“Hoping for a big tent in which it is understood that disagreement is the price to be paid for exploring important ideas.”
This is conceived as an informal and spontaneous annex to my more extensive blog, Grand Strategy: The View from Oregon.
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Discord Invitation
The Dialectic of Love and Revulsion
Two Ways to History.—We arrive at knowledge through discipline or through love, though each also has its characteristic perversion that betrays the epistemic impulse. Discipline yields knowledge without sympathy, remaining blind to the motive behind it all. Love yields understanding without distance, and so it can distort its object to conform to our desires. In the attempt to study our own history and our own civilization, we have grasped them through love and imagined that our understanding was a function of rationality, when it was, in fact, an expression of affinity. Because it is ours, we cannot be dispassionate in its presence, any more than we can be indifferent about our own identity. But other histories and other civilizations, alien to us as not being our own, we can study with the same disciplined rigor we bring to studying an exotic microorganism, or even a fascinating pathology. We can be repulsed, and yet pursue dispassionate scientific inquiry; we could even count the revulsion as a valuable ally in science, as it allows us to maintain our distance from an object of knowledge, the better to remain disinterested in the constitution of the knowledge so occasioned. This, however, is a later achievement of science, which must first develop its methods in the absence of any such revulsion. Discipline must be won through effort, increasing its capacity through repeated engagement. Once the method and the discipline have been developed, they can be directed to any object, but first they must be won through love. The dialectic within science is to study a beloved object and an indifferent or repulsive object with precisely the same methodology, so that what we learn from the one can be applied to the other. In this way, love can supplement discipline, and discipline love. Thus the beloved and the indifferent object of knowledge, both grasped through the same effort of the mind, become mutually intelligible if the methodology of love is mirrored in the methodology of discipline and vice versa.
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Two Routes to Knowledge
Two Routes to Knowledge.—We can arrive at knowledge through discipline or through love. Discipline yields knowledge without sympathy, remaining blind to much that has inspired the knowledge in question. Love yields understanding without distance, and so tends to distort its object to conform to our desires. It is only when discipline gives way to love or love converges on discipline that knowledge is true to its object.
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…I believe there comes a point in love, once and no more, which later on the soul seeks – yes, seeks in vain – to surpass; I believe that happiness wears out in the effort made to recapture it; that nothing is more fatal to happiness than the remembrance of happiness. Alas! I remember that night…
André Paul Guillaume Gide, 22 November 1869 to 19 February 1951, The Immoralist, First Part, Chapter 8.
When I tell people that I admire Gide’s style perhaps above all other authors, I am surprised that this is often met with surprise: it seems that Gide’s “shock value” as an author continues to be associated with his name to a greater extent than his actual literary contribution, which is unfortunate. For sheer beauty of expression, Gide has few if any peers.
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Spontaneity and Generosity
In my previous post, The Fourfold Root of Love, I gave the following tentative definition of love:
Love is enjoyment in spontaneous mutual generosity with The Other.
After I wrote this I realized that my use of the idea of spontaneity might be elucidated by the conception of spontaneity I formulated in The Origins of Time, where I wrote:
The exceptions to Cartesian privacy occur when an individual agent, even having previously cultivated a sense of Cartesian privacy in the childhood dialectic of reflexive time and imaginative time (which perhaps only becomes possible in the context of fully mature historical consciousness), becomes so fully embedded in a meso-temporal frame of reference that they experience no boundaries between themselves and the other agents present. In shared social time one may be so comfortable in the presence of others that one is as spontaneous in interacting with them as one may be spontaneous with one’s own thoughts in private. This constitutes a (temporary) recovery of the reflexive time consciousness of early childhood.
In the case of love, it is difficult to say which comes first: the level of comfort (i.e., intimacy) or the spontaneity. It is easy enough to think of it either way, i.e., that spontaneous mutual generosity flows from intimacy, or that intimacy flows from spontaneous mutual generosity. In all likelihood, the two are mutually reinforcing.
