Speaking of Love: On Spirituality and Life

We are joined together by all the words, whose desire we are (Edmond Jabes)

A word is never final, never merely spoken; it is always speaking as well. This its own life is, after all, the actual mystery of language: the word speaks (Franz Rosenzweig)

There is no meaning . . . when one objectivizes words as simple media of communication between two subjects in the world. It is always for a soul, torn between good and evil and floating before the engaged commitment, that there is, or there is not, a meaning in a sign (Philippe Nemo)

 

Spiritually Human

Only a relation between a being and a being can be called spiritual (Gabriel Marcel[1])

This essay is about the ethics of human interaction. My contention is that ethics is about relationships. But what does it mean to be in relation? First and foremost, it involves communication, because the human is fundamentally a speaking being.[2] But what else is a relationship? Through a sense of concern and care, we are related to others. In subsuming the human relationship to ethical existence, Emmanuel Levinas deliberately sidesteps psychological categories when he suggests that “the ultimate bound of a psychism is not the one insuring the unity of the subject”.[3] Rather, the source of the human ‘I’ is that fundamental act which both divides and connects individuals: language. And so we are human in “the tying separation we call by a well worn name – love”.[4]

In this essay, I suggest that loving and speaking are what make us human, and by that I mean spiritually human. I presume we are spiritual beings. But given this word tends to be used terribly loosely nowadays, let me state right away the meaning I have in mind. As I understand it, spirituality is not about all kinds of weird and wonderful ideas. It means caring for others and refusing violence. As with spirituality, so it is with love. There is probably no word which is so well-worn, used in such a tremendous variety of contexts, and with such varying nuances. People say they love football, fried fish, their friends, and their children.[5] We misunderstand love, however, if we reduce it to a particular species of human emotion or sentiment. Perhaps this is why virtually every psychological, sociological or historical account of love fails to grasp its meaning.[6]

Most of our arguments hinge on some way of proving an assertion, usually on the basis of a conceptual demonstration. But when it comes to love, could it really be a matter of proof?[7] After all, “here it is not possible to prove anything; it is, however, possible to be convinced”.[8] How can I be convinced? Through what I feel. Moreover, the very fact that I do feel something means I’m alive. Knowledge of what love is arises insomuch as one lives in a human way, and human living means loving and being loved. As Franz Rosenzweig put it, in a letter to his fiancé, “Do you know why you were unable at the time to know ‘the meaning of love’? Because one only knows it when one loves and is loved”.[9] Knowledge of love comes out of one’s own living and loving. Thereby love is inseparable from the dynamic of human existence. It’s through love that we understand what it is to be human.

The meaning of love is to be sought in life. In the same way, the link between spirituality and love emerges in the midst of life – more particularly, through encountering others. Spirituality means care and respect for the other person (that is, ethics). Now, when I care for someone, I am bound to them by an intimate sense of concern. The care of concern implies a relational situation. But isn’t a relation precisely what love is about? To love is to be related, connected to another. Yet is love the only way I can be connected to people? Of course not. Connection comes with social associations, job clubs, fitness groups, bonds of friendship or filiality, and feelings of belonging or and loyalty to a nation or an ethnic group. Nevertheless, one form of connection stands out from all these – speech. The connection of a spoken word is distinctive and unique because through it, “one person enters into emotional solidarity with another person”.[10]

An ancient wisdom says that the human is a thinking being. However, there’s another wisdom, far more ancient, which reminds us that this formulation misses two vitally important ingredients of our humanity. To be human also involves loving and speaking. And whilst the fabric of spiritual life is woven out of all three elements, it is speech which draws together the threads. What gives the word this power? We miss the significance of human speech if we regard it merely as a means of conveying information. It’s well known that certain mammals are able to convey information to other members of their own species, and often in very sophisticated ways. Whereas what is important about human speech is “the self-revelation of speakers who express and communicate their uniqueness through speaking – no matter the specific content of what is said”.[11] Human speech is distinguished from the communication of all other living creatures insomuch as the spoken word, beyond being just a medium for the transmission of a certain verbal content, enables a person to express how they feel. In this way, words draw attention to the fact that there is, in each and every one of us, a certain hidden realm. Words remind us that being human means having an inner life. But even more important, through this externalizing of what is within me, something is conveyed to someone. Indeed, what point would there be in speaking of how I feel, of what is inside, if there were not a person present for whom this inner life of mine might mean something? So language is about proximity, relationship.

