‘We’ are not Friends: the Tension between Politics and Friendship
Schuyler Playford
“Action, in which a We is always engaged in changing our common world, stands in the sharpest possible opposition to the solitary business of thought, which operates in a dialogue between me and myself. Under exceptionally propitious circumstances that dialogue, we have seen, can be extended to another insofar as a friend is, as Aristotle says, ‘another self.’ But it can never reach the We, the true plural of action.”
“Willing,” The Life of the Mind, p. 200.
***
Famously, Hannah Arendt had a “genius for friendship.”[1] In addition to showing profound love for her own friends, Arendt thought about the nature of friendship, its possibilities, and its difficulties. There is much in her work to inform our appreciation of friendship, yet we should be cautious not to find in ‘Arendtian friendship’ a simplification that obscures meaningful differences between forms of connection in human life. One way to proceed cautiously as readers of Arendt is to reflect upon the tension between two spheres where the concept (perhaps, metaphor) of friendship shows up in her work. The first sphere is the inner life of the mind. In her published work, Arendt makes regular reference to the silent dialogue of thought as an activity of friendship between ‘me and myself.’ In a recent HAC blog post, Jana Bacevic accurately summarizes Arendt’s understanding of friendship as “dialogue without conclusion.”[2] Understood in terms of an ongoing conversation about the world and the meaning of things, this Arendtian definition of friendship suits the inner activity of thought. Arendt says that friendship with others is the “guiding experience” upon which thinking is based. (It’s not the other way around.)[3] But a reader could be forgiven for taking from Arendt’s ‘Socratic’ accounts of thinking in The Life of the Mind and elsewhere the impression that inner duality — the ‘I and myself’ which thinks — is for Arendt the paradigmatic experience of friendship.
Friendship is also relevant to the sphere of politics for Arendt. As Pinchas Huberman observes in another recent HAC blog post, that same conception of friendship as a tireless dialogue informs Arendt’s way of describing the shared life of citizens in some of her works. There is a kind of Arendtian civic friendship that Huberman reconstructs from Arendt’s description of Lessing, whose “result-less discourse” is “a compressed representation of the unique relationship that is a political community.”[4] In an essay now known as “Socrates,”[5] Arendt outlines an ideal of civic friendship rooted in a kind of Socratic statesmanship that is similar in some ways to the Lessing version. In both essays, Arendt focuses on the possibility that dialogue can shape citizens’ understanding of the world they share and their understanding of what ‘sharing the world’ means and looks like.
In light of all this, it can be tempting to read Arendt as a champion of friendship whose dialogical understanding of friendship provides a bridge between worldly engagement with fellow citizens in a political community on one hand and withdrawal from the world in the activity of thought or private conversation on the other. We could say that friendship seems to form the basis of an Arendtian city-soul analogy that knits together the various dimensions of human experience. Yet the quotation from The Life of the Mind that opens this piece shows that Arendt explicitly distinguishes between the dual ‘I and Thou’ of thought (i.e., the duality of friendship per se) and the plural ‘We’ of politics. The “essential plurality” of being human “is far from explored when an I-Thou relationship is added to the traditional understanding of human nature.”[6] The dialogue with a friend — a personal friend or an inner friend — “can never reach the We, the true plural of Action.”[7] The intimate dialogue between friends or within the self, which is characterized by ‘appeal’ to the other (the friend, the beloved, the Thou), cannot extend “and become paradigmatic for the political sphere.”[8] In short, the duality characteristic of friendship does not fully account for the plurality characteristic of the political sphere.
Why does Arendt highlight the difference between plurality and duality, insisting on the insufficiency of a dialogical model (of I and Thou) for explaining the plurality that characterizes political life? In cautioning against the assimilation of politics to friendly dialogue, Arendt invites us to ask how friendship relates to the human condition of plurality and to the political activity we undertake with others.
