Book 7
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For in a way self-love is friendship by analogy, but not absolutely. For being loved and loving involve two separate factors; owing to which a man is his own friend rather in the way in which, in the case of the unrestrained and the self-restrained man, we have saidCf. Aristot. Eud. Eth. 1223a 36-b 17. Self-restraint (or the lack of it) indicates that a man’s personality has in a sense two parts, one of which may control the other; and similarly self-love implies that one part of the personality can have a certain feeling in regard to another part. how one has those qualities voluntarily or involuntarily—namely by the parts of one’s spirit being related to each other in a certain way; and all such matters are a similar thing,whether a man can be his own friend or foe, and whether a man can treat himself unjustly.For all these relations involve two separate factors;
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in so far then as the spirit is in a manner two, these relations do in a manner belong to it, but in so far as the two are not separate, they do not.
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From the state of friendship for oneself are determined the remaining modes of friendship under which we usually study it in our discourses.Cf. Aristot. Eud. Eth. 1244a 20. Perhaps a reference to Aristotle’s lectures (Stock). For a man is thought to be a friend who wishes for somebody things that are good, or that he believes to be good, not on his own account but for the other’s sake;
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and in another way when a man wishes another’s existence—even though not bestowing goods on him, let alone existence—for that other’s sake and not for his own, he would be thought to be in a high degree the friend of that other;
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and in another way a man is a friend of one whose society he desires merely for the sake of his company and not for something else, as fathers desire their children’s existence, though they associate with other people. All these cases conflict with one another;
