Political friendship,respect,community: Hannah Arendt’s de-materialization of Aristotelian political friendship

Abstract

In this article I demonstrate how Hannah Arendt both appropriates and transforms Aristotle’s view of political friendship. I argue that the brief discussion of Aristotelian political friendship in The Human Condition relies on an earlier de-materialization of Aristotle’s work on friendship. This de-materialization of Aristotle’s view of friendship allows Arendt to discuss Aristotelian friendship as a kind of ‘respect’, where ‘respect’ is a philosophical notion unavailable to Aristotle. Ultimately, for Arendt, the experience of friendship opens up a space for human beings to begin to practice a distinct way of seeing one another – a ‘respect’ – that can in turn be practiced in public, making the experience of friendship an important precursor to action.

With friends men are more able both to think and to act.

— Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1155a15-16

1. Introduction

Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition is clearly indebted to Aristotle. However, critics debate whether Arendt simply appropriates Aristotle’s theory of praxis, or transforms it in the process. Dana Villa has argued that in some respects ‘Arendt’s “Aristotelianism” exceeds the expectations of her critics’ when it comes to the hierarchical distinctions structuring her theory of action. ¹ One such critic is Jürgen Habermas, who has argued Arendt’s ‘conception of politics […] leads to absurdities’. ² For Habermas, these ‘absurdities’ stem from a concept of politics that takes the ancient Greek polis as the essence of politics but which cannot be applied to modern societies. ³ The result, for Habermas, is:

a state which is relieved of the administrative processing of social problems; a politics which is cleansed of socio-economic issues; an institutionalization of public liberty which is independent of the organization of public wealth; a radical democracy which inhibits its liberating efficacy just at the boundaries where political oppression ceases and social repression begins. ⁴

For his part, Villa qualifies the claim that Arendt’s work in The Human Condition is Aristotelian by suggesting Arendt’s adoption of Aristotle’s framework for her theory of action is in some ways ‘ironic since she uses concepts from his political philosophy to deconstruct and overcome his own theory of action’. ⁵ In other words, for Villa, Arendt’s own theory of action is both informed by and a deconstruction of Aristotle’s own. ⁶ In this article, my aim is not to argue against Villa on this score, but rather to show how a similar appropriative deconstruction occurs in a lesser considered aspect of The Human Condition, namely, in relation to Arendt's discussion of political friendship. I argue that the brief discussion of Aristotelian friendship in The Human Condition relies on Arendt’s earlier de-materialization, and thus transformation, of Aristotle’s work on political friendship. This de-materialization of Aristotle’s view of political friendship allows Arendt to discuss Aristotelian friendship as a kind of ‘respect’, a philosophical notion unavailable to Aristotle. For Arendt, this ‘respect’ is first practiced in personal friendships and as such personal friendships can be thought as a precondition for the practice of ‘respect’ in politics.

First, I explain Aristotle’s famous account of friendship and explain why Arendt does not wish to take up Aristotelian perfect friendship. Second, I introduce Arendt’s discussion of Aristotelian friendship in relation to ‘respect’ in The Human Condition, demonstrating the importance of this brief discussion to her overall view of action. Third, I show that in a 1954 lecture series preceding the writing of The Human Condition, Arendt criticized the materialism that grounds Aristotelian political friendship, insofar as this materialism renders all political friendships as utility friendships. Fourth, reading this earlier commentary back into the discussion of Aristotelian friendship as ‘respect’ in The Human Condition, I show that, for Arendt, the experience of friendship opens up a space for human beings to begin to practice a distinct way of seeing one another – a ‘respect’ – that can in turn be practiced in public and is thus a precondition for action. Aristotle called this ‘political friendship’, but I suggest that Arendt uses the term ‘respect’ instead of friendship to highlight the fact that for her, friendship properly speaking never enters the public realm.

