Why does a self-sufficient, virtuous man need friends? This paper tries to elucidate the difference between the Eudemian Ethics VII12 and the Nicomachean Ethics IX9, both concerning with that problem. In EE a friend, being another self, means one's resemblance. He is desirable and needed insofar as he is the object one knows and, thus, he contributes to one's self-knowing, which is the ultimate end. In EN a friend, being another self, means a person to whom one stands in the same relation as to oneself. He is desirable and needed as far as it is so, or nearly so, pleasant to perceive his well-being as it is to perceive one's own well-being. EE opposes its argument to an aporetical claim: friends are not needed since a self-sufficient man is likened to God. If this claim is true, EE argues, then a good man will know nothing whereas God knows nothing else than himself, for cognitive nature of human being cannot attain to self-knowledge without having known other things than itself, since it is 'potential'. The argument above is not found in EN. The reason, we suppose, is that the writer of EN will take the position to liken man's contemplative activity to God's one in his famous last book X.
|