Loving, thinking and talking are the spiritual life. So is that all there is to it? Could it really be so simple? But it only appears simple because we’ve long conceived of spirituality in precisely these terms.[12] The German philosopher Hegel once observed that what is familiar is not known, exactly because it is familiar. We think we know what the word loves mean. However, just try and say something sensible about it and see how quickly it all degenerates into a series of clichés. One reason why it’s so difficult to think about love is that it’s self-evident. But if that’s the case, why should it be important to think or even speak about it? Only because if we don’t find a way to think and speak about love sensibly and on our own account, we’ll find that a thought and a speech which does not care at all for what we really think and feel dictates to us our very own thoughts and feelings. I’m talking about psychology.

 

All Power to the Phrase

In losing the concrete immediacy that resided in the Word, man falls headlong into a process of abstraction, which is the abyss of the mediacy of all communication, of the word as means, the empty word (Franco Rella[13])

Almost a century ago, in his famous essay on the “metaphysical” poets of the Elizabethan age, T. S. Eliot remarked that “the poets of the seventeenth century . . . possessed a mechanism of sensibility which could devour any kind of experience”.[14] We might say the same about contemporary psychology. Presenting itself as a “universal program designed to remedy human frailty and the ills besetting it”,[15] psychology is a technique which “masters and computes emotions, pleasures and pains, and the human existence that feels them”.[16] In this respect, it is a form of cognitive science.

If the medium of science is the concept, the natural tendency of psychology, as a science of cognition, is to frame its understanding of things in terms of concepts.[17] Yet what kind of concepts are these really? Psychology is the popular science of the modern age. When concepts are popularized, they become phrases.[18] The latter supply people with a standardized meaning, stripped of all complexity and subtlety, whereas genuine language uncovers the complexity of reality and makes a person receptive to it, the phrase “informs without communicating”.[19] In the process, “language takes on a function separate from any direct communication through a concentration on phrase–making for its own sake”.[20] The problem with phrases is they make people lazy. Instead of attempting to craft their understanding of things using their own, intelligent resources, people get used to passing on a meaning which is ready-made. Deposited in well-rounded slogans, meaning then starts to circulate like cash currency amongst speakers who have, for the most part, become quite accustomed to not having any kind of personal involvement with what they say.

What exactly happens when people lose any personal connection to the words they speak, when they habitually and unthinkingly mouth word-slogans? Genuine dialogue gives rise to a living energy. Language is, as Enzo Paci put it, “a complex of signs that involves a life”[21] – the life, that is, of living speakers.[22] Yet no matter how powerful the life-blood which courses through the word, when meaning is articulated within a system of signs, it has a tendency to petrify in lifeless configurations. In this condition, words “will designate only facts and will not set in motion new modes of communication or communicate new perspectives”.[23] The vital life-energy of the word “is now imprisoned in language”.[24] Nevertheless, this energy can, at any moment, be “revitalized into what it was when it was presence”.[25] Having previously absorbed into itself the radiant life-energy of all those living speakers whose lips it passed through, the word stands ready to re-radiate this energy upon those who are present, and thus able to hear, speak and enter into the life of the word.

In its being-spoken, the word springs into life, charging the space of dialogue with an energy that draws each participant into the round dance of language.[26] Thereby we become part of the way meaning is created in the very act of speaking. When I speak the word, I speak meaning, and thereby reality and life, into being. And because the situation of dialogue gathers together separate existences, uniting them in speech or in song, the spoken word teaches us to share our life with others. Geniuine speech is the primordial donation, the “power to welcome and to give”.[27] With the phrase, on the other hand, meaning is already complete well before it has a chance to be spoken. The saying adds nothing.[28]

The phrase is received meaning, and as such, it strikes the living word dead. It gives rise to a speech which is uncreative and sterile, and thus unable to impart life to those who speak. Then words emerge still-born from our mouths, falling to the ground in the space between speakers like blocks of stone. A language based on received meanings is a dead language, so a person who habitually mouths phrases ends up becoming detached from life itself. This is language as ideology, a prefabricated system of signification in which meaning, through a process of systematization and “concentration”, becomes infinitely reproducible, dumb, and inert. It is also the condition of language under totalitarianism[29], a form of aphasia in which words, rather than opening onto the plentitude of being and the inner life, merely prescribe ready-made, conditioned responses. Finally the phrase gives rise to a language that, rather than inviting the person to speak, speaks ‘for’ them and ultimately without them.

