Guest Blogger: John von Heyking, “The Form of Politics” Author

We are very pleased to have John von Heyking, author of The Form of Politics: Aristotle and Plato on Friendship (Spring 2016), as our guest blogger. The post is an excerpt from International Political Anthropology Vol. 10 (2017) No. 1: Index; this issue is dedicated to The Form of Politics and includes review essays and the author’s rejoinder.  

Response to My Friends: Symposium in International Political Anthropology on The Form of Politics: Aristotle and Plato on Friendship

By: John von Heyking

We love our friend as ourselves, but our friend enables us to understand ourselves better than we can on our own. This is the root of the wondrousness of friendship as well as the difficulty in understanding friendship. Hermes is the patron god of this paradox because he can rescue us by uprooting us from our personal Hades and providing us with the gift of moly, our souls. Like the Athenian Stranger in Plato’s Laws, our friend uplifts us by crossing an “unfordable river” so we too can enjoy the just regime of “Terebithia,” named after the sacred terebinth tree.

To respond to these five careful reviews (by Leah Bradshaw [Brock University]), Rebecca LeMoine [Florida Atlantic University], Nalin Ranasinghe [Assumption College], Thomas Heilke [University of British Columbia-Okanagan], Thierry Gonthier [Université Jean Moulin-Lyon 3]) then is to receive that gift of having not merely ideas reviewed and discussed, but it is to participate in the mutual and free exchange of the gift of selves. It is to share in a vicarious way, over distance and over the Internet, what Aristotle calls sunaisthesis, a common beholding of the good that has become inseparable from that beholding of the good with one’s companion. In noting the demands the author places upon the reader’s attention, the reviewers note too the companionship and indeed intimacy the author and reader share. Rebecca LeMoine notes that the book “is a carefully crafted book, one that places serious intellectual demands on readers while at the same time unveiling its many delightful insights through cogent prose…. In short, this is not a book for the faint of heart.” Similarly, Nalin Ranasinghe notes, “[t]hough pleasant to peruse, it’s also difficult to march through. JvH invites interruption in as much as he befriends his readers and forces them to converse with him, thus interrupting the smooth flow of swift reading that is so prized in an age of executive summaries, skimming and instant understanding.” The author demands the reader’s attention and invites you to befriend him. It might be said he forces the reader to “converse with him,” but this compulsion can only be effected after the reader has freely offered his or her friendship.

The “serious intellectual demands” the book places upon the reader are the result of the author’s aim to follow the logos as far as it permits him. By reading the book, the reader offers her profound gift when she deigns to accompany the author along that long and difficult road. In offering their responses in written form, the reviewers extend their hands of friendship to mine, and together enable all of us to go and see both further and more deeply than we could on our own. Even so, that the form our inquiry into friendship matches the substance of friendship reminds us how our practice of friendship will elude our theoretical understanding of it, even when the practice of our friendship consists of a theoretical exercise. And it is in this paradox not just of the relationship of theory to practice that informs friendship, but also in the general relationship between theoretic reason to practical reason, that we need to bear in mind as we attend to some of the criticisms and questions arising from my theoretical treatment of friendship. In the passage cited above, Hermes tells Odysseus that moly, which is black at the root but has a white flower, is “hard for mortal men to dig up from its roots, but all things are possible for the gods.” Let us follow up that thought.

Read the full rejoinder here > (may require membership to International Political Anthropology)