pleasure is neither — so why avoid it? The good man's life, then, would be no pleasanter than anyone else's, unless the activity of his faculties were pleasanter too.
Those who grant that some pleasures — the noble ones — are highly desirable, but deny it of the bodily pleasures that are the self-indulgent man's territory, should look harder at those bodily pleasures. Why, if they are bad, are the opposite pains bad? For the opposite of bad is good. Shall we say the "necessary" pleasures are good only in the sense that whatever is not bad is good? Or that they are good up to a point?
Faculties and activities that cannot run to excess beyond what is good cannot yield excessive pleasure; those that can run to excess admit excessive pleasure too. Now, bodily goods do admit of excess, and the bad man is bad because he pursues the excess, not because he pursues the necessary pleasures — everyone takes some delight in food and drink and sex, but not everyone as he ought. With pain it is the reverse: the bad man does not merely avoid excessive pain, he avoids pain altogether. And this is quite consistent with pain being bad; for the opposite of excessive pleasure is not painful, except to the man who chases the excess.
But we ought to state not only the truth, but also the cause of the error; it helps to produce conviction. Once we see what would naturally make a false view look true, we believe the true one more readily. So we must say why the bodily pleasures seem more desirable.
First of all, then, bodily pleasure drives out pain. Because pain can be extreme, men pursue excessive pleasure — and bodily pleasure generally — as its antidote. These remedies are intense, and that is why they are pursued: they stand out in sharp contrast to the opposite pain.
(As we said before, there are two reasons pleasure has a bad name: some pleasures are the doings of a bad nature — bad from birth, as with an animal, or bad by habit, as with bad men; while the remedial pleasures imply want, and it is better to be in the natural state than to be on the way to it. These remedial pleasures are felt while a want is being filled up, and so they are only incidentally good.)
Again, bodily pleasures are pursued for their intensity by people who cannot enjoy anything else — some even work up a thirst on purpose. When the pleasures are harmless, we do not blame this; when they are harmful, the pursuit is bad. Such people simply have no other sources of enjoyment, and to many the neutral state is itself painful, because of their nature. For an animal is always laboring, as natural science teaches us — even seeing and hearing are labor and pain, it says; we have just grown used to them, as the saying goes. In youth, likewise, men are in a state resembling drunkenness, because they are growing — and youth is pleasant. Men of a melancholic nature, on the other hand, are always needing something to restore their balance; their bodies keep vexing them, thanks to their temperament, and they live in a state of violent desire. Now pain is driven out by the opposite pleasure — indeed by any pleasure, if it is strong enough. That is how such men come to be self-indulgent and bad.
But pleasures that have no antecedent pain do not admit of excess. These come from things that are pleasant by nature and not merely incidentally. By incidentally pleasant I mean the restoratives: the restoration happens only because the part of the system that remains healthy is somehow active, and so the restoration itself seems pleasant. By naturally pleasant I mean what stimulates the activity of a healthy system.
But no one thing can go on pleasing us without interruption, because our nature is not simple; there is a second element in us — this is what makes us mortal beings — so that whatever the one element does runs against the nature of the other, and when the two are in balance, what we are doing feels neither painful nor pleasant. If there were a being with a simple nature, the same activity would always be most pleasant to that being. This is why God enjoys forever one simple pleasure: for there is activity without movement as well as activity of movement, and there is truer pleasure in rest than in motion. Change is "the sweetest of all things," as the poet says, only because of a certain badness in us: just as it is the bad man who is most apt to change, so it is the bad nature that needs change — for it is neither simple nor good.
We have now considered self-restraint and weakness of will, and pleasure and pain — what each of them is, and in what way some of them are good and some bad. It remains to speak of friendship.
After what has gone before, a discussion of friendship naturally comes next; for friendship is a sort of virtue, or at least it goes hand in hand with virtue, and besides that, it is one of life's absolute necessities. No one would choose to live without friends, even if he had every other good thing. In fact, it is precisely when a man is rich, when he holds power and authority, that he seems to need friends most of all. What is the use of all that prosperity if he has no chance to do good with it? And doing good is shown most often, and most admirably, toward friends. Or how could such a position even be kept safe without friends? The greater it is, the more danger it stands in. And in poverty, and in every other misfortune, we treat our friends as our one refuge. We need friends when we are young, to keep us from going wrong; when we are old, to care for us and to carry out the plans we no longer have the strength to execute ourselves; and in the prime of life, to help us do noble deeds — "two going together," as Homer says; for two together are stronger both in thought and in action.
Love seems to be planted by nature in the parent for the offspring and in the offspring for the parent — not only among human beings, but among birds and most animals too. It is planted in members of the same species for one another, and among human beings especially; that is why we praise those who love their fellow men. And anyone who travels can see how every human being is akin to every other, and dear to him.
Again, friendship seems to be the bond that holds states together, and lawgivers seem to care even more about securing it than about securing justice. For concord looks like a close cousin of friendship, and concord is what lawgivers want most to preserve, while faction is what they want most to drive out as an enemy. If citizens are friends, they have no need of justice; but even if they are just, they still need friendship or love as well — indeed, justice in its completest form seems to be a matter of friendship or love too.
More than that: friendship is not only necessary, it is a noble thing. We praise those who love their friends; having many friends is thought to be something noble; and some people even think that a good man and a friend are one and the same.
But opinions about friendship differ on quite a few points. Some hold that it is a kind of likeness — that people who are like one another are friends. Hence the sayings "Like to like" and "Birds of a feather flock together," and others of the same sort. Others say the opposite: "Two of a trade never agree."
Still others dig deeper into these questions and look for the causes behind the appearances. Euripides, for instance, says:
The parched earth loves the rain, and the high heaven, heavy with moisture, loves to fall to earth.
Heraclitus says, "Opposites fit together," and "From discordant elements comes the fairest harmony," and "It is by strife that all things come into being." Others take the opposite view — Empedocles above all — and say that like desires like.
Now, the difficulties that concern the constitution of the universe we may set aside; they do not really belong to our present inquiry. But the ones that concern human nature, and are bound up with human character and feeling, we will discuss. For instance: can friendship arise in all men, or is it impossible for bad men to be friends? And is there one form of friendship, or many? Those who suppose there is only one kind, on the ground that friendship admits of more and less, are relying on insufficient evidence; for things that differ in kind can also differ in degree. (But we have spoken about this point already.)
Perhaps these difficulties will clear up once we determine what it is that is lovable. For it seems we do not love just anything, but only what is lovable, and the lovable is either good or pleasant or useful. But "useful" would seem to mean whatever helps us get some good or some pleasure — so that, in the end, only the good and the pleasant are loved as ends.
Now, do men love what is good, or what is good for themselves? For the two sometimes come apart.
The same question can be asked about the pleasant.
It seems that each man loves what is good for himself: the good is lovable in itself, but what is lovable to each man is what is good for him. Someone may object that each man loves not what is really good for him but what seems good for him. It makes no difference; the lovable we are talking about will then simply be the apparently lovable.
The motives of love, then, are three. Now, love for inanimate things is not called friendship; for there is no return of affection there, and no wishing for the thing's own good. It would be absurd to wish well to wine, for instance — at most we wish that it may keep well, so that we can have it. But it is commonly said that we must wish our friend's good for his own sake. A man who wishes another's good in this way is called a well-wisher when the wish is not returned; when the well-wishing is mutual, it is called friendship.
But shouldn't we add that each must be aware of the other's goodwill? A man often wishes well to people he has never seen but supposes to be good or useful, and one of those people may feel the same way about him. These two are plainly well-wishers of one another — but who could call them friends, when neither knows how the other feels?
To be friends, then, two people must wish each other's good — from one of the three motives named above — and each must be aware of the other's feelings.
But these three motives differ from one another in kind; therefore the affections and friendships based on them will differ in kind too. The kinds of friendship, accordingly, are three — equal in number to the motives of love; for any one of the three can be the basis of a mutual affection of which each party is aware.
Now, those who love one another wish each other's good with respect to the very thing that is the motive of their love. So those whose love for one another rests on the useful do not love each other for what they are, but only insofar as each gets some good from the other.
It is the same with those whose affection rests on pleasure: people are fond of a wit, for instance, not for what he is, but as a source of pleasure to themselves.
Those who love on the ground of the useful, then, care for each other for the sake of their own good, and those who love on the ground of pleasure care for each other for the sake of what pleases them — each loving the other not as being the man he is, but as useful or pleasant.
These friendships, then, are "accidental"; for the person is loved not as being the person and character he is, but as a source of some good or some pleasure. Friendships of this kind are easily dissolved, since the parties do not stay the same: when they cease to be pleasant or useful to each other, their love ceases. And the useful is nothing permanent — it shifts from one time to another. So when the motive of the friendship disappears, the friendship dissolves with it, since it existed only with a view to that motive.
Friendship of this kind seems to be found especially among the elderly (for at that age men pursue the useful rather than the pleasant), and among those middle-aged and young men who keep a sharp eye on profit. Friends of this sort do not generally even live in each other's company; sometimes they are not even pleasant to each other — and they have no need of such constant company unless it pays. They make themselves pleasant exactly as far as they have hopes of getting something good out of it.
With these friendships people generally class the kind that exists between host and guest.
The friendship of young men is thought to rest on pleasure. Young men live by impulse, and mostly pursue what is pleasant to them here and now. But as they grow older, the things that please them change. That is why they are quick to make friendships and quick to drop them: the friendship changes along with the thing that pleases, and pleasure of that sort turns over fast.
Young men are also prone to falling in love; for erotic love is mostly a matter of impulse and rests on pleasure. So they fall in love, and soon fall out of it, passing from one state to the other many times in a single day.
Friends of this kind do want to spend their days together and live together; for that is how they get what their friendship is for.
But the perfect kind of friendship is the friendship of good men who are alike in virtue. Each alike wishes the other well as a good man, and each is a good man in his own essential character. And those who wish well to their friends for the friends' own sake are friends in the truest sense; for they feel this way toward each other because of what each is, not by accident. So their friendship lasts as long as their virtue lasts — and virtue is a lasting thing.
Again, each of them is both good simply and good for his friend; for good men are both good without qualification and useful to one another.
In the same way they are pleasant too; for good men are pleasant both in themselves and to each other. Every character delights in the acts that are proper to it and in acts of the same kind, and the acts of good men are the same or similar.
A friendship like this, as we should expect, is lasting, since it unites in itself every condition of true friendship. Every friendship has as its motive some good or some pleasure — whether in itself, or relative to the one who loves — and rests on some likeness. But in this case everything required belongs to the friends in their own nature: here there is likeness, and the rest — what is good simply and pleasant simply — and these are the most lovable things of all. So it is between people of this sort that love and friendship are found in their truest and best form.
Naturally, such friendships are rare, because such people are rare. And a friendship of this kind needs time and long acquaintance besides. As the proverb has it, people cannot know one another until they have eaten the requisite amount of salt together. Nor can they accept one another as friends, or be friends, until each has shown himself to the other, and been approved, as worthy of love. Those who are quick to treat each other as friends may wish to be friends, but they are not really friends unless they are lovable and know each other to be so. The wish for friendship can spring up quickly; friendship cannot.
This kind of friendship, then, is complete — complete in duration and in every other respect; and in it each gets from the other the same or nearly the same as he gives, which is how it should be between friends.
The friendship whose motive is pleasure bears some resemblance to this one; for good men, too, are pleasant to each other. So does the friendship whose motive is the useful; for good men are useful to one another as well. And in these cases too, the friendship is most likely to last when what each gets from the other is the same — pleasure, say — and not only the same, but drawn from the same source: a friendship between two wits, for instance, rather than one between a lover and his beloved. For in the latter case the pleasure does not come from the same source for both: the lover delights in gazing at his beloved, while the beloved likes receiving attentions. And when the bloom of youth fades, the friendship sometimes vanishes with it — the one no longer finds the beauty that pleased him, the other no longer gets the attentions. Yet they often do remain friends: namely, when their time together has brought them to care for each other's characters, and their characters are alike.
Those who in love affairs exchange not pleasure but profit are friends in a lesser degree, and less lastingly. The friendship whose motive is profit ends when the advantage ends; for it was never each other that they loved, but the profit.
For pleasure or for profit, then, even bad men can be friends with one another, and good men with bad, and men who are neither with anyone at all. But clearly only good men can be friends for each other's own sake; for bad men take no delight in one another unless there is something to be gained.
The friendship of good men is also the only one that is proof against slander; for a man is not quick to believe anyone's word against a friend he has tested for himself over the years. Between such friends there is trust, and the certainty that neither would ever wrong the other, and everything else that true friendship demands. In the other kinds, there is no such security.
Now, since men do apply the name "friends" to those who love each other for profit's sake — as states do, for expediency is thought to be the ground on which states form alliances — and also to those who love each other for pleasure's sake, as children do, perhaps we too should call such people friends, and say that there are several kinds of friendship. First, friendship in the primary and strict sense: the friendship of good men as good men. Second, the other kinds, which are called friendships by resemblance to this one; for those people are friends insofar as their relation involves some element of good, and that is the resemblance — the pleasant, after all, is a good to those who love pleasure. But these two lesser kinds do not often coincide: the same people do not usually become friends for the sake of profit and of pleasure both, since accidental properties are not often combined in one subject.
Now that we have sorted friendship into these kinds, we can say: bad men will be friends for pleasure or profit, being alike in that respect, while good men, when they are friends, love each other for what they are — that is, as good men. Good men, then, are friends simply; the others are friends accidentally, and by resemblance to them.