 

Psychology and Language

You can’t talk about the meaning of life without using phony words, imprecise ones. But the trouble is there aren’t any others (Rainer Werner Fassbinder[30])

Psychology is a spiritual technique that “invokes words in general as objects which can be computed, counted and counted upon”.[31] In this respect, psychological discourse works wholly in terms of received meanings. Deaf to anything which transcends the horizon of the world, psychology supplies the individual with a ready-made lexicon of the inner-life, an encyclopaedium of the emotions. But whilst psychology might claim to put people in touch with their feelings, in reality, its concern for the inner life is mere lip-service.[32] Disconnecting the word from its personal source, psychological language detaches the individual from themselves, fostering ersatz emotion in place of real feeling, histrionics and manipulative behavior in place of probity and directness. In the long run, it makes straightforward and emotionally honest relations with others difficult. As a consequence, people end up more isolated and alone than ever.

People generally think psychology gives them a language which enables them to share their deepest thoughts, feelings and emotions with others.[33] However, when there’s a ready-made psychological phraseology which “thinks and speaks”[34] for the individual, how could anyone possibly know what they really think or feel, let alone communicate it to others? With their mouths continually stuffed full of empty clichés, it’s not long before people start to believe there could be nothing more to life than what the phrase says.[35] As far as spirituality and love are concerned, the problem is particularly serious, because here the meanings are already acutely over-determined. Indeed, what more could possibly be said about these two topics? Why bother trying to examine them again? Have not the words themselves, by now wholly drained of meaning, become “banal and base”[36] from the onslaught of stock-standard phrases?

This is where we must work very deliberately and determinedly to restore the “original power and meaning”[37] of words. This is not as difficult as it may sound. It all depends on us. The first thing is to put aside all received meanings and open ourselves up to words, really listening out for what they have to say. Only then does one discover how words, compelling yet ineffable, have the ability to touch us deep within. Words are more than merely neutral labels. And certainly, they are always something more than “simple media of communication between two subjects in the world”.[38] Not “sound and smoke”[39] but spirit and fire, words resonate within us, thereby reattaching us to the feeling, sensing and emotional beings that we are. And yet, as much as words reconnect us with our own inner life, they also draw us out of ourselves. Thus speech breaks down ego-barriers and connects us to others.

One hears a lot of talk nowadays about how impoverished language has become. There is, however, nothing wrong with language. The problem lies with us. Language fails when we no longer have any desire to relate to it. The word is something I must enter into a relationship with, for without involvement on our part, words keep to themselves. Our inability to be open to words and to the spiritual dimension of their truth is more than a psychic blockage, it’s a thoroughgoing spiritual affliction. Yet the wonderful thing is that to be liberated from this affliction requires nothing more simple, modest and wholesome than trust. And language is “easily trusted, for it is within us and about us; as it reaches us from ‘without’, it is no different from language as it echoes the ‘without’ from our ‘within’”.[40]

 

God

Humans are peculiar. As much as we are pragmatic, practical and immensely intelligent beings, we are never satisfied with that. We invariably feel a hankering for something beyond the satisfaction of a small circle of physiological and intellectual needs. For the purposes of this discussion, I will refer to this desire for a beyond as transcendence. However one attempts to account for it, transcendence is not some folly or ridiculous fancy of certain odd individuals. Neither does it derive from a mistaken apprehension about the nature of reality. Every living human being feels a need for the transcendent and has an innate sense of what it entails. The thirst for it is an entirely natural, normal and completely healthy kind of emotion, whose validity and truth is attested to by an immense variety of human experiences in many diverse civilizations.

In this essay, I’ve chosen to refer to the transcendent by way of a terminology traditional in our culture: God. I use this word quite freely, without scholarly reservations, and certainly without any sort of ironic intent. That’s because I see no good reason why it should be treated as taboo. Still, it needs to be acknowledged that there’s probably no word which causes more embarrassment. Some words have the ability to set off a kind of explosion in the soul. And the steps people take in order to keep themselves afloat in the wake of such a psychic disturbance potentially tells us a lot about what’s at stake.

