(the) American (Novel of)

8 Nickolas Pappas
to only one dimension of full honesty, given that it makes no difference,
nothing is at stake (mêden diapherei).
The third field of social behavior is amusement, fun (diagôgê, EN
IV.8). Entertainment is a natural part of life, says Aristotle (1127b34).
People amuse themselves and each other: the buffoon too much, doing
anything for a laugh; the boor, who refuses to be amused, too little; the
man of ready wit to just the right degree. That third type of man makes
proper jokes, responding nimbly to a risible situation but remaining
tactful about it, and laughs only at the jokes that are worth laughing at.
Aristotelian Etiquette?
Somewhat as “magnificence” does (that mean between vulgarity and stinginess
with respect to spending money, EN IV.2), friendliness and a ready
wit and truthfulness about oneself stand apart from the major virtues.
You honor these virtues on the assumption that you want to
mingle with company, which is not a thing Aristotle would say about
justice or temperance. Moreover, friendliness and ready wit are matters
of pleasure, occupying places in between pleasing too much and not
pleasing enough. This is the pleasure of human company, which is to
say that sociability is pursued for its own sake. In this respect the
domain of social intercourse is again the domain of etiquette. Social
virtues hardly have any purpose or significance above and beyond the
mutual pleasure found in social intercourse, except for suggesting what
someone’s character is like (1127b2ff., 1128a17ff.). But that’s what you
would also say about etiquette.
Aristotle plays down the virtues of social intercourse. For instance,
though he warns that many states of character have no name (EN 1107b2,
1107b29, 1108a5, 1115b25, 1119a10), it is normally an excess or deficiency
of some motivation that lacks a name, not the mean. But in the social
domain two of the three virtues treated are nameless, as if one rarely had
occasion to praise those traits. These seem to be smaller virtues, as etiquette
is thought of as smaller in stature than ethics.
When it comes to amusement, Aristotle nearly apologizes for including
the subject in his moral theory. He begins with a reminder that
life includes rest as well as activity (1127b34) and concludes with the
same plea for the subject’s inclusion (1128b3). Later in the Ethics (X.6)