From Political Friendship to Befriending the World

Abstract

Political friendship is typically portrayed as a dyadic relationship. In this traditional model, friendship is conceived as a positive intersubjective experience of relation-to-self and relation-to-other, assuming the reciprocity and equality characteristic of symmetrical relations of recognition. This essay explores an alternative, triadic model of political friendship, suggested by the work of Hannah Arendt. Arendt makes the claim, at odds with most modern accounts, that “politics is not so much about human beings as it is about the world that comes into being between them and endures beyond them.” I suggest that the dyadic model of political friendship is incomplete; a more adequate paradigm would foreground triadic relations of interest, concern and care for the phenomenal world itself, conceived as the quasi-objective intermediary of human artifice. As a “public thing,” a shared world is a necessary condition for intersubjective friendship and therefore is deserving of a properly political mode of acknowledgement and friendship in its own right.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Gabriella Slomp for encouraging me to develop the ideas in this article and for useful discussions. I would also like to thank the reviewers and editors of this journal for their helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Comprehensive surveys are provided in Heather Devere and Graham M. Smith, “Friendship and Politics,” Political Studies Review 8 (2010): 341–56, and Heather Devere, “Amity Update: The Academic Debate on Friendship and Politics,” AMITY 1 (2013): 5–33.

2. For a good survey of the recent recognition debates, see Simon Thompson, The Political Theory of Recognition: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Polity, 2006).

3. Aristotle, Politics, trans. Harris Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press/Loeb Classical Library, 1932), 1280b38–39. On the centrality of friendship in Aristotle’s view of human affairs, which remains subject to interpretive dispute regarding the proper understanding of the political dimensions of friendship, see John Cooper, “Friendship and the Good in Aristotle,” The Philosophical Review 86 (1977): 290–315; John Cooper, “Aristotle on the Forms of Friendship,” Review of Metaphysics 30 (1977): 619–48; Richard Mulgan, “The Role of Friendship in Aristotle’s Political Theory,” in The Challenge to Friendship in Modernity, ed. Preston King and Heather Devere (London: Frank Cass, 2000), 15–32; and Bernard Yack, The Problems of a Political Animal: Community, Justice, and Conflict in Aristotelian Political Thought (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993).

4. Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, trans. J. A. K Thomson (London: Penguin Books, 1976), 1155b29–1156b23.

5. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1156b2–23; on Aristotle’s criterion of recognition see 1155b29.

6. Aristotle, Magna Moralia, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 1213a15–24.

7. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1166a16–b4.

8. As Derrida points out, “there is never a sole friend. Not that there would be none, but that there never is one. … This multiplicity makes the taking into account of the political inevitable.” Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship (London: Verso, 1997), 215.

9. Hence interpretations that claim that Aristotle means to reduce identity to sameness push the point too far. As Hauke Brunkhorst notes, Aristotle’s point is that friends are “reciprocal models” for each other, that is, each is for the other a figure “in whom one can objectively recognize, viewing from the outside, what is good and right for oneself.” Hauke Brunkhorst, Solidarity: From Civic Friendship to a Global Legal Community (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 14. The affiliative relationship of identity between friends can only ever be partial rather than complete, embodying some similarities as well as some differences, for otherwise it would be impossible for one self to recognize a friend as another self, as possessing a distinct identity in his or her own right.

10. A. C. Grayling usefully recounts the significant historical influence of the “friend is another self” trope in the literature—which is given to romantic idealization in the Renaissance—but arguably he himself too readily conflates this trope with the notion of sameness. A. C. Grayling, Friendship (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013).

11. Cicero, De Amicitia, trans. William Armistead Falconer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1923), sect. 27.

12. Cicero, De Amicitia, sec. 22.82.

13. Cicero, De Amicitia, sec. 7.23; cf. sect. 80: “the real friend… is, as it were, another self.”

14. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, trans. English Dominican Fathers (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1947), 1–II, q. 4.

