I will begin by explaining in more detail the problem about friendship posed in Nicomachean Ethics 9.9, first by reference to its background in Plato’s Lysis, secondly by looking more closely at the notion of self-sufficiency that generates it — a notion which, I argue, can be applied consistently throughout the NE. I will then turn to the arguments of 9.9 themselves. These arguments have not been sufficiently well understood by commentators, and the elaborate final argument (1170a14–1170b20) has long evaded interpretation and so has been unjustly neglected. The arguments of 9.9, on my interpretation, indicate that the need for friendship is indeed a different sort of threat to self-sufficiency than the vicious man’s dependence on pleasure or honor. All the same, I argue, the hope that 9.9 might offer a picture of friendship as fully compatible with self-sufficiency is not justified. In the end Aristotle is left with the same counter-intuitive claim I have outlined — that as a person grows in contemplative excellence, he outgrows his dependence on others and so his need for friends. If Aristotle is given a consistent view, in other words, it seems that what he says is false.
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