2. Aristotle and the varieties of friendship

To register the significance of Arendt’s position on Aristotelian political friendship, it is worth first understanding Aristotle’s famous theory of friendship. Having discussed the excellences (aretē) in Book VI and vices in Book VII, in Book VIII of the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle turns to a discussion of friendship (philia), which he says ‘is an excellence or implies excellence, and is besides most necessary with a view to living’. ⁷ Aristotle goes on to state that ‘equality and likeness are friendship, and especially the likeness of those who are like in excellence’. ⁸ Aristotle identifies three types of friendship: perfect friendship, utility friendship and pleasurable friendship. In each type of friendship, ‘there is a mutual and recognized love, and those who love each other wish well to each other in that respect in which they love one another’. ⁹ In perfect friendship, there is a mutual recognition between the friends who love each other that they wish well to each other in respect of the good. ¹⁰ The friends have a mutual recognition of excellence in their friend. ¹¹ In utility friendship there is a mutual recognition between the friends who love each other that they wish well to each other in respect of their usefulness to each other. ¹² Aristotle points out that friendships of utility are the most easily dissolved because ‘the useful is not permanent but always changing’, such that the friends are only mutually useful to each other for a time and when they are no longer useful to each other they cease to be friends. ¹³ In pleasurable friendship the friends find mutual pleasure in one another’s company. Pleasurable friendship values the friend for the sake of the pleasure derived from being in their friend’s company. In pleasurable friendship there is a mutual recognition between the friends who love each other that they wish well to each other in respect of finding them pleasant. ¹⁴ Pleasurable friendship, though not as quickly changing as utility friendship, also dissolves easily because what the friends find pleasant changes. ¹⁵ For Aristotle, ultimately, ‘bad men will be friends for the sake of pleasure or utility, being in this respect like each other, but good men will be friends for their own sake, that is, in virtue of their goodness’. ¹⁶ Aristotle’s notion of friendship pertains to many relationships that we moderns do not often immediately take to involve friends. For example, for Aristotle, friendship is possible between parents and children, teachers and students, and various other relationships. ¹⁷

Interestingly, it is not Aristotle’s view of perfect friendship that Arendt mentions in The Human Condition, but rather a fourth type of Aristotelian friendship, which is really a species of utility friendship: philia politikē. ¹⁸ She writes:

Respect, not unlike the Aristotelian philia politikē, is a kind of ‘friendship’ without intimacy and without closeness; it is a regard for the person from the distance which the space of the world puts between us, and this regard is independent of qualities which we may admire or of achievements which we may highly esteem. Thus, the modern loss of respect, or rather the conviction that respect is due only where we admire or esteem, constitutes a clear symptom of the increasing depersonalization of public and social life. ¹⁹

Arendt turns to Aristotle’s notion of philia politikē, that is, political friendship, and not perfect friendship. Perfect friendship is carried on between two human beings who are like in excellence, that is, who are virtuous, and aims at the good rather than at the world. Perhaps Arendt thinks that perfect friendship is unworldly, and does not pursue it on these grounds. She certainly criticized other philosophers – such as Plato and Kant – insofar as she considered their philosophy to be unworldy. ²⁰ In contrast, she appears to have taken up Aristotelian political friendship because it centers the polis.

However, Arendt does not think that friendship enters the public realm in the way Aristotle thought it did. This may be the reason for the quotation marks around the word ‘friendship’ in the quotation about respect above. ‘Respect’ is friendship only if we understand friendship in an unusual way, whereby even strangers may be called our ‘friends'. There are several instances in Arendt's work which debunk such an understanding of friendship. For example, in a 1964 interview with Günther Gaus, Arendt said that:

The directly personal relationship, where one can speak of love, exists of course foremost in real love, and it also exists to a certain extent in friendship. There a person is addressed directly, independent of his relation to the world. Thus, people of the most divergent organizations can still be personal friends. But if you confuse these things, if you bring love to the negotiating table, to put it bluntly, I find that fatal [to politics]. ²¹

Like love, friendship can be destructive in politics because it requires an unflinching loyalty to the other that becomes dangerous if it is upheld in the public realm, where it may lead a human being to do something for the sake of a friend rather than for the sake of the community. Perfect friendship is one of these directly personal relationships. It favours sameness over difference, is concerned first and foremost with character rather than world.