Just as with the virtues we distinguish the settled character or capacity from its exercise, so it is with friendship. When friends are living in each other's company, they take pleasure in each other and do each other good; when they are asleep, or far apart, they are not exercising their friendship, but they still have the disposition that would issue in friendly acts if it were exercised. Distance does not dissolve friendship itself, only its exercise. But if the absence lasts long, it is thought to wear away even the friendship itself. Hence the saying:
Full many a friendship has been loosed for want of talk together.
Old men do not seem apt for friendship, nor do sour-tempered men; there is little in them to give pleasure, and no one can spend his days in the company of what is painful, or even of what fails to please. For our nature seems to shun the painful and seek the pleasant above all things.
Those who approve of each other but do not live in each other's company seem to be well-wishers rather than friends. Nothing is so characteristic of friendship as living together. The needy seek help that way; but even the happy desire company — a solitary life suits them least of all men. And people cannot spend their lives together unless they are pleasant to each other and delight in the same things, which seems to be what comradeship requires.
The truest friendship, then, is the friendship of good men, as we have said again and again. For what is lovable and desirable, it seems, is what is good or pleasant in itself; but to each man, what is good or pleasant for him — and the friendship of good men for each other rests on both grounds at once.
But it seems that while love is a feeling, friendship is a habit. For love can just as well be directed at inanimate things, but the love of friends for one another involves choice, and choice proceeds from a habit. And when friends wish well to those they love for their own sakes, they are moved not by feeling but by habit. Again, in loving a friend, each loves what is good for himself; for whoever gains a good man as a friend gains a good for himself. So each loves what is good for himself, and each gives back the equal of what he gets, in good wishes and in pleasure. For, as the old saying joins them, "friendship is equality" — and both are found in the highest degree in the friendship of good men.
Sour-tempered men and old men are the less apt for friendship the harsher their temper is and the less pleasure they take in company; for delight in company seems to be, more than anything else, the mark of friendship and the thing that produces it. That is why the young make friends quickly and the old do not — people do not make friends with those who give them no pleasure — and neither do the sour-tempered. Such men may indeed be well-wishers: they wish each other good, and help each other in need. But they are hardly friends, since they do not spend their days together or delight in each other — and those, more than anything else, are thought to be the marks of friendship.
It is impossible to be a friend, in the full sense, to many people at the same time, just as it is impossible to be in love with many people at once. Friendship of that sort is something intense, and intense feeling takes a single object. Besides, it is not easy for one man to find many people at once who deeply please him — perhaps not many good ones either. And the friends must test each other and grow used to each other, which is a very hard thing to accomplish. In the way of profit or pleasure, on the other hand, it is quite possible to please many people; men of that sort are not rare, and their services take little time.
Of these lesser kinds, the one that comes nearer true friendship is the friendship for pleasure, when each renders the same to the other and both take pleasure in each other, or in the same things — the friendships of the young are typically like this, for a generous spirit is commoner in the young. The friendship whose motive is the useful, by contrast, is the friendship of petty traders. The happy have no need of useful friends, but they do need pleasant ones: what they want is people to live with. They may put up with what is painful for a little while, but no one could endure anything continually if it pained him — not even the good itself. So they require their friends to be pleasant. But they ought, we may add, to require them to be good as well as pleasant — and good for them; then everything a friend should be will be combined in one person.
Men in high places seem to keep their friends in separate compartments. Some of their friends are useful and others are pleasant, but rarely is the same man both; for they are not looking for people who are at once agreeable and virtuous, or people useful for noble ends. When they want pleasure they seek out wits, and for everything else they choose men who are clever at carrying out orders — and those two qualities are seldom found in one person.
The good man, as we have said, is both pleasant and useful at once. But such a man does not become the friend of a man above him in station unless the superior is also superior in virtue; otherwise the good man cannot establish proportionate equality — inferior in one respect exactly as he is superior in another. And great men are not much in the habit of conceding this.
In the friendships discussed so far, the parties are equals: they do the same for each other and wish the same for each other, or else they exchange equal amounts of different things — pleasure for profit, say. (We have already explained that these last are friendships in a lesser degree, and less lasting. Being at once like true friendship and unlike it, they seem both to be and not to be friendships. Insofar as they resemble the friendship based on virtue — the one involving pleasure and the other profit, both of which true friendship contains — they seem to be friendships; but insofar as true friendship is proof against slander and lasting, while they change quickly and differ in many other ways, they seem not to be friendships at all. The unlikeness shows.)
But besides these there is another kind of friendship — friendship between unequals: of a father for a son, and generally of an older person for a younger, of a man for a woman, of a ruler of any kind for a subject.
These, too, differ among themselves. The friendship of parent for child is not the same as that of ruler for subject; nor, for that matter, is the friendship of father for son the same as that of son for father, nor that of man for woman the same as that of woman for man. For each of these persons has a different virtue and a different function, and the grounds of their affection differ; so their love and their friendship differ too. What each does for the other, then, is not the same, and they should not expect it to be the same. But when children give their parents what is owed to those who gave them life, and parents give their children what is owed to children, then the friendship between them will be lasting, and what it ought to be. And in every friendship between unequals, the love on each side should be proportional: the better of the two — and the more useful, and so on in each case — should receive more love than he gives. For when love is proportioned to desert, a sort of equality is established; and equality seems to be a necessary condition of friendship.
But equality does not seem to work the same way in friendship as it does in justice. In the sphere of justice, "equal" means first of all "proportionate to merit," and "equal in quantity" only secondarily; in friendship it is the reverse — "equal in quantity" comes first, "proportionate to merit" second.
You can see this plainly wherever a great gap opens between two people in virtue, or vice, or wealth, or anything else: they no longer are friends, and no longer even expect to be. It is plainest of all in the case of the gods, whose superiority in every good thing is greatest. But it shows in the case of kings as well: men far beneath them do not claim their friendship, nor do men of no account expect to be friends with the best and wisest in the state. There is no drawing an exact line in such cases, no fixing the point up to which friendship can survive. Much can be taken away and the friendship remain; but when one party is removed to a vast distance — as God is — it can no longer exist.
This has prompted an objection: that in the end a friend does not really wish his friend the greatest of all goods — namely, to become a god — for then he would lose him as a friend, and so lose a good; for a friend is a good thing. If, then, we were right to say that a friend wishes his friend's good for the friend's own sake, we must add: "the friend remaining what he is." He will wish him the greatest goods a man can have — though perhaps not all of them; for every man wishes good most of all to himself.
Most people, out of a desire for honor, seem to want to be loved rather than to love; and that is why most men are fond of flatterers. For the flatterer is a friend in an inferior position — or pretends to be one, and pretends to love more than he is loved; and being loved is thought to come close to being honored, which is what most men are striving for.
But it seems they desire honor not for its own sake, but incidentally. Most men delight in being honored by those in power because of what they expect: they hope to get from them whatever they happen to want, and so they enjoy the honor as a token of good things to come. Those, on the other hand, who want the respect of good men, of men who know, are seeking to confirm their own opinion of themselves; they take joy in the assurance of their worth, trusting the judgment of those who declare it.
Being loved, however, men delight in for its own sake. It would seem to follow that being loved is better than being honored, and that friendship is desirable in itself.
But friendship seems to lie more in loving than in being loved. The proof is the delight mothers take in loving. Some mothers give their children to others to bring up, and love them, knowing them for their own, without seeking love in return, when they cannot have both — content to see the children doing well, and loving them even though the children, in their ignorance, give back nothing of what is due a mother.
Since friendship lies more in loving than in being loved, and since we praise those who love their friends, it seems that loving is the virtue of friends. So when people love each other in proportion to their worth, they are lasting friends, and theirs is a lasting friendship.
This is also how unequals can be friends most truly; for in this way they are made equal. And equality and likeness are what make friendship — above all the likeness of those who are alike in virtue. For such men, being little liable to change, stay as they were, in themselves and toward each other; they never ask anything unworthy of one another, or do anything unworthy for one another — rather, they hold each other back from anything of the sort. For it is the mark of a good man neither to go wrong himself nor to let his friend go wrong.
Bad men, as friends, have no such steadiness; they do not even stay like themselves. They become friends for a short spell, delighting in each other's wickedness.
Friends who are useful or pleasant to each other last longer than that: as long, that is, as they keep supplying pleasure or profit.
The friendship whose motive is the useful seems, more than any other kind, to be a union of opposites — rich and poor, ignorant and learned; for when a man wants something, he will give something else in exchange to get it. And perhaps we could pull the lover and his beloved, the beautiful person and the ugly one, into this class. This is why lovers sometimes make themselves ridiculous by demanding to be loved as they love. If they were equally lovable, the claim might stand; but when there is nothing lovable about them, it is absurd.
But perhaps nothing desires its opposite as such — only accidentally, the desire being really for the mean between the two, since that is what is good. For the dry, for instance, the good is not to become wet, but to reach the intermediate state; and so with the hot, and the rest of these opposites. But let us set these questions aside; they are, in truth, somewhat foreign to our present purpose.
It seems, as we said at the outset, that friendship and justice have the same field and arise on the same occasions. Every community, every association, gives some occasion for justice — and some occasion for friendship too. At any rate, people speak of their partners on a voyage or in a campaign as friends, and the same with partners in other associations. And just as far as the partnership extends, so far extends the friendship; for so far extends the justice as well.
Moreover, "friends' goods are common property," as the proverb says — and says rightly, for friendship implies community. Brothers and close comrades have everything in common; other friends have certain definite things in common, some more and some less — for friendships, too, differ in degree. And what justice requires differs in the same way. It does not demand the same from parents toward children as from brothers toward one another, nor the same from comrades as from fellow-citizens, and so on through the other kinds of friendship.
Injustice, too, takes different forms in these different relations, and it grows more serious as the friendship grows closer. It is a grosser wrong to rob a comrade than a fellow-citizen, to refuse help to a brother than to a stranger, to strike your father than to strike any other man. The claims of justice, in fact, naturally increase as friendship increases; the two cover the same ground and grow step for step together.
But all associations, all communities, seem to be — so to speak — parts of the political community, the association of citizens. For in every one of them, people join together with a view to some common interest, in pursuit of one or another of the things they need for life. But the association of citizens seems both to have been founded, and to endure, for the sake of the common interest as a whole; for this is what lawgivers aim at, and what serves the common interest of all is called just.
The other associations, then, aim at some particular advantage. Sailors work together for a successful voyage, with a view to making money or something of the kind; soldiers for a successful campaign, whether the further goal is riches, or victory, or the founding of a state; and so with the members of a tribe or a district. Other associations seem to aim at pleasure — people joining together for a feast or a club dinner, where the whole point is the food and the company. But all of these stand subordinate to the association of citizens, for that association aims not at the interest of the moment but at the interest of our whole life — even when its members hold festivals and gatherings on such occasions, honoring the gods and providing rest and amusement for themselves. For the ancient festivals and assemblies seem to have come after the harvest was gathered in — a kind of dedication of the firstfruits — since those were the seasons when people had the most leisure.
All associations, then, seem to be parts of the association of citizens; and the several kinds of friendship will correspond to the several kinds of association.
Now, of constitutions there are three kinds, and an equal number of perverted forms — corruptions, so to speak, of the three. The true constitutions are kingly government and aristocracy; and third, there is a form of government based on a property assessment, which strictly ought to be called timocracy, though most people simply call it constitutional government.
Of these, kingly government is the best and timocracy the worst. The perversion of kingly government is tyranny. Both are monarchies, but there is a vast difference between them: the tyrant seeks his own interest, the king the interest of his subjects. For a man is not properly a king unless he is self-sufficient and supplied with every good thing in overflowing measure; such a man wants nothing more, so his aim will not be his own advantage but his subjects'. A king of any other character would be a mere king by lot.
Tyranny is the opposite of kingly rule, because the tyrant pursues his own good. And of tyranny it is quite obvious that it is the worst of all — for the opposite of the best must be the worst.
Kingly government degenerates into tyranny; for tyranny is monarchy gone bad, and the bad king becomes a tyrant.
Aristocracy degenerates into oligarchy through the vice of the rulers — who, instead of distributing public property and honors according to merit, take all or most of the good things for themselves, keep the offices always in the same hands, and set the greatest store by wealth. You then have a small number of bad men in power instead of the best men.
Lastly, timocracy degenerates into democracy — and indeed the two border closely on each other; for even timocracy is meant to be rule by the many, and everyone who meets the property qualification counts as equal.
Democracy is the least bad of the corrupt forms, for it departs only slightly from the constitution it corrupts.
These, then, are the changes to which the constitutions are most liable; for these are the smallest shifts, and the ones that meet the least resistance.
Likenesses of these forms of government — patterns of them, so to speak — can be found in families. The association of a father and his sons has the form of kingly rule, for the father cares for his children. That is why Homer addresses Zeus as father; for kingly government aims at being a fatherly government. In Persia, however, the relation of father to son is tyrannical, for fathers there use their sons as slaves. The relation of master to slave is tyrannical too, since it is the master's interest that it secures. But this seems a legitimate kind of tyranny, while the Persian kind seems wrong; for different beings require different kinds of rule.
The association of husband and wife seems to be aristocratic. The husband rules in proportion to his worth — that is, in the matters that are his province — and entrusts to his wife the matters that properly belong to her. But when the man lords it over everything, he perverts the relation into an oligarchic one; for then he takes rule where he has no title to it, and not only where he is the better. Sometimes, on the other hand, the wife rules, because she is an heiress. In such cases authority rests not on merit but on wealth and influence — just as in oligarchies.
