Love, Reality, and Understanding
I place myself in a difficult position here, that of attempting to articulate an idea or cluster of ideas that may be peculiar to my habits of thinking—not in the sense of being original, but in the sense of having no worth, meaning, resonance for anyone else. They do not follow directly from any basic principle or problem in our concrete and shared public world, (though this is not to say they have sprung fully formed from my forehead; on the contrary, they are very much derived from the thought of others), but rather follow from my encounter with a wide range of problems; they are for me quite general in import and so I can envision no point from which to begin, to segue into them from, which does not seem somehow indiscreet, arrogant, unjustified. But while I do not feel myself particularly to have the right to frame these ideas, I do feel a need, which I have decided, perhaps selfishly and perhaps ridiculously, to pursue.
These ideas, or this idea, has at its center certain interpretations of the words “Love,” “Reality,” and “Understanding,”—not attempts to “clarify” their meaning in either everyday or scholarly speech or even to redefine them, but quite frankly the appropriation of them and the exploitation of certain of their connotations at the expense of others. In a more basic sense, these are all ideas about the relationship between the self and its environment. I am not especially interested in the ultimate metaphysics of self and world, and in particular whether they are “really” real. I am concerned with the predicament in which I find myself as an apparent person (ego, consciousness, individual self) surrounded by an apparent world. I can doubt this world, call it a dream, but I have found no way of escaping it, and so long as I am within it, I must learn to live in it, to live with it.
My initial premise is that “reality,” that is, my experience of reality or of something real, refers primarily to its resistance to my will. That which is beyond the direct control of the whims of my mind, is a fact with which I must reckon, it is something that, whether it be imaginary or not, is an inescapable (though not necessarily permanent) reality within my world. (This includes the mind itself, of course, inasmuch as it cannot control itself by whim any more than it can transform the keyboard beneath my fingers into a slice of olive loaf.)
Reality is what limits human activity. Much more than the persuasiveness of sensory data—the images I see, the sounds I hear, the practical experimentation of life which persuades me what I can and cannot do provides me with the functional realities of my world. I grant a certain degree of belief to the cup I can see sitting on the table, but it is because I know from experience that I can pour tea into it and then drink the tea out of it that it has meaning, significance, reality, weight for me. It also has more basic kinds of reality—I know it has weight, because there is a certain resistance when I pick it up; I know by my handling of it its hardness, and its shape. I understand that there are certain things that can and cannot be done to it and with it. I can make predictions about it because I have experience with it and with things like it. If I found a cup which behaved very differently—for example, which would not hold liquid—I would regard it either as broken—no longer a working “cup”—or as something not a cup which I had first mistaken for a cup, or else as a fake cup, someone’s practical joke.
This concept of the experience of reality is what accounts for the reality of the laws of physics. In themselves they are merely strings of words and numbers, but they codify for us certain limits of action. Try as we might, we cannot escape the fact of gravity’s function. We can leave the vicinity of earth, thus removing ourselves from the immediate presence of gravity, but this is not “escape” in the sense I mean. I mean that we cannot simply choose to abide by some other and contrary law. This also accounts for the difficulty in understanding certain provocative images and claims emerging from quantum physics—I can be told that if I throw a ball at a wall enough times, it will eventually pass straight through, but I this is not part of the practical limits of my actions—it may be possible, but it is impracticable. It has little reality for me, except as an amusing idea. To one who has a deep knowledge of such matters, it surely has great reality, but we will return to the question of acquired reality later.
Now, I have said that I cannot escape reality—that, indeed, reality is what I cannot escape by an act of will. But this is not precisely true, for there I can treat a real thing as though it were not real. I can take the position, and express it uniformly in my statements, actions, and perhaps even my thoughts, that what I have heretofore called a cup is actually what I have heretofore called an iguana. This may result in a difficult series of reinterpretations, but I can certainly take the stance, and under certain conditions—comprising a form of insanity—it is indeed possible to believe quite sincerely that one thing is really another. The experience of reality in the case of the sane man and the insane man may be identical in all respects other than the issues about which they disagree, and the fact that the sane man can call upon the majority of his fellows to support his version of reality. Indeed, this majority rule is, more or less, what constitutes sanity at any given point, so that a man may be called insane by his fellows and a genius by later history.
