309ARISTOTLE’S IDEA OF THE SELFThe Journal of Value Inquiry 35: 309–324, 2001.© 2001 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

Aristotle’s Idea of the Self

PETER SIMPSONDepartment of Philosophy, City University of New York, College of Staten Island,Staten Island, NY 10314, USA

1. Modern Selves

The preoccupation with the self or with subjectivity would seem to be one ofthe distinctive features of modern philosophy, or philosophy in the traditionthat goes back to Descartes. The turn to the self is very much present inDescartes, since the self or the ego is the very fons et origo of his philosophi-cal system. Everything else is ultimately to be traced back to the self and itsimmediate conscious states. The self is more or less identified with presenceto self: the self is self-consciousness. Animals are thus not selves because notself-conscious. Indeed animals are not even alive, properly speaking. Con-trary to what Aristotle supposed, life comes not with self-movement, but withself-consciousness.1 Accordingly there is a splitting off of self from body, atleast at the level of the meanings of terms, since consciousness need not in-clude any reference to body. This remains true still of modern materialists inthe philosophy of mind, for, while they are keen to reduce the being of con-sciousness to body, they are not as keen to reduce the meaning of conscious-ness to body, as in the case of functionalists. Self-motion, by contrast, doesvery much include reference to body, for self-movers are paradigmaticallybodies.

The separating of self and body, initiated if not fully intended by Descartes,brings with it a separating of the self from the public and observable and itsretreat into the radically private. Just as the public world of bodies is cut offfrom the self behind the screen of the self’s ideas, so is the self cut off fromthe public world of bodies by its merely instrumental and non-constitutiverelationship to bodily motion. Bodily motion can be the effect of the self, butit need not be. Bodily motion is fully intelligible in its own right as a mechani-cal process. It is only subjectively, or in our own self-consciousness, that wecan speak of effects of self on bodily motion. There is nothing in the idea ofthe body’s motion as such that requires the presence of the choosing, activeself. Descartes famously reduced animals to machines but exempted men fromthe same reduction because of the fact of speech.2 Among publicly percepti-

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ble phenomena, it is speech that tells us that behind the phenomena there isanother self like our own.

Many contemporary authors, whether in the Analytic or Continental tradi-tions, do not like the Cartesian idea of a self hidden behind the speaking.They do not want to posit, either in themselves or in others, such private,unobservable entities. But they curiously hang on to the idea that such a selfis the only individual self that there could be in theory. When, in their flightfrom the private, they make publicly perceptible language the primary anddistinctive phenomenon in human life, they identify human characteristics withsuch public language and hence also with the social and historical. Thus thereare only individuals, on this view, to the extent that individuals are sociallyand historically embodied, or in short to the extent that they are not individu-als but social constructs. What is lost on this view, and what, by its absence,makes an individual self impossible to conceptualize, is the self as a self-mover.While speech is a public and social phenomenon, the act of speaking is anindividual one. There could be a place for genuine individuals and genuineindividual selves in the context of public language, if individuals could beconceived as the centers of action from which acts of speaking self-consciouslyproceed. But acts of speaking are the movings of bodies and, as Descartestaught us, and as we still want to believe, there is no self to a moving body assuch. Moving bodies are explicable in purely mechanical terms. It is only thesymbolic aspects of speech, not its material production in the noise-makingsof speakers, that mechanics fails to explain. The symbolic features of languageare that to which the distinctively human characteristics retreat and are so-cially constructed.

There are thus two reductions of human characteristics that we have inher-ited from Cartesianism: the reduction that Descartes himself gave us, whichis to the absolutely private self, and the reduction that the reaction to Descartesgave us, which is to the absolutely social self. The first gives us our own self.Other selves are known indirectly, by analogy and extrapolation and by ananalogy and extrapolation that always remain doubtful. The second gives usonly one self too, the one social self into which an individual is to be whollyabsorbed. The first also gives us individuals that are understood to be com-plete as selves all at once and on their own; the second gives us individualsthat are not selves at all and that are never selves as individuals, but only asconstructed into the existing social whole.

These reductions at the metaphysical and epistemological levels are re-peated at the moral and political levels. Here theory and practice tend to splitinto the rival camps of individualism and socialism, and our conflicts, physi-cal and verbal, concern whether and how far we are to take our bearings byatomic individuals, for whom society is a means, or by the social community,for whom individuals are a means. Atomic individuals lead to capitalism andthe stress on individual rights against a community; the social community leads

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to communism and the stress on community rights against an individual. Thereare problems with both reductions and at each of the levels. The first of themhas the drastic effect of closing the self up within itself. This is true to beginwith at the level of being and knowledge, for there is no being that we knowsave our own subjective states. Whether there is some being beyond the stateswhich they represent is impossible to answer. We never have access to such abeing to know whether there is any such being, and, if so, whether it is likeour conscious subjective states or not.