15. Thomas Aquinas, Quaestiones disputatae de virtutibus, trans. Ralph McInerny (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 1999), q. 5.

16. Michel de Montaigne, “On Friendship,” in The Complete Works (New York: Knopf Everyman’s Library, 2003), 169.

17. Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 216–17.

18. Graham M. Smith, Friendship and the Political: Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Schmitt (Exeter, UK: Imprint Academic, 2011), 10–15.

19. See, for example, Shane O’Neill and Nicholas H. Smith, eds., Recognition Theory as Social Research: Investigating the Dynamics of Social Conflict (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

20. See the discussion in Robert R. Williams, Hegel’s Ethics of Recognition (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1992).

21. G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), pt. 3.

22. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, par. 7 (Addition), 228.

23. There are different pathways to the acknowledgement of interdependence. While Hegel is famous for outlining his account of recognition via the conflictual dialectic of master and slave, it should not be forgotten that ultimately mutual recognition of the master’s and slave’s interdependence is what prepares the ground for the building of amicable relations. See G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 114–17.

24. Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), 107.

25. Bryan S. Turner, Vulnerability and Human Rights (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), 25.

26. Turner, Vulnerability and Human Rights, 27.

27. Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” in Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 25.

28. Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” 32.

29. In Plato’s Lysis, the discussion between Socrates, Lysis and Menexenus regarding the nature of friendship ends inconclusively. Despite failing to arrive at a precise definition of friendship as such, however, Socrates’ concluding comment suggests that by engaging in the very process of dialogue, by sharing their opinions about “what a friend is,” the three interlocutors have in fact become friends (thereby demonstrating that knowledge of what is the nature of friendship is inessential to establishing friendship). See C. D. C. Reeve, ed., Plato on Love: Lysis, Symposium, Phaedrus, Alcibiades, with Selections from Republic and Laws (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2006), 223b.

30. See, for example, P. E. Digeser, “Friendship between States,” British Journal of Political Science 39 (2008): 323–44; Catherine Lu, “Political Friendship among Peoples,” Journal of International Political Theory 5 (2009): 41–58; and Graham M. Smith, “Friendship and the World of States,” International Politics 48 (2011): 10–27.

31. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1159a33–1160a23.

32. See J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975).

33. Smith, Friendship and the Political, 226–27.

34. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1161b.

35. See John von Heyking and Richard Avramenko, eds., Friendship and Politics: Essays in Political Thought (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008), 1; Devere and Smith, “Friendship and Politics,” 341–42; and Smith, Friendship and the Political, 1–3.

36. For example: “friendship… proceeds from two loving each other” (Thomas Aquinas, Quaestiones Disputatae de Potentia Dei, trans. English Dominican Fathers [Westminster, MA: The Newman Press, 1952], q. 10); “friendship… is the complete confidence of two persons in revealing their secret judgements and feelings to each other” (Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, 216); “friendship is a way of conceptualising the bonds between person and person” (Smith, Friendship and the Political, 4; emphases added).

37. For a discussion of the theme of friendship in Arendt’s thought, which is surprisingly sparse, see Margaret Canovan, “Friendship, Truth and Politics: Hannah Arendt and Toleration,” in Justifying Toleration: Conceptual and Historical Perspectives, ed. Susan Mendus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 177–98; Shin Chiba, “Hannah Arendt on Love and the Political: Love, Friendship, and Citizenship,” Review of Politics 57 (1995): 505–35; and Lisa Disch, “On Friendship in ‘Dark Times’,” in Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt, ed. Bonnie Honig (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), 285–312.

38. Arendt’s most systematic treatment of her account of the political is presented in The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1958).

39. Arendt, The Human Condition, 180–81.

40. See Arendt, The Human Condition, 176–88. For a critical analysis of Arendt’s connection to the theme of recognition, see Patchen Markell, Bound by Recognition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003).

41. Hannah Arendt, “Socrates,” in The Promise of Politics (New York: Schocken Books, 2005), 17.

42. Arendt, “Socrates,” 18.

43. Hannah Arendt, “On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts about Lessing,” in Men in Dark Times (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1968), 24.

