193.
Love as unity in difference
This
connects with Alain Badiou’s discussion of love as a hazardous construction of
unity in difference, in the ‘tension between identity and difference’[i]. He denied the romantic
notion of love as a merging, a smelting, a confluence with ‘the other half’, transcending
all difference.
How
can one benefit from difference without eliminating it? I argued that at length
in earlier items in this blog. The highest form of freedom is freedom also from
one’s own prejudice, and for that one needs the opposition from ‘the other’.
Prejudice includes ignorance, self-righteousness, moral myopia, chauvinism,
self-interest, self-absorption, solipsism, and narcissism.
Earlier
in this blog, in items 120 and 121, I discussed the old notions of eros (passion,
romance) vs. philia (loving friendship). Eros is the urge to merge, smelt into
one, and philia is, indeed, a construction from difference. Philia is hard
work, and remains work in progress, imperfection on the move. Often, and
ideally, love starts with eros in the intoxication that impels the lover,
willing because blinded, to leap into to the hazards of building the ‘fragile
bridge’ (as Badiou calls it) between two solitudes, which is the challenge of
philia.
In
item 183 I rendered happiness as a combination of pleasure, or joy, with
purpose, aiming for something beyond and bigger than the self. There, like
Badiou, I pleaded for a transcendence that is ‘horizontal’, from human being to
human being, and ‘imminent’, to strive for in life.
In
love the purpose is the construction of unity in difference, and pleasure
resides in fruitfully developing and employing one’s talents in that endeavour,
and, of course, hopefully also in enduring eros.
Does
love produce happiness? It can, in the pleasure of eros and in the purpose and
joy of making philia work. But in may not. Eros may fade and rot away in
distaste, the striving for philia may fail and drown in resentment.
Can
one love a nation, a party, a leader? In nationalism that may take the romantic
form of wanting to merge with the larger whole of the nation, in identification
with the party and its leader.
The
Nazi’s identified with Hitler. Was that happiness? It certainly had purpose,
but that was the obliteration of difference. If love entails valuation of
difference, then for happiness to include love it must include the valuation of
difference. Did Nazis have pleasure? Perhaps they rejoiced in employing their
talents in the destruction of difference. And perhaps their pleasure was loaded
by the eros of violence and rape.
If
philia is construction in difference between two, perhaps the wider classical
notion of ‘agape’, as love of ‘the
other’ more generally, can be seen that as construction of unity in difference
between many.
So,
perhaps, to the characterization of happiness as pleasure and purpose I should
add the valuing of difference, in philia and agape, so that happiness may
include love. And then the Nazi’s were not happy.
But
if purpose entails dedication to something bigger than oneself, with respect to
others (horizontal), and in this life (immanent), and pleasure includes the
development and employment of one’s own, personal, idiosyncratic talents in
that endeavour, that already implies acceptance and valuation of difference.
[i] Alain Badiou, with
Nicolas Truong, Eloge d’amour (In
praise of love), Flammarion, 2009.
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