At the level of morals and politics, the self is identified with the individu-alized subject of certain self-regarding rights, and political states are guaran-tors of such rights against infringement by others. The self is the center andthe world of morals and politics is constructed from the self outwards. Per-haps the classic expression of this idea is the theory of the social contract asderived from Descartes’s contemporary, Hobbes. Society and the state are,according to Hobbes, constructed by an agreement between what we may callsolipsistic selves. Solipsistic selves are self-seeking selves, or selves that aremotivated only by a desire to achieve the subjective satisfaction of whateverpassions they happen to have at any given time. The pursuit by everyone oftheir own passions naturally leads to conflict of self with self, and the socialcontract is a way of removing or minimizing the conflict. Each self agrees todemand for itself no greater freedom to pursue its own passions than it is pre-pared to grant to others to pursue theirs; each self also agrees to set up a pub-lic force or coercive power to enforce and guarantee the agreement. Theagreement is the social contract, the terms of the contract and obedience to itare morality, and the coercive force is the state.

The features particularly distinctive of this understanding of ethics andpolitics are rational choice and rights. “Rational choice” refers to the mechan-ics, as it were, of making the contract, and “rights” to the principles and re-sults of the contract. Self-interested individuals are understood to be rationalonly to the extent that they make agreements that serve their self-interest bet-ter than any alternative agreements would. Rational choice theory is the studyof what such an agreement should look like. Rights are essentially the self-interested desires of the parties to the contract taken as normative for the con-tract, thereby motivating the contract and being guaranteed by it.

Self-interest is what, on this account, gives content to rational choice andrights, and hence also to the political association that is produced. Such anassociation is essentially an alliance of mutual convenience and not a com-munity. What each person pursues as his good is not some good common toall but a private good peculiar to each. The good of others is viewed as merelyinstrumental to our own individual good, and we make room for or care aboutthe good of others only to the extent that this is necessary to secure our ownprivate good. In a genuine community, by contrast, there is a genuinely com-mon good that is the joint good of each person and constitutive of it.

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There is no place for such a good in the theory of rational choice and self-interested rights. Indeed advocates of that theory rule out such a good fromthe start and proceed on the supposition that whatever goods there are, arealways private to the individual. They thus also rule out goods that are in-creased when shared, the internal goods of character, or virtues, as opposedto the external and bodily goods, such as wealth and fame. Advocates of thedoctrine of rational choice and rights proceed on the idea that we want to taketo ourselves as much as possible and to give up to others as little as possible.But this doctrine would have no place if the goods at issue were goods thatexisted precisely in giving and were necessarily perfected by giving. Love,for instance, which is such a good, plays no role in this doctrine. Yet if weconsider families and their role in our lives and recall that families are wherewe all begin and develop and is fundamentally a giving and a sharing, we cansee how vital to our lives genuine community and the goods of communityreally are.

The self, however, from which rights doctrines start is predominantly theself of passions and feelings. The self seeks to satisfy itself, and rights are themeans for guaranteeing its satisfactions against threats from others. The selfis happy when its passions and feelings are thus indulged and gratified. It ishappy by virtue of its passivity or its capacity to be affected by things thathappen to it. Feelings and the satisfaction of feelings are essentially thingsthat we undergo. They are not things that we do, though admittedly they mayhappen to us because of things that we do. There is little sense in this theoryof the self that is happy, not because of what happens to it or how it feels, butbecause of what it does and how it gives. Passion and passivity take prec-edence, not action and activity. But this should not be surprising. The solipsisticself, from which this whole theory begins, is precisely the self turned in onitself, the self absorbed by its own inner states, not the self turned out of itselfand absorbed in acting and being for others.

The self that suffers or undergoes and that, so to speak, finds itself in whatit suffers and undergoes also has the feature, at a metaphysical level, of lack-ing a robust or substantial coherence and unity. It exists or is a self only inso-far as it undergoes, feels, or is conscious of something. The self thus tends toget dissolved into the succession of its feelings. It collapses, as Hume argued,into the bundle of its impressions.3 But provided the impressions or feelingsare pleasant, nothing else much matters, not even that it is the same self, ifindeed any sense can be given, in this context, to the concept of the same selfthat is different, say, from the concept of a replicated self.4

So much may be said about the first modern reduction of the self to theabsolutely private self. With respect to the second modern reduction of theself to the absolutely social self, the following may be noted. On an ethicaland political level, it is in conflict with the facts. We are clearly existing be-

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ings with a full range of powers and abilities independently of and prior tosociety and the structures of a state. Indeed the powers and abilities makesocieties and states, which are human productions. We, by contrast, are pro-duced by nature. Admittedly we are produced by nature to live in communitywith each other, as the fact that we are produced in and by families proves.But we are not produced to be instruments of a community, let alone a state.We are produced to flourish and reach perfection in communities; hence thestructures of communities and states must be for us.

