Ideas of Love That We Will Be Exploring Hereafter
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THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER Today, we all live in a world that I believe has three dominant characteristics that get in the way of a positive evaluation of this thing that we call love. The first characteristic has been with us for a couple of centuries now. It is associated with capitalism and the hegemony of the marketplace. Its economic term is rational self interest; it is not simply an economic category, however. Because market relations are so pervasive, rational self- interest can now be described as a dominant thread in culture. Moreover, it has a long and evolving history in the West from the Greeks who initially defined the good or valuable as something that we would all pursue if we really knew what was good for us. You might, in fact, think of most of western civilization as wrestling with what is good for us and eventually settling on the self as the primary unit for doing the appraising. The act of appraising or evaluating rationally what is good for us has also increasingly concentrated on what makes the self happy. Those things have value that make us happy and, in true utilitarian fashion, we constantly calculate whether the things we say that we love are making us happy or not. If not, we are encouraged by psychologists, therapists and even friends to get rid of them. Many people are ready and willing to help us formulate a list of pros and cons and will encourage us to cut bait in an unhappy relationship on the grounds that there are many other fish in the ocean. I don’t wish to deny any validity to this kind of thinking. But he problems with thinking about love this way should be obvious, even if a clear alternative is not readily available to modern consciousness. In the first place, love is not rational even if it need not be completely irrational. In the second place, the primary emphasis wherever love is present is neither the self nor society, but the beloved or the particular intimate society or what we sometimes call the world of the lovers. Third, if you think that love will make you happy, you are grossly simplifying a complex emotion, one that is linked to all kinds of pain including the pain of anger and, ironically, the pain of hatred. Love and hate run together more often than many people think, while a degree of anger must sometimes be expected when people deeply care about the other. You don’t get angry with people that you don’t care about. The first characteristic that love has to contend with I would prefer to call early modern and to distinguish it from a more recognizably late modern kind of consciousness that began to enter the culture at the fin de siecle or towards the end of the nineteenth-century. Late eighteenth and early nineteenth century culture was buoyantly optimistic. The general consensus was that, if you gave people freedom and allowed them to develop and explore their own interests, or a more general self-interest, people would be happy or at least happier. As a side effect or bonus, you would also get not only a greatly improved standard of living but also greater toleration of others. Power and violence would be greatly mitigated and peace would be the recognized rational framework for the pursuit of happiness. If you like, late eighteenth and early nineteenth century western culture had a marked tendency towards utopianism. Even as dreams of utopia declined among more critical and sophisticated observers of modernity, they became more pervasive in the general consciousness, boosted as they were by scientific positivism. However, the 2 intelligent naysayers began to proliferate in late modernity, led in particular by a man named Nietzsche who directed an assault on western rationality. Even without Nietzsche, however, the intelligenzia would have moved inexorably into an attitude of cultural despair. You can say lots of things about the causes of this attitude. For example, you could say that the intellectual and cultural elite were increasingly mopy and whiny because they were losing their status in a more bureaucratic society dominated by the growing and largely uncultured middle class. You could dismiss it as sour grapes by a group of people who refused to embrace the democractic thrust of modernity. The problem with such a dismissal, however, is that many of these writers, romantics or conservatives, were pointing to an issue with which many of us are all too familiar. They pointed to the absence of shared meaning in modern life, including the loss of a meaningful god or a meaningful religion and even a meaningful moral code. It is a fascinating realization that free, autonomous and optimistic human beings are more likely to become despondent and disenchanted to the extent that more general social meanings atrophy. The effort that it takes to create individual meanings for oneself is huge once the social props are dismantled. Utilitarian happiness gets reserved for the stupids, or the naïve members of the herd; the smarts pride themselves on appreciating the sadness that is late modernity. How do I know that many of you share this malaise? I just ask you to honestly tell me if you are really happy, in what your happiness consists, and just how optimistic you are about your happiness in the future. It tends to be really easy for a good teacher to poke holes through the hollowness that is modernity; and, in order to be taken seriously, a modern writer simply cannot adopt a universally happy tone. We know all too well that people don’t live happily ever after, even if they are so fortunate as to find real love. Intermittently from the eighteenth-century on, we hear the echoes of the belief that “all you need is love”. The problem is that this persistent refrain is so difficult to maintain. Modern human beings feel increasingly alone in a universe that doesn’t care about them. Love has a heavy burden to carry because it is the focal point of caring in this uncaring world. It is little wonder that love has become so fragile just at the point that it becomes more intense. One of the issues that all declarations of love have to confront is bodily decline and death. In a world that still has faith and hope in either an afterlife or a life that is inherently meaningful, love itself has meaning. In fact, religion and love can support and enrich one another, as we shall demonstrate in this course. Even when religion loses much of its power – when for all intents and purposes “God is dead” – ethics or morality can provides a sort of secular substitute for religion that interacts with love. But take away all of those props and hopes and love stands on its own exposed to the cold winds of late modern consciousness. Arguably the most effective route out of the pessimistic gloom that besets most of us at one time or another is love. Love allows us to lose ourselves in the being that is the love relationship rather than having to constantly toil in the hopeless becoming that is one’s life and one’s relationships with others. 3 Unfortunately, this is a strategy without much hope for success, as Nietzsche among others pointed out. It reduces love to a single moment at the beginning of a relationship, when the distance between oneself and the other vanishes. This longed for moment of forgetfulness, and suspension outside of historical time, clearly is only one stage of love. If you divide love into three rather obvious stages, you will immediately see the dilemma. The first stage of love or falling in love is the only moment in which love feels itself entirely invincible and the question of personal happiness falls into the background. The second stage of being in love with another person already involves a certain distancing where a critical appraisal (more on this concept of appraisal further on) is already very much in evidence. Many so-called romantic relationships fall apart at this stage without ever reaching the much more challenging stage of staying in love. It has often, but not always, been the case that writings, discussions and analyses of love in the West have focused on the first stage. Romantic literature in particular escapes the difficulties posed by the second and third stages with a cute little escape clause – the assumption that they all “lived happily ever after”. But the romantics generally believed that love made the human and the natural world go around and we today are much more cynical. Freud, in particular, has shown us that marriage is a state of constant accommodation where happiness is elusive. Marriage, for Freud, is not an institution designed to make us happy, but to make sexuality stable and to support civilization. The world was not created for love, much less for our single or social happiness. The romantic impulse is basically a limited sexual (i.e. chemical) response. Since Freud, most of the scientific discussions of love are really about sexuality because scientists understand and appreciate love even less than Freud did! You don’t have to agree with Freud’s reduction of romantic love to the sexual; in fact, I would contend that successful love relationships are able to invoke elements of falling in love albeit certainly not on a daily basis or as intensely as in the first stage. But the difficulty is that most of us think of love primarily in terms of falling in love, that we late moderns yearn for that falling out of society and letting go of our nagging and restricted selves, and that we haven’t got much, other than therapy or congenitally theraputic friends, to help us bridge the stages to more lasting and stable love.