Silvia Crupano
1. "So you would have us qualify our former notion of the just man
by an
addition. We then said it was just
to do good to a friend and evil to an enemy, but now we are to add that it
is just to benefit the friend if he is good and harm
the enemy if he is bad?" (Plato, Republic)
The human relationships involve an ethical code that
can define the rules of the "game". This code must necessarily deal with
subjectivism and perspectivism: men do have their own moral principles
which hardly can they infringe. Moreover, there is aproblem of definition:
who is the one who states what is right and what is wrong? If every single
person has his own rules, which of them, from particular, will
become universal?
It is important to start our research from the Greek
culture to find the origins of the concept of enemy and therefore
state its difference with the friend; there was a single word to
define both the guest and the foreigner: xenos. This person
was someone different from the Greek citizens, coming from another city
and they had to give hospitality to him. A foreigner was not an
enemy. The Greeks had also two kinds of war: the stasis and the
polemos: the first was negative, useless and unproductive because it
was against the adelphoi, the brothers, whereas the second was
positive, useful and constructive because it was against the barbaroi.
This word creates some problems: a barbaros was someone who could
not speak Greek fluently, without stammering. Thus, was it just a cultural
difference that divided Greek men in friends and enemies?
Let us analyze what happened in the Latin culture;
the word hostis meant both guest and enemy: why? The hospes,
that is the one who gave hospitality to a foreigner, to a xenos,
did not know whether his guest was a friend or an enemy to him but he had
to take him in anyway, otherwise he would contradict his being a host
– also in English the semantic root is the same. All this implies the
idea of an ever-changing nature which is constitutive of men and which can
turn them from friends into enemies: we do not have a fixed role but
instead we simply live in a limbo, between who we are no more and who we
are no yet.
Continuing our historical research, we notice that
there is not any more a differentiation between friend and enemy but the
related concepts of good and evil are traced back to the individual
subject: men themselves are just or unjust, beyond their being friends or
enemies. "Men do not do good unless forced; as soon as they have the
certainty of impunity, they do evil" Machiave lli said and also Hobbes
meant something similar when he stated that "homo homini lupus".
Maybe we can try to infer the concept of enemy (and
thus of friend) by what Hobbes said about personal freedom: if my own
liberty ends where someone other’s begins, then a friend is a person who
does not interfere with the sphere of my liberty and an enemy is one who
does. And what if a person, acting inside the limits of his freedom, does
something which damages me? Would he be a friend who, taking advantage
from his being a friend, actually acted as an enemy? In this situation, we
could have some problem in following our ethic principle which tells us
"to do good to a friend and evil to an enemy", as we definitely would not
know what is good and what is evil, who is a friend and who is an enemy.
On the other hand, if we decided to "benefit the friend if he is good and
harm the enemy if he is bad", we would have to face the possibility of a
friend being bad and an enemy being good… Thus, if a friend can be both
good and bad, and vice versa, it means that the concepts of good
and bad are not implicit in "being-a-friend" and "being-an-enemy".
The notion of friend can be either subjective or forma: a person can be a
"friend-for-me" but an enemy for others or he can be a friend just
nominally whereas he actually behaves as an enemy.
The language is subject to actions, to experience:
would it be just to benefit the friend and harm the enemy a priori,
without verifying what the abstract- formal status is translated into? It
is wiser to do good or bad a posteriori, that is leaving the formal
condition of friend-enemy out of consideration. It is experience, it is
the a posteriori, which can tell us who is a real
friend or a real enemy, beyond appearance.
We do not have to stop before what a word evokes but
instead we must act only after seeing what corresponds to it in practice.
We should distrust conventions and appearance because they can be false in
the praxis. Therefore, if we are interested in being just, it is
right to benefit a friend only if he is good and consequently it
would be wrong to harm an enemy if he is good as well. If we benefited or
harmed people relying only on the abstract status of friend or enemy, we
would simply follow the doxa, which we all know to be deceiving.
Moreover, to be an enemy does not necessarily imply
the evil: we can decide to call "enemy" someone who is simple different
from us, a foreigner…This would explain both why in ancient
Greece the xenos was not an enemy and not evil, and why in Latin
the same word designates the guest and the enemy. Our status can
change as well as we ourselves do change: "panta rei", Heraclitus said,
and our finitudo, our ever-changing nature, must not frighten us.
We are wiser as much as we accept our limits. We should not forget that
the harmony of opposite positions is very important and that the same
relevance belongs to the fair conflict between them: "polemos panton pater
basileus", Heraclitus can help us again. When there is a difference – for
example between good and evil, friend and enemy – there is dialogue and it
is the basis of our culture: from the interaction of two (or more) distant
and different people, opinions, concepts, feelings, it emerges the
logos itself, which is a truth that does not belong to anyone, it not
more or less valid than another, it is just a new creation, a new starting
point.
Thus, to do good or evil is a private decision that
we have to take following our subjective ethical code and relying on
experience: ex-per-ientia literally means "to go through something
coming from somewhere else" and this place of origin is contingency, that
is reality itself. To state that we will act in a certain way instead of
another involves that we have gained a certainty about the object of our
actions: therefore, we are the just men if we always keep in deep
consideration the realm of possibility, that universal if which
characteristic of life, as Kierkegaard would advice us. In benefiting the
friend if e is good and harming the enemy if he is bad, we
must also remember Kant’s categorical imperatives: "act so that your
principle can be a universal rule" and "do not regard other people as
means but as an aim". This means that, well beyond their being friends or
enemies, we must not exploit people or do to them something we would not
want them to do to us; it is likewise true that we should make the
reaction fit the action but without forgetting that we are all humans,
which means we are very likely to make mistakes.
To conclude, what is then the notion of the just
man? What is right and what is wrong? Who are the friends and who the
enemies? The answer in inside our hearts and in the contingency which
surrounds us: there is absolutely not a unique, universal truth which we
can use as a yardstick, there are no platonic ideas to help us know
without doubt what is the true essence of a thing or of a person.
Experience only can answer us, a true experience which changes us – as
Gadamer would say. It is true that the concepts of good and evil are not
empirical and that belong to our metaphysical
nature but it is likewise true that they often
depend on actions. Thus, before deciding if a person is a friend or an
enemy, who we should benefit or harm, maybe we should go beyond appearance
and language and understand that, in any case, we will never know if we
were right or wrong before all the facts have occurred. Anyway, even if we
managed to be just men, could we really be sure of the foundation of our
being just? According to Plato we could not: "there would be no difference
between the just and the unjust man if the just man had Gige’s ring" (Republic)
…