One way to deal with the problem is to turn whatever has caused the disturbance into a topic of conversation. The most obvious instance here is sex. If it can be discussed, then it can be managed.[41] It can be confronting when the question of God concerns how one actually lives and feels. Things are much easier if this question can all be kept at arms-length. A discussion on the level of ideas and concepts provides for a stimulating clash of opinions. When one is throwing ideas around, it’s easier to keep oneself removed, to maintain a distance.[42] If God can be turned into a theme for talk shows and documentaries, people have the opportunity to busy themselves with all kinds of interesting intellectual issues.[43] Nothing makes people feel better than being busy. Maybe that’s why our culture is always trying to persuade us that any kind of energetic activity is worthwhile and important.

“We have a fear of being nothing and a fantasy of being everything”, observes Leon Wieseltier, “but we do not see that everything is a busy version of nothing”.[44] It’s part of what Martin Heidegger so aptly called the “industrious activity of mere ‘busyness’”,[45] a sure sign of anxiety. Nowadays, a desperate yearning for who-knows-what impels people to chase after fads and devour copious quantities of mind-numbing perceptual and intellectual stimulation. One might even call it a hunger, only that this is no ordinary kind of hunger. Rather, it’s a craving for something which no amount of food for thought could possibly satiate, hunger on a metaphysical level,[46] in short, a hunger for meaning. Gnawing away on the inside, people feel it as a burning pain. To allay it, they throw themselves into all manner of restless activity.

 

Meaning and its Discontents

Philosophy is really homesickness. It is the urge to be at home everywhere (Novalis[47])

The yearning for meaning is a mighty power. It drives the wheels of the media, which is really a vast ‘meaning factory’, churning out vast quantities of images in which people see semblances of their own wishes and dreams, but distorted and manipulated in all kinds of grotesque ways. Does it matter that most of what the media machine produces is actually rubbish? Not at all. Since “any meaning is better than none at all”,[48] people will quite happily devour meaning in any shape or form, even when it verges on the meaningless. To track it down, some are prepared to go, quite literally, to the ends of the earth.

A good example here is the current fad for ‘doing the El Camino’ ‑ that is, walking the old Christian pilgrimage route to Santiago De Compostela. Have the people who flock from all parts of the world to trek hundreds of kilometres suddenly become good Christians? Of course not. What they are looking for is meaning with a capital M, meaning de-historicized and de-contexturalized ‑ in other words, meaning as a sort of personal fetish. But as the hunt for meaning becomes an end-in-itself, that which grounds meaning – that is, reality – evaporates. After all, being continually on the lookout for the novel and the surprising hardly demonstrates any real interest in the world. It’s more like indifference, perhaps even a negation of the real.

Like the Delmore Schwartz character who was always “moving forward to fresh arenas of frenzied activity”,[49] the restless search for meaning is indicative of a mentality: perpetually on the move, dissatisfied at every turn, continually looking for something to give life direction, worth and value. Yet in case one’s tempted to feel sorry for a person whose search for meaning leaves them perennially ‘homeless’, it’s worthwhile recognizing that it’s their own, restless mental economy which is to blame for all their privations.[50] What sustains them is precisely this compulsion to negate every fixed relation and every life circumstance which might potentially turn into a situation of responsibility or commitment.[51]

Insofar as the search for meaning takes shape as a consciously willed negation of everything which exists, it creates a homelessness that is not contingent but transcendental. Yet this is a false transcendence. The compulsion to search (and that means to negate) is what must be resisted. We already are where we really must be. Reality, that which we want to know, is self-evident. Hence the subtitle of this essay: a phenomenology of love. The word phenomenology comes from the Greek phainomai, meaning how things appear, and logos, logic. A phenomenology is a logic of appearances, a form of description. Reality is coherent when we are attentive to the manner in which things are concretely experienced.[52] Such attention makes it possible to describe and have knowledge of any entity whatsoever, without the need for abstract concepts. A phenomenology of love is thereby an investigation of love in the manner in which it appears and makes sense to us, that is, as we apprehend it in the midst of “the quiet, pure, inoffensive fact”[53] of our own existing.

As the appearing of what appears, that which is self-evident requires us neither to seek nor to think. To this extent, the method here “consists in asserting the immediate, the individual and the human as the sphere where all true comprehension takes place and through which every object must be grasped if it is to have any sense”.[54] That’s why this essay is not a work of ‘philosophy’. Philosophical analysis proceeds by assimilating everything which exists to a method of thought, whereas what I’m concerned with here “has no need of thinking in order to be”.[55] My focus in this essay is precisely all those things that thinking is unable to recognize as a ‘problem’.[56] So if God, love, self and existence are not at all difficult to understand, it’s because, insofar as they are already inserted “into conscious life, into the individuality and indivisibility of our concrete existence”[57], we instinctively know what they mean.