I will suggest a few avenues to explore in answering this question. The first is to think about Arendt’s overarching claim that human life is fundamentally conditioned by plurality. The irreducible uniqueness of each human person is, for Arendt, the basis of world-disclosure. Our sense of (shared) reality depends on hearing from others how they perceive the world. The political sphere is where human beings appear to one another in their equality and distinctiveness. Through the words and deeds by which we appear to one another in public, we help shape the webs of relationships that, together with durable things, make up the world we have in common.[9] The plurality of perspectives that constitutes the reality we share is not reducible to a collection of conversational pairs. Each person appears to a multiplicity of others in a shared space. Political interaction depends on plurality.
Another feature of Arendtian politics that distinguishes it from friendship (i.e., from a dialogue without conclusions) is the fact that in the political sphere, we act. We make new beginnings. Each person can intervene into the web of relationships and meanings that she encounters because each person is a new beginning. Arendt draws attention to the uniqueness of each individual person with the concepts of natality and plurality.[10] Yet her account of action points toward living together rather than pure self-asserting agonism. Action is something that human beings undertake in concert with others. Unlike the other activities of the vita activa that she discusses in The Human Condition, only action goes on directly between human beings without things mediating between them.[11] The consent upon which all communities rest is a recognition that “no man can act alone.” [12] In a world that is shared with others, individuals must act together in order to achieve anything.
Politics is different from the duality of friendship for Arendt because plurality is connected to world-disclosure (something that only happens through a multiplicity of perspectives) and to our capacity to make new beginnings by acting. Although, over time, conversation between friends “begins to constitute a little world of its own” shared in friendship, friendship does not entirely capture these features of politics.[13]
So, is the plurality of political life simply more fundamental than the duality of friendship for Arendt? Does duality depend on, or reflect, in a condensed form, plurality? Looking at Arendt’s analysis of loneliness, Ilaria Possenti offers a reading of the relationship between plurality and duality that privileges the former. In the absence of a robust public sphere where plurality flourishes, our ability to engage in dialogue — especially the inner dialogue of thought — is compromised. Withdrawal from the world into the dialogue of thought depends on returning regularly to the reality of the common world. To return to reality, we rely completely on our fellow human beings to ‘call us by our name’ out of the bottomless equivocality of thought so that we may appear as a unified person in a world with others.[14] This means, says Possenti, that care for the world rather than care for the self is primary for Arendt.[15]
On the other hand, the ‘dialogue without conclusion’ is essential to the constitution of the shared world because that world depends on the presence of persons who can be held responsible for their speeches and deeds. Robaszkiewicz and Weinman note the primacy of thinking to the political sphere insofar as the formation of persons capable of taking responsibility is an ongoing by-product of the duality, or self-friendship, of thinking. Without the activity of inner dialogue, which constitutes persons, “no common world could emerge between human beings inhabiting the same space.”[16]
The tension in Arendt’s work between the plurality of politics and the duality of friendship is not an opposition. Rather, it points to a relationship that requires interpretation. I have highlighted Arendt’s claim that the sphere of politics is not reducible to friendly dialogue, a claim that should encourage us to reflect upon the different forms of encounter and connection in human life. We should attend to Arendt’s portraits of civic friendship in her essays on Lessing and Socrates. These portraits illuminate the porosity of the boundary between friendship and politics for Arendt, showing aspects of political life that we may wish to embrace and even, if possible, enhance. And, equally, we should attend to Arendt’s caution about the difference between the dialogue of friendship and the plurality of political life so that we may appreciate the full implications of Arendt’s understanding of politics as a plurality that is not simply an extension of the ‘I and Thou’ encounter.
About the Author:
Schuyler Playford is a PhD Candidate in Political Science at the University of Toronto. Her dissertation project analyses the role of Socrates in Arendt’s revision of the relationship between politics and philosophy. Schuyler’s research engages with Arendt’s understanding of loneliness, as well as her work on love, friendship, and wonder, placing the ‘Arendtian Socrates’ in conversation with Plato on these themes.