44. Arendt, “Socrates,” 16.

45. Arendt, “Socrates,” 175. Greater attention is gradually being given to the central role played by the concept of “world” within Arendt’s thinking; see, for instance, Eveline Cioflec, “On Hannah Arendt: The Worldly In-Between of Human Beings and its Ethical Consequences,” South African Journal of Philosophy 31 (2012): 646–63; Ella Myers, Worldly Ethics: Democratic Politics and Care for the World (London: Duke University Press, 2013); and Siobhan Kattago, “Why the World Matters: Hannah Arendt’s Philosophy of New Beginnings,” The European Legacy 18 (2013): 170–84.

46. Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 103.

47. Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences, 49–50, 142.

48. Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences, 112, 123.

49. Martin Heidegger, Basic Problems of Phenomenology (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1982), 297.

50. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), 49–51. As Emmanuel Levinas has put it, the world is “presented in its very being as a center of action, as a field of activity or of care.” Emmanuel Levinas, The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 119.

51. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2012).

52. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 162.

53. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968).

54. Arendt, The Human Condition, 7–11, 22–33.

55. Arendt, The Human Condition, 7.

56. Arendt, The Human Condition, 57.

57. Arendt, The Human Condition, 179.

58. Arendt, The Human Condition, 177.

59. See Hannah Arendt, “What is Freedom?” in Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin Books, 1993), 154.

60. I borrow the locution “disjunctive synthesis” from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (London: Continuum, 2004). The phrase usefully captures Arendt’s conception of political relations that simultaneously connect and divide and, moreover, reinforces a sense of plurality that is irreducible to a binary logic of identity that would reject the world as a kind of “excluded middle.”

61. Arendt, The Human Condition, 177.

62. Arendt, The Human Condition, 243; Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin Books, 1963), 86; Hannah Arendt, Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954 (New York: Schocken Books, 1994), 406.

63. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1155a3–24.

64. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Books VIII and IX.

65. Paul Ricoeur, The Course of Recognition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 218–19.

66. Ricoeur, The Course of Recognition, 220–42. Here Ricoeur appeals to the example of the gift as examined in the influential work of Marcel Mauss, in order to characterize mutual recognition.

67. Arendt, The Human Condition, 9; Arendt, The Promise of Politics, 107.

68. See Hanna Pitkin, The Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt’s Concept of the Social (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 303 n. 93.

69. Arendt, The Human Condition, 55.

70. In this way befriending the world can be regarded as a variation on Arendt’s notion of “amor mundi” (love of the world), which she had originally considered as the title for her book published as The Human Condition; see her letter of 6 August 1955 to Karl Jaspers, in Hannah Arendt Karl Jaspers: Correspondence, 1926–1969 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1992). It might also be seen as the kind of “partisanship for the world” for which Arendt praises Lessing; see “On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts about Lessing,” 8.

71. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 19–27. For an insightful discussion of Schmitt’s friend-enemy distinction and its relation to typologies of enmity, see Gabriella Slomp, Carl Schmitt and the Politics of Hostility, Violence and Terror (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). If, as Slomp argues, Schmitt’s notion of friendship refers to “an existential bond between agents struggling to create their political identity” (118), then we might say that in an Arendtian vein it refers instead to the existential bond formed between those acting together to bring a common world into being.

72. See Arendt, “On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts about Lessing,” 26–31.

73. Examples include the Franco-German case of building up an international friendship and shared European space of political interaction following the Second World War, the Argentine-Brazilian initiative to build regional integration as a space for friendship, and the growth of regional and global social forums as participative mechanisms of transnational political friendship. See the contributions in Simon Koschut and Andrea Oelsner, eds., Friendship and International Relations (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

74. Arendt, “On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts about Lessing,” 26.

75. Arendt, “The Crisis in Culture,” in Between Past and Future, 221.