Socialists hypostatize and make a fetish of community. They attribute a be-ing to community over and above the being of the individuals who make itup. In reality, the fetish of socialists is just a deceit to hide the all too brutaltruth that socialism is tyranny over the many by the few who constitute a rul-ing party. The few are an independent community and it is to such a group ofindividuals that everyone is to be subordinated or enslaved.

Liberal individualism and socialism are flip sides of the same bad coin.Liberal individualism subordinates community to individuals and socialismsubordinates individuals to community. Neither allows room for the possibil-ity that individuals and community are really on the same level and do notneed to be subordinated. Community is a matter of the individuals who makeit up pursuing goods that only exist in acts of sharing. Admittedly, to be ableto engage in such acts of sharing, individuals cannot be taken in their raw orinitial state as bundles of desires and passions, or as solipsistic selves. Afterall, that is the condition of children from which we have to be weaned byeducation.

Such weaning comes, of course, from a community or society, or at least afamily. But it is nature that gives us the powers to be weaned, and not com-munity or society. Nature also gives us their goal or point. Our capacity tospeak, for instance, is by nature a naming and judging of the being of things.Our capacity is therefore to be weaned or educated in the direction of suchnaming and judging. The sounds used for this purpose and their syntacticalordering can vary infinitely, even as the particular sounds and ordering wecome to use are determined for us by our society. But society and society’slanguage do not determine the beings we name and judge. Nature determinesthem as she also determines our capacity to speak. People who would limitour grasp of being by the limits of our language are no less despotic, and noless to be resisted, than people who would limit our pursuit of goodness bythe limits of the decrees of our rulers. If being outstrips the language, let thelanguage be made to catch up; and if our pursuit of goodness outstrips thedecrees of our rulers, let the decrees and the rulers be made to catch up. Nei-ther in our moral and political life nor in our speaking and thinking are wemere creatures of a fetish oriented society or state, totally absorbed in its al-ienating, despotic goals.

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2. Aristotle’s Idea of Self

The characterization we have considered of the modern idea of the self isperhaps a little too schematic. If we descended more into details, we woulddoubtless find that other views of the self can be found. Still, the schematiccharacterization picks out the main features and deficiencies of the modernidea of the self. Any other views of the self that can be found are only goingto constitute an interesting alternative if they avoid these deficiencies. In fact,they are only going to constitute an interesting alternative if they include el-ements of an understanding of the self that is of a decidedly Aristotelian castinasmuch as they receive a particularly compelling presentation in Aristotle’swritings. We can put together from passages of the Metaphysics, the De Anima,and the Nicomachean Ethics an account of the self that is superior in all thedecisive respects to the modern accounts just discussed.

In Aristotle there is a fully articulated account of substance as the onto-logical or metaphysical reality of each particular thing. What makes a thingstand out, as it were, from bare nothingness is its substantial being. A thingmay exist in a variety of ways or with a variety of properties, as in having acertain size, or shape, or color, but it is not reducible to the properties. Theproperties are reducible to the thing. Sizes and shapes and colors do not existby themselves. They exist as the size or shape or color of something whichcan itself exist, and perdure, even if it changes its size, shape, or color. Thebeing of something, therefore, is conceptually separable from the propertiesof the thing while they are not conceptually separable from it.5

Empiricists reject such a distinction. For empiricists a thing is just the bundleof its perceptual properties and nothing else. But empiricists take this posi-tion on the basis of an irrealist theory of perception. What we directly per-ceive, they declare, are sensations in the sense of mental contents, not in thesense of really existing things external to us. If that is the case, then a thingwould be reducible to its sensations. Its substance, as that of which sensationswould be modifications, would be consciousness itself, not some externalreality. However, if what we perceive are externally existing things, then athing will be its own self-subsistent reality, with properties conceptually butnot really separable from it. The idea that the substance of a thing is a realgiven of experience is central to Aristotelian doctrine.

