Published in Quote of the Week
3 days ago (Medium.com)
Pinchas Huberman
“[H]is thinking was not a search for truth, since every truth that is the result of a thought process necessarily puts an end to the movement of thinking. The fermenta cognitions which Lessing scattered into the world were not intended to communicate conclusions, but to stimulate others to independent thought, and this for no other purpose than to bring about a discourse between thinkers.”
In: Thoughts About Lessing, Men in Dark Times
This passage turns the relationship between thinking and discoursing on its head. It is common wisdom that discoursing is a means to good thinking. We share ideas to test their soundness. By communicating our thoughts to others, by exposing our thoughts to probing questions and counterarguments, we are more likely to develop well-considered views on reflection. Discoursing helps us think, deliberate, and judge what there is reason to believe, to do, to be.
But Arendt’s Lessing seems to come at this another way. He would think, and communicate his thoughts, she says, simply to be in discourse with others. It is as if a “discourse between thinkers” has standalone significance (even) without reference to anticipated epistemic gains in the quality of their thoughts or other good outcomes.
This is a puzzling but intriguing possibility. It centers the relationship between persons in discourse — as if for its own sake. It suggests there is potential worthiness in discoursing that need not be articulated in terms of some other (independently specifiable) good that it produces. It draws attention to a putative value of being-in-discourse that is irreducible to any if its results, whether gains in knowledge or anything else. If correct, that there is self-sufficient purpose to “bring about a discourse between thinkers,” it is realizable only so long as discoursing endures — because its goodness, whatever it is, would not outlast the discoursing that it consists of. And so, Arendt’s Lessing was eager “to stimulate others to independent thought” even “for no other purpose” but sustaining discourse itself. Any “result,” even if good and successful on independent grounds, is unfavorable to the extent it “puts an end to the movement of thinking” with others.
a. Is there value in discourse as such?
But what is the irreducible value of being-in-discourse? An initial possibility is that it denotes the continuity of a valued relationship that exceeds its specific communicative parts. This occurs to the extent certain persons have reason to talk to one another per se — where some value inheres in who speaks to whom — over and above everything else that needs to be said. Even more, sometimes, the sheer fact of being-in-discourse could have a certain primacy over its details. Friends, say, may know they want to talk to one another even if they do not know in advance exactly what they will talk about. They may want to talk to one another even if they cannot crisply specify upfront what discourse-independent goods they expect it to yield. Where pre-specification of contents or outputs is neither necessary nor desirable, a pure relational dimension of discoursing comes readily into focus. Its significance cannot be reduced to its individuated communicative qualities without omitting something crucial — how it sustains the bond of friendship over time.
Even so, in this example of friendly conversation, it is odd to think the locus of value is being-in-discourse. It is probably more accurate to locate value in the friendship that discoursing sustains. Yet the friendship is made of many other features, like mutual care and concern, which are separable from, and endure beyond, the conversations that also help sustain it from time to time. Even if ongoing discourse is partly constitutive of friendship, and even if these archetypal friends want to talk to one another without specifying in advance what they will talk about or expect it to yield, the relevant (relational) good inheres not in conversing as such. There is probably some pre-set and shared understanding that their friendship consists of various features other than talking to one another — mutual care, concern, respect, help for one another (to name a few things). And while ongoing conversation may serve to sustain their friendship, its value is still ultimately reducible to these other (discourse-independent) relational qualities that make a friendship.
Yet Arendt’s image of Lessing’s prioritization of endless discourse makes it seem like it is truly intrinsically valuable — that its value is in discourse as such. I think there may be a way to make some sense of this thought if we could identify a relationship that is both (at least partly) made of discoursing and its character is exceedingly unspecified absent continually talking about it. The more open-ended the terms of a relationship, the more instructive it will be to identify its discourse as a putative good irreducible to specific content or output. In such case, discourse is good for sustaining a relationship that fundamentally consists of continual discoursing about what the relationship is. Here discoursing is good simply because it is a constitutive part of a valued relation-of-discourse. This is not to resolve but to stir the enigma. What kind of relationship so fundamentally consists of discourse, to the extent it is illuminating to regard its worth as irreducible to other discourse-independent goods?
There is a familiar relationship that partly consists of near-maximally open-ended discourse. It is a political community of persons who agree to peacefully share a polity amid persistent disagreement. These persons may have little in common other than a few basic normative commitments: to share a polity, to collectively binding action, and to settle their differences by means of “words and persuasion” (and not merely by force and violence). They have reason to discourse about whatever they deem of concern to the community. But, if committed to a politics of persuasion rather than force, they can never pre-specify its contents or expected outputs. In this relationship, there are few pre-set, stable, agreed-upon values and purposes, other than discoursing about it all without end.