I will now explain the assumptions behind Aristotle’s views of political friendship before moving on in the next section to discuss Arendt’s concerns with it, and thus her reasons for transforming it. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle states that ‘Friendship depends on community’. ²² In the Politics, Aristotle writes that: ‘every community is established with a view to some good’; that which is the highest community of all aims at the highest good; the state or political community ‘embraces all the rest (i.e. other forms of community)’ and is thus the highest community of all; therefore, the state or political community ‘aims at good in a greater degree than any other [form of community] and at the highest good’. ²³ Aristotle’s political community forms out of those who cannot live without one another (that is, men and women). This creates the family home which includes children, as well as slaves and domesticated animals to help run the household and plough the fields. Aristotle writes that the ‘family is the association established by nature for the supply of men’s everyday wants’ and ‘when several families are united, and the association aims at something more than the supply of daily needs, the first society formed is the village’. ²⁴ And finally, ‘when several villages are united in a single complete community, large enough to be nearly or quite self-sufficing, the state comes into existence, originating in the needs of bare life, and continuing in existence for the sake of a good life’. ²⁵ Aristotle adds: ‘Hence it is evident that the state is a creation of nature, and that man is by nature a political animal’. ²⁶ In other words, small communities begin out of the necessities of biological life, growing from families to villages and then cities and then states, with the state being the greatest community. The highest good is the good life, a life of eudaimonia or flourishing. On Aristotle’s understanding of political friendship, the two friends value one another for the sake of the polis, yet the polis exists in order for each individual human being to flourish and thus live an individual good life. Aristotle considers the polis primarily in material terms. On this account, political friendships are utility friendships and are easily dissolved because ‘the useful is not permanent but always changing’, such that the friends are only mutually useful to each other for a time in which they have a similar aim, politically speaking, and when they are no longer useful to each other they cease to be friends. ²⁷

3. Political friendship and ‘respect’

In the brief paragraph regarding political friendship and ‘respect’ in The Human Condition, Arendt claims that Aristotle’s notion of political friendship is not unlike ‘respect’, but then qualifies this claim by differentiating ‘respect’ and ‘modern respect’. It is important to acknowledge the fact that ‘respect’ is not a word used by, or even available to, Aristotle. ‘Respect’, from the Latin respectus, and the verb respicere, is constructed of ‘res’, meaning ‘back’ and ‘specere’, meaning ‘to look at’, and thus originally meant ‘to look back at’. ²⁸ To ‘look back’ insinuates a reciprocity, since it only makes sense for a human being to look back at something that is already looking at them. In ‘Philosophy and Politics’, Arendt claims that: ‘More than his friend as a person, one friend understands how and in what articulateness the common world appears to the other, who as a person is forever unequal or different’. ²⁹ This is the political, respect-dependant element of friendship. To ‘respect’ another human being would then mean to reciprocally look back at another human being through the distance that the world places between the two individuals in an attempt to understand the way the world that distances the friends in turn appears to the other friend.

Modern respect, Arendt says, is in fact a ‘loss of respect’. Modern respect means to admire or esteem, rather than to have a ‘regard for the person from the distance which the space of the world puts between us’. ³⁰ The modern loss of ‘respect’ is a shared loss. When Arendt writes that there is a modern loss of ‘respect’, she is not claiming that a particular person is no longer respected. More significantly, she is claiming that there has been a shared loss of a particular way of looking at other human beings that is independent of esteeming or admiring them. The modern loss of ‘respect’ means the modern loss of a particular way in which human beings look back at one another.

For Arendt, modernity involves a breach in tradition, caused by the loss of the authority of the church and the state, the loss of religious faith, the abandonment of customs and habits that had been passed on through generations, the loss of the certainty of a world to come, the rise of doubt, of scientific enquiry and society, the rise of ideologies of process, progress and race and the rise of technology and of specialization. ‘Modern man, when he lost the certainty of a world to come, was thrown back upon himself and not upon this world; far from believing that the world might be potentially immortal, he was not even sure that it was real’. ³¹ A shared reality, which had once been as certain as the sun rising the next day, was now uncertain. Everything was up for debate, able to be put under a microscope, tested, proven or disproven. The result, for Arendt, is that: ‘World alienation, and not self-alienation as Marx thought, has been the hallmark of the modern age’. ³² Human beings have become alienated from a world they themselves built. The first stage of this alienation was marked by poverty: ‘cruelty, the misery and material wretchedness’. ³³ The second stage was the breakdown of the family, where the family was replaced by social class; membership to a social class now offered the protection once afforded by family. ³⁴ This breach in tradition saw the rise of the primacy of the individual subject and of private property, which necessitated new ways of thinking about how human beings were to be understood as being in relation to one another. Community was no longer the point of departure for this thinking. As a result, the individual was no longer looked at from the point of view of the communal. Rather, an individual subjectivism – which had to think the communal as that which emerges after the subject – took hold. This is what changed the way human beings regarded – that is, ‘respected’ – one another.

