PAUL ROUZER

                 THE LIFE OF THE PARTY:  THEORIZING CLIENTS AND PATRONS IN EARLY CHINA 

WHEN THE FIRST STABLE CHINESE EMPIRE (the Han) was established in 207 B.C.E., the intellectuals and statesmen who advised the rulers found themselves working through a number of philosophical issues that would aid in the ideological construction of a large polity—one that would claim universal domain over the Chinese ecumene. Han dynasty political thought had both a synthesizing and retrospective cast to it; it attempted to absorb the rich legacy of philosophical speculation that had occurred during the earlier so-called “Warring States” period, creating out of its unsystematic utterances a coherent view of the cosmos. At the same time, its concern over the almost continuous violence and social unrest of that earlier period, and what it perceived as a dangerous social mobility, led it to repress tendencies that it perceived as endangering a social “harmony” that would embrace all levels of private life, from the personal relations of the family to the functioning of a large state bureaucracy. Out of this was born what is often called “state Confucianism,” a world view that, for better or worse, tended to color all Chinese governments until at least the twentieth century.

One of the side issues this project addressed was how to deal with the perceived dangers of the rhetoric of “friendship”—how to stabilize that rhetoric either by erasing it or by subsuming it within larger political and societal relations. Particularly problematic for Han thinkers, and for the culture at large, was how to conceive the political consequences of male-male bonds that might make a claim on individual behavior outside of the individual’s participation within this harmonic system. For them, “friendship” was manifested through a rhetoric of exchange and circulation of favors that could potentially occur outside of a cosmic model of political harmony. Such “friendship”—which could be, as we shall see, very broadly defined—might invite counter-models of political association that tended towards instability and violence.

To make sense of some of these Han perspectives, it may help to discuss the “problem” of friendship in its analogous “Western” form, relying in part on Derrida’s explorations in his Politiques de l’amitié (1994; English translation: The Politics of Friendship [1997]). At one point Derrida introduces an anecdote found in Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Gay Science, which Derrida argues demonstrates a destabilization of a seeming Aristotelian ideal. Nietzsche writes:

In antiquity the feeling of friendship was considered the highest feeling, even higher than the most celebrated pride of the self-sufficient sage—somehow as the sole and still more sacred sibling of this pride. This is expressed very well in the story of the Macedonian king who gave an Athenian philosopher, who despised the world, a talent as a present—and promptly got it back. “How is that?” asked the king: “has he no friend?” He meant: “I honor the pride of this independent sage, but I should honor his humanity even more if the friend in him had triumphed over his pride. The philosopher has lowered himself before me by showing that he does not know one of the two highest feelings—and the higher one at that.”

This is part of Nietzsche’s project to re-Greek the Greek, to reconstitute its accepted definition of friendship in a way that privileges the radically unstable and unequal. Derrida remarks:

A logic of the gift thus withholds friendship from its philosophical interpretation. Imparting to it a new twist, at once both gentle and violent, this logic reorients friendship, deflecting it towards what it should have been—what it immemorially will have been. This logic calls friendship back to non-reciprocity, to dissymmetry or to disproportion, to the impossibility of a return to offered or received hospitality; in short, it calls friendship back to the irreducible precedence of the other . . . But is there more or less freedom in accepting the gift of the other? Is this reorientation of the gift that would submit friendship to the consideration of the other something other than alienation?  

This “logic that calls friendship back to non-reciprocity, to dissymmetry” is more understandable in the wake of certain dissonances that are already present in the arguments of Aristotle himself. For Aristotle begins his discussion, both in the Eudemian and in the Nicomachean Ethics, by defining friendship in the broadest possible terms, as embracing any form of social relation, from various forms of kinship to business contracts and political systems. Having done so, he gradually constructs a contrast between what he sees as a primary form of friendship characterized by absolute unselfishness, in which the beloved is admired for his pure goodness, and a less perfect form of friendship characterized by utility or pleasure, which must involve an exchange of some kind. While Aristotle wants to privilege the primary kind, which he perceives as stable and unchanging (Eudemian Ethics 7.2.1237a-1237b; Nicomachean Ethics 8.3.1156b), he nonetheless ends by acknowledging its extraordinary rarity; for to come into existence, it has to be tried by time and experience. Moreover, he suggests at one point, there is always the possibility that such a friendship will become less and less important the more perfect an individual becomes—for what need will a sage have to find the good in others if he contains it within himself (Eudemian Ethics 7.1244b)? As a result, the philosopher ends by putting a considerably greater emphasis upon the “friendship of utility”—that is, social relationships that exist because both parties acquire something they need from the other. It is this friendship that moves friendship into the realm of the political, that is, into the relationships that define the polis.  Paradoxically enough, the friendship of utility does not only define social order; even this “lower” kind can potentially come into conflict with itself through misapprehension. Aristotle points out that much social unrest occurs through the misattribution of higher, “moral” qualities to a friendship of contractual utility; that is, unrealistic hopes are evoked when an individual trusts another on the basis of “character,” instead of on the basis of “fixed terms,” and so comes to rely on the other’s good will.  In this sense, some of the qualities that should ideally define the “primary”—and presumably most perfect—form of friendship are ones potentially exterior to, and disruptive of, human society. This is the central problem in creating a theory of social relations that can move comfortably from amity and affection between individuals to larger political and social institutions. It is rooted in the issue of exchange and reciprocation, and a Maussian fear of the unruliness of uncircumscribed exchange. This is the sore point that Nietzsche probes in his anecdote: the proud philosopher, probably Aristotle himself, rejecting the king’s gift through his own misapprehension of friendship—for the king in his generosity promises an unconditional primary friendship which the philosopher insists on reading as an unequal utilitarian one.