Imagens da página
PDF
ePub

VII

ARISTOTELIAN FRIENDSHIP

We are now prepared to see why Aristotle regards friendship as the crown and consummation of a virtuous life. No one has praised friendship more highly, or written of it more profoundly

than he.

Friendship he defines as "unanimity on questions of the public advantage and on all that touches life." This unanimity, however, is very different from agreement in opinion. It is seeing things from the same point of view; or, more accurately, it is the appreciation of each other's interests and aims. The whole tendency of Aristotle thus far has been to develop individuality; to make each man different from every other man. Conventional people are all alike. But the people who have cherished ends of their own, and who make all their choices with reference to these inwardly cherished ends, become highly differentiated. The more individual your life becomes, the fewer people there are who can understand you. The man who has ends of his own is bound to be unintelligible to the man who has no such ends, and is merely drifting with the crowd. Now friend

P

ship is the bringing together of these intensely individual, highly differentiated persons on a basis of mutual sympathy and common understanding. Friendship is the recognition and respect of individuality in others by persons who are highly individualised themselves. That is why Aristotle says true friendship is possible only between the good; between people, that is, who are in earnest about ends that are large and generous and public-spirited enough to permit of being shared. "The bad," he says, "desire the company of others, but avoid their own. And because they avoid their own company, there is no real basis for union of aims and interests with their fellows." "Haying nothing lovable about them, they have no friendly feelings toward themselves. If such a condition is consummately miserable, the moral is to shun vice, and strive after virtue with all one's might. For in this way we shall at once have friendly feelings toward ourselves and become the friends of others. A good man stands in the same relation to his friend as to himself, seeing that his friend is a second self." "The conclusion, therefore, is that if a man is to be happy, he will require good friends."

Friendship has as many planes as human life and human association. The men with whom we

play golf and tennis, billiards and whist, are friends on the lowest plane-that of common pleasures. Our professional and business associates are friends upon a little higher plane-that of the interests we share. The men who have the same social customs and intellectual tastes; the men with whom we read our favourite authors, and talk over our favourite topics, are friends upon a still higher plane that of identity of æsthetic and intellectual pursuits. The highest plane, the best friends, are those with whom we consciously share the spiritual purpose of our lives. This highest friendship is as precious as it is rare. With such friends we drop at once into a matterof-course intimacy and communion. Nothing is held back, nothing is concealed; our aims are expressed with the assurance of sympathy; even our shortcomings are confessed with the certainty that they will be forgiven. Such friendship lasts as long as the virtue which is its common bond. Jealousy cannot come in to break it up. Absolute sincerity, absolute loyalty, these are the high terms on which such friendship must be held. A person may have many such friends on one condition: that he shall not talk to any one friend about what his friendship permits him to know of another friend. Each such relation must be

[ocr errors]

complete within itself; and hermetically sealed, so far as permitting any one else to come inside the sacred circle of its mutual confidence. In such friendship, differences, as of age, sex, station in life, divide not, but rather enhance, the sweetness and tenderness of the relationship. In Aristotle's words: "The friendship of the good, and of those who have the same virtues, is perfect friendship. Such friendship, therefore, endures so long as each retains his character, and virtue is a lasting thing."

VIII

CRITICISM AND SUMMARY OF ARISTOTLE'S
TEACHING

If finally we ask what are the limitations of Aristotle, we find none save the limitations of the age and city in which he lived. He lived in a city-state where thirty thousand full male citizens, with some seventy thousand women and children dependent upon them, were supported by the labour of some hundred thousand slaves. The rights of man as such, whether native or alien, male or female, free or slave, had not yet been affirmed. That crowning proclamation of universal emancipation was reserved for Chris

tianity three centuries and a half later. Without this Christian element no principle of personality is complete. Not until the city-state of Plato and Aristotle is widened to include the humblest man, the lowliest woman, the most defenceless little child, does their doctrine become final and universal. Yet with this single limitation of its range, the form of Aristotle's teaching is complete and ultimate. Deeper, saner, stronger, wiser statement of the principles of personality the world has never heard.

His teaching may be summed up in the following:

TEN ARISTOTELIAN COMMANDMENTS

Thou shalt devote thy utmost powers to some section of our common social welfare.

Thou shalt hold this end above all lesser goods, such as pleasure, money, honour.

Thou shalt hold the instruments essential to the service of this end second only to the end itself.

Thou shalt ponder and revere the universal laws that bind ends and means together in the ordered universe.

Thou shalt master and obey the specific laws that govern the relation of means to thy chosen end.

« AnteriorContinuar »