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- W2009300007 abstract "Politics of Friendship—Once Again Peter Fenves (bio) The Friend Vanishes At the end of the eighteenth century and near the conclusion of his philosophical career, Kant published a brief essay that has since become as famous—or notorious—as anything he ever wrote, for in this essay he solidifies the image of a cold-hearted philosopher who is so rigorous and inflexible that he would, without the slightest hesitation, subordinate every claim of friendship, even the most dire, to the demands of an abstract principle of legality. For this is how Kant’s essay “Über ein vermeintes Recht, aus Menschenliebe zu lügen” (On a Supposed Right to Lie from Love of Human Beings, 1797), his response to Benjamin Constant’s tract Des réactions politiques (On Political Reactions, 1796), has generally been interpreted. Constant argues that one has a right to lie to a murderer who demands to know if one is harboring the intended victim, a friend; Kant denies the legality of this “supposed right.” The debate between the agèd German philosopher and the youthful French one serves as an auspicious place to begin reflecting on the politics of friendship in the eighteenth century, for the two appear to represent two opposing positions with respect to the role friendship is supposed to play not so much in the everyday life as in the founding of society, the legal order, and the sphere of political action—or reaction. More than simply a dispute over a narrow legal issue, the debate between Constant and Kant, [End Page 133] which they both present as a dispute between representatives of two contrasting nationalities, takes its point of departure from the image of a friend in extreme danger and poses a basic social, legal, and political question: to whom and to what do agents finally owe their allegiance? One could respond to this question only under the condition that one has already answered, if only implicitly, a question that becomes especially acute during times of political revolution and political reaction: who and what is a friend, if there is such a thing after all? Kant opens his essay by citing Constant’s single sentence story about friendship, murder, lying, criminality, legality, the possibility of society, and a certain German philosopher who says dangerous things and seems to be none other than Kant: In the journal Frankreich im Jahr 1797, Part VI, No. 1, “On Political Reaction” by Benjamin Constant contains the following (p. 123). “The moral principle ‘it is a duty to tell the truth’ would, if taken unconditionally and singly, make any society impossible. We have proof of this in the very direct consequences drawn from this principle by a German philosopher, who goes so far as to maintain that it would be a crime to lie to a murderer who asked us whether a friend of ours whom he is pursuing has taken refuge in our house.” 1 In a footnote to his translation of Constant’s tract, K. F. Cramer informs his readers that the French philosopher had told him that he was referring to Kant, and in a footnote to this footnote Kant concedes the point: “I hereby grant that I actually said this somewhere or other, although I cannot recall where” (Ak, 8: 425; PP, 611)—and for good reason: no such place has ever been found in his previous writings. But there is something even stranger about Kant’s admission than the fact that he cannot recall having invented a story in which a friend is pursued by a murderer and indeed never published anything of the kind. When he comes to retell the story Constant imagines he has taken over from himself, he drops the word friend and replaces it, oddly enough, with enemy: It is indeed possible that, after you have honestly answered Yes to the murderer’s question as to whether his enemy is at home, the latter has gone out unobserved, so that he would not meet up with the murderer and the deed would not be done; but if you had lied and said that he is not at home, and he has actually (although unbeknownst to you) gone out..." @default.
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- W2009300007 title "Politics of Friendship--Once Again" @default.
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