We can now see why modern ‘respect’ is admiration or esteem: modern human beings tend to come together from the point of view of their private lives, they are thrown back on themselves, and when they look at the other, they look at them primarily in order to compare themselves with the human being they look at, to admire what the other has and say to themselves, ‘what I have is better’ or ‘what I have is not as good as that’. ³⁵ This is the case whether they are comparing material goods or their own moral worth with others. In other words, Arendt claims that the way human beings look at one another in Aristotelian political friendship is a way of looking at one another without admiration, and as a means to an end, but rather as an end in themselves. With the modern loss of ‘respect’, or with ‘respect’ transformed in modern times into ‘modern respect’, human beings look at and listen to others primarily in the register of utility; ‘modern respect’ looks at the other but it throws the individual back on themselves rather than back towards a common world. In the transition between ancient and modern life the quality of the space and distance, the type of equality it promotes, and, as a result, the ways that human beings look at one another, changes. Whereas the ‘respect’ that is not unlike Aristotle’s political friendship has regard for others insofar as they are part of a community, and always considers their individuality as second to, and informed by, the community and times in which they live, modern ‘respect’ admires and esteems human beings as a means to an end.

That Arendt distinguishes a notion of ‘respect’ that is Aristotelian insofar as it takes the polis as prior to the individual – rather than as a means to the individual good life and thus secondary to the individual – is unsurprising. A 1953 entry in Arendt’s Denktagebuch – her thinking diary, or intellectual journal, into which she made entries from 1950 to 1973 – makes it clear that Arendt thought re-examining old philosophical questions such as ‘What is friendship?’ from the point of view of the primacy of the human condition of plurality – that is, the fact that human beings are always already in relation with other unique human beings – was important:

Experimental Notebook of a Political Scientist: To establish a science of politics one needs first to reconsider all philosophical statements on Man under the assumption that men, and not Man, inhabit the earth. The establishment of political science demands a philosophy for which men exist only in the plural. Its field is human plurality. Its religious source is the second creation-myth—not Adam and rib: but: Male and female create He them.

In this realm of plurality which is the political realm, one has to ask all the old questions—what is love, what is friendship, what is solitude, what is acting, thinking, etc., but not the one question of philosophy: Who is Man, nor the Was kann ich Wissen, was darf ich hoffen, was soll ich tun? ³⁶

This task could in fact sum up the guiding principle of Arendt’s oeuvre: to re-examine the old questions from the point of view of the fact that the human being cannot be isolated and properly thought out in their singularity. Below I show that this is precisely what Arendt does when it comes to Aristotelian political friendship. We saw above that she rejects ‘modern respect’, that is, the modern way in which human beings look at one another. In this section I complicate Arendt’s adoption of Aristotle’s political friendship. I show that while she does take Aristotelian political friendship as a blueprint for her notion of ‘respect’, she does so with significant caveats. Namely, she does so with a rejection of the materialism it is grounded in.

4. The materialism of Aristotelian political friendship

Arendt has, curiously, chosen a variety of Aristotelian friendship to ground her criticism of ‘modern respect’ that is based in materialism and thus is subject to the same concerns she has in regard to ‘modern respect’. In fact, Arendt had previous criticized Aristotle for his materialism. In 1954, just prior to the commencement of her work on The Human Condition, Arendt gave a lecture series on the relation between philosophy and politics. In 1990, part of this lecture series was posthumously published under the title ‘Philosophy and Politics’. ‘Philosophy and Politics’ contains one of Arendt’s most sustained, explicit discussions of friendship. It is there, in regards to Aristotelian friendship, that Arendt writes:

