The Right Kind of Self-Love

The bad kind is well understood: giving yourself the largest share of material goods, pleasures, and honors. Feeding the irrational part of your nature, the part that is indistinguishable from a bad child — it wants what it wants and doesn't know why.

The good kind requires a preliminary question: which self?

Aristotle's position is that the Intellectual Principle — the rational faculty, the thing in you that can reason and choose and form purposes — is most properly what you are. Other things contribute to making you the person you are, but the self that deliberates, that can look at its own desires and evaluate them, that chooses what to do rather than merely responding to stimuli: that is the self that constitutes you.

So if you ask "am I loving myself?" the answer depends on which part of yourself you're treating well. The man who gratifies his lusts is treating the worst part of himself as if it were the whole of him. The man who chooses the noble thing, even when it costs him comfort or money or even life, is feeding the part that is most genuinely himself.

This produces a result that looks paradoxical.

"The good man does many things for the sake of his friends and his country, even to the extent of dying for them."

He gives up money. He gives up honors, preferring to give the opportunity to his friend rather than take it himself. He gives up life when the time demands it. In every external accounting, he is giving things away, receiving less, sacrificing himself.

And yet: he gives himself the kαλόν. The noble. The honourable. The thing that cannot be taken away because it is the quality of the action, not the material result.

Aristotle's claim: by choosing the noble over the advantageous, the good man takes more for himself. He leaves the money to the friend but keeps the honour of having given it. He gives his life but keeps — in some sense, for however long he has — the greatest thing he could do with it.

"So in fact he gives to himself the greater good."

This is not a consolation prize.

The good man doesn't prefer the honourable as a kind of cope — "well, I didn't get the money, but at least I was noble." He genuinely prefers to be the person who gave the money. The kαλόν is what he was after. The money was only ever a means, and you can't take means all the way down.

The bad man takes the money and leaves the honour. He has optimized for something he thought was the real thing, the actual payoff. But Aristotle thinks he has confused means for ends and ends for means.

The harder question: is this right?

There's a reading of this that sounds like a rationalization — the loser's consolation, philosophy as a sop for those who gave things up. The hero dies and we say he "got more." The philanthropist impoverishes themselves and we say they "have the greater good." This can seem like post-hoc framing dressed up as ethics.

But I don't think Aristotle means it as compensation. He means it as a description of what the good man actually wants. The problem isn't that noble people sacrifice themselves for lesser payoffs. The problem is that most people want the wrong thing. If you've trained yourself to want the kαλόν — not as a second-order preference but as the primary one — then you're not sacrificing when you choose it. You're getting what you wanted.

This is the project of ethical formation for Aristotle: changing what you want, not just what you do. A person who does the noble thing while still wanting the money isn't virtuous yet. They're just controlled. The virtuous person wants the noble thing and gets it.

What I find interesting in this: it locates the self in a place that most modern accounts don't.

We tend to think of "self" as given, and selfishness as taking more for that given self. Aristotle thinks the self is partly the project — you become more yourself by developing the rational principle, by feeding the thing that can deliberate and choose. Someone who only ever satisfies irrational desire hasn't developed much of a self to love; they're mostly just an appetite-management system.

So the accusation of "self-love" aimed at the grasping man might be literally backwards. He's not loving himself enough, or the right self. He's treating his worst part as his best, which is a failure of self-understanding, not an excess of self-regard.

The person who dies for friends and country is, on this account, a more developed self — one that knows what it wants and takes it.

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