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Week 6: St. Augustine — 26.05.2025
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For Plato
- As long as one is connected to the polis, one can be friends with others, but in a sense friendship has no meaning of its own. It is a connection which make sense through one’s bond with the polis. Since one can only find its place in this world with polis, between being good/virtuous and being part of the ideal city require each other.
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Aristotle
- For Plato we are place holder for beauty for Aristo we love them not because we are after eternal, ideal beauty but because of their own sake.
- For Aristotle and Cicero, but especially for Aristotle, friendship has its own meaning and purpose. Friendship is connected with a virtuous life, it is an element of a virtuous life, which is related to Eudaimonia. This requires that actions should be authorised by reason, finding the middle way. So it is not a state of being, but it is connected to how we act, matter of praxis. Friendship has a value by itself. For Aristo, friendship is a form of relationship, if it is a complete one, that unites people in virtue with goodwill, we always do or ask things for the sake of other friends for their good, not for our own interest.
- A tension of forms of friendship: can one be friends with all one’s fellow citizens, does this not suggest that friendship loses its intimacy.
- Utility Friendship / Pleasure Friendship
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Cicero
- Cicero follows Aristotle closely, we still have the idea of the connection between being a good person and being a citizen. But the same tension continues, adding another layer, now there is a problem of loyalty.
- In Cicero and Aristo, a complete friendship can take place between good people. There are other forms of friendships, based on pleasure and usefulness, but the perfect one can exit only with virtuous individuals.
- In this respect, we could also argue to some extent that friendship in Cicero and Aristotle works as a device to introduce more divisions between people and to exclude certain groups from friendship.
- Cicero follows Aristotle closely, we still have the idea of the connection between being a good person and being a citizen. But the same tension continues, adding another layer, now there is a problem of loyalty.
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Augustine:
- Stealing of Pears:
- He was after desires following his passions and flesh, he was going further further way from his God more into the barren fields of sorrow.
- He was rather hanging out with his friends, he was ashamed of being not shameless enough, he took pleasure in mischievous actions, and acting this way was praised by others (friends).
- “the pleasure I god was not from the pears, it was in the crime itself, enhanced by the companionship of my fellow sinners.”
- “O friendship all unfriendly”
- All friendships are problematic
- It is the seducer of the soul, it is this excess that give that trickle on the nect and pushes one to do something shameful of which the actor do not feel shame at all.
- He was driven by cupiditas (desire) not by caritas. In this case friendship is a seduction of mind and might become a hindrance of seeking God. Seduced by friendship.
- The sin of Adam and Eve: Adam committed the crime not because he was deceived but because of companionship of Eve. (sharing the sin)
- Theory:
- The universe has no stability or order in itself, without God’s constant watchfulness, the universe would suddenly turn into nothingness.
- Reason necessarily needs the guidance of faith.
- Reson has no light of its own to illuminate the truth. It is only the light of revelation that illuminates the truth.
- He introduces his famous distinction between the City of Man (civitas terrana) and the City of God (civitas Dei).
- “Accordingly, two loves have founded the two states: the earthly one, the love of self, to the point of despising the whole; the heavenly one, the love of God, to the point of despising the self. In a word, the former glorifies self, the latter God.”
- Social Life:
- Augustine distinguishes 4 forms of human society. The first of these is the family (domus) in the broadest sense; the second, above and wider that the family, is the city-state (civitas), which includes the extended, imperial forms of the city-state, such as that of Rome, or states in larger units comprising many cities; the thir
- d is the orbis terrae (earth), which includes the civitas, but is wider that it, and includes the whole earth and the people living on it. Finally, there is the universe (mundus), the largest of all societies, which includes earth and sky, God, His angels and spirits, and the entire human community.
- Man, as God’s creation, has two aspects, the physical and the spiritual.
- Agape:
- Agape is the indiscriminate love for fellow human being. Love becomes indiscriminate, does not see individual faces but only there is existence through God.
- “Love is God. It must be that whoever loves God loves his brother.”
- The relationship is mediated through something else: Which is God.
- Agape is the indiscriminate love for fellow human being. Love becomes indiscriminate, does not see individual faces but only there is existence through God.
- Stealing of Pears:
Week 8: Carl Schmidt
Self-Notes
- Concept of “partisan” is defined via relation to the concept of the “political” which is based on the binary opposition between friend and enemy.
- enemy is an existential threat for the partisan
- Friendship is thus, a very fixed concept — it is fixed because it is defined by fixing the other
- with this binary opposition, two different bodies of knowledge are created
- it doesn’t provide any space for other, it already “knows” what the other is, not open to change or challenge — therefore it is not a relationship between two bodies, it is an opposition between two binaries
- Siyasalın Devlet Monopolünün Krizi: Schmitt, 20. yüzyılda devletin siyasal karar alma (dost/düşman ayrımı) üzerindeki tekelinin zayıfladığını belirtir. Partizan gruplar, bu krize işaret eder. Makale, Schmitt’in iki yeni siyasal aktör tanımladığını vurgular: tellürik (toprağa bağlı) partizan ve küresel devrimci. Bu aktörler, devletin siyasal tekelini sorgular.
