Civic Friendship
remarks
The other day, I had the privilege of giving some remarks on civic friendship at a joint symposium hosted at Eastern University for humanities students at Eastern, Villanova, and Penn. The occasion sent me back not only to some old sources that deal with friendship, but also to (Book VII of) Aristotle’s Eudemian Ethics.
I’m of the growing opinion that one reason for the factions in our society, and in our church communions, is the failure to parse out the strata of “agreement” that constitute the various “kinds” of friendship. The stratus of agreement that Aristotle seems to think is required for civic friendship (only a friendship of utility, not a friendship of the good) is, I think, more attainable than we think.
Those of you so inclined, please save our society by reading Book VII of the Eudemian Ethics and helping me understand what kind of agreement constitutes civic friendship. Below are the remarks that got me going on this:
I want to thank Dr. Rea for inviting me to select some readings and offer some remarks tonight on civic friendship. The first longing I can remember was a longing for friendship. And, after reading Plato, Aristotle, Jesus, and Cicero, it became a longing for the kind of friendship they described. Their word is philia.
I’ve been captured by the vision that Hugh Black articulates in his reflections on philia in the classical world. Among the texts in general, and in Aristotle in particular, “Friendship,” he said, was “made the flower of Ethics, and the Root of Politics.” (I’ve given you a chapter from his 1905 treatise on Friendship.)
I’ve also been challenged by contemporary critics of classical philia. The Episcopal theologian, Ephraim Radner, for one, points out that “Aristotle founded friendship on a kind of abstracted ‘singleness.’” (I’ve given you this reading as well.) The philosopher, Alexander Nehamas, says this abstract mode of singleness was one inhabited exclusively by socially elite men having some share in the governance of their own city. Philia, it has been said, is irreducibly aristocratic. And, at least in 21st century America, we may be in need of more modest models.
The promise and the problems with philia have driven me back to the classical sources. And so the third reading I’ve chosen to bring tonight is a portion of Aristotle’s Eudemian Ethics, a portion that discusses “civic friendship.”
Civic Friendship
Before we begin thinking together about civic friendship, I want to distinguish what Aristotle calls “civic friendship” from what we might call “civil friendship.”
While the contemporary philosophical discussion of civility is wide-ranging, there is general agreement on at least two points. First, the concept of civility does not have much particular content. And, second, that civility is not, in every case, necessary for justice—justice may at times require incivility. The political theorist, Patrick Deneen, has pointed out the etymological similarity between “civility” and “politeness.” Civility from civitus; politeness from politus.
Civil friendship is a necessary good, but civic friendship envisions something more. With my final three minutes, I want to offer three observations about civic friendship. If you’d like to hang them on words, I’ll talk about aristocracy, affection, and utility.
Aristocracy
Contemporary critics of philia argue that, because Aristotle founded his vision for friendship on aristocratic, male singleness, that his vision does not square with our contemporary political sensibilities.
Remember with me, if you can, the first chapter of Lord of the Flies. The boys have crash-landed on an island. Ralph and Jack, the two most natural leaders, and Simon, the martyr figure, leave the rest of the boys to go on an expedition. They summit a mountain. They find a huge rock. Naturally, they figure out a way to send it careening down the mountainside. Reaching the summit, they scan the physical features of the island, assimilating them into a shared mental map. Ralph turns to the others and says, “This belongs to us.” The boys cheer. And the narrator writes: “Eyes shining, mouths open, triumphant, they savored the natural right of domination. Then they were lifted up: were friends.” I believe he means “friends” in the aristocratic sense.
Hey, we all know how badly the story goes. But the possibility for civic friendship begins when two or more people see a place together with their eyes, see it together with their hearts, and then can say, “This belongs to us.” Mutual possession.
I’m calling this situation small-scale aristocracy. To the extent that we can meaningfully say, “This ____ is ours,” we have the potential to become not only civil, but civic friends.
Affection
In the literature on friendship, it is widely accepted that the root of friendship is affection. If friendship means being able to say affectionately to the other, “We belong, in some way, to each other,” then civic friendship means also being able to say affectionately to a place, “This belongs, in some way, to us.” Civic friendship is at least a triangle of affection.
To the extent that authority and ownership are really delegated and shared, and not seized and restricted, civic friendship is possible. Totalitarianism does not permit civic friendship. Neither do oligarchic capitalism, certain forms of socialism, or general authoritarianism.
Civic friendship is the small-scale, affectionate aristocracy of mutual ownership.
Utility
The first thing you learn about Aristotle’s concept of friendship is that he sees three sorts: there is friendship of goodness, of utility, and of pleasure. The second thing you learn is that friendship of goodness is the noblest of the three sorts. But Aristotle says that civic friendship is a friendship of utility. By my lights, here’s how he arrives there:
Friendship begins with affection, or kindly feeling, but affection alone is not friendship. Friendship, essentially, is agreement. Agreement doesn’t mean thinking the same way, but submitting to the same rule so that you can do something together. Action, he says, is a more desirable thing anyway. One model of civic friendship is the saw and craftsmanship. Both choicefully submit to the craftsman—that is their agreement—in order to make an active contribution. (I think of Walt Whitman’s “I hear America singing.”)
Another model of civic friendship he offers is the marriage. Whether or not Aristotle imagined the possibilities of equality and mutuality in marriage may be another question. Either way, he describes the marriage partnership not as a democracy—which denotes numerical equality, whatever that might mean in the context of a marriage—but as an aristocracy. Marriage, considered in this context, is a small-scale, aristocratic partnership, unfolding from a sustained affection, that exhibits real mutual ownership and practices real mutual submission in its active collaboration in the creation of a household and a family.
Questions:
What distinguishes a civic friendship from the common friendships most of us experience, built on the bonds of affection?
Is “small-scale aristocracy” a viable vision for civic friendship in contemporary American society? Is it possible to be an affectionate aristocrat?
What does this “agreement” mean, and what does it look like, in a polarized and ideological world?