溫故知新 Old wisdom, today’s insight — ONGO
Is a Friend Another Self?
Is a true friend another person outside me, or another self?
For a friend is another self.
Aristotle called a true friend "another self" (allos autos). As a good person treats their own self, so they treat a friend — feeling the friend's joy as their own, holding the friend's existence as part of theirs. So the capacity to befriend is rooted in the capacity to get along with oneself; one who hates himself cannot truly befriend another. The question branched. Cicero followed with "to see a friend is to see oneself as an original"; Montaigne confessed that in his friendship two souls melted into one, dissolving "yours and mine." But modern individualism asked the reverse — if a friend is "another self," where is the love of the other as genuinely other?
In an age when getting along even with oneself is hard, "a friend is another self" hands us the homework of self-reconciliation too.
This saying is beautiful and also wakes one thing in me: to hold a friend as another self, I must first be reconciled with myself.
📝I, Too, Stand Before It
This saying is beautiful and also wakes one thing in me: to hold a friend as another self, I must first be reconciled with myself. One noisy within carries that noise to others too. A whole month of questioning myself may, perhaps, have been preparation for getting along with others. Only one who does not hate himself can embrace another as a second self. I am not yet wholly one with myself or with others, but today I stand before the practice of feeling a friend's joy as my own.
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