The association of brothers resembles a timocracy, for they are equal except so far as they differ in age. That is why, if they differ very widely in age, their friendship can no longer be a brotherly one.
A democratic form of association is found chiefly in households that have no master — for there everyone stands on an equal footing — or where the head of the house is weak and everyone does as he likes.
In each of these forms of government, friendship has a place exactly as far as justice does. The king shows his friendship for his subjects by the surpassing benefits he confers: being good, he does good to his subjects, and tends them with a view to their welfare as a shepherd tends his sheep — which is why Homer calls Agamemnon "shepherd of peoples."
The friendship of a father for his child is of the same kind, though the benefits conferred are greater still. For the father is the author of the child's very existence — which seems the greatest benefit of all — and of his nurture and education; and we credit these to our forefathers generally. Thus it is according to nature that fathers rule their children, forefathers their descendants, and kings their subjects.
These friendships involve the superiority of one side over the other; and that is why parents receive honor as well as service. What justice requires here is not the same on both sides, but what is proportionate to each party's worth — for that is the rule of friendship as well as of justice.
The friendship of husband and wife, again, is the same as the friendship found in an aristocracy: each benefits in proportion to merit, the better getting the greater good and each what is fitting — which is the rule of justice too.
The friendship of brothers resembles that of comrades, for they are equal and of like age — and people of that sort generally have the same feelings and the same character. The friendship in a timocracy is of this same type; for the citizens there mean to be equal and fair, so they take office in turn and share it equally, and their friendship follows the same rule.
In the corrupt forms, just as there is little room for justice, so there is little room for friendship — and least of all in the worst: in a tyranny there is little or no friendship. For where ruler and subject have nothing in common, there can be no friendship, just as there can be no justice — no more than between a workman and his tools, or the soul and the body, or master and slave. Tools, body, and slave are all benefited by those who use them; but our relations with inanimate things admit of no friendship and no justice — nor do our relations with a horse or an ox, nor with a slave as slave. For master and slave have nothing in common: the slave is a living tool, and the tool is a lifeless slave. As a slave, then, the master's relations with him admit of no friendship; but as a man, they may. For there seems to be room for some kind of justice between any man and any being that can share in law and contract — and if for justice, then for some kind of friendship too, just so far as the other deserves the name of man.
And so friendship and justice are found to some small extent even in tyrannies; but they are found to a greater extent in democracies than in any other of the corrupt forms, for there the citizens are equal and have many things in common.
All friendship, as we have said, implies association; but we may set apart from the rest the friendship of kinsmen and that of comrades. The friendships of fellow-citizens, fellow-tribesmen, fellow-sailors, and the like look, by contrast, more like association pure and simple, for they seem to rest on a kind of compact. With these we might also class the friendship of host and guest.
The friendship of kinsmen seems to include several species, but all of them appear to depend on the friendship of parent and child. Parents love their children as part of themselves; children love their parents as the source of their being. But parents know their children better than the children know that these are their parents; and the one who gives life is more closely attached to what springs from him than the offspring is to its maker. For what proceeds from us belongs to us — as a tooth or a hair or anything of the sort belongs to its owner — but we do not belong to it at all, or belong to it in a lesser degree.
There is a difference in time as well: parents love their offspring from the moment of birth, but children come to love their parents only after time has passed, when they have acquired understanding, or at least perception.
These considerations also show why mothers love their children more than fathers do.
Parents, then, love their children as themselves — for what proceeds from us is, as it were, a second self, a self set apart — while children love their parents as the source of their being, and brothers love one another because they spring from the same source. Their common relation to that source makes an identity between them; hence the sayings "the same blood," "the same stock," and so on. They are, in a way, the same thing in separate persons.
Friendship between brothers is greatly furthered by being brought up together and by nearness in age; for those of the same age naturally take to one another, as the saying goes, and those who are used to one another naturally make comrades of one another — which is why the friendship of brothers comes to resemble the friendship of comrades.
Cousins and other kinsfolk are attached to one another for the same reason — namely, that they come of the same stock; and the attachment is closer or looser according as the founder of the family is nearer or more remote.
The friendship of children for their parents — like that of men for the gods — is friendship for what is good and superior to oneself: for the source of the greatest benefits, of life itself, of nurture, of education from birth onward.
Friendship of this kind brings more of both pleasure and profit than the friendship of strangers, in proportion as the life shared is greater.
The friendship of brothers has all the marks of the friendship of comrades, and has them in a greater degree — provided the brothers are good, and generally alike — inasmuch as they belong more to each other and have loved each other from birth; they are more alike in character, being of the same stock, brought up together, and educated alike; and they have had the longest and surest experience of one another.
In all the other friendships of kinship, the same elements will be found in proportion to the closeness of the tie.
The friendship of husband and wife seems to be natural; for human beings are by nature more inclined to join in couples than to form states — since the family is earlier than the state and more indispensable, and the propagation of the species is more fundamental to animal life. The other animals associate for this purpose alone; but husband and wife live together not merely to have children but to supply the needs of life. For their functions are divided and distinct from the start: they supply each other's wants, each contributing to the common stock. And so this kind of friendship is thought to bring both pleasure and profit with it. But it will rest on virtue too, if the two are good; for each has a virtue of their own, and each will delight in the goodness that answers it.
Children, moreover, seem to be a bond that knits husband and wife together — which is why childless unions dissolve more quickly. For children are a good that both have in common, and what people have in common holds them together.
To ask on what terms a man should live with his wife — and, in general, friend with friend — is the same as asking what justice requires in each case; for what is required of a man toward a friend is not what is required toward a stranger, a comrade, or a fellow-student.
There are three kinds of friendship, as we said at the outset; and within each kind there are friendships between equals and friendships between unequals. Sometimes two equally good men become friends, sometimes a better man and a worse; and so with those who are pleasant to each other, and with those whose friendship aims at profit — sometimes their services are equal, sometimes not.
Now, those who are equal should establish equality by loving each other, and doing everything else, equally; those who are unequal should establish it by making what each renders proportionate to the other's greater or lesser merit.
But accusations and reproaches arise solely, or mostly, in friendships whose motive is profit — as we should expect. Those whose friendship rests on virtue are eager to do good to one another (for that is the office of virtue and of friendship), and between people who are rivals in that, no accusations or quarrels can arise. No one is embittered against a man who loves him and does him good; if he has any grace in him, he pays the service back with a like service. And the one who outdoes the other will not reproach his friend, since he is getting exactly what he desires — for what each desires is the good.
Nor do such quarrels readily arise in friendships whose motive is pleasure; for both get what they want at the same moment, if they delight in each other's company. And a man who accused his friend of not being agreeable would only make himself ridiculous, since he was under no compulsion to keep the company.
But the friendship whose motive is utility is fruitful in accusations. Since the parties use each other purely for their own advantage, each always wants the larger share, each thinks he has less than his due, and each reproaches the other for not doing as much for him as he needs and deserves — though in truth the one doing the service can never supply all that the other wants.
Now it seems that, just as the rules of justice are of two kinds — the unwritten, and those set down in law — so the friendship of utility is of two kinds: one moral, resting on character and trust, the other legal, resting on stated terms. And accusations arise most readily when the relation is understood in one sense at the beginning and in the other at the end.
The legal kind is the kind with specified conditions, and it has two forms. One is purely commercial, on the principle of cash on delivery; the other allows more time, but still stipulates a definite return for a definite service. In this second form what is owed is plain and cannot be disputed, but the delay in payment carries an element of friendliness — which is why in some states there is no legal recovery in such cases: it is held that a man who gives credit must take the consequences.
The moral kind has no specified conditions: a man gives a present, or whatever it may be, as one friend to another. But afterward he claims as much back, or more — treating what he gave not as a gift but as a loan. And since he wants to end the relation in a different spirit from the one in which he entered it, he will accuse the other. This happens because all men, or nearly all, wish for what is noble but choose what is profitable; and while it is noble to do a good turn without expecting a return, it is profitable to be on the receiving end.
In such cases, then, we should make an equivalent return for what we received, if we have the power — for we must not hold a man as a friend against his will. We should recognize that we made a mistake at the start and accepted a benefit from the wrong person: he was no friend and was not acting for the deed's own sake, so we should close the relation just as if we had received a service on stated terms. And what we should return is what we would have agreed to repay had we been able; if we had been unable, the giver himself would not have expected repayment. So we may fairly say: repay if you can.
But at the very outset we ought to consider carefully who is doing us the service, and on what understanding — so that we can accept it on that understanding, or else decline it.
It is a debatable question whether the return should be measured by the value of the service to the receiver or by its cost to the giver. Receivers tend to say that what they got was a small matter to their benefactors and could just as well have been had from others — talking the service down. Givers say the opposite: that it was the best they had, that it could not have been had from anyone else, and that it was given in a moment of danger or some other pressing need.
Perhaps we may settle it this way: if profit is the friendship's motive, the benefit to the receiver is the measure. He is the one who asked for the service, and the other renders it expecting an equal return; so the amount of the assistance is fixed by the extent of the benefit, and the receiver should pay back as much as he got — or even more, for that would be the nobler course.
In friendships based on virtue, on the other hand, accusations of this sort do not occur; there, the measure of the service would seem to be the giver's choice — the purpose behind the deed. For virtue and moral character lie in choice.
Quarrels occur in unequal friendships too; for sometimes each party claims the larger share — and when that happens, the friendship dissolves. The better of the two thinks he ought to have more: "the larger share belongs to the good man," he says. The more useful of the two makes the same claim: "everyone agrees," he says, "that a useless person should not share equally; friendship turns into unpaid charity unless what each gets out of it is proportionate to what he puts in." Such people imagine that the same rule should hold in friendship as in a business partnership, where those who invest more take the larger share.
The needy man and the inferior man argue the opposite way: "it is precisely a good friend's business," they say, "to help you when you are in need. What is the use of being friends with a good man or a powerful man if you are to get nothing by it?"
It seems that both claims are right — that each ought to receive the larger share, but not of the same things. The superior should get more honor, the needy man more profit; for honor is the tribute due to virtue and to doing good, while need finds its proper relief in material gain.
This is recognized in constitutions as well. No honor is paid to the man who contributes nothing to the common stock of good; what is common is distributed among those who benefit the community, and honor is part of what is common. A man cannot make money off the community and expect to be honored by it too; no one is content to take the smaller share of everything. So to the man who spends his money on public objects we pay honor, and to the man whose services can be paid in money we pay money; for by giving each what is proportionate to his merit, equality is established and friendship preserved — as we said before.
The same principles, then, must govern the dealings of unequal individuals. He who is benefited by another — in his purse or in his character — must give honor in return, repaying with what it is in his power to give. For friendship asks for what is possible, not for what is strictly owed; what is owed is sometimes impossible to pay, as with the honor owed to the gods and to parents. No one could ever pay that debt in full; but the man who serves them as well as he is able is held to fulfill his obligation.
For this reason it would seem that a son may not disown his father, though a father may disown his son. A debtor must pay; and nothing a son can do will ever make full return for what he has received, so he remains forever in debt. But a creditor is free to release his debtor — and so a father is free to cast off his son. At the same time, it seems unlikely that anyone would ever actually disown a son unless the son were an utter scoundrel; for natural affection aside, it is only human not to push away the support a son would bring. The son, though — if he is a scoundrel — will look for ways to avoid helping his father, or at least will not be eager to; for most men are glad enough to receive benefits, but avoid conferring them as unprofitable.
So much, then, for these questions.
In all friendships between unlike partners, it is proportionate exchange that keeps things equal and keeps the friendship alive — we have said this already. It works just as it does in the association of citizens, where the shoemaker gets, in exchange for his shoes, a return proportionate to what they are worth, and so with the weaver and everyone else.
In those civic cases, a common measure is ready to hand: money. Money is the standard everything is referred to and measured against.
In erotic friendships, though, there is no such standard, and so the lover sometimes complains that he loves intensely and gets no love back — when, perhaps, there is simply nothing lovable about him. And often the beloved complains that the lover once promised everything and now delivers nothing.
Complaints like these tend to arise when one party is in the friendship for pleasure and the other for profit, and neither is getting what he wants. A friendship built on those motives dissolves the moment the partners stop getting the very thing they became friends for; neither one loved the other's self — each loved only something the other had, and something not built to last. Which is why these friendships are not built to last either. But friendship based on character is its own reward, and so, as we said, it tends to endure.
Friends also quarrel when they find they are getting something different from what they wanted — for when you fail to get what you want, it is as if you got nothing at all. There is a story about a harper that makes the point. A man promised him that the better he played, the more he would be paid; but when dawn came and the harper claimed what was promised, the man replied that he had already paid — pleasure for pleasure. Now, if pleasure was what both of them wanted, that would settle it. But if one wanted pleasure and the other wanted profit, and one has what he wants while the other does not, the bargain has not been fairly carried out; for what a man happens to want is what he sets his heart on, and it is for the sake of that — and only that — that he agrees to render his particular service.
But who should set the value of the service — the one who gives first, or the one who receives first? The one who gives first seems to leave the pricing to the other. They say this was the practice of Protagoras: after teaching a subject, he would tell the pupil to estimate what the knowledge was worth to him, and that is the fee he would take.
Some prefer the rule of the proverb: "Let a friend be content with his stated wage."
But a man who takes his money up front and then delivers nothing — because he promised more than he could perform — is rightly held accountable; he has not fulfilled his contract. (The sophists, perhaps, are forced to take payment in advance, since nobody would pay for what they know once they had heard it.)
