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The Human Experience

Love Letter

Nigel Rapport steps towards a cosmopolitan love.

“We are all human and should treat each other decently and with respect”, Ernest Gellner counselled: “Don’t take more specific classifications [eg ethnicity, nationality, religiosity, class, caste] seriously” (Times Literary Supplement, 1993). Or again, from Bertrand Russell: “Remember your humanity and forget the rest” (The Russell-Einstein Manifesto, 1955). Sadly, more usually we assess others by virtue of a group or class to which they happen to belong. This is a situation that Primo Levi, in the light of his experience of the Holocaust, deemed unconscionable. It is not to be tolerated, Levi insisted, that any human being should find themselves in a situation where definition and evaluation are being made on the basis not of an essential humanity and intrinsic individuality, but due to being assigned to a collective type – possibly with fatal consequences (The Drowned and The Saved, 1996).

Such classifications I would define as fictions. Here, by ‘fiction’, I mean a symbolic construction that may have cultural validity, but which is not true ontologically: it does not pertain to that person’s identity as a living human being. Rather, the categorisations are impositions on the person – extraneous, and dependant on their cultural construction and recognition. The individuality of a life, on the other hand, is true independent of any cultural constructions.

Love has been mooted as a practice whose essence is the perception of the individual, in opposition to any such ‘category-thinking’. To fall in love, Iris Murdoch urged, is to be stunned by the realization of an absolute particularity beyond the self: to become conscious of another for what they uniquely are, beyond any cultural practice. In the face of irreducible individual dissimilarity, “love is the imaginative recognition of, that is respect for, this otherness” (Existentialists and Mystics, 1999). Or again, in the words of Emmanuel Levinas, love is the ‘revelation’ of ‘ipseity’, or individual being: it is the practice of a being ‘absolutely singular’ that ‘opens up’ the singularity of the Other (Outside the Subject, 1993). In other words, love discovers the reality of the individual human Other.

Here I want to consider love as a mechanism of emancipation from the fictions of cultural classes and relations – that is to say, as a means of freeing us from the way in which identities are typically identified, collectivized, and homogenized. This brief account extracts from a more extensive treatment of mine, Cosmopolitan Love and Individuality: Ethical Engagement beyond Culture (2018), where I argue that love may give rise to forms of social integration and inclusion that remain true to the individuality of anyone, and that transcend category thinking.

The Loving Look

“Moments of vision” is a phrase of the novelist Thomas Hardy. In Moments of Vision and Miscellaneous Verse (1917), he says that, in certain insightful moments, “whose magic penetrates like a dart”, someone’s identity becomes transparent to one’s look. Habitual facades fall away, and the viewer sees self and other as they truly are. Nor is this notion of a truthful look necessarily sociologically naïve. Georg Simmel argued that the eye has a unique sociological function, giving rise to perhaps the most ‘direct’ and ‘pure’ interaction and union between human beings (‘The Sociology of the Senses’, 1921).

I contend that love may be understood through such a ‘moment of vision’; and one that originates in a look. This specific look is desirous: one is attracted to another human body. By this forceful, emotional engagement, one is motivated to see – not what one may expect to see or conventionally should see, but what is before one’s eyes: an individual Other, the indubitable individuality of a human life.

The attraction is not necessarily a lustful one, and the individual Other is not even necessarily a direct interlocutor. One is very possibly espying strangers, and possibly at a distance. Nor does one expect or even wish to lessen the distance. And yet, against one’s proclivities, one is forcefully drawn to recognizing another life and admitting its individuality: there is the body, the face, the smile, the word, the gesture, of another human being. One is drawn to them, motivated to recognize them, as who they are, quite independent of the cultural categories one might otherwise assume them to occupy: indeed, in contradistinction to this prejudiced categorisation. One is motivated by the loving look to recognize the Other in their individuality, in contravention to how one would ordinarily inhabit that social environment and classify its contents.

Not only is the moment of loving vision such that one recognizes the individuality of the Other, it’s also one that would respect this individuality, and have it respected. Albeit that the loving look may be fleeting, unerotic, from afar, one is motivated to have a care for the safe passage and security of that individual life. Having responded desirously to a particular human embodied identity, one also desires that the integrity of that individual life be retained: that it fulfils itself as itself and for itself. A feeling of care has been engaged – even a sense of responsibility. One has a care that that life is let be, and given the space to develop on its own terms, along a trajectory of its own determination. The beloved may remain a stranger; but they are a human, individual stranger, and one would practice a certain civility towards that life, and wish for others to do so.

