The politics of friendship and friendship in politics

Yeni Şafak · YASİN AKTAY - The politics of friendship and friendship in politics

The connotations of politics and the connotations of friendship generally play on different frequencies. If one proceeds from the assumption that in politics there are no friendships but only goals and interests, no place can be found for friendship in any definition of it. It would be hard to reconcile the two. That is why, in a political world where those who say there is no friendship, no loyalty, only partnerships of interest predominate, politics itself cannot easily free itself from remaining stuck to a negative meaning.

Yet politics does not, as is supposed, have an aim, a normative content or a goal that means the same thing for everyone. Whatever the human being is, politics is that, because politics is among the most important faculties of the human being, a quality that makes the human being human. That is why the human being has been defined as a political animal (zoon politikon).

Politics is the name of the effort exerted on earth toward cultivating the world, toward making it better than one found it. Before being within a particular political party, organization or movement, it is a basic human activity. But the effort exerted toward corrupting the world is also politics and requires its own particular allies. Therefore whether politics is in itself good or not is not independent of our evaluations of what the human being is and what kind of course he travels in this world.

If we heed Nietzsche, the human being is a being charged with the desire for power. All mystical or moralistic philosophies that ignore this merely practice hypocrisy and conceal their desires for power behind lofty claims. This is, at the very least, an invitation to a serious reckoning for people who proceed in politics with one claim or another.

Does the political human being carry the desire for power in his own name, or in the name of his clan, his tribe, his gender, his fellow citizens, his co-religionists, his virtues or his friends, and put it into practice on their behalf? Indeed, do all these constitute pretexts that camouflage his own desire for power?

Of course, the politics of those who harbor no calculation of interest toward one another, who trust one another, who truly love one another, who are friends around virtues, is also expected to be free of calculations of interest and friendly, for the sake of friendship and of the virtues that are the cause of friendship.

The politics of those whose friendships with others are based on interests is also based on interests, and where interests clash friendship ends, and is at once added to the stories of the incompatibility of politics and friendship. Yet in the politics of those who have formed friendship by reason of virtues, the aim is the very virtues in which the friends believe and to whose path they devote themselves, and therefore the friends themselves.

The advantages produced by the political journey and struggle come in between like a fishbone, and the noble are the people who can remove these fishbones from between them.

In his newly published book on friendship, our esteemed friend Kenan Göçer very aptly distinguishes "politics that seeks comrades" from "friendship" itself. According to him, although the comrades of politics and friends look the same from the outside in the sense of walking a path together, in reality they are not the same. "Even if comrades do not love one another, they walk toward the same goal together, feeling as though under an obligation to love." Yet love and obligation make it impossible to stand side by side in the same sentence.

For love to be under obligation is of course something that destroys love. What gives rise to this contradiction is the unfriendly workings of politics that place the goal ahead of friendship and of love. The politics of friendship, or friendly politics, excludes instrumentalizing the friends who exist now, or everything, in the name of a fetishized future set aside as a "goal," an imagined utopia.

Göçer's book "Philosophy of Friendship," which I must note at once as one of the finest original works I have read recently, tells the tragic story of how comrades focused on the goal move away from being a community of friends: "As comrades march toward the goal, they turn the goal into a cause. The moment this happens, nothing matters except reaching that goal. Everything outside the cause is seen as small and insignificant. Once everything begins to be done for the cause, principles, if there are any, can be neglected as encumbrances. Not only revolutions, but causes too devour their own children. After all, what importance can children have beside so great a cause!

Because the comrade's eye is always on the horizon, he often cannot see where he treads. Seeing the ground is a waste of time. He must reach the goal at once, and he is late. Every cause arouses a feeling of being behind schedule in the comrade. He has no time to lose. By doing so he in fact loses the time he is in. When the eyes are turned to the goal, to the future tense, time is never lived. That is why the man of the cause is always out of breath. He cannot stop long enough to understand that he is living and to listen to silence... For the comrade of politics the path is already determined, given. What falls to him is only to walk the path with his comrades. When he thinks about the path, there is the possibility of straying from it. For this reason comrades always advise that the path not be thought about, and that attention be focused on the goal instead. The verdict is ready for those who leave the path: Agent, sellout, traitor!"

The replacement of friends by comrades in politics is of course only one of the ways that kill friendship in politics. Before the far coarser, far cheaper sellouts of friendship that we experience in movements that generally arise in the name of a lofty cause, this kind of degeneration is not even mentioned. Comradeship too, although not like friendship, ultimately requires a certain law, indeed a friendship, and every politics of friendship includes a comradeship.

But sometimes even the goals that friends determine together, in the name of certain virtues, with love and affection, come between friends again like a fishbone. These fishbones sometimes arise because of the fetishization of the goal and its departure from goodness in a way that loses the present, and often through the simple temptations of the benefits that emerge while marching toward those goals.

At the extreme of this paradox, Kenan Göçer rightly asks the question bound to come to mind: Do friends have no cause, or do friends not walk a path?

Can it be that they never do, that they never walk?