Friendship and the Common World

For this session we’ll read Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics VIII.1–6, VIII.9, IX.6, and IX.9, alongside Hannah Arendt’s 1959 Lessing Prize address, “On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts about Lessing.” Both writers, writing millenia apart, tackle the question of how friendship relates to the shared world that friends inhabit, and whether it can survive that world coming apart

Aristotle divides friendship into three kinds — utility, pleasure, and character — and holds that only the third is friendship in the full sense. Two claims push this outward into politics. Friendship and justice have the same extent, so every friendship belongs to a community and takes its shape from that community’s end: sailors have the friendship of the voyage, citizens the friendship of the city. And IX.6 limits concord to practical matters that concern the parties themselves, not agreement about everything.

Arendt draws a line through this. She separates friendship from fraternity — the warmth that arises among the persecuted and among those who have withdrawn from an unbearable world. Fraternity produces real humanity, but at the cost of worldlessness, flourishing precisely where the world between people has dropped away. Friendship stays worldly, and consists in discourse about a common world among people who see it from different positions. Her Lessing prefers friendship to truth, a preference Aristotle may not be able to absorb.

You can find a free copy of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics here. Hannah Arendt's essay is here