But what we
allow to function as real—which limits on our action we choose to respect in
our action—is a highly contingent matter. It depends on a number of factors.
Some limits are more difficult to ignore; it is harder for me to believe that
gravity does not operate constantly than for me to believe that I do not live
in the
Simone Weil has said that, “To believe in the existence of other human beings as such is love.” I agree. This love—which chooses to affirm that the humans around me are indeed human in the same sense I am, to treat them as though they are as real to me as I am to myself (indeed, to make them so real by an act partly of choice (love is never entirely something we can choose, but must also emerge organically from those parts of us we do not control—those parts formed by our personal history, those parts which constitute the limits of action within ourselves))—is comparable, though on a much higher level, to the faith which I demonstrate in consenting to believe, say, that the earth is indeed more or less spherical in shape, rather than flat, or cubic.
This brings us to the question of what “love” is, or what shape I am going to manhandle that overused word into. The aspect of love that interests me is this: that which I love is that without which I could not exist as the person I am. Now, obviously this involves a semi-arbitrary or at least fluid boundary between one “me” and another; we are all an indefinite number of people throughout our lives, varying from instant to instant in our physical and mental composition, our personal history, etc. But there are junctures beyond which one cannot help feeling that one is a different person, that there is a real break in the continuity of identity. Love, of the kind I mean, always involves such transformations. They may be sudden or gradual, but they always occur, such that the person or thing loved becomes an indispensable part of the lover’s world, of the lover him or herself. This is not to say that their identities merge, but rather that the existence and practical presence (of some sort) of the beloved comes to constitute an essential part of the self-definition of the lover. This is why love seems to be a matter of life and death, particularly to the young and exuberant; they are correlating this shift in their identity with the life of their body; so that they feel they cannot “live without” the object of their affection. It is not that they will die without this object as they would without air or water, but rather that they cannot conceive tolerating existence without it; its existence has become a condition of theirs.
This is true for all things that are very real to us; it is the same as something being truly real. This is a reality beyond the reality of the laws of physics (except for those who love those laws, as it is not uncommon to feel love for ones special area of expertise), because the laws of physics are such that we can, in most cases, conceive of living comfortably apart from them; they are not essential to who we feel ourselves to be, they are merely ubiquitous in day-to-day life. But when I love, the beloved is as inescapable a reality me as I am to myself, precisely because love has altered the conditions of my being.
There are many forms of love—as many as there are objects and ideas available to our sensation and conception—but two interest me in particular. These are understanding, the mode of falling in love which most concerns the intellect, and which is the proper vocation of education, and conversion, which is the mode of falling in love which concerns our relationship to the divine, and which is the proper vocation of religion.
All forms of love are transformations on the part of the individual in response to features in its environment. Dewey’s discussion of conversion is paradigmatic here [FILL]
Understanding is best summarized by Whitehead [FILL], particularly in his invocation of the adage, “To understand all is to forgive all.” This is what distinguishes understanding from lesser stages of knowledge, which can be roughly divided into factual knowing (i.e., knowing that a thing happened), organic apprehension (knowing not merely the facts but their interrelations; being able to trace antecedents and consequences; in short, a thorough and reasonably complete knowledge), and understanding, which differs not at all from apprehension on an intellectual level, but involves a moral and emotional transformation. This is not the same as mere interest or excitement, though these are of course correlates; it is a genuine form of love, involving a redefinition of self.
We can justifiably begin to suspect we understand when we realize we cannot do without a set of knowledge. I have begun to understand a writer when she becomes indispensable to my thinking on a regular basis. But we know we understand (though of course there are degrees of understanding, and every understanding is susceptible of deepening, so that there is saying that my understanding is “complete” or finished) when we can, without having to adopt a view, an idea, or what have you, say that we cannot desire that the author should have thought anything else. Their presence and voice, what they have communicated to us, becomes an essential part of ourselves, a condition of our being who we are; this is love; this is understanding.