121. How does love work?

 Earlier in this blog (item 6) I discussed romantic love (eros) in contrast with loving friendship (philia). Romantic love is utopian, reaching for an unattainable ideal outside reality, and tends to be possessive, aiming to own the loved one.

As an outflow of the Enlightenment, in modern society our self-image is that we make our choices in freedom, as a rational, autonomous being. But in love we are about to surrender our autonomy and freedom, incurring constraints on our actions. That step is difficult to reconcile with rational autonomy.

Romantic love is needed to cause blindness, initially, to the imperfections of the loved one, in order to be prepared to take the leap into the hazardous adventure of love. But how can a possessive, self-oriented, obsessive eros next develop into the openness and reciprocity of philia?

Freud had more to say on this issue. Eros entails dependence and a risk of loss, of sinking a deep emotional investment without receiving equally intense love in return, or of losing the loved one. This fearful dependence can yield suspicion, lack of trust. The lover anticipates unrequited love, and is on the lookout for signs of it, twisting perception to confirm the fear. It can yield hate. The urge to appropriate the loved one is an attempt to maintain control, to eliminate dependence and risk of loss. Of course all this only antagonizes the loved one and threatens to fulfil the fearsome risk of a lost love and of desertion, in a mutual escalation of fear and mistrust. The greater the passion the greater the risk, possible suspicion and hate, and the hazard of breakdown. 

The perversity of perfect passion especially tempts the adolescent, with its dream of purity and perfection, in disdain of adult cowardice and compromise.

Could it be the other way around: start with philia rather than eros? Is there a way to develop acquaintance and familiarity first and release the passion of eros later? As described by Eva Illouz, in her book ‘Why love hurts’, that is what we had in the past, in social rules and rituals of acquaintance and engagement prior to commitment. Presently, love has to be immediate and ‘authentic’, preferably in love at first sight. I would not want to go back to former social and ritualistic strictures that locked up love in class endogamy, but how, then, can we proceed?

The challenge is to learn not only to recognize but also to accept, and next even to cherish, the quirks and imperfections of the loved one, in what Eva Illouz called incremental reciprocity. Here again we find imperfection on the move. Learning to trust and shed suspicion. To give space to the loved one, not to appropriate. Not to jump to dark interpretations of innocuous conduct. To learn to talk about it, and to hear the other out. To count to ten. To extend benefit of the doubt, to allow for errors of interpretation and for mistakes of judgement or perception of the partner. In other words: to exercise voice, as discussed in the items on trust in this blog (items 68 to 74). That, I propose, is the maturity of love.

Next to the negative freedom of being free from constraints, there is positive freedom of having access to new sources for fulfilment or development of the self, to be discovered in a process of incremental reciprocity. While the leap of eros limits freedom in the negative sense, it can enable positive freedom, in the building up of philia.   

  

 

120. Does reading literature make people better?

In item 5 of this blog, on free will, I argued that we do not have full free will, we do not have full conscious control over unconscious impulses, but we do have some conscious influence. We can consciously simulate the effects and outcomes of possible actions. While this may not determine the choice of action it may affect it. When we consider how bad smoking is for our health, this may not keep us from smoking, but it may still affect the impulse to do so.

In item 92 I argued that reading fiction helps to develop empathy and the ability to simulate the consequences of acts. Fiction is about possible worlds, and the reader must suspend disbelief.

The Belgian philosopher Patricia de Martelaere argued against this view. She claimed that it is a ruse to maintain the old, failing philosophical view of meaning in terms of reference to things in the world. She claims that the very term fiction is misguided. The claim of the reference view is that with our words in language we can access ‘reality’; that literature is not about this reality and hence must be ‘fictive’.

De Martelaere claims, correctly, that we cannot claim to ‘represent reality realistically’. We use language not to mirror reality but to form it conceptually. Presumed ‘reality’ is already fictive. In literature we simply go a step further, adding ‘more of ourselves’, in deliberate imagination.

While I agree with this, I still think that it is useful to think of literature as being about possible worlds rather than what we see as reality. It makes a difference whether we violate reality because we cannot do otherwise, in language and thought, or do so deliberately, in phantasy.

De Martelaere claims, correctly in my view, that in reading fiction we do not take more distance from protagonists but less. In real life we have good reasons not to identify with others. We might suffer from it in various ways. Our identification may not be reciprocated. We may have to follow it up with sacrifices. We look away from miserable people lying crumpled on the sidewalk, from personal tragedies we encounter, and from global hardship and terror displayed on TV. We identify more easily with Madame Bovary, or with Othello.

I still think that reading fiction (I maintain that term, notwithstanding de Martelaere’s criticism) entails a suspension of disbelief , but, and here I agree with her, that it also entails a suspension of distance, and leap of identification, at no cost or risk.

Because of that we can experiment, intellectually and morally, with emotions, motives and actions, at no cost and risk, using literature as an exercise in simulation and empathy.

Does the development of empathy make people better? There is warm and cold empathy. Warm empathy is accompanied with feelings of compassion, remorse, and shame, arising in the amygdala, deep in the brain. Cold empathy is a purely intellectual, dispassionate insight in how people think and feel, in the prefrontal cortex of the brain, in a disconnect with the amygdala.  

It is a feature of psychopaths, and of other people who remain calm and lucid under danger, violence, risk or what to other people would be stress. Think of surgeons, heroes, and investment bankers. Empathy is for better or for worse.