So: whoever fails to do what he has already been paid for is rightly charged with it. But where there is no explicit agreement about the service, two cases arise. (a) When one man helps another freely, for that other's own sake, no accusation can arise — as we said, that is the very nature of friendship based on virtue. Here the return should be measured by the purpose of the man who did the first service, for purpose is the mark of both the friend and virtue. The same rule seems to apply between a philosopher and his students: the worth of what he gives cannot be measured in money, and no honor could fully repay him; but here, as with gods and parents, what is possible is accepted as enough. (b) If, however, the first gift was made not in that spirit but on the understanding that there would be a return, then the return should, ideally, be one that both parties agree is proportionate to what was given. And if they cannot agree, it seems not only necessary but just that the one who received the first benefit should set its value: whatever advantage he actually got from it, or whatever he would have paid for the pleasure of it, that amount repays the giver in full. This is plainly how it works in sales; and in some states the law gives no remedy at all in voluntary contracts, on the principle that once you have given a man credit, you must finish the bargain in the same spirit in which you began it. It is held fairer for the service to be valued by the man who was trusted than by the man who trusted him. For most things are valued differently by those who have them and those who want them: what belongs to us, and what we give away, always looks precious to us. All the same, the return must be measured by the value the receiver sets on the service — though he ought, perhaps, to price it not at what it seems worth now that he has it, but at the value he put on it before he had it.
Some further questions come up here. Should a father's claims on his son be unlimited, so that the son obeys him in everything — or should a sick son obey the doctor, and should a citizen electing a general choose the man skilled in war? Similarly: should you help your friend rather than a good man, and repay a benefactor rather than do a favor for a comrade, if you cannot do both?
Perhaps we may say that laying down precise rules for all such cases is scarcely possible; the cases differ in every possible way — in how much is at stake, and in whether the act is noble or merely necessary. But this much is fairly clear: no single person's claims override everyone else's; and as a general rule we should repay benefits received before doing favors for comrades — just as, if we had borrowed money, we ought to pay our creditors before giving presents to our friends.
But even this rule may not hold in every case. Suppose a man has been ransomed from bandits. Should he in turn ransom his ransomer, whoever that may be — or repay him when he asks, even though he has not been captured — in preference to ransoming his own father? It would seem a man ought to ransom his father even before himself.
So, as we said: generally speaking, we should repay what we owe; but if giving instead is nobler, or meets a more pressing need, we should lean that way. Sometimes it is not even fair to repay the original service — for instance, when one man helped another knowing him to be good, while the repayment would mean helping a man he believes to be bad. Sometimes, likewise, you are not bound to lend in turn to a man who once lent to you: A may have lent to B fully expecting repayment, because B is honorable, while B has no hope of ever being repaid by A, who is a scoundrel. If that is the true state of things, A's demand for a return loan is not fair; and even if the facts are otherwise, so long as they think this of each other, their conduct will seem natural enough.
As we have said many times, statements about human feelings and actions can only be as definite as their subject matter allows.
It is fairly plain, then, that on the one hand not everyone's claims are the same, and on the other hand the father's claims do not override all others — just as Zeus does not receive all our sacrifices. The claims of parents, brothers, comrades, and benefactors are all different, and to each we must render what is properly his own and his due.
And this is how people actually behave. To a wedding they invite their kin, for kin share in the family and so in everything that concerns it; and for the same reason it is thought that kin have first claim to be invited to funerals.
Parents would seem to have a special claim on us for their support: we owe it to them, and it is nobler to sustain the lives of those who gave us our own than to sustain ourselves.
Honor, too, we should pay our parents, as we do the gods — but not every kind of honor. The honor due a father is not the same as the honor due a mother, nor do we owe either of them the honor due a wise man or a good general, but precisely a father's honor and a mother's honor.
To all our elders, again, we should pay the honor their age is due — rising when they enter, giving them the place of honor at the table, and so on. Between comrades and brothers, on the other hand, there should be frank speech and everything in common. And to kin, to fellow tribesmen, to fellow citizens, and to everyone else, we should always try to give what is due — assigning to each what properly belongs to him, according to how close he is to us and how good or useful he is. When the people involved are of one kind, the assignment is fairly easy; when they are of different kinds, it is harder. But that is no reason to shirk the task; we must draw the distinctions as best we can.
Another hard question: should we or should we not break off friendship with people who are no longer what they were?
Where the friendship was based on profit or pleasure, perhaps there is nothing puzzling: when those give out, the friends naturally part. It was the profit or the pleasure they loved; when that is gone, it is only to be expected that the love goes too. But complaints are likely if a man who loved another for profit or pleasure pretended to love him for his character. As we said at the outset, quarrels between friends most often arise when the real basis of the friendship is not what it was supposed to be. If a man deceives himself — assuming he is loved for his character when the other's behavior gives no ground for it — he has only himself to blame. But if he is taken in by the other's pretense, he has fair ground for complaint against the impostor — more, even, than against a counterfeiter of the coinage, since what has been tampered with is more precious.
But suppose you take a man into your friendship as a good man, and he becomes — and shows himself to be — a bad one. Should you still love him? Surely that is impossible: not everything is lovable, only the good. What is bad is not lovable and should not be loved; we ought not to love what is bad, nor make ourselves like what is worthless — and as we said before, like makes friends with like.
Should the friendship, then, be broken off at once? Perhaps not in every case — only where the badness is incurable. Where reform is possible, we are more bound to help a friend's character than his fortune, since character is the nobler thing and has more to do with friendship. Still, a man who does withdraw his friendship in such a case does nothing unnatural: it was not this man he made friends with. His friend has become someone else, and since he cannot restore him, he keeps his distance.
But suppose one friend stays as he was while the other improves and comes to far surpass him in virtue: should the better man still treat the other as a friend? It is hardly possible. We see this most plainly when the gap grows wide — take a boyhood friendship. If one of the two remains a child in understanding while the other has become a man in the fullest sense of the word, how can they still be friends, when the things that please them, the things they rejoice and grieve over, are no longer the same? They will not even agree in their tastes about each other; and without that, we found, people cannot be friends, for they cannot live together. (But this point has already been discussed.)
Shall we say, then, that the better man should treat his old friend as no more than a stranger, exactly as if they had never been friends? Perhaps we can go further: he should not entirely forget the old intimacy. Just as we hold that we should serve friends before strangers, so former friends retain some claim on us for the friendship that once was — unless it was extraordinary depravity that parted us.
Our friendly relations toward others — all the marks by which friendship is defined — seem to be derived from our relations toward ourselves. A friend is sometimes described as one who wishes and does what is good, or seems good, for the other person's own sake; or as one who wishes his friend to exist and to live, for the friend's sake. (This is what mothers feel toward their children, and what quarreling friends still feel for one another.) Others describe a friend as one who spends his life with another and chooses what he chooses, or as one who shares his friend's griefs and joys. (This, too, is found above all in mothers.) And friendship is regularly defined by one or another of these marks.
Now, every one of these marks is found in the good man's relation to himself — and in other men just so far as they suppose themselves good; but, as we have said, virtue and the good man seem to be the standard in everything. For the good man is of one mind with himself: he desires the same things with his whole soul. He wishes for himself what is good, and what seems good, and he does it — for it is the mark of the good man to work out what is good — and he does it for his own sake, that is, for the sake of the rational part of him, which seems to be what a man's self really is. He wishes himself to live and be preserved, and above all the part of him with which he thinks; for to the good man, existence is a good. And it is for himself that each of us wishes what is good: no one would choose to have every good in the world (as, say, God is in complete possession of the good) on condition of becoming someone else — only on condition of remaining just who he is. And a man's reason would seem to be his self, or at least to be his self more truly than anything else in him.
Such a man also wishes to spend time with himself; his own company is pleasant to him. The memory of his past life is sweet, and his hopes for the future are good — and such hopes are pleasant. His mind is well stocked with matter for contemplation. And he shares his own griefs and joys: the same things pain and please him at every season, not one thing now and another thing later — he is, so to speak, not a man who changes his mind.
Since, then, all these marks are found in the good man's relation to himself, and since he stands to his friend as he stands to himself — for his friend is another self — friendship is defined by one or another of these marks, and those in whom they are found are called friends.
Whether friendship toward oneself is possible we may set aside for now; though it would seem possible insofar as a man is two or more selves — that follows from what has been said, and from the fact that the extreme of friendship for another is likened to friendship for oneself.
But the marks we have listed appear to be found in the general run of men, who are not good. Perhaps we should say that men share in them just so far as they are satisfied with themselves and believe themselves good. The utterly worthless and impious never have them — never even seem to. Indeed we might almost say flatly that no one who is not good has them; for such men are not at one with themselves. They desire one thing and wish another, like the weak-willed, who choose what is pleasant but harmful instead of what they themselves hold to be good. Others, through cowardice or laziness, shrink from doing what they believe is best for them. And those who have done many terrible things out of wickedness come to hate life, wish to be rid of it, and sometimes actually destroy themselves.
Bad men hunt for company to pass their time in and run from their own; alone, they remember much that is painful and expect more of the same, but other people's company distracts them from it. There is nothing lovable in them, so they have no friendly feeling toward themselves.
The man who is not good, then, cannot share his own griefs and joys, for his soul is divided against itself. One part of him, because of its viciousness, is pained at holding back from something while another part is pleased; one part pulls this way, another that, as if tearing him to pieces between them. Or if it really is impossible to be pained and pleased at the same moment, then at least a little while later he is pained that he was pleased, and wishes those pleasures had never come his way — for men who are not good are full of remorse.
So we may say flatly: the man who is not good has no friendly feeling even toward himself, since there is nothing lovable in him. And if to be in this state is utter misery, we ought to strain every nerve to avoid vice and to try to be good; for that is how a man comes to be a friend to himself, and comes to be a friend to others.
Goodwill looks like friendship, but it is not friendship. We can have goodwill toward people we do not know, and who have no idea we wish them well — and there can be no friendship there. But this we have said already.
Nor is goodwill the same as affection, for it has none of the intensity and desire that go with affection.
Affection, moreover, requires close acquaintance, while goodwill can spring up in a moment — as it does toward athletes competing for a prize. We become well-wishers of a competitor and are eager for him to win, though we would not lift a finger to help him; for, as we said, our goodwill in such cases is sudden, and the fondness is only skin-deep.
The truth seems to be that goodwill is the germ of friendship, just as pleasure in the sight of a person is the germ of erotic love. No one falls in love without first being delighted by visible beauty; but delighting in someone's beauty is not yet being in love — not unless you also ache in his absence and long for his presence. In the same way, people cannot be friends without first becoming well-wishers, but well-wishers are not yet friends on that account: they merely wish good to those they favor, and would not actually help them in anything, or put themselves out for them. So one might say — stretching the term — that goodwill is friendship lying idle, which with time and close acquaintance may become friendship proper. Not the friendship whose motive is profit, though, nor the one whose motive is pleasure, for goodwill has no place in those. The man who has received a benefit does return goodwill to his benefactor, and justly so; but the man who wishes another prosperity in hopes of the good things he can get through him does not really wish the other well — he wishes himself well, just as a man is no real friend if his service has one eye on profit.
Generally speaking, goodwill is founded on some kind of excellence or goodness: it arises when someone strikes us as beautiful, or brave, or endowed with some other fine quality — as we said in the case of the athletes.
Concord — unity of mind — also seems to be a mark of friendship. That is exactly why it is not mere agreement in opinion, which is possible even between total strangers.
Nor do we speak of concord when people agree in judgment on just any subject — on astronomy, say; being of one mind about that has nothing to do with friendship. We say concord prevails in a state when the citizens agree about what is in the common interest, choose the same course, and carry out what they have decided together. Concord, then, is about practical matters — and among those, matters of importance, where both parties, or all parties, can get what they want. A state is of one mind, for instance, when all the citizens agree that offices shall be elective, or that an alliance shall be made with Sparta, or that Pittacus shall govern — Pittacus himself being willing to take the office. But when each man wants the power for himself, like the brothers in Euripides' Phoenissae, there is discord. Being of one mind is not just each thinking of the same thing, whatever it may be, but thinking of it under the same terms — as when the common people and the upper classes both agree that the best men should govern; for then everyone gets what he wants.
Concord, then, appears to be — just as it is called — the friendship of states: it concerns the common interest, and things that bear heavily on how we live.
This kind of concord is found among good men. They are of one mind with themselves and with each other, standing, so to speak, always on the same ground; their wishes hold steady and do not ebb and flow like the Euripus. They wish for what is just and for the common interest, and they work for it together. But men who are not good cannot be of one mind, except to a small degree — just as they cannot be friends except briefly. They strive to take more than their share of the profits while taking less than their share of the labors and public burdens; and each man, while aiming at this for himself, keeps a sharp eye on his neighbor and blocks him from doing the same — for if they are not on guard against each other, the community is ruined. The result is discord: each compelling the other to do what is just while refusing to do it himself.
Benefactors seem to love the people they have benefited more than the beneficiaries love them back. This looks irrational, and people hunt for the explanation.
Most people think the reason is that the one is a debtor and the other a creditor. Just as, with a loan, the debtor would be glad to see his creditor out of the way while the lender positively worries over his debtor's safety, so — the theory goes — the benefactor wants his beneficiary to stay alive in hopes of a return favor, while the beneficiary is in no hurry to repay.
