A friendly philosophy of politics

We live in a world that makes one think that, in politics, in the economy and in social life in general, enmity prevails over friendship, and fierce competition over understanding and solidarity. Especially after Carl Schmitt, enmity in politics has become a more current value. Today the scarcity claimed or assumed in friendship turns into an attitude that makes it impossible even to form alliances against enemies together with friends. Even political allies sustain the alliance among themselves in a distrust that may turn into enmity at any moment. Members of the same party can harbor a potential enmity toward one another as much as the enmity they display toward the other side.

The understanding that has made enmity so current has spread in waves and has become the defining atmosphere of today's political culture.

In such an atmosphere, to build a world together, to do good things for humanity together, much more needs to be wanted and done, because the rationality on which this atmosphere rests gives little premium to sincerity and friendship. In place of sincerity and friendship, rules, bureaucratic rationality and impersonal systemic arrangements are put in. As if friendship and sincerity made these impossible. Indeed, among the modern political philosophers who are a result of this atmosphere or who created it, enmity holds a much more important place than friendship.

In fact, even before Carl Schmitt, since the rise of modern political philosophy with Niccolò Machiavelli and Thomas Hobbes, the fundamentally conflictual nature of social relations and man's wolfishness toward man, or potential enmity, has been a more dominant theme.

Even the line of deliberative democracy that developed as an alternative to this understanding, or the Lockean-Rawlsian-Habermasian line of liberal democracy, cannot bring people an approach based on an essential friendship or affection toward other people. Instead, on this basis it again tries to sow an ethics of interest by which rational interests can be secured more. Ethics as a kind of commercial investment: not doing to another what you would not want done to you, so that in return for the good conduct you perform, you may in sum receive a favor.

Yet it is possible to go beyond a political philosophy that wants good only for itself, only for its own party, only for its own tribe, clique, race or coreligionists and has no proposal for others other than enmity. Such a philosophy is sorely needed. Styles of politics should be evaluated not only by what they propose for their own tribes or factions, but also by what they propose to others, by what they can promise to people other than themselves.

In governance or in politics, must those who are not friends inevitably be regarded as enemies? In the world that is aimed to be established, is the plan deemed fit for rivals who are not friends destruction, revenge or humiliation? In every scene of political encounter the desires to prevail, to overcome, to defeat reach their extreme, but at the end of this encounter, what kind of end does anyone truly deem fit for his enemy?

In this matter, our Prophet's struggle with his enemies is a perfect example that sufficiently shows that an alternative approach in politics is radically possible. A magnificent approach that wished the absolute good of his enemy even in the moment of the hottest conflict. To be an enemy to the enemy without hating, only because of his actions and his stance, without closing off the possibility that he too, as one created by God, may attain guidance, while at the same time fighting fiercely. To be able, the moment he attains guidance, to set aside all the enmity between them and embrace him as a brother.

This is a magnificent reference for reviving this distorted world of politics and society with a call to friendship. A different kind of politics is possible. However, a vigilance is needed against the arrogance that squanders friendship in politics or in modern society for the sake of exalting bureaucratic rationality, and that belittles it as a primitive value that invites favoritism, mafia-like solidarities or unseriousness.

Hannah Arendt is one of the important modern political philosophers who called for reviving friendship, which has been neglected in politics for years. According to her, friendship is a necessity, because without it we cannot fully participate as citizens in the life and work of the state.

According to Arendt, what makes power possible, unlike force, and makes it the foundation of politics is friendship itself. Arendt takes up the subject with an approach that affirms power against force. Totalitarianism is based on force, and true power politics cannot function, and indeed cannot be defined, without friendship; the basic principles of friendship, the continuity of the relationship, the mutuality of commitment and the recognition of plurality, are at the same time the foundations of a strong political structure that functions on a human basis. In force-based totalitarianism, however, all these principles become inoperative. According to Arendt, the political element in friendship is that, in a dialogue that goes on between people, each friend can understand the truth immanent in the other's view. Thus friendship promises certainty and continuity in a world of uncertainty and discontinuity, but always within the limits and restrictions of that particular friendship.

It is a place that focusing on the perfect and idealized concept of friendship of Aristotle, who said "my friends, there is no friend," cannot take us to. Whereas Arendt instead points to the possibility of a friendship that can be reached by the greatest possible number of people.

So what is the outlook necessary for this friendship that is in fact possible and attainable? However one looks at it, Arendt's outlook too remains quite theoretical. She announces, with a more positive understanding, glad tidings against all the pessimistic view of friendship from Aristotle onward, but there is no ground in the western world to which she belongs that could bring this glad tiding. On the contrary, with every passing day that ground becomes more racist, more elitist, more separatist.

Who are the people who can want for the Other the good they want for themselves, who can realize it, who can put forward a politics of friendship that will make the world bearable, livable for all people?

Will these be able to come up and enter the field only with a philosophical education?

Where are the friends we are waiting for, and from where will they come?