Dialogue without Conclusion
Jana Bacevic
“This kind of dialogue, which doesn’t need a conclusion in order to be meaningful, is most appropriate for and most frequently shared by friends.” (The Promise of Politics, 2005: 63).
This quote appears in “Socrates,” the first essay in The Promise of Politics, the posthumously edited collection of Arendt’s essays. As Jerome Kohn argues in the introduction to the volume, the essays that he assembled in The Promise of Politics pick up some of the themes from The Origins of Totalitarianism, but also develop them into themes that would, eventually, culminate in The Life of the Mind. These essays, then, can be seen as linking Arendt’s thinking of politics, and thinking about thinking — that is, the relationship between the life of the mind and the life of the polis.
“Socrates” is concerned with the relationship between philosophy and politics; more importantly, it uses this relationship to query what makes a political community. This, for Arendt, is maintained through the exchange of opinions (doxai) in the public sphere:
“To assert one’s own opinion belonged to being able to show oneself, to be seen and heard by others. To the Greeks this was the one great privilege attached to public life and lacking in the privacy of the household, where one is neither seen nor heard by others. (The family, wife and children, and slaves and servants, were of course not recognized as fully human.)” (2005: 62),
She goes on to say:
“To Socrates, maieutic was a political activity, a give-and-take, fundamentally on a basis of strict equality, the fruits of which could not be measured by the result of arriving at this or that general truth. It is therefore obviously still quite in the Socratic tradition that Plato’s early dialogues frequently conclude inconclusively, without a result. To have talked something through, to have talked about something, some citizen’s doxa, seemed result enough. It is obvious that this kind of dialogue, which doesn’t need a conclusion in order to be meaningful, is most appropriate for and most frequently shared by friends.” (2005: 62–3).
Conversation without conclusion: that, for Arendt, is the essence of friendship. This kind of relationship is in contrast to both instrumental exchange — that is, an exchange of objects, words or symbols that aims at reaching a conclusion — and to iterative exchange involved in competition. It suggests a model of sociality, or community, that exceeds exchange:
“Friendship to a large extent, indeed, consists of this kind of talking about something that the friends have in common. By talking about what is between them, it becomes ever more common to them. It gains not only its specific articulateness, but develops and expands and finally, in the course of time and life, begins to constitute a little world of its own which is shared in friendship. In other words, politically speaking, Socrates tried to make friends out of Athens’ citizenry, and this indeed was a very understandable purpose in a polis whose life consisted of an intense and uninterrupted contest of all against all, of aei aristeuein, ceaselessly showing oneself to be the best of all.” (2005: 64)
The possibility of a form of commonality not based on exchange (nor, alternatively, on fictions of nation/blood/kin) is crucial for thinking about reciprocity and its opposites. Can we conceive of a political community that is not, ultimately, predicated on economic models of exchange? In seeing friendship as standing in opposition to the competitive, outperforming spirit of the Athenian polis, Socrates tried “making friends out of Athens’ citizenry”. Sadly, this political project failed:
“Because the commonness of the political world was constituted only by the walls of the city and the boundaries of its laws, it was not seen or experienced in the relationships between the citizens, not in the world which lay between them, common to them all, even though opening up in a different way to each man. If we use Aristotle’s terminology in order to understand Socrates better — and great parts of Aristotle’s political philosophy, especially those in which he is in explicit opposition to Plato, go back to Socrates — we may cite that part of the Nicomachean Ethics where Aristotle explains that a community is not made out of equals, but on the contrary of people who are different and unequal. The community comes into being through equalizing, isasthēnai. 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 […]”
What we witness in friendship is a relationship without exchange; that is, without the formal equalizing of value that is involved in trade. For Aristotle, the chief difference is that friendship is political and not economic. But, as Arendt points out, Aristotle’s materialism prevents him from seeing the realm of the political, by analogy with the economic, as emanating from something other than the satisfaction of individual needs; this also means he is incapable of conceiving of a political community that is not based on their provision.
From Arendt’s view, we are able to infer a facet of friendship and a meaning to community that does not rest on reciprocity, at least not as it is commonly conceived. This is not because friends do not care about each other, or because they are not able to judge each others’ acts, but because friendship does not require a pre-existing operation of equivalence involved in trade. In economic forms of exchange, this commensuration is usually performed through money or a similar common denominator; but the chief purpose of commonality it produces, and the principles of equivalence it requires, is to enable the satisfaction of individual needs.
In friendship, however, the idea of commonality — the common world — precedes the idea of exchange. We are with friends not because we expect or want to get exactly (or: about the same) as what we give, but because our common world is of concern to both of us. This does not mean it exists by itself; it is maintained and renewed through our dialogue, but, as Arendt says, that dialogue is not one that needs to reach a conclusion. It does not require an instrumental justification: the space is already there.
This is very important for those among us trying to conceive alternative models of society not based on extractive, expropriative or proprietary, and growth-oriented concepts of human togetherness. This, for that matter, is often the case even with more egalitarian and less explicitly oppressive approaches that nonetheless prioritize the (re)distribution of goods. But Arendt (and Aristotle, and Socrates) recognized that a political community is never a community of equals. Friendship, in this sense, becomes a mode of relating that does not rest on shared economic interest, nor on the provision of needs that are modelled on it.
Reference:
Arendt, H. 2005. The Promise of Politics (ed. by Jerome Kohn). New York, NY: Schocken Books.