Epicharmus might perhaps say that people who talk this way are "looking from the cheap seats," but it sounds true to life; most men do have short memories, and are more eager to receive benefits than to confer them.
But the real cause, it would seem, lies deeper in the nature of things, and the creditor's case is not even a true parallel. Creditors feel no affection for their debtors — only a wish that they stay safe long enough to pay. But those who have done a kindness feel real love and affection for those they have benefited, even if the beneficiaries are of no use to them and never will be.
The same thing can be seen in craftsmen: every craftsman loves the work of his own hands more than the work would love him if it came to life. Poets perhaps carry it furthest: they love their own poems to excess, doting on them as if they were their children.
The benefactor's case is like theirs. The person he has benefited is, so to speak, his handiwork; and so he loves his work more than the work loves its maker. The reason is this: existence is something we all desire and love; but we exist in activity — in living and doing; and what a man makes is, in a way, its maker in activity. So he loves his work because he loves existence. And this is simply the nature of things: what a thing is potentially, its work exhibits in activity.
Besides, for the benefactor there is something noble in his act, so that he delights in the person who embodies it; but for the beneficiary there is nothing noble in the benefactor — at most something useful, and that is less pleasant and less lovable.
Again, what is pleasant is the activity of the present, the hope of the future, the memory of the past; and the most pleasant — and most lovable — is what we are actively engaged in. For the benefactor, his deed endures (for the noble is lasting); for the beneficiary, the advantage soon passes away.
Again, the memory of noble deeds is pleasant, the memory of merely profitable ones hardly pleasant at all, or less so — though with expectation the reverse seems true.
Again, loving is like doing something; being loved is like having something done to you. And the ones who have the doer's part in the transaction naturally feel, and show, the more love.
Again, we are all fonder of what has cost us effort — those who made their money love it more than those who inherited it. Now, receiving a benefit costs no labor, while conferring one takes trouble. This is also why mothers love their children more than fathers do: bearing them costs the mother more, and she knows better that they are her own. And that would seem to be the mark of benefactors too.
Here is another question people raise: ought we to love ourselves most, or someone else?
We criticize, it is said, those who love themselves most, and we call them "self-loving" as an insult. The bad man, it is thought, does everything with an eye to his own advantage — and the worse he is, the more he does so; hence the complaint that he never acts except for himself. The good man, by contrast, is supposed to act because the act is noble — and the better he is, the more the noble is his motive — and for his friend's sake, setting his own interest aside.
But this theory disagrees with the facts, and no wonder. For everyone grants that we ought to love best the man who is most truly a friend; and the truest friend is the one who, in wishing another well, wishes it for the other's own sake, even if no one will ever know. But all these marks of friendship — these and all the others that go into its definition — are found most of all in a man's relation to himself. We have already seen that all our friendly relations to others grow out of our relation to ourselves. And the proverbs all point the same way: "Friends have one soul," "Friends hold everything in common," "Equality makes friendship," "The knee is nearer than the shin." Every one of these holds above all of a man's relation to himself, for a man is his own best friend. So, it seems, he ought to love himself most of all.
Naturally people are puzzled about which side to take, since both have their appeal. Perhaps the right method with conflicting claims of this kind is first to pull them apart, and then to determine how far, and in what sense, each is true. So here: if we first find out what "self-loving" means in each claim, the difficulty may clear itself up.
Those who use "self-loving" as a reproach apply it to people who take more than their share of money, honors, and bodily pleasures. These are the things most men crave; they set their hearts on them as the best things in the world, which is why the competition for them is so fierce. Those who grab for more than their share of them are indulging their animal appetites and their passions generally — in a word, the irrational part of their nature. And most men are like this; that is how the word came by its bad sense — from the fact that most self-love is self-love of the bad kind. People who are self-loving in this way deserve the reproach.
That it really is to grabbers of this sort that most people apply the word is easy to show. If what a man always insisted on were that he, rather than anyone else, should do the just thing, or the self-controlled thing, or any other virtuous thing — if, in a word, he were always claiming the noble course for himself — no one would call him self-loving, and no one would blame him.
And yet such a man would seem to be the truer lover of self. At any rate, he assigns the noblest things to himself, the things most truly good; he gratifies the ruling part of himself and obeys it in everything. Just as the ruling part of a state, or of any other system, seems more than anything else to be the state or the system, so the ruling part of a man seems most truly to be the man himself. The man who loves and gratifies this part of himself is the truest lover of self.
Again, we call a man self-restrained or weak-willed according to whether his reason is or is not in command — implying that his reason is his self; and when a man has acted under the guidance of his reason, we say in the fullest sense that he did the deed himself, and did it willingly.
Clearly, then, this part of us is our self, or is most truly our self, and the good man loves it more than anyone else does. So he, above all men, will be self-loving — but in a different sense from the man we reproach, differing from him by the whole distance between living by reason and living by passion, between desiring the noble and desiring what looks profitable.
Those who care beyond other men for noble deeds are welcomed and praised by everyone. And if all men were competing with each other for the noble, each straining every nerve to act as nobly as possible, then the community would have everything it needs, and each man individually would have the greatest of all goods — for that is what virtue is.
The good man, therefore, ought to be self-loving: by doing what is noble he benefits himself and helps others at the same time. The bad man ought not to be: by following his passions, which are not good, he will injure both himself and his neighbors.
With the bad man, then, what he ought to do and what he does pull apart; with the good man, what he ought to do is exactly what he does — for reason always chooses what is best for itself, and the good man obeys his reason.
Again, it is quite true that the good man does much for his friends and for his country, and will even die for them if he must. He will throw away money, honors — in a word, all the goods men fight over — keeping the noble for himself. He would rather have one brief spell of intense joy than a long stretch of mild pleasure; one year of noble living than many years of the ordinary kind; one great and noble deed than many little ones. That, we may say, is what the man gets who gives his life for others: he chooses for himself something noble on a grand scale.
Such a man will hand over wealth to make his friend richer: the friend gets the money, but he gets the noble deed — so the greater good falls to him.
He acts the same way with honors and offices: he will give them all up to his friend, since that, to him, is noble and praiseworthy.
No wonder, then, that we count him good, when he chooses the noble above everything else.
He may even give up an opportunity for action to his friend: it can be nobler to be the cause of your friend's doing a deed than to do it yourself.
In everything for which he is praised, then, the good man plainly assigns the larger share of the noble to himself. In this sense, as we said, a man ought to be self-loving — but not in the sense in which most men are.
Another disputed question: does the happy man need friends or not?
It is said that the blessed and self-sufficient have no need of friends. They are already stocked with good things; being self-sufficient, they need nothing more; and a friend — being another self — is there to supply what you cannot supply for yourself. Hence the line:
When the god provides, what need of friends?
But it seems strange, while granting the happy man every good thing, to deny him friends — supposedly the greatest of all external goods.
Besides, if it is more the mark of a friend to confer benefits than to receive them, and if doing good to others is the mark of the good man and of virtue, and if it is nobler to benefit friends than strangers, then the good man will need friends to receive his benefits.
Hence the further question whether friends are more needed in prosperity or in adversity — the thought being that in adversity we need people to help us, and in prosperity people for us to help.
Again, it is surely absurd to make the happy man a hermit. No one would choose to have every good in the world on condition of having it alone; for man is a social being, built by nature to share his life with others. So the happy man must have this good too, since he has everything that is naturally good for man. And obviously it is better to spend one's days with friends and good men than with strangers and whoever happens along. The happy man, then, must have friends.
Then what do the people on the other side mean, and in what sense are they right? Is it that most men take "friends" to mean useful people? Friends of that sort the blessed man certainly will not need, since he already has everything good. Nor will he need — or will need only a little — the friendship based on pleasure: his life is pleasant already and requires no imported pleasure. Because he does not need those kinds of friends, people conclude that he does not need friends at all.
But that conclusion, I think, is false. We said at the outset that happiness is a certain activity, an exercise of our powers; and an activity plainly comes to be in time — it is not a possession, like property acquired once and for all. Now, if happiness consists in living and being active; if the good man's activity is good and pleasant in itself, as we said at the start; if the sense that a thing is our own is itself a source of pleasure; and if we can contemplate our neighbors better than ourselves, and their actions better than our own — then the actions of good men who are his friends are a pleasure to the good man, for they unite both marks of the naturally pleasant. The blessed man, therefore, will need friends of this kind, since he desires to contemplate actions that are good and that are his own — and the actions of a good man who is his friend are both.
Again, the happy man's life is supposed to be pleasant. But if he is solitary, life is hard for him: it is very difficult to keep continuously active all by yourself, and much easier in company and toward others. With friends, then, his activity will be more continuous — and it is pleasant in itself, which is just what the blessed man's life ought to be. For the good man, as good, delights in acts of virtue and is pained by acts of vice, exactly as a musician delights in good music and winces at bad.
Besides, as Theognis says, living with good men gives a kind of training in virtue.
But if we look a little deeper into the nature of things, a good friend appears to be desirable to the good man by nature. Here is the argument.
What is naturally good, we have already said, is good and pleasant in itself to the good man.
Now, life in animals is defined by the power of feeling; in man, by the power of feeling or thought. But a power points to its exercise, and the reality lies in the exercise. So life, in its full reality, seems to be feeling or thinking.
Life, again, is one of the things good and pleasant in themselves; for it is determinate — formed — and the formed belongs to the nature of the good. And what is naturally good is good to the good man; which is why life seems pleasant to everyone. (But we must not take as our sample a bad and corrupt life, or a life of pain; such a life is formless, as is everything in it. We shall try to throw some light on the nature of pain later on.)
Life itself, then, is good and pleasant — as we can also see from the fact that everyone desires it, and the good and blessed most of all; for life is most desirable to them, and their life is the most blessed.
Now, he who sees is aware that he sees; he who hears is aware that he hears; he who walks is aware that he walks. Whatever we do, something in us perceives that we are active; so whenever we feel or think, we are conscious that we feel or think.
But to be conscious that we feel or think is to be conscious that we exist; for our existence, we found, is feeling or thinking.
And consciousness of life is pleasant in itself; for life is naturally good, and to be conscious that a good thing is present is pleasant.
Life, then, is desirable, and most of all desirable to the good man, because his existence is good and pleasant to him: the consciousness of what is good in itself gives him joy.
But the good man stands to his friend as he stands to himself — for his friend is another self. So, just as his own existence is desirable to each man, his friend's existence is desirable too, in the same way or nearly so.
Now, existence, we found, is desirable because of the consciousness that one's self is good — and such consciousness is pleasant in itself.
So the good man needs to be conscious of his friend's existence as well; and this consciousness comes from living together and sharing talk and thought. That, surely, is what "living together" means when we say it of human beings — not grazing in the same field, which is what it means when we say it of cattle.
Put it all together, then. If his own existence is desirable in itself to the good man, being naturally good and pleasant; and if his friend's existence is desirable to him in nearly the same way — then a friend is one of the things desirable for him. But what is desirable for him he ought to have, or else he is incomplete at just that point. Our conclusion, therefore: the man who is to be happy must have good friends.
Should we make as many friends as possible? Or — as with guest-friends, where we approve the saying "neither a host of guests nor yet none" — is it best in friendship too neither to be friendless nor to have too many friends?
For friends chosen with an eye to usefulness, the saying fits perfectly. Repaying the services of a crowd is troublesome, and life is simply not long enough to do it. More useful friends than one's own life requires are superfluous, and a hindrance to living nobly; so we have no need of them.
Of friends chosen for pleasure, again, a few are enough — as a little sweetening is enough in our diet.
But good men — should we make as many of them our friends as we can, or is there a limit to the size of a circle of friends, as there is to the size of a state? Ten men do not make a state, and a hundred thousand make something that is no longer a state. The right number of citizens is perhaps not one fixed figure, but any number within certain limits. So too with friends there is a limit, and it is, we may say, the largest number one can live with — for living together, as we saw, is one of the most essential marks of friendship, and it is quite plainly impossible to live with a great many people and spread yourself among them all.
Moreover, one's friends must be friends with one another if they are all to spend their days together; and among many, this is hard to arrange.
Again, it becomes hard to share properly in the joys and sorrows of many; you are likely to find yourself called on to rejoice with one and grieve with another at the same moment. Perhaps, then, the best plan is not to collect as many friends as possible, but as many as suffice for a life in common; indeed, an intense friendship with a great number seems impossible.
For the same reason, one cannot be in love with several people at once: erotic love is a sort of superlative friendship, and that is possible only toward one person — just as intense friendship is possible only toward a few.
And this is what we actually find. People are not bound together in crowds by the sort of friendship comrades have; the friendships the poets celebrate are friendships of two. The man with a host of friends, who greets everyone like a brother, seems to be really friends with no one — except in the way fellow-citizens are friends. He is the man we call obsequious.
As fellow-citizens, it is true, one can be friends with a great many people without being obsequious — being, in fact, a genuinely good man. But the friendship that rests on virtue and on the friend's own self cannot be felt for many; we should be well content to find even a few friends of that kind.
Is it in prosperity or in adversity that we need friends more? We turn to them in both: in misfortune we need help; in prosperity we need people to live with and people to do good to — for we wish to do good.
In adversity, then, the need is more pressing, and what we need there are useful friends. But friendship is a nobler thing in prosperity, and there we seek out good men as friends; for it is more desirable to do good to men like that and to spend our days in their company.
The mere presence of friends is sweet, even in misfortune; our grief is lightened when our friends share it. One might ask whether they literally take up part of it, as of a weight, or whether it is rather that their presence, which is sweet, and the consciousness of their sympathy make the grief smaller. Whether this or something else is the cause of the relief, we need not pursue; the fact, at any rate, is as we said.
