Friendship as a Principle of Association of the City in Aristotle’s Politics

According to Aristotle’s ethics, family essentially contributes to happiness of a human being. Since birth, the function of education is to encourage habits founded on the intermediate dispositions of two extreme passions, that is what enables the discovery and promotion of the right purpose of actions and, moreover, the development of the greatest virtue of prudence. We will try to give an account of the fact that philía has two dimensions: it is natural because it belongs to a human being as the capacity to think and talk about his destiny, and, at the same time, it produces a concrete destiny in terms of habits, tradition, and his own history. As a matter of fact, our second goal is to argue that philía is the concept that might underneath and facilitates the union of common and natural law in Aristotle’s political and social paradigm (nómos, phýsis). On the other hand, since philía is as much historical as natural, for rooted in the primary associative experience, it links ethical and dianoethical virtues so that it is possible to recognise in its correlation universal human rights—as Cicero already grasped. At last, we maintain that only from philía’s point of view it is possible to understand Aristotle’s preference on democracy.