Autor: Purcell, Brendan M.

Buch: The Drama of Humanity

Titel: The Drama of Humanity

Stichwort: Aristoteles, Freundschaft, Polis, Gemeinschaft, homonoia

Kurzinhalt: homonoia, Disharmonie, Abspaltung als sozialer Ausdruck der Nicht-Freundschaft, Alexander, Alasdair MacIntyre: Politik als Bürgerkrieg der Meinung

Textausschnitt: § 4 THE COMMUNITIES OF FRIENDSHIP1

26/5 Thirdly, the polis is a community of good people who can reach out to each other as friends because they are true friends to themselves. In his Ethics, IX, 6, Aristotle refers to this social consequence of friendship as political friendship, politike philia, giving it the technical term of homonoia. This is paraphrased by Voegelin as 'a friendship based on likeness in actualization of the nous.'(1964b,p.321;Moulakis,1973,pp.99-104) In Book III,9, of his Politics (1946) Aristotle mentions the network of relations sustained by friendship-in marriage, kinship, social and religious associations- which are necessary if the polis, as the community of such communities, is to achieve its goal of the shared realization of their humanity by its members. Such likemindedness has to do especially with the basic issues, choices and actions of the community, and guarantees the continuity of its inner substance since it springs from the friendship of good men whose real goal is the common good rather than self-interest: (138f; Fs)

Likemindedness seems to be [...] political friendship [...] [S]uch likemindedness is found among good men; for they are likeminded both in themselves and with one another, being, so to say, of one mind, for the wishes of such men are constant and not at the mercy of opposing currents like a strait of the sea, and they wish for what is just and what is advantageous, and these are the objects of their common endeavour as well.(IX,6)

27/5 Just how this extension of friendship into the political sphere might come about is at least explored in the famous scene in the life of Alexander the Great, the Banquet of Opis, which Voegelin has analysed in The Ecumenic Age. Plutarch speaks of Alexander's plan 'to gain for all men harmony (homonoia) and peace (eirene) and community (koinonia) among one another.'(cf. Voegelin, 1974,p. 156) At the Banquet, Arrian reports that Alexander 'prayed for [...] Homonoia, and for partnership in the realm between Macedonians and Persians.'(ibid.,p. 157) Voegelin comments: (139; Fs)

[T]he formula of the specific blessing transfers the categories of homonoia [...] and koinonia, which Aristotle had developed for the polis, to Alexander's creation, i.e., to the empire that embraced not only Macedonians and Persians, but also Greeks, Egyptians, Phyrigians, Phoenicians, Arameans, Babylonians, Arabs, Indians, and so forth. That such a vast agglomeration of culturally variegated peoples was in dire need of a community of the spirit (nous) to become the people of an empire will hardly be doubted.(1974,p.l58)
28/5 The unfriendliness of bad men who can only relate on the basis of immediate self-interest results in bickering at the interpersonal level and speedy destruction of the common interest. Enmity or faction is the social expression of this unfriendliness just as homonoia is the social expression of friendship: (139; Fs)

[B]ad men cannot be likeminded except to a small extent, any more than they can be friends, since they aim at getting more than their share of advantages, while in labour and public service they fall short of their share; and each man wishing for advantage for himself criticizes his neighbour and stands in his way; for if people do not watch carefully the common weal will be destroyed. The result is that they are in a state of faction, putting compulsion on each other but unwilling themselves to do what is just.(IX,6)

29/5 A modern version of this dysnomia, to use Solon's term, is referred to in Alasdair MacIntyre's discussion of the breakdown of moral consensus in modern societies. His bleak comment, in After Virtue (1981,p.236) that 'Modern politics is civil war carried on by other means' has the shock value of illuminating the breakdown of the basis for an experience of homonoia and its implications for the range of life and death issues discussed in, say, John Paul II's Evangelium Vitae (1995). (140; Fs)

30/5 In the Politics Aristotle had remarked that 'friendship is the greatest good of the polis'(1262b7) and it is easy to see why Voegelin regards parts of the discussion on friendship in the Ethics as constituting Aristotle's 'little Politics'(1990a,p.67). This is because Aristotle focuses on the equivalent of Plato's anthropological principle, the core of human personal existence as oriented beyond the individual to, eventually, all others, and to the divine ground of all existence, as the core also of social and political existence.(cf. Voegelin, 1964b,p.323) (140; Fs)