Virtue within Aristotelian Friendships. Along with love, virtue and the way in which it is chosen and cultivated is significant to the agents within Aristotelian friendships. Xxxxxxxxx defines virtue as “a certain completion” in the Physics, when he claims that: “…the virtue is a certain completion…for each thing is said to be complete when it takes on its virtue—for then, it is most in accord with its own nature--- just as a circle is complete when it has most of all become a circle and when it is best, and a vice is a spoiling or a departing from this” (Xxxxxxx, 2007, p.21). Here, virtue is described as not only a certain “completion,” but as a state where something is in “accordance with its nature.” Moreover, an agent’s virtuous disposition is acquired through habit and nature, as Xxxxxxxxx notes that “…virtuous character comes into being as a consequence of habit, on account of which it even gets the name by a small inflection from habit” (NE 110317-18). Nature, particularly an individual’s knowledge of self and soul, influences his sense of pleasure and pain and becomes an additional determinant of whether the individual’s character is “set on the right path” (Xxxxxxx, 2007, p.74). As Xxxxxxxxx claims: “the whole concern both of virtue and of politics is about pleasure and pains, since one who deals with these well will be good, and one who does so badly will be bad” (NE 1105a11-13). Here, the virtuous agent is cultivated, from his childhood, to be engaged in the practice and process of being good, and taking pleasure in the right sorts of actions (Xxxxxxx, 2007, p.74). In relation to our topic, this nature further determines the type of actions that the virtuous agent undertakes within friendships, and suggests that an agent possessing virtue would have to be consistent in thought and action, by virtue of being “in accordance with [his] nature.”
