우정의 정치학

Abstract

Philosophers have long recognized that friendship plays a central role in a meaningful and happy life. Indeed, Aristotle elevated friendship at its best to an ethical ideal, declaring that only good people could be friends in the fullest sense, and that only with such friendship could the virtues be fully exercised. However, at the dawn of the modern state, the beginning of the scientific revolution, the outset of the spread of universal principles of rights and freedoms, and the advent of international truck and trade, friendship as a political concern nearly drops out of sight. Whereas liberalism and its offspring liberal democracy promise the individual liberty, the cost of this liberty is often isolation. However, the equalization in friendship, Arendt argues, means that the friends become partners in a common world – that they together constitute a community. Friendship in a community binds together the citizens of good judgment communicating their mutual judgments on the basis of truthfulness. The crucial point is the ‘political’ understanding friendship. It envisions the existentially engaged participation in the life of community on account of the common reason present in all citizens that signifies the theomorphy of human beings’ humanity. The reflexive politics of friendship is, therefore, in this respect a case study of human nature’s potential for creatively ordering its existence in societal form.