Friendship and the Common World

For this session we’ll read Aristotle's [Nicomachean Ethics](https://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/nicomachaen.html) VIII.1–6, VIII.9, IX.6, and IX.9, alongside Hannah Arendt’s 1959 Lessing Prize address, “[On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts about Lessing](https://divinity.duke.edu/sites/default/files/documents/Arendt.Thoughts+on+Lessing.Men+in+Dark+TImes.pdf).” Both writers, writing millenia apart, tackle the question of how friendship relates to the shared world that friends inhabit, and whether it can survive that world coming apart

Aristotle divides friendship into three kinds — utility, pleasure, and character — and holds that only the third is friendship in the full sense. Two claims push this outward into politics. Friendship and justice have the same extent, so every friendship belongs to a community and takes its shape from that community’s end: sailors have the friendship of the voyage, citizens the friendship of the city. And IX.6 limits concord to practical matters that conc