The substance of a thing is also primarily its form or its structuring princi-ple. In the case of material things, the structuring principle is combined withmatter which it structures so that the whole is an enduring sensible entity.6

The particular form or principle of a thing is sufficient, not only to individuatethe thing as what it is, but also to make it the same individual thing through-out all changes. The doctrine of substantial form is what explains, for Aristo-tle, the identity over time of individual material things. It is the principal partof his answer to the problem of personal identity. We tend to wonder if per-

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sonal identity is to be explained by reference to bodily continuity, or psycho-logical continuity, or both.7 On Aristotle’s view it is neither. Personal identityis identity of form or identity of the structuring principle that keeps the bodythe same despite changes. It is the enduring source of all the powers and actsof a person.

The structuring principle that constitutes personal identity over time is thesoul or, as Aristotle describes it, the first actuality of the organic body.8 It iswhat sets the body in act as a body and as a living body. Without it, the bodywould not be a body. Whether or not the soul can survive without the body,for Aristotle, it is clear that the body cannot survive without the soul. Becausethe living body is essentially something that moves, grows, and acts in vari-ous ways, it cannot be without soul. A dead body is no longer a body, but thedecaying remains of a body. The soul is the source of being for the body andthe ground of all the acts of the body in growing, moving, sensing, desiring,or thinking. Such acts are the second actualities of the living body, in whichthe powers of the living thing come to exercise. The body does not alwaysexercise its powers, as in sleep. But it always exercises its first actuality, forwithout that it would not be a living body at all.

From all this it follows that the principle of personal identity is not identi-cal with acts of self-consciousness, or even with what is immediately knownin acts of self-consciousness. Acts of self-consciousness are intermittent, butthe actuality of the soul is not. Moreover what is known in self-conscious-ness are the various acts being performed at the time, such as perceiving orthinking, or what are called second actualities.9 The first actuality of the souldoes, nevertheless, come to view in a way, since our conscious acts are actsof us sensing and thinking, which must involve some reflexive awarenessof the substantial unity from which the acts spring. But the acts need nothave any further unity among themselves; they could be episodic, haphaz-ard, or disorganized. Perhaps in extreme cases it might even be unclear, atleast from inside consciousness, if the acts all belong to the same soul. Self-consciousness might, then, be Humean: a mere bundle of otherwise inde-pendent states. From outside a given individual’s consciousness, however,there will be no doubt that all the acts belong to one soul, since the substan-tial entity that is the living body will always be one and the same and pub-licly observable.

Our awareness of ourselves as one and the same may owe more to our ex-ternal awareness of our body than to our internal awareness of our own acts.Perhaps there is no awareness of the unity of the self apart from awareness ofthe body and the unity of the body. Aristotle would reject the notion of aCartesian ego, which is supposed to be a unitary given even in absence ofreference to the body. He would, as far as self-consciousness goes, sympa-thize more with the bundle theory of Hume, though he would reject Hume’sempiricism.

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We may say, then, that the idea of the primary self for Aristotle is the on-tological reality of the composite of body and soul. This reality, which canbecome an object of self-consciousness, has a being independent of self-consciousness and acts of self-consciousness. Consequently, it is not the ideaof the self of Descartes’s cogito, for that is pure self-consciousness, or theidea of the self of Hume’s bundle of perceptions, for that is a collection ofparticular conscious acts, or the idea of the self of Kant’s transcendental ap-perception, for that is a theoretical posit. Aristotle’s idea of the primary selffunctions at the level of natural philosophy and biology. It is the self that comesto view, and to public view, as a particular animate body. The self is animal innature, in our case our being as rational animals: precisely what Descartesrejected as a possible understanding of the self.10

It does not follow from this, however, that the biological or ontological self,as we may call it, is all there is to Aristotle’s idea of the self. In fact we mightsay that for Aristotle the biological self is the lowest level of selfhood. Be-yond the unity of an animal’s substance, which is an immediate given, thereis also the unity of an animal’s powers and acts, which is not an immediategiven and does not automatically follow the unity of substance. The body, forinstance, can, in its powers, be estranged and divided from itself, as by dis-ease, deformity, and paralysis, when the parts of the body do not act in coordi-nation or do not follow the commands of reason and wish. Disease and paralysiscan strike the psychic powers too, when passion conflicts with passion or withreason, and someone is driven now this way and now that.11 A man may be oneself in his substance, but many and conflicting selves in his acts.