Aristotle explains that a community is not made of equals, but on the contrary of people who are different and unequal. The community comes into being through equalizing, isasthénai. This equalization takes place in all exchanges, as between the physician and the farmer, and it is based on money. The political, noneconomic equalization is friendship, philia. That Aristotle sees friendship in analogy to want and exchange is related to the inherent materialism of his political philosophy, that is, to his conviction that politics ultimately is necessary because of the necessities of life from which men strive to free themselves. Just as eating is not life but the condition for living, so living together in the polis is not the good life but its material condition. He [Aristotle] therefore ultimately sees friendship from the viewpoint of the single citizen, not from that of the polis: the supreme justification of friendship is that ‘nobody would choose to live without friends even though he possessed all other goods.’ ³⁷

Here, we see both what Arendt finds to be the merits and failures of Aristotle’s account of friendship. Unlike perfect friendship, his view of political friendship does indeed center difference. Friendship is then that which brings two otherwise different human beings into an equality that allows for communication and for solidarity on political matters. Yet, as we have already seen, Aristotle also grounds friendship in the material conditions of the good life. In the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle writes that:

all forms of community are like parts of the political community; for men journey together with a view to some particular advantage, and to provide something that they need for the purposes of life; and it is for the sake of advantage that the political community too seems both to have come together originally and to endure, for this is what legislators aim at, and they call just that which is to the common advantage. ³⁸

Aristotelian philia politikē ultimately aims at the common advantage, at that which allows all citizens to live individual flourishing lives. Arendt agrees with Aristotle when he states that ‘Friendship depends on community’. ³⁹ However, she does not agree with Aristotle’s claim that the state or political community ‘embraces all the rest (i.e. other forms of community)’ and is the highest community of all such that the state or political community ‘aims at good in a greater degree than any other [form of community] and at the highest good’. ⁴⁰ Rather than beginning with a notion of community (and thus the condition of plurality) and from there discussing friendship, Aristotle describes friendship as that which culminates in community, a community which serves the individual’s material needs and in turn the flourishing of the singular human being.

Arendt seeks a positive account of friendship, rather than a notion of friendship that is a response to, and thus is dependent upon, ‘the necessities of life from which men strive to free themselves’. ⁴¹ In other words, Arendt thinks that Aristotle is correct in trying to formulate a notion of friendship from the point of view of the polis, of the community, but she thinks his materialism fails him. Aristotle understands the polis first and foremost in terms of its material conditions. Arendt understands the polis first and foremost as a site of plurality, of communication, of difference, of beginning and of freedom. While a human being can only appear in the polis if the material conditions of biological life are met, the polis itself and the human activities it allows are fundamentally non-material and are therefore of an altogether different quality to the material conditions of biological life.

Arendt introduces her notion of ‘respect’ in the section of The Human Condition titled ‘Action’, which tells us that the notion of ‘respect’ she is concerned with is a notion that is relevant for the human freedom to appear in speech and action. Martha E. Stortz has argued that there are similarities between Arendt’s and Aristotle’s conceptions of friendship. She writes that Arendt and Aristotle ‘each conclude that friendship has an important place in public’. ⁴² Stortz adds that: ‘Aristotle’s friendship presumes civic space; Arendt’s creates it’. ⁴³ Given that Arendt is clear that friendship itself is in fact dangerous when carried out in public, I do not think that friendship creates civic space for Arendt per se. We can be more specific about what friendship can do politically speaking. It seems to me that what Arendt wants to salvage from Aristotle is a way of looking at another human being that assumes plurality to be primary. In other words, for Arendt, Aristotle is right to place the polis front and centre in his political philosophy, but what the polis really houses at its most fundamental and human level is not the material goods for living but plural human beings. What is most essentially human about the polis is not the material goods in it nor even the freedom it gives human beings to live their private lives as they choose to, but the freedom it gives human beings to speak and act.