But their presence seems to be a mixed thing. On the one hand, the very sight of friends is pleasant, especially in adversity, and does something to ease the grief; for a friend, if he has tact, can comfort us greatly both by his face and by his words — he knows our character, and what pleases us and what pains us. On the other hand, to see a friend grieving over our misfortunes is itself painful, for no one likes being a cause of sorrow to his friends. That is why a man of firm nature is careful not to pass his grief along to his friends: he shrinks from the pain it would give them, unless the relief to himself far outweighs it; and in general he does not allow others to join in his laments, since he is not given to lamenting himself. Weak women, and men who resemble them, delight in people who wail along with them, and love them as friends and fellow-sufferers. But plainly, in everything, our model must be the better man.
In prosperity, again, the presence of friends not only makes the time pass pleasantly but brings with it the consciousness that our friends are pleased at our good fortune. Hence, it would seem, we should be eager to invite our friends to share our prosperity — for readiness to confer benefits is noble — but slow to summon them into our adversity, since we ought to give others as small a share of our evils as possible; whence the saying, "That I suffer is suffering enough." We should be least reluctant to call them in when they can relieve us greatly at little trouble to themselves.
Conversely, when our friends are in trouble, the right course, I think, is to go to them unsummoned and with a will; for it is a friend's part to serve his friend, above all when the friend is in need and has not asked — then it is nobler and pleasanter for both. When they prosper, we should go readily to help in their affairs (for this too is one of the uses of a friend), but not so readily to take a share of their good things; for eagerness to receive benefits is not a noble thing. Still, we must take care that our refusal does not come across as ungracious, as sometimes happens.
The presence of friends, then, in conclusion, is plainly desirable in all circumstances.
Lovers delight in the sight of each other above everything, and would keep that sense sooner than all the rest, because love owes its being and its origin to it more than to any other. In just the same way, we may venture to say, friends desire nothing so much as to live together. For friendship is, at bottom, community; and a man stands to his friend as he stands to himself. Now, the consciousness of his own existence is desirable to him; so the same consciousness of his friend's existence is desirable too; and it is in a life in common that this consciousness becomes active; so it is natural that friends aim at a life in common.
And whatever existence means for each man — whatever it is that makes life worth choosing for him — in that he wishes to pass his time with his friends. So some drink together, some dice together, others train together, or hunt together, or do philosophy together: each group spending its days in the thing it loves best of everything in life. For, wishing to live in common with their friends, they do the things, and share in the things, which for them make up a life in common.
So the friendship of bad men turns out to be a positively bad thing. Having no stability of character, they confirm each other in pursuits that are not good, and they become positively bad as each grows more like the other. But the friendship of good men is good, and it grows with their companionship. They even seem to become better as they are active together and correct each other's faults; for each molds himself on what he admires in the other — whence the line,
From good men you will learn good things.
So much, then, for friendship. Our next task is to consider pleasure.
Our next business, I think, is to discuss pleasure. For nothing seems more intimately bound up with our nature than pleasure; which is why, in educating the young, we use pleasure and pain as the rudders by which we steer them. And to delight in what we ought to delight in, and to hate what we ought to hate, seems to matter as much as anything for the formation of a virtuous character. These feelings run through the whole of life, and they carry weight enough to pull a man toward virtue and happiness — for we choose what pleases us and shun what pains us.
Surely, then, we cannot pass over these questions, especially since they are so hotly disputed. Some people say that pleasure is the good. Others say the very opposite — that pleasure is thoroughly bad: some of them, perhaps, because they are convinced it really is, others because they think it has a good effect on men's lives to declare pleasure a bad thing even if it is not. Most men, they say, lean toward pleasure and are slaves to it, and so they ought to be pulled in the opposite direction — that way they will be brought to the middle.
But I cannot think this is right. Where feeling and conduct are concerned, words carry less weight than deeds; and when what a man says is contradicted by the plain facts, his words fall into contempt and drag the truth down with them. When a man who denounces pleasure is caught, now and then, desiring it himself, his very attraction to it is taken as proof that he really considers all pleasure desirable — for most men do not draw fine distinctions. True statements, then, seem to be the most useful ones, for practice as well as for theory: because they square with the facts, they are believed, and so they persuade those who understand them to regulate their lives by them. But enough of this; let us now go through the current opinions about pleasure.
Eudoxus held that pleasure is the good, because he saw that all beings, rational and irrational alike, strive after it. In every case, he said, what is desirable is good, and what is most desirable is best; so the fact that all beings incline toward one and the same thing shows that this thing is best for all. (Each being, after all, finds out what is good for itself — its own food, for instance.) But what is good for all, and what all strive after, is the good.
His arguments won acceptance more because of the excellence of his character than on their own merits; for he was known as a man of remarkable self-control, and so people concluded that he was not saying all this out of love of pleasure — what he said must really be true.
Eudoxus also thought his point could be proved just as clearly from pleasure's opposite: pain, in itself, is something all beings shun; therefore its opposite is desirable for all.
Again, he argued, the most desirable thing is what we choose not on account of something else, but for its own sake; and pleasure is admitted to be like this. Nobody ever asks a man his motive for feeling pleasure — we take it for granted that pleasure is desirable in itself.
Again, he argued that any good thing whatever — just or self-controlled conduct, for instance — becomes more desirable when pleasure is added to it; and only the good can increase the good.
Now, this last argument does seem to show that pleasure is a good thing, but not that it is one bit better than any other good thing; for any good becomes more desirable when another good is added to it than it is by itself.
Indeed, Plato uses an argument of exactly this shape to show that pleasure is not the good. The pleasant life, he says, is more desirable with wisdom than without; but if the combination of the two is better, pleasure itself cannot be the good — for nothing can be added to the good to make it more desirable. And it is equally clear that nothing else can be the good either, if it becomes more desirable when combined with anything that is good in itself. What good is there, then, that cannot be improved by addition, and that men can actually share in? For that is the sort of good we are looking for.
But those who insist, on the other side, that what all beings desire is not good are surely talking nonsense. What everyone thinks, that, we say, is true; and to the man who tells us to put no trust in the opinion of mankind, we reply that we can hardly put more trust in his. If it were only irrational creatures that desired these things, there might be something in the objection; but since rational beings desire them too, how can it be anything but nonsense? And perhaps even in the lower creatures there is some natural principle of good, stronger than they are, that strives after their proper good.
Nor does what Eudoxus' opponents say against his argument from the opposite seem sound. They say that even if pain is bad, it does not follow that pleasure is good; for one bad thing can be opposed to another bad thing, and both of them to some third thing that is neither. Now, this is not a bad point in itself, but it does not hold in the present case. If both were bad, both alike ought to be shunned; if neither were bad, neither should be shunned — or at any rate one no more than the other. But in fact men plainly shun the one as bad and choose the other as good. That, then, is how the two are opposed.
Again, even if pleasure is not a quality, it does not follow that it is not a good thing. The activity of virtue is not a quality either; neither is happiness itself.
It is objected, next, that the good is determinate while pleasure is indeterminate, because it admits of more and less.
Now, if the evidence for this is that one can be more or less pleased, then the same can be said of justice and the other virtues. We plainly speak of people as being, and showing themselves, more or less virtuous: one man is more just or more brave than another, and it is possible to act more or less justly and with more or less self-control.
But if what they mean is that one pleasure can be more or less of a pleasure than another, I suspect they miss the real reason when they say it is because some pleasures are pure and some mixed. Why should it not be with pleasure as it is with health? Health is something determinate, yet it admits of more and less. The balance of elements that constitutes health is not the same for everyone, nor always the same for the same person; it can vary within certain limits without ceasing to be health, being now more and now less truly health. The same may hold of pleasure.
Again, assuming that the good is complete while motions and comings into being are incomplete, they try to show that pleasure is a motion and a coming into being.
But they do not seem to be right even in calling it a motion. Every motion, it seems, is necessarily quick or slow — either absolutely, like the motion of the universe, or relatively; but pleasure is neither quick nor slow. One can become pleased quickly, just as one can become angry quickly; but the feeling itself cannot be quick — not even relatively, as walking and growing can be. The passage into pleasure, then, may be quick or slow; but the active state itself — the feeling of pleasure — cannot.
And how could pleasure be a coming into being?
It seems that not just anything comes out of just anything; rather, what a thing comes out of is what it dissolves back into. So if pleasure is the coming into being of something, pain must be that thing's dissolution. And indeed they say just this: that pain is a falling short of the natural state, and pleasure its replenishment.
But these are bodily processes. If pleasure is the replenishment of the natural state, then the thing in which the replenishment happens — that is, the body — must be the thing that feels pleasure. And that does not seem to be the case. Pleasure, then, is not the replenishment; rather, while the replenishing goes on we may feel pleasure, as while the depleting goes on we may feel pain.
This whole view of pleasure seems to have been suggested by the pleasures and pains of eating; for there we really do first run short, suffering pain, and then find pleasure in being filled again. But it is not so with all pleasures. The pleasures of the mathematician involve no antecedent pain; nor, among the pleasures of sense, do those of smell; nor do many sights and sounds; nor memories and hopes. Of what, then, are these the coming into being? Nothing has run short here that could be replenished.
To those who point to the disgraceful pleasures as proof that pleasure is not good, we may reply that these things are not pleasant. Granted they are pleasant to ill-conditioned people, we should no more conclude that they are pleasant — except to those people — than we conclude that what is wholesome or sweet or bitter to a sick man is really so, or that a thing is white because it looks white to a man with diseased eyes.
Or we might reply this way: the pleasures are desirable, but not from these sources — just as wealth is desirable, but not at the price of treachery, and health is desirable, but not at the price of eating any abominable food.
Or we might say that pleasures differ in kind. The pleasures that come from noble sources are different from those that come from base ones; you cannot feel the just man's pleasure without being just, or the musical man's pleasure without being musical, and so on through the rest.
The distinction between the true friend and the flatterer seems to show either that pleasure is not good, or else that pleasures differ in kind. The friend, in his company, is thought to have our good in view; the flatterer, our pleasure. And we blame the flatterer, while we praise the friend for having a different aim in keeping our company.
Again, no one would choose to live his whole life with the intellect of a child, even on condition of enjoying a child's pleasures to the fullest possible degree; and no one would choose to get enjoyment by doing some utterly disgraceful act, even if he were never to feel a moment's pain for it.
And there are many things we should care about even if they brought no pleasure — sight, memory, knowledge, the moral and intellectual virtues. Even if we grant that pleasure necessarily accompanies them, it changes nothing; for we should choose them even if no pleasure came of them.
It seems plain, then, that pleasure is not the good, and that not every pleasure is desirable, but that some pleasures are desirable — differing in kind, or in their sources, from those that are not. Let this stand, then, as a sufficient account of the current opinions about pleasure and pain.
What pleasure is, and what sort of thing it is, we shall discover more readily if we make a fresh start, as follows.
Seeing seems to be complete at any moment: it lacks nothing that could come along afterward to complete its nature. And pleasure seems to resemble seeing in this respect. It is something whole and entire, and at no moment could you find a pleasure that would be made complete by lasting longer.
Therefore pleasure is not a motion. Every motion takes time and aims at an end — the motion of building, for instance — and is complete when it has produced what it was aiming at: complete, that is, in the whole time, or at the final moment of it. While the work is in progress, all the motions are incomplete, and different in kind from the whole motion and from one another. Fitting the stones together is a different thing from fluting the column, and both are different from building the temple. The building of the temple is complete — nothing more is needed to carry out the plan; but the building of the foundation, or of the triglyph, is incomplete, for each is the building of a part only. These motions, then, differ in kind, and you cannot find a motion that is complete in its nature at any given moment — it is complete, if at all, only in the whole time.
The same goes for walking and the other forms of locomotion. All locomotion is motion from one place to another, but there are distinct kinds of it — flying, walking, leaping, and so on. More than that: within walking itself there are differences. The starting point and the destination are not the same for the whole course as for a stretch of it, nor for this stretch as for that; and crossing this line is not the same as crossing that one — for you do not cross a line in the abstract, but a line that lies in a particular place, and this line lies in a different place from that one. For a detailed discussion of motion I must refer you to my other works; but the upshot seems to be that motion is not complete at any moment — its several parts are incomplete and different in kind from one another, the starting point and destination being what makes the difference in kind.
Pleasure, on the other hand, is complete in its nature at any moment. Plainly, then, pleasure and motion must be distinct from each other, and pleasure must belong to the class of things whole and complete. The same conclusion follows from this too: duration is necessary for motion, but not for pleasure — a moment's pleasure is something whole and entire.
From all this it is clear that people are wrong to call pleasure a motion or a coming into being. Those terms do not apply to everything, but only to things that are divisible into parts and are not wholes. There is no coming into being of seeing, or of a mathematical point, or of a unit; none of these is a motion or a coming into being. And the terms are just as inapplicable to pleasure; for pleasure is a whole.
Every sense is active upon its proper object, and its activity is complete when the sense is in good condition and its object is the noblest that falls within its range — for this seems to be what complete activity means. (And let us assume it makes no difference whether we speak of the sense being active or of the person who has it.) For each sense, then, the activity is best when the faculty on the one side is in the finest condition and the object on the other is the finest that falls within that faculty's range.
And this activity will be not only the most complete but also the pleasantest. Every sense has its pleasure in being active, and so do thought and contemplation; and the activity is pleasantest when it is most complete, and most complete when the faculty is in good condition and the object is the worthiest of those that fall within its scope.
