The Root of Friendship: Self-Love and Self-Governance in Aquinas

Conclusion

Conclu s ion The goal of the foregoing inquiries, explanations, and arguments has been to establish three interconnected theses: Aquinas’s account of proper self-love is a description of the nature and importance of a person’s subjective self-experience, his notion of self-governance cannot be understood fully unless we grasp its basis in self-love, and his account both satisfies contemporary conditions of relevance for self-governance and offers attractive solutions to issues raised in analytic discussions on such matters. I conclude with a summary both of the threads of the analysis and how they tie together to establish the theses above. My primary focus has been on Aquinas’s account of self-governance and its relevance to contemporary discussion. However, because he grounds self-governance in self-love, I began with an examination of the latter. Fully actual proper self-love is the full actualization of a person’s immanent love that is directed toward oneself as subject or person. Moreover, his account of proper self-love equates to an account of a person’s subjective self-experience and how this experience constitutes the form and root of relating to others in 139 g 140 Conclusion friendship, which is why I use the term “self-friendship” to connote fully actual proper self-love. Self-friendship possesses five key properties , the first three of which form the basis of self-governance. A person’s desire for the full attainment and preservation of his personal interior life is the first property, while the second is his desire for the goods that perfect himself as a person. The third property connects to the second: the activity of pursuing and obtaining the apprehended goods, the chief act of self-governance. The final two properties concern the quality of a person’s self-experience and impact self-governance in an important, though less direct, manner; the better a person’s self-experience, the stronger the motives he has for continued appropriate self-governance. While I think Aquinas offers a novel characterization of self-experience and self-governance relative to historical antecedents, he clearly develops his notions in terms of the eudaimonist self-governance tradition. We saw in chapter 2 that interior relations and the possibility of sustainable self-governance provide a focus for the tradition from the beginning. The Platonic biconditional stresses the need to comport oneself interiorly in certain virtuous ways as necessary and sufficient conditions for the authentic moral authority to govern oneself at all. To this baseline account, Aristotle contributes assessments of self-love, the Stoics add a conception of law, and Augustine offers a strong view of providence and characterizes its relation to self-governance. Aquinas incorporates aspects of all of these elements within his account and offers the most direct link between self-love and moral authority. Proper self-love, particularly as fully actualized in self-friendship, is both the paradigmatically best way of relating to oneself and the necessary and sufficient condition for the moral authority to exercise self-governance. Aquinas connects the notion of moral authority generically to divine providence, contending that God governs persons in a manner consistent with their dignity, which entails the safeguarding of the possibility of individual self-governance. A person’s orientation to and apprehension of the good constitutes the core nexus between providence and personal authority. Human persons know the Conclusion 141 precepts of the natural moral law through the process of practical reason’s apprehension of the good—a process rooted in self-love; a person’s basic self-experience of self-love is the relating to oneself as a good being. Love is the complacency for the good as apprehended by reason, and this love, in turn, prompts a desire for the given good. Structurally , self-love is a person’s most elemental love, due to the unique combination of the unions of similitude and possession. A person loves himself naturally because he is himself, and since there is not a separation of lover and beloved, there is a unique strength to the union of possession. Self-love’s apprehension of the goodness of one’s own being—including one’s nature—forms a person’s fundamental apprehension of the good. This apprehension serves as the origin of practical reason’s further apprehension and pursuit of personal goods. Selfloveformsthebasisofaperson ’ssubjectiveself-experience.Subjective self-experience, since it involves a person’s most basic apprehension of...