Arendt’s de-materialized ‘political friendship’, that is, ‘respect’, therefore takes plurality as primary. This then allows one human being to view the other human being as a personality, to see them as they appear, as both different (and in this sense ‘unequal’) but as equalized by ‘respect’, by the way in which they are looked at. We have seen that this ‘respect’ is not an admiration. It is quite simply taking the person seriously, letting them appear as they are, neither assimilating them via some metric of utility nor dismissing them as an alien other, that is, overemphasizing neither their sameness nor their difference. This notion of ‘respect’ is an element of personal friendships, and is the element of friendship that can also be practiced in public life, providing a ground for public dialogue. The other element of friendship would be some form of liking or loving the other. Friendship requires loyalty, and a liking or loving of the person as a particular. In contrast, when it comes to public dialogue, one simply needs to respect, rather than like, the person one is appearing and speaking to or with. However, the exploration of this aspect of Arendtian friendship is outside the scope of this article.

As we have seen, in 1954, in ‘Philosophy and Politics’, Arendt criticized Aristotle on the materialism of his notion of friendship. Just two years later, in 1956, Arendt gave a series of lectures which were the point of departure for her preparations for The Human Condition. ⁴⁴ In the final version of The Human Condition, which went through many changes – having started initially as a study of the totalitarian elements of Marxism ⁴⁵ – this critique of materialism appears peripherally in the section on ‘Action’.

The basic error of all materialism in politics – and this materialism is not Marxian and not even modern in origin, but as old as our history of political theory – is to overlook the inevitability with which men disclose themselves as subjects, as distinct and unique persons, even when they wholly concentrate upon reaching an altogether worldly, material object. ⁴⁶

In a footnote to this observation, Arendt reiterates that for Aristotle the state comes into existence in service to individual material needs. ⁴⁷ While Arendt does not explicitly criticize Aristotle when she associates philia politikē with ‘respect’ in The Human Condition, it would be reasonable to assume that in The Human Condition – published in 1958 – Arendt still held the same reservations about Aristotle’s views as she had held in 1954. When Arendt discusses ‘respect’ qua philia politikē, she is arguing for a notion of ‘respect’ that resembles philia politikē but without the materialism. This notion of ‘respect’ puts a space, a distance, between human beings that allows for seeing and being seen, for hearing and being heard, and thus for public freedom. As the passage above hints, human beings look at each other with a ‘respect’ independent of material concerns even when human beings are concerned with material issues. In other words, the ‘respect’ Arendt is concerned with is associated with the human freedom to appear, which is independent of material life even if those who appear together are discussing material life. This point is gets to the heart of Habermas' criticism of Arendt’s work, wherein he claims that on Arendt’s account of politics, social problems cannot be discussed. Arendt is not arguing that material concerns are of no relevance for politics and political discussion. She is arguing, however, that politics cannot be reduced to the material conditions of the individual good lives of citizens. Political life, at its most fundamental, is the freedom to appear and discuss matters – including material or social matters – in public while disclosing one’s unique personality and position in the world.

Arendt is suggesting a drastically reworked version of Aristotle’s political friendship. In the Lessing address, delivered by Arendt upon winning the Lessing Prize in 1959, Arendt compares Greek friendship with the friendship expounded by Gotthold Lessing, a modern. In relation to Greek friendship Arendt writes that:

for the Greeks the essence of friendship consisted in discourse. They held that only the constant interchange of talk united citizens in a polis. In discourse the political importance of friendship, and the humanness peculiar to it, were made manifest. This converse (in contrast to the intimate talk in which individuals speak about themselves), permeated though it may be by pleasure in the friend’s presence, is concerned with the common world, which remains ‘inhuman’ in a very literal sense unless it is constantly talked about by human beings. For the world is not human just because it is made by human beings, and it does not become humane just because the human voice sounds in it, but only when it has become the object of discourse. ⁴⁸

We again hear the hint of a criticism of Aristotle in this passage. The world is made up of material things, and Arendt claims that it is ‘inhuman’ until it is talked about by human beings. Thus we could extend the Arendtian critique of Aristotle we have arrived at so far and add that since material things, made by human beings, are inhuman until they are talked about, Aristotle’s materialism leads him to base his theory of friendship on the world before it is talked about, and thus to base his theory of friendship on the ‘inhuman’.