 

Reason and Intelligence

Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not against thinking. It’s just that thought is generally far more thoughtless than we care to imagine. On the other hand, even the most rigorous kind of thinking can be quite unsystematic. We know this from the accounts by famous scientists of their working methods. It’s often by taking an oblique path that momentous discoveries are made. Moreover, the links between intellect and emotion are complex and not easy to describe. In a perceptive reading of the films of French director, Robert Bresson, Raymond Durgnat suggests that cognition is far more bound up with emotion, moods, and the contingencies of the moment than most people would care to admit:

“Thoughts often strike us, like a physical jolt, but we’re not so sure what the specific message is. Or we feel a broad splash of emotion, plus a mish-mash of half-ideas, as a whole network of association fires off. Or a mood poleaxes us, for no reason we’re aware of . . . This applies even to the so-called conscious mind. It’s ‘stream of consciousness’ is typically chaotic, irrational, even absurd. So much so that ninety-five percent of the time we ignore it for a much narrower kind of ‘conscious thought’‑the ‘systematic’ thinking that follows the decision, or attempt, to think about something. Such thinking is usually rational, in a very loose sense, but it’s rarely tightly logical. It’s a fairly directed use of some of our consciousness. Insofar as it’s learned, it’s artificial, but it’s not unnatural”.[58]

I think that what Durgnat has in mind is a non-abstract type of thought, intimately linked to how things seem and appear, which rides the waves of appearance and makes itself home in the world of concrete experience. In this respect, Michael Wyschogrod is quite right to suggest that thinking tends to be seen far too much in terms of reason and not enough in terms of intelligence. Whereas “reason is a philosophical construct with definite theoretical implications”, intelligence is a “working endowment rather than a theory and can be active in the absence of a philosophical theory about the rationality of the universe and the structure of the mind”.[59]

Wychogrod defines intelligence as “a quality of brightness that enables all normal human beings to some extent and some to an extraordinary extent to grasp relations and implications in complex situations”.[60] In this respect, intelligence is enmeshed in life; unlike the abstract logic of reason, it follow the cues provided by actual existence.[61] If intelligence directs the effort of comprehension towards “the individual, the immediate, the concrete”, it’s because such things contain “the very atmosphere of comprehension”.[62] Not that this relieves us of the need for rigour; the path of intelligence is no easy ride. Exactly because it aims to cope with the complexity and ambiguity of real situations, intelligence must be more exacting than reason, which often feels free to ignore reality when the latter fails to measure up to its own expectations.

The issue with reason, narrowly conceived, is that it has a tendency to become smug and conceited. Intelligence, on the other hand, is never satisfied with itself. This sense of dissatisfaction gives rise to an outward-moving impulse, a characteristic yearning for something more ‑ in particular, a yearning for that which a person is unable to supply from within themselves. Such an absence of self-sufficiency would be scandalous to reason, however, which could never suffer a ‘lack’, and must always be adequate to itself. In short, there is a level on which intelligence recognizes its own failure and inadequacy. By contrast, reason is always convinced of its ability to make a perfect image of the world simply through thinking. Believing its understanding of things is flawless, reason can never admit that it may have failed (even when it does come face-to-face with its own failure, it will try to reckon this as success).

The ability to acknowledge failure entails recognizing that one does not have a handle on everything.[63] Reason’s inability to accept failure stems from its insistence on being self-sufficient. In short, because of its tendendy to become trapped in an “illusory work of the purely thinkable”,[64] reason finds it easy to believe everything it does is perfect from the start. But if reason really is perfect, nothing more need be asked. In which case, thought then comes to a full-stop with itself. All I have to do is think, and the entire job is done and finished, whereas for intelligence, such a terminus does not exist.