Arendt’s depiction of Lessing’s result-less discourse is indeed a compressed representation of the unique relationship that is a political community. “Lessing was a completely political person,” Arendt tells us. His manner of thinking and discoursing personifies a particular conception of political relationality: civic friendship.
b. Two conceptions of political relationality: fraternity vs. friendship
Amid her “thoughts about Lessing,” and in her accustomed way of thinking by way of sharp distinctions, Arendt contrasts two conceptions — two metaphors — of political accord: fraternity and friendship. They are ways of grappling with persistently hard questions of why form political community and what effectively holds it together? There are surely ways to conceive of grounds for political community in plausibly instrumental terms (i.e., of goods that are wholly specifiable independent of being in political community). Organizing politically may be distinctly good for benefits enjoyed by persons severally, like personal safety, liberty, property, something else — take your pick. The possibility of securing these benefits may motivate their respective forms of political ordering. As I understand it, though, Arendt’s contrasting conceptions of fraternity and friendship are both ways of imagining what a political community’s relational integrity consists of in non-instrumental terms. They are alternative ways of imagining what it means to be in political community.
Fraternity, first, for Arendt, denotes human relation based in shared inner features of human nature, like sympathy or reason. It is (the possibility of) a powerful unity of interest — of common feeling or thought. It “obliterates all distinctions.” It may manifest, perhaps, in sharing foundational values or ways of life. Arendt calls this is an “invisible” mode of relation since it shrouds itself from a worldly reality of many peoples for whom feelings of kinship are typically absent. She also calls it an “instinctual” mode of relation since it “tend[s] to muteness” and not “dialogue.” In a fraternity model, disagreements are blemishes; persons seek their own to avoid contest.
Friendship, though, denotes human relation mediated by an externally shared world. Evoking antiquity (when the concept had political resonance), Arendt understands Aristotle’s phila, of “friendship among citizens,” as “a readiness to share the world with other men.” She says it is “sober and cool,” not “sentimental.” It is “not intimately personal but makes political demands and preserves reference to the world.” It is a worldly co-existence. In this tradition, Arendt explains, “the essence of friendship consisted in discourse,” and “only the constant interchange of talk united citizens in the polis.”
In contrast to fraternity, a friendship conception of political accord upholds plurality and distinction, not unity or likeness. It is a politics that could embrace a “fundamental relativity” among civic persons and a potentially “infinite number of opinions that arise when men discuss the affairs of this world.” Disagreement is at home in this mode of relating; it gives discourse partners even more to talk about.
The friendship model makes space for plurality, for dissent, for contest. It is to insert enough distance between persons — a shared world — to separate and link them. A world is “shared,” though, only when it is an object of discourse among a plurality of persons who hold it in common. It is constituted by “many voices;” a multiplicity of expressed opinion “both links and separates men, establishing in fact those distances between men which together comprise the world.”
One must wonder about the stability of political community in Arendt’s friendship model. It entails a multiplicity of views and interests that somehow co-exist in and around common objects. These persons do not necessarily share fundamental values or ways of life. Yet they have little choice but to share a polity, its public institutions, and resources; and they can try to shape its affairs, while accepting potential opponents will do the same. In these conditions, are not civic relations at constant risk of turning un-friendly in the ordinary sense of the word?
The instability is deep because their most basic commitment is just to keep discoursing about what it means to be their community — what collective decisions to take, what its values should be, what should appear in its polity. And while the community necessarily enacts and enforces collectively binding norms, embodying certain values, that are expected endure for some time, these are still impermanent on the fundamental level, always up for debate, prone to change. It seems there is no further substantive bedrock of agreement. As far as I can tell, Arendt’s conception of civic friendship does not stipulate anything like constitutional pre-commitments to public standards that embody a reciprocal respect, good will, and concern for citizens’ wellbeing — qualities we might otherwise associate with civic friendship.1
We should be careful not to overstate the concept’s vacuity either. There still is a fundamental commitment at play — at least to co-exist peacefully and keep discoursing about what do as a community. This also means, more substantially, I think, that a political community must act to secure conditions and affordances for ongoing discoursing in the polity.
Still, this latter imperative flows from the more minimal commitment to simply (continue to) be in discourse. There need not be independent commitment to maintaining certain social or material conditions for other reasons — like, e.g., under a specification of political obligation to underwrite minimal standards of living. Rather, upkeep of shared worldly structures — social, material, normative — is required because it is both the precondition and object of ongoing discourse among persons in political community (if they are to be civic friends). The public spaces, institutions, and resources in a polity must form a “world,” a structure with some durability, made fitting for human habitation, where separate persons can discourse about sharing what is in it.2 And the specifics of world-maintenance are surely up for debate. The only thing that is theoretically secure — and paradoxically maybe even not open to debate — is a shared commitment to the continuity of a political relationship that is (in a salient sense) defined by open-ended discoursing itself.
