Autor: Purcell, Brendan M.

Buch: The Drama of Humanity

Titel: The Drama of Humanity

Stichwort: Aristoteles, Freundschaft, Modell, Vorbild

Kurzinhalt: Einheit mit dem wahren Selbst -> Einheit jeder Freundschaft

Textausschnitt: § 3 THE MODEL OF FRIENDSHIP

24/5 Secondly, there is Aristotle's use of this notion of a good man's friendship with himself not only to point to the source of friendship but to articulate the state of friendship by which good men relate to each other. The good man loves and befriends the best part of himself, his self-transcendent reason, by which he is a man. Similarly, friends love what is best in one another and for one another. Without saying so explicitly, although he comes very close to it in a passage which we shall later quote from IX, 12, Aristotle seems to indicate that the conscious unity of the different friends in their friendship is analogous to the conscious harmony of a good man with the different aspects of his personal existence: (137; Fs)

Friendly relations with one's neighbours, and the marks by which friendships are defined, seem to have proceeded from a man's relations with himself. For we define a friend as one who wishes and does what is good, or seems so, for the sake of his friend, or as one who wishes his friend to exist and live, for his sake [...] Now each of these is true of the good man's relation to himself [...] [S]ince each of these characteristics belongs to the good man in relation to himself, and he is related to his friend as to himself, for his friend is another self, friendship too is thought to be one of these attributes, and those who have these attributes to be friends [...] There would seem to be friendship in so far as he is two or more, to judge from the aforementioned attributes of friendship, and from the fact that the extreme of friendship is likened to one's love for oneself.(IX,4)

25/5 So, being ethically one with oneself is the primary concrete heuristic which Aristotle has developed as a model for understanding how one can be one with other good persons. Similarly, Aristotle develops the contrary notion, that a person who is ethically not one with himself, who is personally disintegrated, cannot be a source of friendship, but rather of its opposite, enmity. Earlier Aristotle had remarked that 'in tyranny there is little or no friendship. For where there is nothing common to ruler and ruled there is not friendship either.'(VIII, 11) We can link this with what he now says of the wicked, who through lack of friendship with their true self are incapable of forming friendships with others: (138; Fs) (notabene)

[Wicked men] having nothing lovable in them [...] have no feeling of love to themselves. Therefore also such men do not rejoice or grieve with themselves; for their soul is rent by faction, and one element in it by reason of its wickedness grieves when it abstains from certain acts, while the other part is pleased, and one draws them this way and the other that, as if they were pulling them in pieces [...] Therefore the bad man does not seem to be amicably disposed even to himself, because there is nothing in him to love; so that if to be thus is the height of wretchedness, we should strain every nerve to avoid wickedness and should endeavour to be good; for so and only so can one be either friendly to oneself or a friend to another.(IX,4) (notabene)