These considerations bring us directly into Aristotle’s moral and politicalthought. Unity of actions, or what we may call the moral self, is not, unlikethe ontological or biological self, a given of nature; it is an achievement ofpractice and habituation and the result of virtue.12 Without virtue, individualsand communities are torn and divided. Aristotle presents a vivid picture ofsuch a division in his description of a bad man:

The base are divided against themselves and, as in the incontinent, theirappetites are other than their wishes. For they choose, in place of what theythink good, things pleasant but harmful. Some shun doing what they thinkbest for themselves through cowardice or sloth. . . . For their soul is rivenby faction, and one part, because of depravity, grieves to be kept from cer-tain things while another is pleased, and one part pulls them in this direc-tion and another in that as if splitting them asunder.13

To be contrasted with this is Aristotle’s description of a good man:

The decent man is of one mind with himself, and he desires with his entiresoul the same things. He wills for himself what is and appears to be good,

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and does it. . . . He shares the same griefs and pleasures as himself, for atall times the same thing is painful or pleasant to him and not one thing atone time and another at another.14

A bad man, then, is not really a unity while a good man is. A bad man is acombination of several parts that are in conflict with each other. As Aristotlesays again:

That which is good is simple but what is bad is multiform. And while thegood man is always alike and does not change in character, the base andthe senseless man is one thing in the morning and another at night.

In the wicked man there is dissonance, and it is for this reason that itseems possible for a self [autos] to be an enemy of itself [hautoi]. But quaone and undivided a self [autos] is desirable to itself [hautoi], and such thegood man is . . . since the depraved man is not one but many and withinthe same day is a different self [heteros].15

If the translation of this passage is somewhat unusual, it brings out how muchthe idea of self is present in the Greek. Aristotle’s message is that a bad manis not a self but many selves that are hostile to each other. A bad man is a sortof schizophrenic. The only unity his many selves have is that they are all states,moods, or acts of one and the same composite of body and soul. A bad manmay thus be ontologically one self, but he is not existentially one self. On thecontrary, his lived experience is a bundle of conflicting acts and emotions.“The depraved do not have any fixity in them, for not even to themselves dothey persist in being alike.”16

The reason for all this is plain. The vices, which are what disfigure badand depraved individuals, do not have any principle of unity. They form pairsof conflicting opposites: rashness and cowardice, prodigality and meanness,and irascibility and passivity.17 It is likely that a bad man will share some-thing of both pairs of vices. He will run rashly into needless danger at onemoment and then at the next, when he realizes his mistake, run out of it likea coward. He will give his money prodigally at one moment but then at thenext, when he sees it dissipating too quickly, seek to increase it like a miser.18

The very nature of the vices, therefore, will deprive a bad man of unity.In addition, the vices are opposed to reason and nature. They are opposed

to reason because vices are by definition failures to keep to the mean markedout by reason. They are opposed to nature because our nature has a life ofvirtue as its proper end and function.19 Moreover, our soul is the principle ofour nature, and the principle of our soul is reason. Indeed, Aristotle says onseveral occasions that reason or intellect is what we truly are.20 It is not sur-prising, therefore, that to be vicious is to be driven against ourself and to ex-perience a perpetual state of opposition within ourself – an opposition between

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what we are, reason, and what we fall prey to, vice. As remarked in the MagnaMoralia: “[T]hen only will the soul be one, when the reason and the passionsare in accord with one another.”21 In the Eudemian Ethics, we find:

The object of our search is this, that things simply good be good to theself. For what one should choose is what is simply good, but what oneshould choose for oneself is what is good for one’s self. These must har-monize together, and that is what virtue does. This is also what politicalscience is for, so that those who do not yet have this harmony may cometo have it.22

Virtue is what brings our soul to unity and makes us into single selves. Novirtue opposes any other. All are united in and through the virtue of prudencewhich, as right reason, falls into the definition of each of them.23 Moreover,since the virtues accord with reason and nature, they integrate our soul withitself and with its acts, and they also integrate the acts with each other.

Virtue is for the sake of acts and a good man is good in action, not merelyin having the power and disposition to act.24 The self that a good man is mustcome fully into being as a self in activity, and action is itself complete in andthrough the body. Thus, it is in a self-moving body that the self most comesto view, contrary to what Descartes held. Our self-motion, however, unlikethat of plants and animals, is self-conscious motion. It is deliberate and cho-sen, and choice is impossible without self-awareness, since without suchawareness we could not know our acts as our own and so could not directourselves to them. We would instead be being directed by something else, andso we would be acted on rather than acting. Besides, the very idea of a selfdenotes reflexivity, the returning of awareness back on the self as source ofthat awareness. A self that had no awareness of itself would not be a self. Itwould not know itself as “I” or have any awareness of anything as being“mine.” Self-awareness and self-possession are integral to being a self andan agent of acts.