Further, the pleasure completes the activity. But it does not complete it in the way the object and the faculty complete it, when both are as they should be — just as health and the doctor are not in the same way the cause of a man's being healthy.
(That every sense has its pleasure is evident: we speak of pleasant sights and pleasant sounds. And it is evident too that the pleasure is greatest when both the faculty and the object it works upon are as good as they can be; when that is true of object and perceiver alike, there will always be pleasure — so long, at least, as there is something to act and something to be acted upon.)
Now, the pleasure completes the activity not in the way the trained habit does, by being present in a man already, but as a sort of completeness laid on top — like the bloom of youth on those in their prime.
So long, then, as the object of thought or of sense is what it should be, and likewise the subject that perceives or contemplates it, there will be pleasure in the activity. For while the thing acted upon and the thing acting remain the same and stand in the same relation to each other, the same result naturally follows.
Why is it, then, that no one can feel pleasure continuously? Probably because we tire. No human faculty is capable of continuous activity; so pleasure cannot be continuous either, since it accompanies the activity. For the same reason some things please us when they are new, and please us less afterward. At first the mind is stimulated and works away at them intensely — just as we strain our eyes to look hard at something; later the effort slackens and relaxes, and the pleasure loses its keenness along with it.
We should expect the desire for pleasure to be shared by all men, seeing that all men desire to live.
For life is a kind of activity, and each man is active with the faculties he loves best upon the things he loves best: the musical man is active with his hearing upon melodies, the lover of learning with his mind upon the objects of study, and so on with the rest.
But pleasure completes these activities, and therefore completes life — which is what men desire.
Naturally, then, men desire pleasure too; for each man finds in it the completion of his life, and life is desirable.
Whether we desire life for the sake of pleasure or pleasure for the sake of life is a question we may set aside for the present. For the two seem to be yoked together and to admit of no separation: without activity there is no pleasure, and pleasure completes every activity.
From this it seems to follow that pleasures differ in kind. For things that differ in kind are, we believe, completed by things that differ in kind. That is how it stands with the products of nature and of art — animals and trees, paintings, sculptures, houses, furniture. In the same way, then, activities that differ in kind are completed by things that differ in kind.
Now the activities of the intellect differ in kind from the activities of the senses, and the several kinds of each differ from one another; therefore the pleasures that complete them differ too.
The same conclusion follows from the close bond between each pleasure and the activity it completes. For an activity is heightened by its proper pleasure. People who enjoy a thing understand it better and press deeper into it: those who delight in geometry become geometricians, and grasp its propositions better than anyone else; and likewise lovers of music, or of architecture, or of anything else, make progress in their own line of work because they delight in it. The pleasures, then, help the activities grow. But what helps a thing grow must belong closely to it; and where things differ in kind, whatever belongs closely to them must differ in kind as well.
The point comes out still more clearly, perhaps, from the fact that the activity of one faculty is blocked by the pleasure proper to another. A lover of the flute cannot attend to an argument if he hears someone playing nearby; he takes more delight in the flute-playing than in the business at hand, and so the flute-player's pleasure ruins the activity of his reason.
The same thing happens in other cases too, whenever a man is active on two fronts at once: the pleasanter business crowds out the other, and the greater the gap in pleasantness, the harder it crowds — even to the point of shutting the other down altogether. That is why, when something delights us intensely, we cannot do anything else at all; and when we turn to a second thing, it is because we no longer care much about the first. People who eat sweets in the theater do it most when the actors are bad.
Since its proper pleasure sharpens an activity — makes it last longer and go better — while an alien pleasure spoils it, plainly these two pleasures stand far apart. An alien pleasure, in fact, does almost exactly what the activity's own pain does. For an activity is ruined by the pain that arises from it: if a man finds it disagreeable and painful to write or to calculate, he stops writing in the one case and calculating in the other, because the activity hurts. An activity, then, is affected in opposite ways by its proper pleasure and its proper pain — and by "proper" I mean what arises from the activity itself. An alien pleasure, as we have already said, does nearly what the proper pain does: it wrecks the activity, though not to the same degree.
Again, activities differ in goodness and badness — some are to be sought, some shunned, some are neither — and their pleasures differ in just the same way; for each activity has its proper pleasure. The pleasure proper to a good activity is good, and the pleasure proper to a bad one is bad: desire for noble things is praised, desire for base things blamed. And the pleasures that ride along with our activities belong to them even more intimately than the desires do; for the desires are separate from the activity both in time and in nature, while the pleasures come at almost the same moment, and are so hard to pull apart from the activity that men debate whether the activity is not simply identical with the pleasure.
It seems, though, that pleasure is not the same thing as thinking or perceiving — that is impossible; it is because the two cannot be separated that some people fancy they are identical.
As the activities vary, then, so do their pleasures. Sight is purer than touch, hearing and smell purer than taste; and their pleasures differ accordingly. The pleasures of the intellect are purer than these pleasures of sense, and within each class some are purer than others.
Each kind of being, moreover, seems to have its proper pleasure, just as it has its proper function — namely, the pleasure that accompanies the activity of its faculties, the realization of its nature. Look at the animals one by one and you will see it: the pleasures of a horse, a dog, and a man are all different. As Heraclitus says, a donkey would rather have hay than gold; fodder gives a donkey more pleasure than gold does.
The pleasures of beings that differ in kind, then, differ in kind; and we might naturally expect the pleasures of beings of the same kind not to differ. Yet among men, at least, they vary widely. The same things delight one man and pain another; what is grievous and hateful to one is pleasant and lovable to another. It happens even with sweet things: a man in a fever has a different notion of what is sweet from a man in health, and a feeble man a different notion of what is hot from a robust man. And so it goes in other matters too.
But in all matters of this kind we hold that things are what they appear to be to the good man.
If this is right, as we hold it to be — if, that is, the measure of everything is virtue, or the good man as such — then what appears to him to be pleasure will be pleasure, and what he delights in will be pleasant.
If what he finds disagreeable strikes someone else as pleasant, there is nothing astonishing in that; men are corrupted and warped in many ways. Such things are not pleasant — they are pleasant only to these men, in this condition. Plainly, then, the pleasures that everyone admits are base should not be called pleasures at all, except for the corrupt.
But among the pleasures that are considered good, which, or what kind, are to be called the proper pleasures of man? The answer follows from his proper activities, for the pleasures ride along with these. Whether, then, the activities of the complete and happy man are one or many, the pleasures that complete those activities will be the pleasures of man in the full sense of the words; the rest will be so only in a secondary sense and with a fraction of the meaning — just like the activities themselves.
Now that we have discussed the kinds of virtue and friendship and pleasure, it remains to give a summary account of happiness, since we set that down as the end of everything man does. And it will shorten the work if we first recapitulate what we said above.
We said that happiness is not a habit — not a settled state. If it were, it could belong to a man who slept through all his days and lived the life of a vegetable, or to a man crushed by the greatest misfortunes. Since we cannot accept that, we must place happiness among activities, as we said before. And since some activities are necessary — that is, desirable for the sake of something else — while others are desirable in themselves, plainly happiness must be placed among the activities desirable in themselves, not those desirable for the sake of something else. For happiness lacks nothing; it is self-sufficient.
Now, an activity is desirable in itself when nothing is looked for from it beyond the activity itself.
Two kinds of activity are held to be of this sort: first, virtuous actions, for doing what is noble and excellent must count as desirable for its own sake; and second, the amusements that please us, for these are not chosen for the sake of anything else — indeed men are more often harmed than helped by them, neglecting their health and their fortunes.
Now most of the people whom the world calls happy fill their days with pastimes of this sort. That is why the man with a ready wit at such pastimes is a favorite at a tyrant's court: he makes himself pleasant in exactly what the tyrant wants, and what the tyrant wants is amusement. So amusements pass for ingredients of happiness, because princes spend their leisure on them. But princes, we may venture to say, prove nothing. Princely rank does not carry virtue or reason with it, and virtue and reason are the springs of all excellent activity. And if these men, never having tasted pure and refined pleasure, run to the pleasures of the body, that is no reason to think those pleasures the more desirable; children, too, are sure that what they prize is better than anything else. It is only natural, then, that as children and men differ in their estimate of what is valuable, so do bad men and good.
Therefore — as we have said many times — what is truly valuable and truly pleasant is what is valuable and pleasant to the good man. Now what each man finds most desirable is the activity that fits his own trained character; and so what the good man finds most desirable is activity in accordance with virtue.
Happiness, therefore, does not consist in amusement. Indeed, it would be absurd if the end were amusement — if we toiled and labored our whole life long for the sake of amusing ourselves. For we choose everything, one may say, for the sake of something else — everything except happiness, for happiness is the end. To be serious and to work hard for the sake of amusement seems silly, downright childish; but to amuse ourselves so that we can get back to serious work — that, as Anacharsis put it, seems right. For amusement is a kind of rest, and we need rest because we cannot work continuously.
Rest, then, cannot be the end; for we take it as a means to activity.
Again, the happy life is thought to be the life in accordance with virtue; and such a life is a serious business, not a matter of amusement.
Again, we call serious things better than funny and amusing things, and the better the part or the man, the more serious the function; but we have already said that the activity of the better is higher, and more of the nature of happiness.
Again, bodily pleasures are within anyone's reach — a slave's no less than the best man's; but no one supposes that a slave shares in happiness, seeing that he does not share in the life proper to a man. For happiness does not lie in pastimes of this sort, but in activities in accordance with virtue, as we have already said.
But if happiness is an activity of the soul in accordance with virtue — or, if there is more than one virtue, in accordance with the best and most complete of them — then it is reasonable to expect that it will be the activity of the highest virtue; and that will be the virtue of the best part of us.
Now, that part or faculty — call it reason or what you will — which seems by nature to rule and to lead, and to grasp things noble and divine, whether it is itself divine or only the most divine element in us: the activity of this part, in accordance with its proper virtue, will be perfect happiness.
That this activity is contemplation we have already said.
And this conclusion would seem to agree both with what we said above and with the truth.
For this activity is the highest possible: reason is the highest thing in us, and of all knowable things, those that reason deals with are the highest.
Again, it is the most continuous; for we can contemplate more continuously than we can do anything else whatever.
We think, too, that pleasure must be one of the ingredients of happiness; and by common consent the pleasantest of all virtuous activities is the activity of wisdom. Philosophy, at any rate, is held to offer pleasures wonderful in their purity and steadiness; and it stands to reason that those who possess knowledge pass their time more pleasantly than those who are still hunting for it.
Again, what we call self-sufficiency will belong most of all to the contemplative life. The necessities of life, true enough, the wise man needs as much as the just man and the rest; but once these are adequately supplied, the just man still needs people toward whom, and along with whom, he can act justly — and so do the self-controlled man and the courageous man and each of the others — while the wise man can contemplate all by himself, and the wiser he is, the more he can do it. He would do it better, we may grant, with fellow workers; but for all that, he is the most self-sufficient of men.
Again, this life alone seems to be desired purely for its own sake. It yields nothing beyond the contemplating itself, while from the practical activities we look to gain something, more or less, beyond the action.
Again, happiness is thought to require leisure; for we work in order to have leisure, just as we make war in order to have peace. Now the practical virtues get their exercise in politics or in war, and these are anything but leisurely occupations.
War, indeed, is the very opposite of leisurely. No one chooses to fight for fighting's sake, or stirs up a war for that purpose; a man who turned friends into enemies just to bring on battles and slaughter would be counted a bloodthirsty monster.
But the politician's life is not leisurely either; and beyond the political work itself, it aims at power and honors — or at least at happiness for the man and his fellow citizens, which is something different from the political activity; for we, in asking what happiness is, also ask what politics is, plainly treating the two as different things.
If, then, among actions in accordance with virtue, the statesman's and the soldier's stand first in nobility and grandeur, and yet they are unleisurely, aim at some further end, and are not desired simply for themselves; while the activity of reason seems to surpass them in seriousness, since it is contemplation of truth, and to aim at no end beyond itself, and to have its proper pleasure — which itself heightens the activity — and to be self-sufficient, and leisurely, and unwearying so far as anything human can be, and to have every other mark that we assign to happiness: then this, the activity of reason, will be the complete happiness of man — provided it is granted a complete span of life; for nothing incomplete has a place in happiness.
But a life of this kind would be something more than human. A man will live it not insofar as he is a man, but insofar as there is something divine in him; and as far as this divine element surpasses our compound human nature, so far does its activity surpass the activity of the other kind of virtue — the practical, moral kind.
If, then, reason is divine compared with man, the life of reason is divine compared with human life. And we should not listen to those who advise us, being men, to think human thoughts, and, being mortal, mortal thoughts. We ought, so far as in us lies, to put on immortality, and strain every nerve to live by the best thing in us; for small though it may be in bulk, in power and in worth it far surpasses all the rest.
Indeed, this part would even seem to be each man's true self, since it is the sovereign and better part of him. It would be strange, then, if a man chose to live not his own life, but the life of something else.
And here what we said before applies again: what is proper to each being by nature is best and pleasantest for it. For man, then, the life of reason is best and pleasantest, since reason more than anything else is the man. And this life, therefore, is also the happiest.
The life that consists in the activity of the other kind of virtue — moral virtue — is happy only in a secondary sense; for the activities of moral virtue are emphatically human, not divine. Justice, I mean, and courage and the other moral virtues show themselves in our dealings with one another: in contracts and services and outward acts of every sort, where we observe what is due in each case, and in our inward feelings too. And all of this is emphatically human business.