Notes:
[1] Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World, xii. In the preface to her biography of Arendt, Young-Bruehl quotes this remark made by Hans Jonas at Arendt’s funeral.
[2] Bacevic, “Dialogue without Conclusion.”
[3] Arendt, “Thinking,” The Life of the Mind, 189.
[4] Huberman, “Hannah Arendt’s Concept of Civic Friendship.” The essay Huberman draws upon to reconstruct an Arendtian civic friendship is “On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts about Lessing.”
[5] The essay is an edited section of a lecture series Arendt delivered at Notre Dame University in 1954, published posthumously by Jerome Kohn first as “Philosophy and Politics” in Social Research in 1990 and later as “Socrates” in The Promise of Politics (2005). See Villa 1999 and 2020 as well as Cavarero 2019 for critical engagement with the version of Socrates Arendt presents in this essay.
[6] Arendt, “Concern with Politics in Recent European Philosophical Thought,” 445.
[7] Arendt, “Willing,” The Life of the Mind, 200.
[8] Ibid., 200.
[9] Arendt, The Human Condition, 181–3.
[10] Arendt writes, “[M]en, not man, live on the earth and inhabit the world” (Arendt, The Human Condition, 7). This statement echoes her Biblical reference to the “miracle that God did not create Man, but ‘male and female He created them.’” (Arendt, “Socrates,” 39, emphasis added).
[11] Arendt, The Human Condition, 7. The other activities of the vita activa are work and labour.
[12] Arendt, “Willing,” The Life of the Mind, 201.
[13] Arendt, “Socrates,” 16.
[14] Arendt, “Ideology and Terror,” 324–5.
[15] Possenti , “Pluralità e Dualità Un Problema Politico: Note Su Hannah Arendt,” 266–8.
[16] Robaszkiewicz and Weinman, p. 46.
Works Cited:
Arendt, Hannah. 1953. “Ideology and Terror: A Novel Form of Government.” Review of Politics 15 (3): 303–27.
— — — . 1958. The Human Condition. Second. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
— — — . 1968. “On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts about Lessing.” In Men in Dark Times, 3–32. New York: Harcourt Brace & World.
— — — . 1978. The Life of the Mind. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
— — — . 1994. “Concern with Politics in Recent European Philosophical Thought.” In Essays in Understanding 1930–1954, edited by Jerome Kohn, 428–47. New York: Schocken Books.
— — — . 2005. “Socrates.” In The Promise of Politics, edited by Jerome Kohn, 5–39. New York: Schocken Books.
Bacevic, Jana. 2023. “Dialogue without Conclusion.” The Hannah Arendt Center Quote of the Week (blog). August 13, 2023. https://medium.com/quote-of-the-week/dialogue-without-conclusion-d0d423d30a5a.
Cavarero, Adriana. 2019. “The Human Reconceived: Back to Socrates with Arendt.” In Antiquities Beyond Humanism, edited by Emanuela Bianchi, Sara Brill, and Brooke Holmes, 31–46. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198805670.003.0002.
Huberman, Pinchas. 2023. “Hannah Arendt’s Concept of Civic Friendship.” The Hannah Arendt Center Quote of the Week (blog). August 20, 2023. https://medium.com/quote-of-the-week/hannah-arendts-concept-of-civic-friendship-be313f905410.
Possenti, Ilaria. 2017. “Pluralità e Dualità Un Problema Politico: Note Su Hannah Arendt.” Filosofia Politica 2: 253–68.
Robaszkiewicz, Maria, and Michael D. Weinman. 2023. Hannah Arendt and Politics. Thinking Politics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Villa, Dana. 2020. “Hannah Arendt: Socratic Citizenship and Philosophical Critique.” Research in Phenomenology 50, 2020 (2): 143–60. https://doi.org/10.1163/15691640-12341444.
Villa, Dana R. 1999. “Arendt and Socrates.” Revue Internationale de Philosophie 53 (208 (2)): 241–57.
Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth. 2004. Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World, Second Edition. Yale University Press.
