Education and Intellectual Friendship: Mutual Flourishing

Abstract

The final chapter is framed within a broader discussion of how Arendt located her own lifelong education within the context of intellectual friendship, which as a Jewish migrant—and as a stateless person for eighteen years of her life—she valued as a key element in her own human development. She lived and worked in and out of the institutions of education which undoubtedly sustained her in her career, but she relied crucially—within and outside the boundaries of those institutions—on the kinds of trusting relationships that value honesty and truthfulness, intellectual and emotional engagement, and a sense of lifelong loyalty. Intellectual friendship was for her a way of educating oneself into what it means to be grown-up in a world of human plurality and unpredictability.