Love and the Dignity of Human Life: On Nature and Natural Law
79
Love and the Dignity of Human Life: On Nature and Natural Law
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780802866936 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Eerdmans, William B. Publishing Company |
| Publication date: | 01/09/2012 |
| Pages: | 79 |
| Sales rank: | 747,588 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.25(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.22(d) |
About the Author
David L. Schindler is Edouard Cardinal Gagnon Professor ofFundamental Theology at the Pontifical John Paul II Institutefor Studies on Marriage and Family at The CatholicUniversity of America, Washington DC.
Read an Excerpt
Love and the Dignity of Human Life
On Nature and Natural LawBy Robert Spaemann
William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company
Copyright © 2012 Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8028-6693-6
Chapter One
The Paradoxes of Love
"We never advance one step beyond ourselves." With this statement, David Hume expressed the heart of the modern worldview. This might become even clearer, if we add the statement of Thomas Hobbes, which says that knowing a thing means "to know what we can do with it when we have it." Consider that the Hebrew jadah — the term for "knowing" in the Bible—appears for the first timewhere it says, "Adam knew his wife and she gave birth to her first son." Aristotle's statement, intelligere in actu et intellectum in actu sunt idem, also lives from this insight. Knowing is to become one with the known, while in this unity the known comes into its own. The Cartesian perspective is different. Descartes' prototype of knowledge is the windowless brightness of subjects that stay within themselves, which secures their controlling power. Hume's statement expresses that the subject remains in itself and that every notion of self-transcendence or being-outside-of-oneself is an illusion. It is not presently my task to show the logical inconsistency of this statement (if it were true, then it would be impossible to know and express what it says). I would only like to point out that this statement characterizes the mainstream of modern consciousness. This does not mean that all people think this way. Common sense cannot think this way. But common sense is unable to find itself anymore in what the official interpreters of reality want us to believe. They want us to believe that we are not what we think we are. They want us to believe that what we understand truth to be does not exist, and likewise for what we mean by the word "love."
But, indeed, does this word mean anything unequivocal? Is love a clara et distincta perceptio? In fact, there is no word — except maybe "freedom" — that has such a wide-ranging and often contradictory conglomerate of meanings as the word "love." It denotes feelings that parents have for their children, and children for their parents, and friends for their friends. But especially and above all that famous and never highly enough praised feeling that unites man and woman, and which is used in the Sacred Scriptures of Jews and Christians as a metaphor for the relationship between God and his people, or between God and the one devoted to him. We also speak about love for one's country. When one of Germany's former federal presidents was asked about his love for his fatherland, he answered: "I love my wife, not the state." But this is to distort the question: nobody needs to love the state, in order to love his home-country and fatherland, even to the point of sacrificing his life for it. We also use the term "love" to signify pure sexual desire and its satisfaction. Here, the ambiguity of the term becomes most obvious: the same act of sexual union can be experienced as the deepest expression of love, and as a pure instrumentalization in the service of the crudest egoism. Or, more subtly: the most enthusiastic feeling of love can be a mere means of increasing the intensity of one's own life-experience, the other becoming a mere means of experiencing these feelings, and loved only as long as this drug works. And if, then, the promise of fidelity is broken, absolution comes from the intensity of a new love. As the old tune goes: "How could love be sin?"
At this point, however, I have to question the initially assumed characterization of love as a feeling.
On the one hand, this is what it seems to be: if a wife were to ask her husband—or vice versa—if he still loved her, and he answered that he loves her, but does not have any feelings for her anymore, then the wife — or the husband — would rightly find this strange. Nevertheless, nobody would say that he did not love his wife this morning, because he did not have the time to think of her all morning long. The lover is a lover insofar as, if he thinks of the beloved person, he thinks of her with love. As a consequence, he loves to think of her, and consequently thinks of her often, and loves to be in her presence. This is precisely what Aristotle calls a hexis, and the Latinists a habitus.
In this sense, for example, knowledge is a "habit." One does not always have to think of what one knows. But if one thinks of it, one thinks of it with that kind of conviction which we call knowledge. Yet, in the case of knowledge, there is an additional feature that cannot be described at all as merely a mental state, i.e., the conviction that we know, since this conviction can be an error. We only talk of knowledge when things are in fact as we think they are. This is different in the case of love. Yes, I can be deceived in this case, too, but this deception is not a deception about facts in the world, but only a deception about myself.
