So a good evangelical Christian friend and I were discussing gay marriage the other day. (Not our gay marriage; just the idea of it more generally. I'm just clarifying that for for his decidedly anti-gay sake.) Taking a page from the standard evangelical playbook, my (hetero) friend defined love as seeking what is best for a person. Because we love the sinner, not the sin, and because love is directed at doing what is good for people according to an objective standard of their final purposes, then we love that person best and most unconditionally when we direct that person away from their sin. Okay, you now have enough information to see how this unfolded. Standard stuff.
Agape. Caritas.
Unconditional love.
Okay, I'm down with agape. Especially when I'm the one doing the directing away from your sins. I'm also cool with it when I'm pitiful and in a hospital bed and can offer absolutely nothing of worth to the world--at this point I'm really down with agape. I'll take an extra heaping of it with a cherry on top, please.
But imagine a world in which agape was the principal kind of love there was--say, the love between lovers, between parents and their children, between friends, between teachers and pupils, and so on. A situation where we would care about other persons because they are humans rather than becaue of what makes them unique and worth knowing as individuals--and what separates them apart from others.
How dreadful.
were agape love the only kind of love, then human beings would be valuable because they are valuable types of things and our final ends are ultimately one and the same. What makes you and I special--and the daily work we do to become just the right you and I for you and me--isn't nearly as important as the fact that we're creatures, a type of being.
I'm pro-human to be sure, but I'm also pro-person. And it seems to me that respect for persons means more than simply having the person follow the ultimate ends as my lights have directed me to understand them. Isn't it groovy when people follow a billion different paths?
Wittgenstein famously (and, to my light, convincingly) discusses how some concepts are essentially contestable. (That's not his term.) He challenges his readers to consider what makes a game a game--to aim at a decisive and final definition with platonic certainty. Some games are playful; some are contests with winners and losers; some require skill--and on and on. So what is it that ties marco polo and Frisbee and solitaire and tetris and bowling and lacrosse and tag and chess? It's not a single thing. No single definition of game could exclude all non-games and include all games. Instead, Wittgentstien tells us that some concepts are like a family resemblance--each resembles the other parts in some respect, but all the parts may not resemble all the other parts in the same respects.
Maybe it is so with human ends. It surely is the case that people cannot live out perfectly individually-tailored notions of happiness and fulfillment. Just as there can't be a private language, there can't be a perfectly private happiness--a notion of happiness utterly alien to all other people's understanding of happiness. At the same time, surely we cannot be reduced to a single good, or perhaps even a finite (single) set of goods.
And that's what makes life so cool--those wacky people we encounter everyday. Weird, funky, obnoxious, and beautiful people. So you have Neil Diamond and Neil Armstrong, Lance Armstrong and Louis Armstrong, Karen Armstrong and Karen Carpenter. You have lots of interesting people leading interesting lives. What is the single end that tied all these lives together? You figure it out; I don't have the time.
In contrast to agape love, which ultimately urges us to view people as placeholders for something beyond them, friendship and eros are loves that pivot on keenly sensing what makes one person different from another.
I like these loves much better. Agape has its place. At times it is lovely and profoundly human. And at the worst moments--the moments where we have nothing to offer--then agape is the best thing going. But both the other loves are are more satisfying. I don't want to be a type. Eros aims at completion, and so it seems to me that it is the genuine love we should have for god. To be made complete. Not in a generic way, but in just that way my being calls for completion.
I'm pro-eros. WAY pro-eros.
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What prompted all this was they "hourglass" look of the photo, which made me think of....well, never mind.
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8 comments:
Question from the Dummy in the Front Row:
What in the world is "agape" love, and where did it come from?
Actually here's a better question:
On what date and time did you make up that phrase?
Alls I can picture is, me standing there with my jaw on the ground, eyes bulged out, staring at a swimsuit model. That is both agape, and love, of that I can assure you.
But I somehow don't think that's what it means to you.
Oh man, Andy D. didn't grow up evangelical Christian, clearly. Perhaps fortunately.
I agree wholeheartedly with you. What a take on the issue - I love it. (in particular, not as a type ;) ) You my friend have hit the issue on the nose. And I'm confounded that anyone could continue to blind himself to his own pomposity in thinking he could know (agape or not) what is "best" for another. But eh, arguments like that make me feel uncharitable.
Also, I like the way complexity of the light and color seen through the glass. It's what I see when I stop to look closely. Similarly - have you ever noticed how light glimmering on the surface of a pool at night makes hundreds of thread-rainbows where it catches the ripples? Amazing.
Joy--of course you would like it, because you more than most people transcend "type."
Take it however you want. ;~)
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No, I've never noticed the thread rainbows. Cool. I'll keep a lookout. On the other hand, I'm an old dude, and old dudes are rarely doing the pool thing at night.
Andy D--according to the all-knowing and respectably scholarly wikipedia, agape is "an intentional response to promote well-being when responding to that which has generated ill-being."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agape
As Augustine said (or did not say, since I'm making half of this stuff up), love is an act of volition, not emotion. Love is doing the good thing, the right thing, for someone else. It's not based on how you feel, for how you feel at any given time changes. Or at least it does for the non-pods.
Now I'm not knocking agape. It's fabulous. Fantastic. When people dive into the water to save a drowning stranger, that's pretty cool. And to be kind to the least among us--I'm good with that.
Ok, now I get it. Though can I say Joy's comments were more helpful than Michael B's.
Look if you're going to fall back on Wikipedia as your first move, I know I've got you...
Besides, Wikipedia clearly says, "The term 'agape' is rarely used in ancient manuscripts," so I know your Augustine reference is bunk. Everyone knows the word derives originally from the Septuagint...
you crack me up when you talk religion, dude. it's sort of like me talking interior decorations. it just doesn't ring true.
The hourglass made you think of... eggs cooking? "Days of Our Lives?"
no...not those things. i actually was going to say what it made me think of, but then i thought, "dude, you just wrote this pro-individual piece based on a stereotypical 'type.'" so i decided not to share it.
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