To come full circle, this priority of open-ended discoursing, of civic friendship, is not easily grasped in epistemic or other outcome-oriented terms. With only minimal normative conditioning, its discourse cannot support reasonable expectations of producing good output on independent grounds. All it demands is the continuity of discoursing among persons who have reason to talk to one another because they share a polity. Its normative ordering is purely relational: “a readiness to share the world with other men.” This is an interpretation, anyway, of what it could mean to value being-in-discourse without reduction to anticipated outputs, whether learned truths or consensuses or collective decisions that must occur from time to time. It inheres in certain persons agreeing to discourse as and to members of the same political community into the future. It is no more but no less than a venture in “sharing-the-world-with-others.”3
c. Arendt’s Lessing’s example of worldly civic friendship in endless discourse
Arendt sees in Lessing a personification of civic friendship rather than fraternity; she reports that he “wanted to be the friend of many men, but no man’s brother.” She relates, quite amazingly, how Lessing “rejoiced” in the notion that “the truth” as “uttered” may be “immediately transformed into an opinion among many,” and then aptly “contested, reformulated, reduced to one subject of discourse among others.” She thought that Lessing’s “greatness” consisted in his “gladness” that there may be no “single truth.” He was glad, that is, that “discourse among men will never cease so long as there are men at all.”
His preoccupation with discoursing, moreover, meant a keen focus on the worldly space that both holds a discourse and is its object. For this reason, in judging art and ideas, Arendt says, Lessing was most “concerned with the effect” of the art or ideas “upon the spectator” and the “worldly space which has come into being between the artist or writer and his fellow men as a world common to them.” He was “always taking sides for the world’s sake” and he understood and judged “everything in terms of its position in the world at any given time.” He would thus “attack or defend in his polemics according to how the matter was being judged by the public and quite independently of the degree to which it was true or false” and without assuming any “fixed position.” And so, for instance, where “everyone else was contending over the ‘truth’ of Christianity, he was chiefly defending its position in the world.” He would argue in opposition when he was “anxious that it might again enforce its claim to dominance” but in its favor when he feared “that it might vanish utterly.” He wanted religion to have a place in the world alongside the philosophy of its critics. In “taking sides for the world’s sake,” Lessing was securing the conditions for more discoursing. He was prioritizing ongoing discourse over any decisive outputs.
Arendt acknowledges we may be “astonished that Lessing’s partisanship for the world would go so far that he was prepared even to sacrifice to it the axiom of noncontradiction.” But his thinking was just not a “search for truth.” It was a “mode of moving in the world in freedom.” He conceived of thinking as a “freedom of movement,” which, in turn, meant “never binding his thinking to results;” results are undesirable because they put an “an end to the movement of thinking.” The many “disjunct” ideas he “scattered into the world,” Arendt says, “were not intended to communicate conclusions, but to stimulate others to independent thought.” And he wanted to “stimulate others to independent thought,” she thinks, “for no other purpose than to bring about a discourse between thinkers.” His priority was the continuity of a discourse relation. He was partisan to the “world” because it is a precondition and the shared object of (civic) friendship.
And so, in the role of civic friend, Arendt’s Lessing sought to humanize “the world by incessant and continual discourse about its affairs and the things in it.” The inverse possibility — the idea of a singular truth, discovered form beyond, to then rein over persons — was undesirable to him since it “might have the result that all men would suddenly unite in a single opinion.” If such misfortune occurred, then “the world, which can form only in the interspaces between men in all their variety, would vanish altogether.” And if such a “world” were to vanish, the possibility of civic friendship, of incessant discourse among partisans and rivals alike, would go with it.
Arendt, Hannah (1968): On Humanitiy in Dark Times. Thoughts About Lessing. In: Men In Dark Times. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, p. 3–31.
Footnotes:
1 For a conception like that, see, e.g., Sibyl A. Schwarzenbach, On Civic Friendship: Including Women in the State.
2 This is to say her concept of civic friendship entails a concept of a “world.” It is unclear to me, though, whether her concept of a “world” also entails a concept of civic friendship, i.e., persons discoursing about commonly held things, which separate and link them.
Written by The Hannah Arendt Center
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The Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities at Bard College is an expansive home for thinking about and in the spirit of Hannah Arendt.