There is another way in which the habit of love is different from that of knowledge. I know something, if I can situate what I know among all the other things that I know, through reasons. I know it, that is, if I can connect it with the totality of my convictions in such a way that it has become part of my identity. Even then, however, it can be an error. The relation which makes a conviction into knowledge, i.e., the relation of truth, is a purely objective one, which does not touch on or modify at all the mental state of believing that I know. Here, therefore, Hume's statement is indeed in some sense true: "We never advance one step beyond ourselves." Yet, we do want to take this step. The mental state of believing that we know is the belief that we do in fact take this step. Descartes has shown that we can always question this belief again, except for one case where we can be certain that we truly have taken this step, namely when we think or express Hume's statement. We do claim reality for "ourselves," when we deny that step beyond ourselves. "I think" implies "there is thinking," "thinking is happening": not only do I think that I am thinking, but my thinking happens within a space that is larger and wider than the space of my consciousness, and in which my thinking itself occurs as an objective fact. It is the idea of God that opens up this space. Likewise it is the idea of God which allows me to believe that my thinking stands in something like the relation of truth. There is no direct path here to the other of myself, not something like a real contact. Nor does it exist for a Leibnizian monad, dreaming to be with the other; in this case, we are all only life-long dreams, coordinated by God.
This is different in love. What the term "knowing" means can only be fulfilled in love. Ubi amor, ibi oculus, we read in Richard of St. Victor. Whether a particular intentional state is a case of knowledge cannot be decided through observation of this state itself, but only through circumstances that are entirely extrinsic to this state. Whether something is a case of love, on the other hand, is decided only from the character of a particular state of mind.
Yet does this not mean that love cannot be placed on the same level as understanding and knowing, i.e., with mental states that transcend themselves, and of whose definition such transcendence is part? Amor oculus est, it says in Richard of St. Victor. But popular wisdom has it in the reverse: "love makes blind." Someone in love makes up an image of the beloved that cannot stand the later tests of experience. On the other hand, truly personal love transcends all images, all qualities of the beloved and aims at the person beyond all these qualities. The qualities are that through which love is enkindled. But once it is enkindled it leaves these qualities behind. The one who can answer the question why he loves this person does not yet love truly. The lover is therefore ready and open to engage all the future changes of the beloved person, and to tie irrevocably, for better or for worse, his own changes, his own biography, to that of the other. Here we find one of the paradoxes about which I want to talk. The unconditionality of the commitment, the promise of fidelity, is constitutive of love. Here we find another paradox: the case that this promise is not kept happens frequently, very frequently. It is not kept, because the other has changed more than the lover can stand, or because the lover has lost his love "like a stick or a hat." Because the unconditionality and the perspective of unchangeability is constitutive, it appears to the former lover in hindsight as if he had in fact never truly loved — especially if a new love takes away the luster of the old one. Indeed, it is part of the Catholic teaching on love of God and neighbor that no one can never know for sure whether he has it or not.
Of course, one can always know for sure whether one is "in love" or not. This article of the Catechism does not speak of infatuation, but of the habitus of the amor benevolentiae. Now, it is here that we come to the heart of all the paradoxes that occur in the context of the notion of love. It seems that the term does in fact denote two entirely different things, two attitudes, which already Aristotle had distinguished when he speaks of the three types of friendship: that for the sake of pleasure, that for the sake of its usefulness, and that because the friend is worthy of being loved for his own sake.
Tradition then spoke of amor concupiscentiae and amor benevolentiae. The New Testament calls friendship for the sake of the friend agape, caritas. For the one who has friendship with God, every human being is potentially a friend. Yet even here again a paradox creeps in: if every man is a friend, then we need a new term to signify the phenomenon of exclusive friendship, which does not get lost in Christianity, and which, in the Bible, even gives the model for the special relationship between God and the people of God.
On the other hand, amor concupiscentiae and amor benevolentiae seem to denote such opposite phenomena that we could wonder why the term "love" is used for both of them. The one must have something to do with the other. That they have something to do with each other seems also to be the most important message of the pope's encyclical Deus Caritas Est, in which the amor concupiscentiae is raised in status by being attributed to God himself: God appears in the prophets as the jealous lover of his bride, the people Israel. In the Incarnation, God even enters the situation of someone who is in need of and dependent on the love of others.