It is in the context of intimacy that one recovers (some of) the innocence of childhood, and when one is confident that one will be supported and not attacked, the freedom to express oneself without reservation can blossom and the comfort one feels in spontaneous expression is affirmed, and so long as the context of unruptured intimacy is maintained, the spontaneity can escalate. But if that intimacy is violated, the spontaneity vanishes and all one’s freedom is channeled back into Cartesian privacy.
Similarly, my use of the idea of generosity can be elucidated by what I wrote in a couple of posts about the nature of gift giving, The Moral truth of Re-Gifting and A Theory of Gift Exchange.
The Moral truth I attempted to formulate in The Moral truth of Re-Gifting is this:
The more one gives, the more one is fulfilled; the more one demands, the more empty one is.
It has been disappointing that this post is so little read, but one of course has no control over what others will find valuable, one can only be grateful that anything at all is found to be of value and is read by others. In any case, when the fulfillment of giving is reflected and mutually escalated between two persons, fulfillment drives further generosity, and generosity drives further fulfillment.
In these rare cases, this virtuous circle becomes the best of all possible worlds in which spontaneous generosity begets gratification and fulfillment, and the gratification and fulfillment begets further generosity.
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The Fourfold Root of Love
In The Symmetry of Our Affections I suggested that the rarity of ideal love is to be attributed to the difficulty of finding purely symmetrical affection between two persons, and I noted that the one-sided recognition of the perfect object of our affections is precisely half of that symmetry, and is a condition that ought not to be despised on that account.
Reflecting on this further, I realized that the recognition of the perfect object of one’s affections is in fact only one quarter of an ideal and perfect love. There are two forms of symmetrical affection, and each holds for each of two persons, so that a perfect and ideal love possesses a fourfold symmetry.
I hold that ideal love obtains when four conditions are met:
1. recognizing one’s capacity to give love to another particular individual
2. recognizing one’s capacity to receive love from another particular individual
3. recognizing in the other the capacity to give love to oneself
4. recognizing in the other the capacity to receive the love that one has to give
Moreover, if we recognize that these are the conditions of ideal love for one individual, reflecting on that individual’s relationship between self and other, the whole of love constituted by two persons each possessing these four conditions would mean that ideal love actually possesses an eightfold symmetry.
This still leaves “love” itself undefined. It would then be better to call these conditions “the parameters of ideal love” than to call it a definition of love.
In any case, I hold that ideal love possesses a fourfold (or quadruple) symmetry as outlined in the conditions above (or eightfold, if we considering the perspectives of two distinct individuals).
I see now that one way to approach the “problem” of love would be to simply remove love itself from all the above conditions (like taking it away from both sides of an algebraic equation).
Thus:
1. recognizing one’s capacity to give to another particular individual
2. recognizing one’s capacity to receive from another particular individual
3. recognizing in another particular individual the capacity to give to oneself
4. recognizing in another particular individual the capacity to receive that which one has to give
Certainly mutual generosity, if not constituting love itself, is involved in love.
Perhaps another condition must be added, and one that comes to mind would be not mere generosity, but joyful generosity – that is to say, a spontaneous enjoyment in mutual generosity with The Other.
So this brings me to my tentative definition of love:
Love is enjoyment in spontaneous mutual generosity with The Other.
“Focus on them that love you. For the rest, the less said the better.”
J. N. Nielsen
Originally posted on Twitter, 29 July 2009.
Shared Time
One of the most mysterious aspects of personal chemistry between individuals, and that which is perhaps the conditio sine qua non of friendship (whether Platonic or romantic), is the simple fact of shared time. We are able to be friends with those with whom the common passage of time is enjoyable. In contemporary colloquial English, this is called “hanging out” or simply “hanging.”
I suspect that everyone, or almost everyone, has experienced among their interaction with acquaintances the fact that, with some combinations of individuals, the two or more parties in question mutually enjoy the passage of time together, while among other combinations of individuals, the two or more parties find the common passing of time together to be irritating, unpleasant, or otherwise unfulfilling.
There are also obvious cases of asymmetry, when one party to the shared passage of time finds the experience rewarding, while another party to the same shared temporal frame of reference finds the experience unrewarding or even odious. Here the temporal frame of reference is identical, but the subjective experience of that shared time is sharply distinct. Such are what Shakespeare called the pangs of despised love.