Again, moral virtue seems in some respects to be actually a product of our physical constitution, and in many respects to be closely bound up with the passions.
Again, practical wisdom is inseparably yoked to moral virtue, and moral virtue to practical wisdom, since the moral virtues fix the principles from which practical wisdom starts, while practical wisdom fixes what is right in morals.
But the moral virtues, being bound up with the passions, must belong to our compound nature — the union of soul and body — and the virtues of the compound nature are emphatically human. Therefore the life that expresses them, and the happiness that consists in that life, must be emphatically human too.
The happiness that consists in the activity of reason, on the other hand, stands apart from our lower nature. (So much we may be allowed to assert about it; a detailed discussion would take us beyond our present purpose.)
Further, this happiness would seem to need only a small supply of external goods — certainly less than the moral life needs. Both need the necessaries of life to the same extent, let us say; for though the statesman does in fact take more care of his body than the philosopher does, the difference will be trifling. But in what they need for their activities the difference will be great. The generous man will need money, if he is to act generously; the just man will need it to pay what he owes — for mere wishes cannot be tested: even unjust men pretend they wish to act justly. The courageous man will need strength, if he is to perform any act of courage; and the man of self-control will need the liberty to indulge — for how else can he, or the possessor of any other virtue, show what he is?
Again, people dispute whether the purpose or the action is more essential to virtue, since virtue implies both. Plainly, completeness requires both. But action needs many things, and the greater and nobler the action, the more it needs.
The man engaged in contemplation, by contrast, needs none of these things for his work; indeed, one may even say they get in the way of his contemplating. But insofar as he is a man living among men, he chooses to act virtuously; and so he will need such things in order to live a human life.
That perfect happiness is some kind of contemplative activity may also be shown in the following way.
We always suppose the gods to be the most blessed and happy of all beings; but what kind of actions shall we ascribe to them? Acts of justice? Surely it is ridiculous to picture the gods making contracts and returning deposits and so on. Acts of courage, then — enduring terrors and facing danger because it is noble to do so? Or acts of generosity? But to whom are they to give? And is it not absurd to imagine that they have money, or anything of that kind? And what could acts of self-control possibly mean for them? Surely it would be an insult to praise the gods for having no evil desires. Run through the whole list, and you will find that everything about action is petty and unworthy of gods.
And yet everyone supposes that the gods live, and therefore that they are active; we can hardly suppose they lie asleep like Endymion.
Now, if a being lives, and action cannot be ascribed to it, still less production, what is left but contemplation? It follows, then, that the divine life, which surpasses all others in blessedness, is a life of contemplation.
Of all human activities, therefore, the one most akin to this will be capable of the greatest happiness.
And this is further confirmed by the fact that the other animals have no share in happiness, being wholly incapable of this kind of activity. The life of the gods is blessed through and through; the life of man is blessed just so far as it attains some likeness of this activity; but none of the other animals is happy, since none of them can contemplate at all.
Happiness, then, extends exactly as far as contemplation does: the more contemplation in a life, the more happiness — not by accident, but because happiness necessarily accompanies contemplation; for contemplation is precious in itself.
Our conclusion, then, is that happiness is a kind of contemplation.
But since we are men, we shall need external good fortune as well; for our nature does not by itself supply everything contemplation requires. The body must be healthy, and fed, and otherwise cared for. Still, we must not suppose that because happiness is impossible without external goods, the man who is to be happy will need many of them, or much. Independence does not depend on a superabundance of good things, and neither does action; a man can do noble deeds without being ruler of land and sea. A moderate equipment of fortune is enough to give a man scope for virtuous action — as we can easily see, for private citizens seem to do what is right not less than princes, but rather more — and that much is all he needs; for that man's life will be happy who has virtue and exercises it.
Solon too, I think, described the happy man well when he said that, in his view, it was a man moderately supplied with the gifts of fortune who had done the noblest deeds and lived with self-control; for a man of modest means can do his duty.
Anaxagoras also seems to have held that the happy man is neither a rich man nor a prince; he said he would not be surprised if the happy man struck the masses as a strange choice, for they judge by externals, which are all they can appreciate.
The opinions of the wise, then, seem to agree with our theory. Such opinions carry some weight; but in practical matters the test of truth lies in the facts of life, for it is there that the supreme authority resides. So we should test everything we have said against the facts of life: if it agrees with the facts, we may accept it; if it clashes with them, we must set it down as mere theory.
But, once more, the man who exercises his reason and cultivates it, and keeps it in the best condition, seems also to be the most beloved of heaven. For if the gods take any care for human affairs, as they are thought to do, it is reasonable to suppose that they delight in what is best in us and most akin to themselves — that is, in reason — and that they reward those who love and honor it most, as men who care for what is dear to the gods and act rightly and nobly. And plainly all this belongs, above all, to the wise man. The wise man, therefore, is the most beloved of heaven — and therefore, we may conclude, the happiest.
In this way too, then, the wise man will be happier than anyone else.
Now that we have said enough — in summary form, at least — about these matters, and about the virtues, and about friendship and pleasure too, are we to suppose that we have reached the end we proposed? Surely not. The old saying holds good: in practical matters the end is not to know what should be done, but to do it. It is not enough to know about virtue, then; we must try to possess it and to use it, or take whatever other road may make us good.
Now, if theories had power by themselves to make us good, then, in Theognis' words, "many and great would be the rewards they deserved," and we ought to provide them. But in fact, though theories seem strong enough to guide and stimulate generous-minded young men — though a well-bred character with a sincere love of the noble may be opened by them to the influence of virtue — they are powerless to turn the mass of men toward goodness. For most men are naturally governed by fear rather than by reverence: they abstain from evil not because it is foul but because of the punishment it brings. Living under the sway of their passions, they pursue the pleasures that suit their nature and the means to those pleasures, and avoid the opposite pains; while of the noble and the truly pleasant they have not so much as a notion, since they have never tasted it.
What theory or argument, then, could bring men like these to order? It is impossible, or at least very difficult, to argue away what has long been ingrained in the character. For my part, I think we must be well content if, when everything that seems to make men good is present, we get some modicum of virtue.
Now, what makes men good is held by some to be nature, by others habit — that is, training — by others instruction.
As for the goodness that comes by nature, it is plainly not in our power; it is bestowed by some divine agency on those who truly deserve to be called fortunate.
As for theory and instruction, I fear they cannot avail in every case. The hearer's soul must first have been prepared by training — taught to feel delight and aversion on the right occasions — just as soil must be prepared if the seed is to thrive. A man who lives at the mercy of his passions will not listen to the arguments meant to turn him back, and will not even understand them. When he is in that state, how is argument to change his mind? To put it bluntly, passion seems to yield not to reason but only to force. The character, then, must already be there, somehow akin to virtue — loving what is noble and hating what is base.
But it is hard to get right guidance toward virtue from our youth up unless we are brought up under suitable laws; for a life of self-control and steadiness is not pleasant to most men, least of all to the young. Our upbringing, then, should be fixed by law, and our whole way of life with it; it will stop being painful as it becomes habitual. And I venture to think it is not enough to get the right nurture and training while we are young: since we must keep up the same way of life as grown men, and confirm the habits, we need the intervention of the law in these matters too — and indeed, to put it bluntly, over the whole of life. For most men obey compulsion more readily than reason, and fear of punishment more readily than desire for the noble.
That is why some hold that the legislator should first invite men to virtue, exhorting them for the nobility of it — those who have been well trained will listen; but that when men will not listen, or are of baser nature, he should apply correction and punishment, and banish the incorrigible altogether. The good man, they say, whose guide is the noble, will obey reason; but the man who is not good, whose desires are set on pleasure, must be corrected by pain, like a beast of burden. And for the same reason, they say, the pains applied must be those most contrary to the pleasures the offender loves.
As we have said, then, the man who is to be good must be well nurtured and trained, and must afterward continue in the same excellent way of life, doing nothing vile either willingly or unwillingly; and this can be brought about only if men live subject to some kind of reason and right order — backed by force.
Now, a father's rule has neither the force nor the power of compulsion required, nor does the rule of any individual, unless he is a king or something like one. But law has compulsory power, and at the same time it is a rational ordinance proceeding from a kind of practical wisdom, from reason. And whereas we resent individuals who oppose our inclinations, even when they are right to oppose them, we do not feel aggrieved when the law bids us do what is right.
Yet Sparta is the only state, or nearly the only one, where the legislator seems to have attended to the nurture and way of life of the citizens. In most states these matters are wholly neglected, and every man lives as he pleases, laying down the law for wife and children like the Cyclops.
The best thing, then, would be for the state to take these matters in hand and manage them rightly. But since the state neglects them, it would seem to fall to each of us individually to help our own children and friends along the road to virtue — and we should have the power to do it, or at least the will.
From what has been said, it would seem that our best plan for this is to learn the art of legislation. Training on the public scale is plainly carried on by means of laws, and it is good where the laws are good; and it would seem to make no difference whether the laws are written or unwritten, or whether they regulate the education of one person or of many — no more than it matters in music or gymnastics or any other course of training. For just as law and custom prevail in the state, so in the household the father's word and the family's ways prevail — no less, indeed even more, because of the ties of kinship and of benefits received; for affection and obedience are implanted in the members of a family by nature from the start.
Moreover — despite what has just been said — individual treatment is better than treatment in the mass, in education no less than in medicine. As a general rule, rest and fasting are good for a fever patient; in a particular case they may not be. A boxing master, I suppose, does not prescribe the same style to every pupil. It would seem, then, that individuals are educated more precisely under private instruction; for then each gets exactly what he needs.
But you will treat an individual case best — whether as doctor, or trainer, or anything else — when you know the general rule: "such-and-such is good for all men," or "for all men of a certain temperament." For the sciences are said to deal, and do deal, with what is common to many individuals.
I do not deny that a particular person may be treated quite well by someone with no scientific knowledge at all, if experience has taught him precisely how particular causes affect that one man — just as some men seem to be their own best doctors, though quite unable to prescribe for anyone else.
Nevertheless, I venture to say that a man who wishes to master an art, or to grasp it scientifically, must go on to its general principles and get to know them by the proper method; for, as we have said, it is with universals that the sciences deal.
And so the man who wants to make men better by training — whether many men or few — should try to acquire the art or science of legislation, assuming that men can be made good through law. To mold rightly the character of whoever presents himself is not a thing that just anybody can do; if anyone can, it is the man who knows — just as in medicine, and in every other profession that calls for careful treatment and practical wisdom.
Our next business, then, is to ask: from whom, and by what means, are we to learn the art or science of legislation?
"As we learn the other arts," someone will say — "from the men who practice it, the politicians; for we found that legislation is a branch of statesmanship."
But I think the case of statesmanship is not quite like that of the other sciences and arts. In the others, the same men plainly teach the art and practice it — physicians and painters, for instance. But with statesmanship, the sophists profess to teach it, while it is never they who practice it, but the statesmen. And the statesmen would seem to act by some instinctive gift, proceeding by experience rather than by reasoning. For plainly they never write or speak about these matters (though that might be a better use of their time than composing speeches for the courts and the assembly), and they have never made statesmen of their own sons or of any of their friends. Yet we should expect them to have done so if they could; for they could have left no better legacy to their country, and there is nothing they would sooner have chosen for themselves — and therefore for those dearest to them — than this power.
Experience, however, we must allow, does seem to be of great service here; otherwise men would never become statesmen by mere familiarity with politics. Those who want a knowledge of statesmanship, then, seem to need experience as well as theory.
But those sophists who profess to teach statesmanship turn out to be ludicrously far from doing it. To put it bluntly, they do not even know what statesmanship is or what it deals with. If they knew, they would not treat it as identical with rhetoric, or as something lower than rhetoric; nor would they think it easy to frame a code of laws by collecting the laws that are most admired. "It is only a matter of picking out the best," they say — ignoring the fact that the selection itself requires understanding, and that to judge correctly is here, as in music, a matter of the greatest difficulty. In every field it is the men of special experience who judge the products rightly, who understand how and by what means each is brought about, and which combinations are harmonious; the inexperienced must be content if they can tell whether the result is good or bad — as with painting. Now, laws are, so to speak, the products of statesmanship. How, then, should a collection of laws make a man able to legislate — or even to pick out the best of them?
Even medicine, it seems, cannot be taught from handbooks. And yet the medical handbooks try to tell you not only the remedies but how to apply them, and how to treat each class of patient, sorting them by temperament. All this may be serviceable to men of experience; to those who know nothing of medicine it would seem to be useless.
So too, I think we may say, collections of laws and constitutions may be very serviceable to those who are able to examine them with a discriminating eye — to judge which ordinances are good and which bad, and which fit together with which. But those who go through such compendia without the trained faculty cannot judge them properly (unless a correct judgment comes of itself), though they may perhaps sharpen their wits on these matters.
Since our predecessors, then, have left the subject of legislation unexamined, it will perhaps be better to look into it ourselves — and indeed into the whole question of the management of a state — so that our philosophy of human life may be completed as far as it lies in our power to complete it.
Let us try, then, first of all, to review whatever sound observations our predecessors have made on this or that branch of the subject; and then, with our collection of constitutions before us, let us ask what things preserve and what things destroy states, what preserves and destroys each kind of constitution, and why some states are governed well and others badly. When we have gained an insight into all this, we shall perhaps be better able to see what the best kind of constitution is, and how each kind should be arranged, and what system of laws and customs suits each best.
Let us begin, then.