It is important to point out that Arendt wrote the Lessing address in relation to what she called ‘dark times’, hence the title of the book it appears in: Men in Dark Times. By ‘dark times’ – a phrase taken from Brecht – Arendt means times when the light of the public world in which human beings appear to one another has been snuffed out by tyranny, when human beings are not free to inter-act. ⁴⁹ These are times in which no ‘space of appearance’ – as she calls it in The Human Condition – can spring up, and where free speech and action are not permitted. ⁵⁰ In these times the flourishing of human beings as thinking and acting beings is, at best, discouraged and, at worst, prohibited. For Arendt, dark times – which she herself endured in Hitler’s Germany – emerge out of modern times.

Echoing the critique of Aristotle advanced by Arendt, Alasdair MacIntyre writes:

Friendship, of course, on Aristotle’s view, involves affection. But that affection arises within a relationship defined in terms of a common allegiance to and a common pursuit of goods. The affection is secondary, which is not in the least to say unimportant. In a modern perspective affection is often the central issue; our friends are said to be those whom we like, perhaps whom we like very much […] E. M. Forster once remarked that if it came to a choice between betraying his country and betraying his friend, he hoped that he would have the courage to betray his country. In an Aristotelian perspective anyone who can formulate such a contrast has no country, has no polis; he is a citizen of nowhere, an internal exile wherever he lives. ⁵¹

MacIntyre points out the same issue with Aristotle on friendship that Arendt finds problematic – namely, its materialism – but also echoes the main lesson Arendt thinks we learn from Lessing: ‘in terms of a way of thinking governed by neither legal nor moral nor religious strictures – and Lessing’s thought was as untrammelled, as “live and changing” as that – the question would have to be posed thus: Would any such doctrine, however convincingly proved, be worth the sacrifice of so much as a single friendship between two men?’ ⁵² MacIntyre observes, in his own way, that this question would have made no sense to Aristotle because he saw no separation between the citizen and the friend. Arendt, though, had learnt throughout her life that citizenship could be taken away, as had happened to her. She knew that no place in the world, no political protection, was guaranteed. ⁵³ In this context, modern friendship, exemplified by Lessing, begins to resemble a kind of refuge from an uncertain world dominated by technological processes. MacIntyre writes that ‘“Friendship” has become for the most part the name of a type of emotional state rather than a type of social and political relationship’. ⁵⁴ While Arendt rejects Aristotle’s materialism, she does not want to endorse the claim that friendship is merely an emotional state, nor does she want to claim that friendship’s political elements mean that friendships themselves should be called upon in public life. Rather, for Arendt, friendship is a fundamental human relationship which allows the human being to practice ‘respect’, which equalizes the friends, and where ‘respect’ is also the equalizer in public life. ‘Respect’ promotes a distance between human beings that allows each human being to appear in their uniqueness, as different but also, while ‘respected’, as an equal.

5. Conclusion

Arendt detects material and thus utilitarian tendencies in Aristotle’s philia politikē, where ultimately friendship is utilized in order to sustain community and community is no more than the accumulation of many individuals each of which is primarily concerned with their own flourishing. The Aristotelian notion of political friendship ultimately throws the human being back on themselves, and in this sense contains within it traces of modernity. For Aristotle, living together in the polis is not the good life but is merely the material condition of the good life. To combat this, Arendt performs a de-materialization of Aristotle’s work on friendship. This de-materialization predates The Human Condition. It leaves her with a notion of friendship that is a personal relationship that does not enter the political realm properly speaking. If friendship enters politics at all, it does so only indirectly insofar as it provides a space in which human beings can practice a particular kind of ‘respect’, of looking at one another, that can carry into the political realm. In the introduction, we saw that for Habermas, Arendt’s theory of action leads to ‘absurdities’, and that this problem stems from a concept of politics that takes the ancient Greek polis as the essence of politics and which cannot be applied to modern societies. ⁵⁵ I do not think that Arendt took the ancient Greek polis as the essence of politics. Rather, she saw in the ancient Greek polis a community that took a certain way of looking at one another seriously, such that ‘respectful’ and productive dialogue could take place.

My claim has not been that Arendt endorses political friendship in the Aristotelian sense or in any other sense, but rather that she de-materializes Aristotelian political friendship and discusses it as ‘respect’. This ‘respect’ is not a political friendship, since Arendt does not think that friendship can be political in any direct sense. If Arendtian friendship is politically significant, it is only every indirectly so, insofar as the practice of ‘respect' in our personal friendships can be carried into public life.