119. Moral animals?

 Frans de Waal published studies on moral behaviour, in particular altruism, among apes. They turn out to frequently support each other, even if it yields no advantage or indeed goes against it, and also when they are not kin. 

 A Dutch commentator, Chris Rutenfrans, criticized the claim of morality among apes on the grounds that morality entails a philosophy and a debate on ethics, which animals cannot have[1]. It would be preposterous to suggest that de Waal entertained the thought that animals do have that. But more importantly, the comment misses the point of de Waal’s studies. Moral behaviour does not necessarily require a moral theory or religion. It could be instinctive.

 It has long been thought that humans do not have an instinct for altruism

because that would not have survived in evolution. Egotism or self-interestedness, to
protect one’s interests, would have favoured survival and would hence have been favoured in selection. Altruistic genes would have been muscled out by genes for self-interest. If that were so, then altruism would have to be completely cultural, working against evolutionary pressure towards unmitigated self-interest. Then Rutenfrans would have been correct.

However, more recent evolutionary theory came with an argument why next to self-interest also altruism could have survived. I gave the argument earlier in this blog, in item  46, and I will not repeat it here.

The point of de Waal’s work now is that it shows empirically that altruism arises even among apes, which is important precisely because apes have no moral theory that might have given an alternative explanation, and thus the proclivity towards altruism must somehow be in their genes, and if that is possible then it is possible also in Man.

In other words, while cultural artefacts such as religion may enhance altruism, those are not necessarily the only basis for moral conduct in the form of altruism. To be sure, next to an instinct for altruism the human being also has an instinct for self-interest, to survive in evolution, and any contrary instinct towards altruism would be up against that. When push comes to shove, self-interest will mostly win over altruism. Cultural counterforces would and do help, but de Waals work shows that they may not be indispensable or the only basis.

Rutenfrans also jumps to the conclusion that morality requires a sense of something ‘outside’ and ‘bigger’ than the self, and hence requires a God. Earlier in this blog I argued that while religion indeed is best defined as yielding a sense of something ‘outside’ and ‘bigger’ than the self, that is not necessarily a God. It may be a sense of awe and respect for nature, life and for the other human being. Here, I drew inspiration from Levinas.

A final comment. In my analysis of instinctive altruism, in item 46, I argued that in-group altruism comes at the price of instinctive out-group suspicion. I wonder if that would be found also in studies of apes: less altruism or suspicion or discrimination concerning apes outside the group (allowing for different ways to define that).

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[1] In a review of de Waals recent book, in the Dutch newspaper ‘De Volkskrant’, Saturday 6 July 2013.

118. Debatable ethics

In this blog I have argued (e.g. in item 16) against absolute universals that apply strictly everywhere and forever.

Concerning knowledge, I arrive at warranted assertability, instead of truth in any absolute sense of being objective and indubitable, as discussed in item 104. We cannot claim truth in an absolute sense but this does not necessarily yield relativism in the sense that any opinion is as good as any other. Arguments matter, using logic and facts whenever those can reasonably be established, imperfect though they remain, and conditions for their use are satisfied.

Now I arrive at the equivalent of this in ethics. There are no absolute, i.e. strictly universal and fixed rules of conduct. In item 95 I even rejected Kant’s famous categorical imperative (a variation upon the ancient golden rule that one should not do to others what one does not want done to oneself). I accept fundamental moral rules as guidelines that are to be followed as a matter of strong principle, but I allow for exceptions and special pleading.

To many philosophers this yields a debatable ethics, and indeed that is precisely the point: ethics is debatable. That, after all, is also what we find in legal courts, where judges interpret the law and mete out punishment with an eye to motives, pressures, circumstances, means, and capabilities. Here also we find the use of multiple causality that I discussed earlier in this blog. There generally is no simple single cause of misdemeanour or crime.

But how, then, can argumentation in deviance from rules occur without resulting in a relativism where any excuse will do? It is a matter of debate, again with arguments concerning multiple causes, as indicated.

There are problems in the notion of a just debate, without one-sided imposition of power, as I discussed in the preceding item (with reference to Jürgen Habermas). Perhaps under unequal power such debate should look more or less like jurisdiction: with a prosecutor and a defence attorney. And should there then be a jury, as in countries with an Anglo-Saxon tradition, or only a judge?

A complication here is, of course, that there are no detailed moral laws as there are legal laws, and no independent judges, prosecutors and attorneys, subjected to standards of knowledge, training and ethical conduct. Once upon a time priests and vicars fulfilled that role, executing divine law.

There are good reasons for this. Political mechanisms determine legal laws but liberal societies are averse to laying down similar moral laws beyond legality. That does not mean that no more or less law-like moral rules arise, as part of institutions, but that they are beyond democratic control, and as a result they are even more subject to hidden structures of power than legality already is.

Morality should be based on ethics, so what ethics do we use? As I argued earlier, I am a follower of Aristotelian virtue ethics, recognizing that virtues are multiple, often not instrumental but intrinsic, often incommensurable, contingent and subject to change.

So, what moral debates can this yield? Similarly perhaps to Socratic dialogue. But rather than this being dominated by a single clever rhetorician, such as Socrates, there should be competent opponents. In case opponents are not competent, mediators and perhaps something like a jury. Or could one perhaps think here of the role that the chorus played in ancient Greek tragedy, taking an outside view for commenting on the proceedings? Is that perhaps how we can ideally interpret public debate in the media?