In all this, the look of love embodies a kind of epiphany.

Cosmopolitan Love

I am concerned with a particular understanding of love, then – a particular practice. This recognition of the individual in their individuality is love as a civic virtue: not domestic, and not romantic, but a form of public, civil behaviour that I shall call ‘cosmopolitan love’. Cosmopolitan love is a complex of behaviours, comprising:

(i) An emotional attraction to an Other;

(ii) A rational discernment of the individual specificity of the Other; and

(iii) A respectful engagement with that specificity.

Cosmopolitan love believes that a human, species-wide individuality supervenes upon the fictions of conventional cultural symbolizations in all ‘civil’ practice, and that anyone may be recognized in their unique, finite and precious embodiment.

While containing various other elements of love (elements of eros, philias, ludus, for example: that is, of romance, friendship, and playfulness), a cosmopolitan love comes closest, perhaps, to what has been called agape – the Greek word for ‘giving love’, or ‘unconditional love’, which was first made well-known from a Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible; for instance, from Leviticus 19:18, which includes the phrase “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” According to current exegesis, ‘neighbour’ is to be understood here to include the stranger, the alien, and even the enemy; and this ‘love’ to concern not rapture and romance, but respect, justice, and even-handedness. And in the Christian New Testament that followed on from the Jewish scripture, agape begins to denote universal benevolent concern for all human beings: “Love is patient, love is kind… It does not dishonour others… Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres” (1 Corinthians 13:4-8).

We might think of this agape kind of love as behaviour directed to the Other to further their welfare, beyond any thought of reciprocation – as an anthropologist might put it, beyond the reciprocity of merely habitual social relations. To attend to the Other in this way means to engage with their specific needs, and in a self-controlled way – that is, not being ruled by one’s passions, nor pursuing one’s own interests. Rather, one is guided by the absolute value of the Other as a living being neighbouring oneself. Or in Jacques Derrida’s summation: “Love means an affirmative desire towards the Other: to respect the Other, to pay attention to the Other, not to destroy the otherness of the Other” (‘Derrida on love. In interview with Nikhil Padgaonkar’, July 9, 2008).

The project of cosmopolitan love is to build on such conceptions as agape, not as a religious commandment, but as aspects of a philosophical anthropology. Love, a kind of desirous engagement with the world on its own terms, can be proposed to form part of a natural set of human capacities.

So, ‘loving recognition’ is a bodily response to living individual otherness – it is really looking, really seeing – and it’s a universal human capability (for more on this, see my article ‘Loving Recognition: A proposal for the practical efficacy of love as a public virtue’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 24(1), 2018). Might not such love be caused to form the foundation of how a moral society operates, globally: to recognize, respect, and accommodate the individual identities and life-projects of its members? And further, might not recognition of individuality extend even beyond humanity – to entail respecting animal or even organic sensibilities?

Envoi

This is not to offer love as a panacea; nor to deny love’s potential ‘pathologies’ (Kant) or ‘vulgarizations’ (Levinas); nor to underplay modernist deprecations of it (Nietzsche, Freud, Sartre…). I’m not espousing love as prophylactic against unhappiness, or as a cure for suffering amid a ‘vale of tears’. The proposal is ‘merely’ that love may function to inform personal morality, civic virtue, and social integration, such that recognition and respect is accorded to human beings (and maybe other beings) on the basis of their individuality alone. A cosmopolitan love envisages a species-wide human individuality supervening in civil practice over the fictions of traditional cultural classifications, such that anyone – any human being – might be civilly recognized in their unique, finite, and precious embodiment, and included as significant on that basis alone.

I cannot claim cosmopolitan love to be an easy practice. And there are questions. How is the look of love to be routinized: universally admitted, valued, made consequential? Furthermore, a cosmopolitan love carries the cost of working against cultural habits of ‘knowing’ the Other; it entails the asceticism of letting be; of attending to an individual otherness that is loved, perhaps, from a distance. But securing the identity of an individual life-form is a supremely ethical work.

In this way, the ‘epiphany’ of the moment of vision, the loving look, may translate into an institutionalized politesse: into a civil engagement that bears witness to individual Others proceeding along their individual life-courses.

Nigel Rapport FRSE FLSW FRSA is a Professor Emeritus of Anthropological and Philosophical Studies, and Founding Director of St. Andrews Centre for Cosmopolitan Studies. A related book of his is Anyone: The Cosmopolitan Subject of Anthropology (2012).