The State of the Mind (Updated)
Today, my YouTube algorithm informed me of a recent Dispatch podcast featuring Jonah Goldberg’s interview with a certain “Hannah Arendt scholar,” Roger Berkowitz, focused on Professor Berkowitz’s new book about Arendt and friendship. The topic was interesting on its face, so I took the bait and clicked on the recommendation, which turned out, as such things typically do, to be an excellent reminder of the importance of never ceding one’s deliberative power to algorithms.
Berkowitz begins by noting that “there aren’t that many great books on friendship,” a claim he follows up by citing what he presumably takes to be a representative sample of the best of what has been said on the subject: “There’s Montaigne’s essay on friendship, which I talk about in the book; there’s Cicero, which I mention briefly and don’t really agree with; but there’s not that much. One of the greatest thinkers of friendship is Hannah Arendt.”
That was the end of the road for me; I passively listened for a few more minutes, and then, as Berkowitz explained friendship with the example of meeting Goldberg to “talk about our kids,” I turned it off, in the name of all that is holy.
I can take with a grain of salt the claim that Hannah Arendt is “one of the greatest thinkers on friendship” (or on anything else for that matter), given that the speaker is an author plugging his new book on this very subject. What I cannot abide, however, is a supposedly experienced scholar, an accredited member of the modern academy, lamenting the paucity of major philosophical writings on friendship, and then citing the (two) historical examples which spring to mind, without so much as alluding to the two most conspicuous and influential thinkers on this subject, Plato and, above all, Aristotle, whose Nicomachean Ethics — the seminal and still-definitive treatise on virtue and the happy life — devotes two of its ten books (the largest proportion spent on any topic) to an extraordinarily detailed and ennobling analysis of friendship, which Aristotle describes most famously as being akin to “one soul in two bodies,” elucidates by means of the subtlest account ever given of self-love, and identifies evocatively as the indispensable bridge between the moral (human) and theoretical (godlike) aspirations of the human soul. Apparently, The Philosopher’s account was not sufficiently impressive to make Berkowitz’s short list of worthy efforts on friendship. Even worse, it appears that Berkowitz, who must, one presumes, have researched his topic before writing a book about it, is largely oblivious to the Greeks in general — apart from Plato and Aristotle, what about Epictetus, Epicurus, et al? — on a theme which they address at the very highest level, and treat with a gravity, a philosophical significance, unmatched in any subsequent age.
I might go on here to mention Nietzsche, not to mention many serious novelists and poets who have had a few quite relevant and informative things to say about friendship, perhaps at least as interesting as the ideas of Cicero, which Berkowitz at least deigned to mention, although only in order to observe that he disagrees with them, whatever that might mean.
Jonah Goldberg is a pseudo-intellectual’s pseudo-intellectual. What does it say about the modern academic world when such a host seems more informed and thoughtful than the scholarly “expert” he is interviewing? And what does it say about the desperation of our time that I was actually dumb enough to imagine this podcast could have offered anything better?
UPDATE: In the name of due diligence, I subsequently forced myself to listen further along in that Dispatch podcast to make sure I was being completely fair to Professor Berkowitz. I was. He does indeed mention Aristotle a couple of times during the conversation, but only in a manner equivalent to name-dropping. On the subject of friendship in particular, his one later remark about Aristotle substantially distorts an incidental Aristotelian observation about friendship and the polis, while ignoring everything at the heart of the Ethics’ theory of friendship proper, specifically Aristotle’s distinctions among the three main types of friendship and his account of the truest and rarest type, the friendship of character. Berkowitz appears to speak of all other thinkers, or certainly Aristotle at least, through the lens, or according to the summary or critique, of Hannah Arendt. Not a sound method of reading an ancient philosopher.
(For a simple gloss of Aristotle’s actual theory of friendship, which I maintain is the most profound explanation ever given of this most essentially human of relationships, you may read my Aristotle’s Analysis of Friendship, Crystallized.)
