Abstract

Much has been written on love and friendship, but not a lot on the nature of an enemy, in a manner analogous to the nature of love itself. To understand something about what it means to be an enemy is not at all self-evident. And if we do not know what an enemy is, do we really know what a friend or a lover is? An understanding of what it means to be an enemy might offer us something like the reverse negative of love or friendship. From holding the reversed negative to the light perhaps we can also gain some sight of the "unreversed" original. The article discusses the fact that we live life as something that offers us a certain affirmative delight in the "to be" as good. It explores how this is changed in relation to different forms of threat. It situated the nature of an enemy in terms of the equivocal constitution of the human being as passio essendi and conatus essendi. Different kinds of enemy are investigated by considering the "reversed negatives" of these four forms of love: self-affirming love, erotic love, philia, and agapeic love