An intelligent person can never say, ‘okay, I am finished thinking about that particular problem’. Intelligence regards the act of thought itself as “always tentative, partial, incomplete, subject to correction by life processes that no theory can forecast but only follow”.[65] In effect, the intelligent person is continually asking themselves, ‘but do all these thoughts I am having really describe what they’re meant to describe? Do they actually make sense of reality as I experience it?’. For intelligence, reality is something which “challenges us and strikes us”.[66]

 

Transcendence and Words

As soon as thought exits from the illusory work of the purely thinkable . . . then it is plain that every thought and all knowledge are inseparable from the life of language (Massimo Cacciari[67])

In The German Ideology, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels observed that for “philosophers, one of the most difficult tasks is to descend from the world of thought to the actual world”.[68] But then, what precisely can bridge between reality and the self-satisfied world of our thinking? Because “language is the immediate actuality of thought”,[69] the word is the true medium, the living life-blood, of intelligence.[70] Even so, the correspondence between language and thought is by no means simple or mechanical. Words are more than merely the form in which we express our thoughts, and certainly, they cannot be reduced to just a means of passing on ideas or information to others. Words belong in the world, just as our thoughts belong in the world.[71] And yet, at the same time, the word is not reducible to the world.

Even as they exist along with everything else, words are themselves an entire world. And words also have a certain living character. As Herder and the Romantics recognized, language is a form of life.[72] In this respect, from out of this life which they are, they want to tell us something. If only we could just allow them to speak, rather than always imposing a meaning upon them, we might learn a lot. For one thing, unlike pure reason, words are never definitive; they do not supply us with logical axioms, nor should we expect them to. Translating “insights into words”[73] is a task for “creative minds”, who will be “more anxious to save what they sense than refine and protect what they say”.[74] To this extent, the intelligence of the word makes it “responsive to complexity and relations and therefore to distinctions and to the inherent ambiguity of the human situation”.[75] From this comes the realization that there is no final meaning. But even if the word can never be definitive, there is an immense wisdom in all languages. And in this sense, the word can serve as a guide, leading us along the paths of life. Indeed, language is “unable to do anything but lead . . . but not to the end, to the goal. It [i.e. language] can only lead from chance to chance, from event to event”.[76] But words will only be able to lead us in this way if we are open to the guidance they offer. It is then that one discovers the marvel of words, and their unique promise, which is that when we move in their company, we discover reality.

Let us now return to that troublesome word, God. So many words have been written about it. Yet how many of them allow the word itself to tell its own story?[77] It stands for an immense reality. Nevertheless, for all its grandeur and mystery, it is still a human word. We’ll have a much better chance of understanding what it means if we allow all our words to take their place in that life which becomes human insomuch as it is a life lived as words spoken and listened to. Here is where we recognize the indispensability of words. As Francois Dominique put it, “for hundreds of thousands of years, language has constituted humankind”.[78] Words are our humanity. Nowhere does this apply more than with the word, love.

As with anything transcendent, love is self-evident. Rather than try to ground love on the basis of a knowledge, it’s enough to testify to its reality. In this respect, my focus on the subject of love in this essay is quite completely concrete and practical rather than abstract. Not that this essay is a ‘self-help’ manual for those wanting to improve the quality of their intimate relationships. Of course, it would be difficult to talk about love without at some point addressing certain psychological considerations. All the same, the thrust of my argument is neither psychological nor sociological but ethical. Love is part of the enduring human adventure which is spiritual existence. By loving, an individual reaches out to others, finding there a confirmation of their own worth and uniqueness as a human being.[79] To this extent, rather than presupposing society, love is what first makes it possible.

The point of this essay is that all the important questions of spirituality are ultimately questions of living ‑ that is, human questions.[80] And yet, even as the spiritual belongs in the world, it should not be reduced to a worldly dimension. Without a separation between the spiritual and the mundane, transcendence is robbed of its meaning. The spiritual is certainly part of the world, but also transcends it. Nevertheless, it’s also possible to go too far in this latter direction. For when the spiritual life is seen as somehow totally removed, isolated out and placed in a higher realm, without any reference to the here-and-now of daily existence, the quest for the spiritual is in danger of deteriorating into a self-serving and empty game.

Obviously, there is a tension here. But it’s a matter of holding this tension, rather than regarding it as a contradiction that needs to be removed or resolved. A state of tension is intrinsic to that modality of being which goes by the name of relating. To relate to someone, I will need to get out of myself. This might be uncomfortable, because it entails a situation where I’m not necessarily in control of everything. It also means respecting another person even if I don’t agree with them. Relating, then, carries with it a sense of distance which is not indifference. Or as Cacciari put it, relating is a “being-together-in-the-distance – but in distance [that is] acted upon, crossed through, suffered, never simply measured or contemplated”.[81]

The tension inherent to relating is, I would suggest, what words and love are all about. The key thing is that the transcendence of words and love is not static. Rather, they transcend in the very movement of life, as a movement that propels the self out of the narcissistic self-enmeshment of thought towards real living, by way of the two-fold miracle which is speech and love.