In one sense, self-awareness is easy and automatic. As soon as we are awake,we are aware of ourselves and of our existence and activity. We do not haveto put any effort into being aware of ourselves; it comes at once with each ofour waking acts. We perceive a tree, for instance, and in perceiving it, weperceive that we perceive. We know a mathematical equation, and in know-ing it, we know that we know. We walk and talk, and in doing so, we knowthat we walk and talk.25 The same is true of all our activity, including our de-liberating and choosing. But such immediate self-awareness, while enoughfor awareness of self, is not enough for knowledge of self. It does not give usto ourselves in a full and direct way. What we directly know and perceive issomething other than ourself such as a tree or an equation. The self we onlyknow and perceive reflexively.

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We can bring ourselves into direct awareness in another way, when in oneact of ours we make another act of ours the object. We may recall in memorysomething we did and, focusing on it, try to see why we did it and in whatstate of mind or feeling. Or, while performing some act now that we can doeasily and without much concentration, we may distance ourselves from it inthought and watch ourselves doing it. But while this kind of awareness canprovide us with the source of a deeper knowledge of ourselves, it is alwaysperformed at one remove from ourselves. It is ourself as somehow other, asbelonging to another time or another act, that we focus on. Self-knowledge isnot the same as immediate self-awareness, and it is harder to achieve.

We can study our neighbors more than we can study ourselves and theirdeeds more than our own. It is a most difficult thing, as some of the sageshave said, to attain a knowledge of oneself . . .; we are not able to see whatwe are from ourselves, and that we cannot do so is plain from the way inwhich we blame others without being aware that we do the same thingourselves.26

Aristotle’s stance is anti-Cartesian. The self is not, as Descartes argued, whatwe first and most know, but what, in a way, we know last and least.27 Evenour immediate self-awareness, which accompanies each one of our consciousacts, is not first, though it may be contemporaneous. To be aware that we areseeing or hearing or walking presupposes as something logically, though nottemporally, prior that we are seeing or hearing or walking.28

Aristotle’s remarks about the difficulty of self-knowledge come in the mid-dle of his discussion of friendship and the need for good people to have friends.They form part of complex arguments to the effect that we can know ourselvesbest in our friends, and that by contemplating them we can thereby contem-plate and know ourselves. But such contemplation of ourselves in our friendsis only possible if our friends are like ourselves, since otherwise what we con-template in them will not manifest what is in ourselves. The only friends whocan play this role will be friends who are other selves and who act as mirrorsin which we can see ourselves reflected.29 Only virtuous friends are other selvesand mirrors for each other, since only their friendship is founded on love ofwhat a friend essentially is. As Aristotle remarks in Nicomachean Ethics: “Theother two kinds of friendship, those of pleasure and utility, are based on acci-dental qualities of the friend.”

If self-knowledge, therefore, comes to its full completion in such virtuousfriendship, and if self-knowledge is necessary to being fully a self, then itfollows that the self only comes to full completion in being a virtuous friendto a virtuous friend. It will be in virtuous friendship alone that selves come totheir perfect realization as selves. In a virtuous friend the self is given to theself in direct focus and in a direct act, so that in seeing such a friend directly

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we see ourselves directly. The friend is a faithful mirror of my own self. Like-wise, he too in seeing me directly sees himself directly. We each reflect theself back to each other, and the self-knowing that we could not do well on ourown we do easily together.

This is what Aristotle ultimately has in mind by the striking phrase he useson several occasions about a friend, that a friend is heteros or allos autos andeven heteros ego.30 This phrasing is normally translated as meaning that afriend is “another self” or “another I,” and this is undoubtedly right. But thephrasing has a greater grammatical richness, and there is no reason not to trans-late it also as meaning that a friend is “the self or I as other,” or even “theother as self or I.” All three translations serve only to highlight, in their dif-ferent ways, the same and decisive fact about virtuous friendship: that a friendmakes the self stand opposite itself as a direct object for itself, thus bringingthe self to fuller knowledge of itself and so also to fuller being as a self.31 How-ever, a friend cannot do this service for his friend without his friend doing thesame service for him at the same time. Virtuous friends necessarily completeeach other mutually in their acts of friendship. As I become fully aware ofmyself and my life and being in a friend, so the friend becomes fully aware ofhimself and his life and being in me. In a real sense, we each give ourselvesto each other in our acts towards each other. Moreover, we thus give ourselvesfully to each other, for there is no more that we can give to each other than ourvery selves. Each act of the friends thus becomes another act of self-giving, andeach act of self-giving intensifies the being of the self that gives and receives.

