Is a Friend Needed by the Person Who Asks Scarcely Anything?

Abstract

The article is devoted to the question how self-sufficiency can be compatible with friendship: these two concepts are essential for the Aristotle’s ideals of a person (Great-minded) and a polis. In his philosophical concept of friendship Aristotle overcomes and denies the everyday understanding: he rejects the usefulness and that means that friendship keeps its aim and value in itself; he stresses that friendship is an action in which the self-sufficient person, high-minded plays an active role being the agent who loves his own creation. The kernel of this concept is the idea of friendship with oneself giving birth to the friend and polis as friendship, so that Aristotle’s friendship based on virtue appears to be the form of self-sufficiency and his analisys happenss to be an approach to the problem of moral subject and the world, the Other.