In my ecological temporality, in which I developed Urie Bronfenbrenner’s bio-ecological model, specifically expanding and extending the ecological treatment of time, I distinguished levels of temporality parallel to Bronfenbrenner’s distinction between levels of bio-ecology. Thus what Husserl called internal time consciousness I called micro-temporality, and the interaction of micro-temporalities begets meso-temporality.
Meso-temporality is social time, and another way to refer to social time would be to call it shared time. An isolated individual experiences the micro-temporality of internal time consciousness, and simply by being present in an environment experiences a rudimentary level of meso-temporality from the necessary interaction of an organism with its environment.
However, the social time or meso-temporality that emerges from a common temporal frame of reference for two or more individuals possessing internal time consciousness is perhaps distinct from that meso-temporality emergent from the micro-temporality of internal time consciousness in the context of an inert, non-conscious environment. Perhaps I need top interpolate another distinction here. I will continue to think about this.
In any case, the minimum condition for social time is two conscious individuals. Two micro-temporalities functioning in a common frame of reference constitutes the first and simplest level of meso-temporality (at least in reference of the temporality of consciousness).
However, we can see from the very different responses that individuals have to shared social time that this “functionality” in a shared temporal frame of reference can function in different ways for different individuals. Even when the shared temporal frame of reference is identical, the micro-temporality of consciousness remains clearly distinct from the shared time.
Or maybe not. If I think more about this, I may find a way to demonstrate that in cases of shared temporality in which the participating individuals experience in common what psychologists call “flow states” that the individuals in question can no longer distinguish between their internal time consciousness and the meso-temporality of shared time: the barriers of the self come down, and the individual is lost in the shared world. This would be a particularly intimate form of social time, and is possibly the necessary condition of love. Possibly.
All of the above formulations are highly tentative, and I am here engaging in the blogger’s prerogative to “think in public.” There is much more to be said on this topic.
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Comments?
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The Test of Love
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We neither test nor punish the ones we love.
This, in turn, becomes a test:
If we find that we have tested or punished, then we have not loved.
Q.E.D.
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If to test is to demonstrate an absence of love,
And if we test ourselves to see if we have loved,
Then, ex hypothesi, if we test ourselves we do not love ourselves.
Q.E.D.
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Must we choose between testing ourselves and loving others on the one hand, or testing others and loving ourselves on the other hand?
Is it possible to love others if we do not love ourselves first?
These are questions that lie beyond proof.
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“We make exceptions for those we love, not because they are exceptional, but simply because we love them.”
J. N. Nielsen
Originally posted to Twitter on 18 March 2009
The symmetry of our affections
In the personal quest that is life in the contemporary Western world, the individual goes in search of his or her destiny, as though each and every one of us were one of the Knights of the Round Table (such that each enters the wood where there is no trail to seek an adventure that will define a life). For some it is a quest for fame, for others a quest for fortune, and for many it is a quest for love.
All of these quests have archetypes that go back to the Middle Ages that defined the individual quest as the highest form of human existence, a kind of medieval synthesis of the vita activa and the vita contemplativa. These ideals have not stood still since the Middle Ages, but our contemporary ideals are related to those past ideals by descent with modification.
The contemporary ideal of love, of personal and individual love, looms large in the life of each of us, and the imperfect pursuit of perfect love is disappointed more often than it is fulfilled. Or so it seems. We feel what Shakespeare called the pangs of despised love because we have felt the half of love without experiencing the whole. We have experienced our half of love, and it is a love that is unrequited.
What makes ideal love so rare, and so rarely fulfilled in fact, is that distinct individuals must locate a precisely symmetrical affection in the press of the world’s masses. To find that, or to believe that one has found that, is the half of love. We ought not to despise this condition. In so recognizing the perfect object of our affections, we have seized the half of love, which for many of us is the closest we come to the whole. This is, in fact, the authentic personal and individual love. That it is spurned by the other is proof of this.
It is the whole of love that is not, ultimately, a personal and individual love, because its fulfillment is contingent upon what is neither personal nor individual. It is only in the symmetry of our affections that that we grasp an ideal love that is as objective as it is personal.