If we are to follow out the implications of Aristotle’s remarks, we mustnote that giving and receiving not only must be mutual or reciprocal, but alsomust be immediate to each other. In giving myself to him I receive the gift ofhimself to me. At least this must be so in the most complete acts of virtuousfriendship, when both friends are active toward each other. For then my actof giving myself to him is immediate with his act of giving himself to me.This remains so even if the act in question concerns the friend doing me abenefit and my thanking him for it. An act of gratitude is a matter of givingtoo. Of course, there can be an interval between an act of beneficence and anact of gratitude, say if my friend saves my life by taking me to a hospital whenI am wounded or ill and unconscious. But when I have recovered enough toknow what my friend did and to thank him for it expressly and personally,then at once the activity of mutual giving and receiving is restored. I givemyself to him again in giving thanks. He gives himself to me in receivingthanks.

The sort of acts which virtuous friends do together as friends are virtuousacts, and virtue and virtuous acts are goods that are par excellence communalgoods, that are realized in two or more people acting together and that areincreased in being shared.32 Money is a material good that is diminished inbeing shared, but the generous use of money is a good of virtue that is in-

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creased in being shared. If people share in being generous to each other ac-cording to their means, generosity is necessarily increased. The same holdsof the goods of the intellectual virtues. These goods too are increased whenshared, since contemplation and study can often be more intense and morecomplete if done by several people together.

Of course, even bad men can cooperate for particular purposes and eventhe lower grades of friendship, that involve mere utility or pleasure, neces-sarily involve some cooperation. There is doubtless even some degree of self-giving in such friendships. But such self-giving is inevitably imperfect andflawed because the selves who are giving and receiving are imperfect andflawed selves. Besides, it is not the friend’s self that they love but some fea-ture attaching to the friend which they currently need or enjoy. Hence there isno mutual giving and receiving of selves. The friendship of virtuous peopleis not like this because they are complete selves and their love is for the selfof their friends.

3. The Ideas of Selves Compared

So much must be implied by Aristotle’s teaching on friendship, even if Aris-totle himself does not spell it all out in so many words. The idea of the self weget from him stands in marked contrast to the modern notion of selves weconsidered earlier. Aristotle’s idea of the self has substantial reality as an in-dividual self. We might say that Descartes’s idea of the self is something sub-stantial; but Descartes’s way of understanding this leads too easily to the lossof substantiality. Descartes identifies the substantiality with consciousness,and consciousness in us is an act or a series of acts and not a substance, andpassive, not active. It expresses the self in its mode of experiencing itself andnot in its mode of moving itself. The attempt to separate the body from theself, which is the chief legacy of Cartesianism, is what leads also to the lossof substance and action. Indeed, it is what leads to the Humean idea of theself, which though at some distance from the Cartesian idea is nevertheless anatural development from it. A bundle of feelings or impressions is what con-sciousness, understood as identical with conscious acts, must always threatento become.

Aristotle’s insistence on the reality of the objects of immediate perception,including especially the reality of our own bodies, is what enables him to keepthe substantial reality of the self as the abiding source and ultimate object ofconsciousness. It is also what enables him to keep the substantial reality ofindividual selves as the source and perfection of friendship. He loses real in-dividuals neither into bundles of perceptions nor into social constructs.

Aristotle takes as his starting point the idea of an embodied rational ani-mal. Such an animal stands out because of its capacity for sharing the genu-

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inely communal goods of the soul. In such sharing this animal comes fully toitself and indeed becomes fully a self. There can be here no conflict betweenthe good of others and the good of the self, or between altruism and selfish-ness.33 Communal goods are communal. They satisfy each person individu-ally as much as all people together and do so at the same time. It is as muchan error here to raise, with a liberal individualist, the idea of a conflict be-tween self and other as it is to raise, with a socialist collectivist, the idea ofthe self losing itself in the other or in society. On the contrary, in the pursuitof communal goods, each self is perfected as a self and finds itself again andagain in other selves.

