Affection and Civic Friendship

Spiritedness is the ‘‘heart’’ of political psychology in part because it is a source of civic friendship and other forms of affection. Previously, spiritedness was shown to be the seat of the political passions honor and shame. But now Aristotle goes much further, asserting that spiritedness is the faculty of soul through which most of us experience affectionate, non-erotic love (Pol. 7.7.1327b38-1328a17). Philia, a very different passion from eros, denotes affection for the near and dear, family members and friends.18 But on what grounds does Aristotle base his claim that thumos creates affection?

Aristotle asks us to consult our experience when we feel slighted. Our anger is kindled more when relatives and friends (philoi) slight us than when strangers do. The greater anger felt toward relatives and friends must be connected, at the source, to the greater love felt toward them (Pol. 7.7.1327b38-1328a17). But if affection and anger are two sides of the same, underlying coin of spiritedness, what does that imply about affection? We earlier said that spiritedness was responsible for the sense of self, and that anger was aroused when the self-idea was endangered. Affection for others would then appear to be an enlargement or extension of one’s sense of self. The self is enlarged so as to infuse itself into other people and things. Affection on this account would be a possessive love because the self would come to regard those people and things as its own (or itself as their own). Affection would always go together with the possessiveness and protectiveness of a watchdog.

Such a ‘‘low’’ view of affection makes more sense of Plato’s doglike guardians (whom the Politics 7.7 passage criticizes) than it does of the rational friendships Aristotle discusses in the Ethics. Unlike the Politics, the Ethics does not claim that spiritedness is the source of affection. Friendships ethically considered are based on three lovable things: pleasure, utility, and virtue (e. g. Eth. Nic. 8.2.1155b16-20). Civic friendship - love for a fellow citizen qua citizen - would seem ordinarily to be a species of utility friendship. By contrast, thumos most often means mere anger in the Ethics, and it can be argued that Aristotle does not accept the tripartite division of the soul for truly ethical and philosophical people, whose choices and whose very being should be a harmonious blend - or even identification - of reason with desire (e. g. 6.2.1139b5-6; cf. Sachs 2002). Spiritedness would thus be a feature of the merely political soul. In short, it is by no means clear how to reconcile the very different accounts of friendship found in the Politics and the Ethics.

One way of reducing the gap between the two accounts is to examine how far the apple of friendship falls from the tree of the self in the Ethics. The self looms very large in all three types of friendship. The true friend or loved one (philos) is a second self, literally an alter ego (Eth. Nic. 8.12.1161b29, 9.4.1166a32, 9.9.1170b7). Of the three bases of friendship, use and pleasure are explicitly self-seeking (8.3.1156a11-19). But virtuous people, too, are selfish for Aristotle, albeit in a different way. They love others who are a lot like them: the highest friendships are loves between sames or similars (8.4. 1156b20-4). Such friends do not need each other’s virtues and are far more likely to share the same virtue. By contrast, user and used are opposites because what one lacks the other fulfills (8.8.1159b12-24). Virtuous friends admire in the other what they admire in themselves (it takes one to know one). The happiest man wants to contemplate his own good actions, but since actions are easier to contemplate in others, he enjoys contemplating his friend’s actions, which are equivalent to his own (9.9.1169b33-1170a5). This ethical friendship is a love of one’s own kind19 and, as such, is an extended form of self-love. The virtuous man is the ultimate selflover, according to Aristotle (9.8.1168b25-1169a15).

The fact that the most exalted friendships of the Ethics remain self-centered - even without reference to spiritedness - may provide a further clue to the problems of ordinary ‘‘thumoeid’’ affection in Politics 7. Unaware of the selfish roots of love, such political friends are surprised and hurt by betrayals, and their love quickly turns to anger and hatred.20 Such friends probably fall into the common errors discussed in the Ethics: believing that good people should act ‘‘for the sake of a friend’’ and neglect their own (Eth. Nic. 9.8.1168a28-1168b1), they are disappointed when these expectations are not fulfilled. Such a low view of affection lacks the altruism of much modern thought, but it makes sense of such phenomena as possessiveness, love which turns to hate, love which ‘‘smothers’’ the loved one, as well as the way identity often gets bound up with people and things other than the self. The political friendships are mostly based on spiritedness for Aristotle.

