Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies.
He who can be, and therefore is, another's, and he who participates in reason enough to apprehend, but not to have, is a slave by nature.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Aristotle implies that true freedom requires self-awareness and reasoning, as being dependent on others diminishes one's autonomy.
In this quote, Aristotle posits that an individual who can be defined by the will or desires of another is inherently a slave, for they lack true independence. He emphasizes the importance of reason as a means to understand oneself and one's place in the world, suggesting that simply having the capacity to understand without the ability to act upon that understanding forces one into a subordinate position, reducing their essence to that of servitude.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
In a debate about personal autonomy, you might quote this to emphasize the importance of self-governance.
More from Aristotle
All quotes βThose who cannot bravely face danger are the slaves of their attackers.
For often, when one is asleep, there is something in consciousness which declares that what then presents itself is but a dream.
You will never do anything in this world without courage. It is the greatest quality of the mind next to honor.
But if nothing but soul, or in soul mind, is qualified to count, it is impossible for there to be time unless there is soul, but only that of which time is an attribute, i.e. if change can exist without soul.
The whole is more than the sum of its parts.
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God is the original, master forgiver. Each time we grope our reluctant way through the minor miracle of forgiving, we are imitating his style. I am not at all sure that any of us would have had imagination enough to see the possibilities in this way to heal the wrongs of this life had he not done it first.
The natural state of this universe is attraction; and that is surely followed by an ultimate disunion.
Ancient eschatological texts are actually maps of the inner territories of the psyche that seem to transcend race and culture and originate in the collective unconscious.
Liberty of any kind is never lost all at once.
In the world of physics we watch a shadowgraph performance of the drama of familiar life. The shadow of my elbow rests on the shadow table as the shadow ink flows over the shadow paper. It is all symbolic, and as a symbol the physicist leaves it. ... The frank realisation that physical science is concerned with a world of shadows is one of the most significant of recent advances.