The communal goods are the rational goods of the virtues, and the virtueshave the effect of bringing the self to the fullness of selfhood. The unity thatthe self already is by its substantial reality as body and soul is not automati-cally carried over into the activities of the self. There is need in addition ofthe virtues which alone can unify the self in this way. Without the virtues, theself is dissipated and ceases, in its lived experience, to be a self. The self thatis unified by the virtues not only completes itself by becoming, in its acts,one self, but also completes itself by becoming the only sort of self that,through union with other selves like itself, can fully come to itself and fullygrasp and possess itself. A perfect self is, as it were, an unimpeded flow ofexistence from substance to powers to acts. Such perfection is achieved fullyin virtuous friendship, wherein friends, while different in their being, are unitedin their living and are to each a true other self. In such a case the differencebetween substance and acts, and between the substantial and the moral self,may remain ontologically, but it has little importance existentially. In theexperience of their lived being, friends are one in their joint act of self-gift.34

Such friendship marks the highpoint of Aristotle’s idea of self, the goodlife, and happiness. Only a good man is properly speaking a self. A bad manis many and conflicting selves. Only a good man is truly happy. A bad man istorn and tortured by the war between his selves. Only a good man truly actsand, in acting, realizes himself. A bad man is acted upon as he is seized by hiswarring selves. Happiness for him is not what he does but what he undergoesbecause of what he does, namely, the pleasures or satisfactions, however tem-porary, that his conflicting actions bring. Consequently, he measures his rela-tions with others, not according to the mutual self-gift of virtuous friends, butaccording to how the relations may bring him satisfaction. He demands fromothers his self-focused rights; he does not expand into others through self-perfecting love. Virtuous people, by contrast, not only achieve genuine com-munity with others through their friendships, but also complete their selfhoodthrough community. They are not lost in some hypostatized social mass. Eachis and remains a genuine self.

Aristotle’s idea of the self is evidently neither solipsistic nor a social con-struct. Instead it keeps to a mean between these two modern extremes, and by

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so doing it achieves a higher degree of selfhood and of community than ei-ther. Aristotle furnishes us, therefore, with a better basis, not only for theontology of the self and consciousness, but also for an ethics and politics thatgive genuine and equal worth to individuals and community instead of col-lapsing one into the other.

Notes

1. Aristotle, in W.D. Ross trans. and ed., De Anima (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956),403b25–27; 412a14–15; 427a17–19.

2. Rene Descartes, Discourse on Method, Part V, pp. 44–45, Descartes: Selected Philo-sophical Writings, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cam-bridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

3. David Hume, in L.A. Selby-Bigge ed., A Treatise of Human Nature, 2nd ed. (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1978), Part IV, sect. VI, esp. pp. 252–253.

4. See Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), Part3.

5. See Aristotle, Metaphysics trans. and ed. David Daso (Oxford: Oxford University Press,1958), 7(Z).1.

6. Ibid., 7(Z), esp. 6 & 15.7. Parfit, op. cit., Part 3; Friedo Ricken, “Ist die Person oder der Mensch Zweck an sich

selbst?” Information Philosophie 2, (1997).8. Aristotle, De Anima, 412a27–28.9. Ibid., 425b12–17.

10. Descartes, Second Meditation, in Descartes, op. cit., p. 81.11. Aristotle, in Ingram Bywater ed., Nichomachean Ethics (Ethica Nicomachea) (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1957), 1102b16–28.12. See Suzanne Stern-Gillet, Aristotle’s Philosophy of Friendship (Albany: State Univer-

sity of New York Press, 1995), pp. 25–29.13. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 116b7–22.14. Ibid., 1166a13–29.15. Aristotle, in R.R. Waltzer and J.M. Mingay eds., Eudemian Ethics (Ethica Eudemia)

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 1239b11–14; 1240b12–17.16. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1159b7–9.17. Ibid., bk. II, ch. 7.18. Ibid., 1115b28–6a9; 1121a30–2a13.19. Ibid., 1097b22–8a20.20. Ibid., 1166a16–17; 1168b34–69a3; 1178a2–3.21. Aristotle (attrib.), in Immanuel Bekker ed., Magna Moralia in Aristotelis Opera, 2nd

ed. (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1960), 1211a34–35.22. Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics, 1236b38–37a3.23. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, bk. VI, chs. 1, 5, 13.24. Ibid., 1098b31–9a7.25. Aristotle, De Anima, 425b12, and Nicomachean Ethics, 1170a29–32.26. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1169b33–35, and Magna Moralia, 1213a11–18.27. Descartes, Second Meditation, in op. cit.28. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1170a29–32.29. Ibid., 1170a1–4, and Magna Moralia, 1213a20–24.

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30. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1166a31–32; 1170b6–7; Eudemian Ethics, 1245a29–30,34–35; Magna Moralia, 1213a11, 23–24. See Stern-Gillet, op. cit., pp. 28–29.

31. See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1170a32–b7.32. Cf. Cooper, op. cit., pp. 304–310.33. Cf. Stern-Gillet, op. cit., pp. 120–122.34. Ibid., pp. 99–101, 140–142.