- 3 types of enmity
- Conventional Enmity: Jus publicum europaeum’a dayalı, devletler arası savaşlarda görülen sınırlı ve düzenlenmiş düşmanlıktır. Düşman, suçlu değil, saygıdeğer bir rakiptir.
- Real Enmity:
- Absolute Enmity: Küresel devrimcinin (örneğin, Lenin’in Marksist ideolojisi) soyut bir adalet adına yürüttüğü, sınıfsal veya ırksal düşmanı insanlıktan çıkararak tamamen yok etmeyi hedefleyen sınırsız düşmanlıktır.
- Düşmanlığın Dönüşümüne Etki Eden Faktörler:
- Clausewitz’in savaş ve siyasetin iç içe geçtiği fikri, partizan teorisinin temelini oluşturur. Lenin ve Mao, bu fikirleri geliştirerek sırasıyla mutlak ve gerçek düşmanlık kavramlarını güçlendirir. Schmitt, ideolojilerin (Marksizm, “insanlık adına savaş” gibi) düşmanlığın dönüşümünde rol oynadığını belirtir.
- İdeolojilerin yanı sıra teknolojik ilerlemeler (silahlar, iletişim), sanayileşme, küreselleşme ve siyasal karşılıklı bağımlılığın, konvansiyonel düşmanlığın erozyonuna ve düşmanın suçlulaştırılıp insanlıktan çıkarılmasına katkıda bulunduğunu vurgular. Özellikle nükleer silahlar, mutlak düşmanlık kavramını destekler.
Lecture Notes
- Theory of the partisan — an irregular fighter, doesn’t belong to an army
- doesn’t follow strict rules, doesn’t wear official uniform, autonomous,
- teluric character: tied to geographical boundaries of — he has a geographical belonging
- more defensive than actively starting the fight — duty is the pushing back the enemy
- Types of enemies:
Week 9: Hannah Arendt — 23.06.2025
- Eichmann had been an anti-Semitic, her argument was, but his hatred of the Jewish people was not his primary motivarion. Rather, she argued, it was the hubris of his everyday life that made him want to rise through the ranks of the Third Reich.
- Banality of Evil: The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.
- Eichmann was not Iago and not Machbeth, and nothing would have been farther from his mind than to determine with Richand III to prove a villain. Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all. He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing. It was sheer thoughtfulness — something by no means identical with stupidity.
- Loneliness / solitude / isolation:
- What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience in the ever-growing masses of our country.
- Totalitarianism makes people lonely, takes away their ability to think and judge, dissolves private bonds between people and replaces them with bonds formed according to the totalitarian ideology. People are now connected to each other in a certain way, that they are “kamaraden” as the Nazis called each other. They share the same goals, and it is these goals that unite people, that bind them together.
- What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience in the ever-growing masses of our country.
- The Human Condition:
- Arend delineates three aspects of the human condition — work, labor, and action and realms of human existence: the private, the public, and the social.
- Being visible in public sphere: “the polis, properly speaking, is not the city-state in its physical location; it is the organization of the people as it arises out of acting and speaking together, and its true space lies between people living together for this purpose, no matter where they happen to be”
- Arend delineates three aspects of the human condition — work, labor, and action and realms of human existence: the private, the public, and the social.
- Arendt on Jewishness
- My Jewishness is pre-political, a fact, I have never in mu live “loved” certain nation or collective (not the German nor the working class).
- The importance of ancient Athens in creating a space in which they interacted by exchanging opinions rather that fighting, rather than resorting to physical force, rather than relying on the sheer physical strength of their bodies, they used the power of their arguments.
- It is in this sense that friendships has certain things in common with Arendt’s understanding of politics. For Friendship is based on conversation, as Aristotle suggested. Friendship in this world takes place in-between. ıt is about plurality, diversity.
- For the world is nor humane just because it is made by human beings, and it does not became humane just because the human voice sounds in it, but only when it has become the object of discourse.
- As conclusion:
- In totalitarianism, friendship would be totally and systematically aradicated and in mass society friendship would become just a commodity. The solution is not friendship but it gives worldliness. Friendship is halfway between the public and the private, incorporating elements of both. A necessary condition for preparing to political space. But not enough, more plurality. Even though friendship is not wordless its scope is limited. Friendship quasi what made her at home in this world and she felt at home wherever her friends were. Friendship in this world takes place in-between. It is about plurality, diversity.