But while taking over Plato’s thumos, Aristotle rejects Plato’s innovation or thought-experiment of making the city into one great household. Instead of stretching family relations to include fellow citizens, Aristotle appeals to the more traditional philia he observed within and among small (especially familial) groups inside the city (e. g. Pol. 2.3.1261b16-2.4.1262b25; cf. Eth. Nic. 8.10-12). Philia was indeed a traditional political passion. To take one of the most important instances: military arrangements sometimes relied on family philia to motivate unit cohesion. Hoplite armies were traditionally organized by tribe and thus were partially family affairs. Three generations of men from the same family might all be stationed near enough to see one another during battle. Rather than fighting for an abstract cause, they fought for each other: they wanted to protect their comrades who were also friends and loved ones (philoi). Clearly, the traditional arrangement assumes that men do not love their fellow citizens qua citizens as much as they love their own family and friends. The traditional wisdom made civic use of friendships that were private rather than civic. In the Theognidea, for example, philia is essentially a private alliance (or even pact) between two aristocratic families (cf. Figuera and Nagy 1985).

One may be forgiven for wondering if the historical progression of thought from Thucydides to Plato to Aristotle has not merely been a long road back to the obvious. The obvious superiority of philia over eros - its stability as opposed to eros’ volatility, philials connections to honor and pride and its source in the indomitable thumos - seems to render further experimentation pointless.

But can one be friends with every member in a whole polis (let alone a modern nation-state)? Aristotle practically admits that the really strong ties that bind will always obtain within and among nepotistic, factional groups inside the polity. The specter of nepotism is ever present, for example, in the philia between aristocrats in the Theognidea. Such powerful families no doubt believe that, together, they constitute the true polis of peers, but their dominance means subservience for everyone else. Plato’s thought-experiment of abolishing real families serves to highlight this problem with families, as Aristotle also shows (Pol. 2.2-2.4). The Republic assumed that all guardians could be made to share ‘‘one belief’’ about their own (oikeion; 5.464d). But in the absence of communism, ‘‘one’s own’’ will include much that other citizens do not share. Thus philia is good for cities, but any philia wide enough to encompass the whole citizen body will probably be shallow. We have learned that affection is self-centered, that the objects of affection form a target pattern with the self at the bull’s-eye: the inner circle is loved most, the middle ring less, the outer perimeter is not much loved at all.

In defense of civic friendship, it might be argued that people can become friends to the extent that they share something in common (Eth. Nic. 8.9.1159b29-30). And the polity does aim at no mere partial advantage, as Aristotle says (Eth. Nic. 8.9.1160a14-30). In theory, then, this most common of advantages ought to bind citizens together in the strongest friendships. In practice, however, partial advantages closer to home and strong parochial bonds draw citizens away from care ofthe public good. Nothing guarantees that civic friendship will be adequate to its aim. And that is only internally. Little or nothing of later antiquity’s preoccupation with cosmopolitanism and friendship across national boundaries is visible in classical theory. Foreign enemies may even be needed to remind citizens that they are supposed to have a bond with their fellow citizens as citizens - people for whom otherwise they would feel nothing. Fear and hate of outsiders creates solidarity among insiders. The problem with civic friendship remains its selfish, angry roots. Only because the alternatives are so problematic did this thumos-inspired passion emerge as the front-runner. Thus the upshot or normative recommendation of ancient theory is civic friendship. But when today’s political theorists apply ancient ideals of civic friendship to modern problems without taking cognizance of the problems out of which the recommendation emerged, the results can be confusing.