Nevertheless, tradition has avoided the inner oppositions within the concept of love by simply distinguishing two kinds of love, without inquiring about their inner unity. Friedrich von Spee in his Güldenes Tugendbuch—highly valued by Leibniz — distinguishes between begierliche Liebe and Liebe der Gutwilligkeit, the latter which he also calls love of friendship. In regard to God he identifies the amor concupiscentiae with the virtue of hope, similar to Fénelon, who later will write: "En perdant l'espérance on retrouve la paix." For Spee one can talk about love in the full sense only if both come together. He writes:
As an example that often both come together, take this: a bridegroom loves his bride with both of these loves, for he loves her with the love of desire, since he desires her for himself and embraces her heartily, who is pleasing to him and, as he thinks, his salvation and delight. He also loves her with the love of benevolence or friendship, since he also wishes her well from his heart, and wants and desires every good for her. On the other hand, one often loves something only with the love of desire and not with the love of benevolence and friendship. Take this example: an evil man might love a woman only with the love of desire, because he only embraces her for his lust and her beauty, while he does not otherwise want for her or wish her any good, but would rather "send her to Jericho," if only he can satisfy his desires. Thus he loves her only with the love of desire and not with the love of benevolence or friendship. In like manner, I, too, love good food, apples or roses with a love of desire alone, but not with the love of benevolence or friendship.
In a different passage, Spee introduces the notion of "pure love," i.e., pure friendship without desire. For this, he chooses examples from the realm of politics—similar again to Thomas Aquinas and later Fénelon: Thomas talks about love of one's fatherland; Fénelon, characteristically, about the love of the citizens for the ancient republics; Spee about the love for the emperor, "our gracious Lord Ferdinand II, whom I do not precisely love with a love of desire, but whom I do love with a strong love of benevolence." This love is then illustrated as an example of selfless love, since the subject does not gain an immediate advantage from the good fortune of the emperor, his victories, etc. He cannot even delight in the sight of his triumph, because the emperor is far away.
But the political examples show that the amor benevolentiae without any desire likewise does not exemplify the perfect love that extends from person to person. There must be an inner, a constitutive, unity between amor concupiseentiae and amor benevolentiae. Philia, amor amicitiae, is something different from the merely accidental addition of the two elements in our state of mind. Rather, one would have to speak of a dialectic of love. Leibniz has suggested a definition of love, which he later also thought apt to settle the famous amour pur debate between Bossuet and Fénelon, a "formula of concord" (Konkordienformel), so to speak. His definition is: delectatio in felicitate alterius. In this definition, both are contained: first, that love is a state of mind of the lovers, a delectatio. This was in contradiction to Fénelon's critique of Jansenism. The Jansenists had spoken of a delectation supérieure. They had appropriated Vergil's trahit sua quamque voluptas. Whether someone is a child of grace becomes apparent from what he delights in. For Fénelon, on the other hand, the désintéressement of love proves itself in the firm adherence of the will, even when the soul in its contact with divine things senses nothing, i.e., when the soul is in the state of dryness which, for the pupils of St. Augustine, was a sign of being lost. Love has to do with delight, Leibniz insists on this. But the content of this delight is the happiness of the other. (It is notable, by the way, that Leibniz chooses as his example for this kind of love the delight that we have in viewing a painting of Raphael, even if we neither own this painting, nor want to get any other advantage from it. "Disinterested delight" will be Kant's definition, following Leibniz's definition of aesthetical feelings. The objection, that the example is not well chosen because paintings cannot be happy, is rejected by Leibniz with reference to the fact that delectatio is only a subjective form of experience belonging to an objective perfection; hence, one can define love also as the delectatio in perfectione alterius. This love, then, can also have a painting of Raphael as its object. This, by the way, does not seem to be a satisfying answer. For personal love aims at something beyond all perceivable qualities, while the delight in the painting only terminates at the qualities, and therefore also does not include any promise of faithfulness, through all the possible changes of the painting.)
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Love and the Dignity of Human Life by Robert Spaemann Copyright © 2012 by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Excerpted by permission of William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Foreword, by David L. Schindler....................viThe Paradoxes of Love....................1
Human Dignity and Human Nature....................27
Is Brain Death the Death of a Human Person?....................45