Aristotle is not generally regarded as the friendliest of writers. No doubt the starkness and seriousness of his elliptical prose is felt to be less than companionable. Nonetheless, he does devote one-fifth of the Nicomachean Ethics to an analysis of friendship. Moreover, the two books on friendship (VIII and IX) hold the penultimate position, coming right before Book X's concluding assertion of the superiority of the philosophic life. Lorraine Smith Pangle seeks the reason for and the meaning of friendship's privileged position within Aristotle's ethical explorations.

By situating the books on friendship within the overall movement of the Ethics (from the life of moral virtue and prudence to the life of philosophy) and with her sensitivity to the question of who Aristotle's audience might be, Pangle is able to solve some of the puzzles and discontinuities that have long perplexed scholars. Although she concentrates on two of the ten books, she makes of the Ethics a whole work. She offers a detailed commentary on Books VIII and IX, showing how Aristotle's searching and complex investigation of such themes as “the naturalness of friendship, the possibility of selflessness in friendship, and the relationship of friendship to justice” (p. 5) prepares the way for the emergence of philosophy as a theme. Moreover, she supplements her reading of Aristotle with expositions of other famous texts on friendship. With a couple of exceptions (Montaigne and Bacon), these are mostly by ancient authors (Plato, Epicurus, Cicero, and Seneca).

The ancients took the phenomenon of friendship seriously as a matter for sustained reflection. By contrast, as Pangle points out in her Introduction, both Christianity and modern philosophy treat friendship slightingly. The egalitarianism and universality of the Christian commandment to love all men renders suspect the particularity and exclusivity of friendship. Modern thought, meanwhile, either has reduced us to solitary egoists (à la Hobbes) incapable of generous attachments, or has issued a high-minded demand for a certain sort of abstract and dutiful selflessness (à la Kant). Friendship falls into the chasm separating self-interest and altruism and, consequently, a large swath of life as actually lived goes unexamined.

I would add that friendship itself may suffer from philosophy's long neglect, inasmuch as our practice of friendship increasingly lacks a language to sustain and inform it. Although popular culture still offers us models of friendship (think of sitcoms like Cheers, Seinfeld, and Friends), they are models compounded of equal parts cynicism and sentimentality. The resurgence of scholarly interest in Aristotle—to which Pangle's fine book makes a signal contribution—may not only remedy the inadequacies of modern philosophy but provide as well materials for a recovery of the art of friendship.

Particularly helpful is Aristotle's thinking through of the relation of self-love and love of others. Aristotle begins from the commonly held opinion that to be selfish is reprehensible. A bad man is self-serving, whereas a good man, dedicated to both noble actions and his friends, is self-neglecting. Aristotle shows that what the common opinion fails to grasp is that the good man is in fact a great self-lover. While the good man gives unsparingly of those things that most men overvalue (money, honors, and even life itself), he takes for himself the larger share of nobility, and in doing so gratifies what is sovereign in his soul. According to Pangle, Aristotle makes the “radical claim that the greatest self-love is characteristic of the very best people, even or especially in their moments of seemingly greatest self-sacrifice” (p. 169).

There is a problem, however, with this devotion to the noble—a problem that comes to sight particularly when one reflects on the friendship of two such paragons of virtue. Since nobility attaches to one, not to two, they are rivals. In competitive well-doing, to receive is ignoble. Thus, by every gift, the magnanimous man humbles his friend, imposing on him what Samuel Johnson termed “that inferiority which obligation implies.” This, then, seems to be the tragedy of friendship between noble men of action: Either the friendship is devoid of doing for one another or the doing for one another is destructive of the friendship.

There is a form of friendship that escapes this self-contradiction, and in which “the love for the friend for his own sake is an extension or expansion of self-love” (p. 142). According to Aristotle, the friendship nonpareil consists in synaisthanesthai, or “sympathetic consciousness” (p. 190), achieved by living together and sharing in speech and thought. At its peak, Aristotle's teaching about friendship becomes a teaching about the life of contemplation. Of course, all friends discuss their common pursuits, be they card playing and carousing or bicycling and business ventures; however, that talk, if not exactly extraneous to the activities that constitute their life together, is nonetheless not identical to those activities. One talks of tennis when not playing tennis or to improve one's tennis. Not so with philosophy. The conversation of dialectical partners does not substitute for thinking. Far from there being a loss of thought in speaking thoughts, as there is a loss of tennis in speaking of tennis, thought is furthered by its expression. Friendly philosophic activity is uniquely self-sufficient. Moreover, the common object of philosophic friends—the truth—is perfectly shareable, in other words, shareable not by apportionment but by communication. As a result, the philosophic love of oneself as mind is compatible with perfect friendship. Self-love and friendship do not vie with one another as they would in the friendship of great-souled men of action.

What emerges very clearly from Pangle's account is that modern philosophy's demotion of reason has pulled the rug out from under friendship as well. For friendship to be restored to its rightful place would mean recognizing it as an essential element of the “perfection of man's potential as a rational being” (p. 196).