Book 7
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To perceive and to know a friend, therefore, is necessarily in a manner to perceive and in a manner to know oneself. Consequently to share even vulgar pleasures and ordinary life with a friend is naturally pleasant (for it always involves our simultaneously perceiving the friend), but more so to share the more divine pleasures; the reason of which is that it is always more pleasant to behold oneself enjoying the superior good, and this is sometimes a passive, sometimes an active experience, sometimes something else. But if it is pleasant to live well oneself and for one’s friend also to live well, and if living together involves working together, surely their partnership will be pre-eminently in things included in the End. Hence we should study together, and feast together—not on the pleasures of food and the necessary pleasures (for such partnerships do not seem to be real social intercourse but mere enjoyment),
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but each really wishes to share with his friends the End that he is capable of attaining, or failing this, men choose most of all to benefit their friends and to be benefited by them. It is therefore manifest that to live together is actually a duty, and that all people wish it very much, and that this is most the case with the man that is the happiest and best. But that the contrary appeared to be the conclusion of the argumentCf. Aristot. Eud. Eth. 1244b 2ff., Aristot. Eud. Eth. 1245a.27. was also reasonable, the statement being true. For the solution is on the line of the comparison,i.e. of man with God, Aristot. Eud. Eth. 1244b 7. the correspondence being true; for the fact that God is not of such a nature as to need a friend postulates that man, who is like God, also does not need one.
