Source: The Conversation – UK – By Henry Somers-Hall, Professor of Philosophy, Royal Holloway, University of London
Let’s begin with a story from the beginnings of western philosophy that doesn’t sit well with existentialist thought.
In Plato’s Symposium, a character called Aristophanes gives an account of love. He tells us that human beings originally had doubled bodies, with two heads, four arms and four legs. As a punishment for threatening the gods, however, Zeus cut each of them in half.
Now, these half humans, with just one head and one pair of arms and legs, find themselves adrift in the world, searching for the other half of themselves that would make them whole.
This, for Aristophanes, is the origin of love – the desire to return to a lost unity and to become whole. Why this story appeals to us is that it captures our intuition that love is destiny, and that there is someone out there who will take away our feeling of incompleteness.
For the existentialist, however, this feeling of incompleteness points to a fundamental truth about being human. For them, we are this tension. We are thrown into the world we haven’t chosen, but we are still responsible for the sense we make of our lives. This is what the existentialists mean by the slogan: existence precedes essence – there’s no script of our lives.
We become who we are through what we do, in a world defined by contingency and transience. Aristophanes here gives us the comforting illusion that there is some essence or meaning to our lives given before we exist – that there is someone out there who will resolve the tensions of being human by making us whole, if only we can find them.
For the existentialist, stories like Aristophanes’ cover over irresolvable tensions with being human rather than solving them. Think about the idea of finding “the one”. For the existentialist, behind this project is really one of putting the script back into our lives. Love proves that our lives have meaning.
If the aim of love, then, is to resolve our own feelings of anxiety at being cast adrift in a world, then we’re unlikely to really connect with another person. Rather, what will be important about them will be the role they play in our life.
Think about our desire to be the centre of someone else’s world. For existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, this is less about them than it is about the place they give us in their lives: their love for us becomes a proof that our own life has meaning. From here, we ask for what our lover cannot in good faith give us – the certainty that we will occupy that place: “you’ll always love me, won’t you?”
It sounds as if love is not so much a relationship, but a project we use to insulate ourselves from our own fears. It lets us believe the meaning of our lives comes from the outside while ensuring that we stay safely on the inside.
Stepping back from love itself, we can see another tension, however.
A more positive possibility for love
When we think of Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, whose lifelong partnership combined romantic and intellectual commitment with a deep insistence on personal freedom, it’s difficult not to see a model of romantic love.
At the beginning of the second world war, Sartre wrote to de Beauvoir: “Never have I felt so forcefully that our lives have no meaning outside of our love, and that nothing changes that, neither separation, nor passions, nor the war. You said it was a victory for our morality, but it is just as much a victory for our love.”
There is here, then, a more positive possible account of love.
For Sartre, this possible positive love is not an attempt to resolve the tensions in what it is to be human. Rather, to love authentically is to love in full understanding of the tensions of time and freedom.
Love’s aim, on this account, is not to escape time, but to embrace it together. This means loving, in the moment, absolutely, while recognising that just as we can always disavow our past, this moment, in the future, will itself become another past that we may disavow.
Loving is, then, not using the ideal of love as a project to step out of time, to hide. Instead, it involves the recognition that being with another within time entails living with fragility and transience, and that what makes this love human is the possibility of change.
Rejecting love as an ideal, and the lover as a role to be played, allows us to see our lovers not simply as a foil for our own projects, but as another person, with all the complexity and singularity a human being contains. In this, we find ourselves outside of ourselves, exposed in a world where failure is always possible.
But with such exposure there is also the possibility of a genuine connection with another human being. As Søren Kierkegaard, the first existentialist, puts it, in love, we do not love the “other I”, but the “you”. Love, then, becomes the rejection of destiny for authenticity.
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Henry Somers-Hall does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
– ref. An existentialist philosopher on why we should not let fear dictate love – https://theconversation.com/an-existentialist-philosopher-on-why-we-should-not-let-fear-dictate-love-275455
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