 

ENDNOTES:

[1] Quoted in Emmanuel Levinas, Proper Names, 5.

[2] Thus in the Targum Onkelos, the Hebrew name of the first human created by God, Adam, means “speaking spirit”.

[3] ‘Foreword’, Stephane Moses, System and Revelation. The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig, 22.

[4] Ibid..

[5] “Undoubtedly the clearest illustration of the helplessness and awkwardness of language, when it comes to expression of the infinite shades of emotion, is the curious word ‘love’. There are countless words for colours, there are scales for music, but for all shades of love we have the one word. ‘I love nice clothes’, says one. And another says, ‘I just love baked potatoes’. We also love our friends, we love our parents, we love our children, and we love love itself. A very extraordinary word, surely” (Shamyra Levin, The Arena, 111. This work is the third part of Levin’s three-part autobiography).

[6] Nowadays, apart from historical-sociological studies, literary treatments of the theme of a love generally fall into two categories. Firstly, psychological approaches. These generally follow broadly psycho-dynamic methodologies and focus on a process of self-analysis. The second category is what might be called spiritualistic. Here the approach ranges across the gamut of personalized to traditionalistic‑from the crypto-psychology of New Age philosophies to those treatments that seek to update orthodox theological doctrines on love, casting them into a language more palatable to contemporary readers, who are generally lacking in any familiarity with traditional devotional literature.

[7] The same applies to God: “God cannot be described by definitions because He cannot be defined” (Abraham Heschel, The Prophets, Volume 2, 47).

[8] Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, 76.

[9] Quoted in Nahum Glatzer, Franz Rosenzweig, 90.

[10] Heschel, The Prophets, Volume 2, 98.

[11] Adriana Caverero, For More than One Voice. Towards a Philosophy of Vocal Expression, 190.

[12] For example, in Christianity, God is referred to as Logos, an ancient Greek term that means word but also thought. Likewise, the connection between spirituality and love is evident in the whole Judeo-Christian tradition. In fact, the great majority of social institutions in the West are underpinned by secularized Jewish and Christian values (i.e., the dignity of the individual, the notion that each and every human life is sacred, etc.). Perhaps that’s why the link between love and spirituality is taken for granted. The result of five centuries of secularization in western culture is that our culture is permeated by elements of particularly Christian religious orthodoxy. For instance, who has not heard of that old Christian maxim- ‘God is love’? But even whilst most people would be able to affirm the sentiment in general terms, few would be able to articulate what it means.

[13] Quoted in Francesco Dal Co, Figures of Architecture and Thought, 163, n. 131.

[14] ‘The Metaphysical Poets’, in Selected Essays, 287.

[15] Philippe Nemo, Job and the Excess of Evil, 44. In the discussion that follows, with the term, psychology, I’m referring to “the most modern manifestation of technique, the now 200-year-old ambition of intervening with the ‘human’ itself, with the human spirit and the secret in the human heart, for the sake of mitigating all those evils which, prior to these last two centuries, found their best refuge in religion” (ibid., 44). It’s because psychology regards “the Beyond as a pleat to be unfolded from this world” (ibid., 65) that it will always be unable to fathom the spiritual. The problem is that psychology is completely unable to acknowledge the existence of anything which “does not accede to the order of the world” (ibid., 69).

[16] Ibid., 63.

[17] For all its pretensions to being scientific, psychology is really pseudo-science.

[18] Phrase-making and sloganeering are the inevitable effect when the conceptual language of science is made into an item of mass consumption; with psychology, science becomes propaganda.

[19] Massimo Cacciari, Europe and Empire. On the Political Forms of Globalization, 55.

[20] Anthony Phelan, Reading Heinrich Heine, 9.

[21] The Function of the Sciences and the Meaning of Man, 207.

[22] As James Muilenberg put it, “The word (dabar) is the most elemental form of speech . . . The dabar is alive because it is born within the self of the speaker, and bears within it the vitality and power of the speaker. The word becomes alive in speaking; it initiates dialogue, invites response, calls to action, and registers its effect upon the one addressed by the uniqueness of the spoken name” (The Way of Israel, 31-32).

[23] Cacciari, Europe and Empire, 55.

[24] Paci, The Function of the Sciences and the Meaning of Man, 207.

[25] Ibid.

[26] Reflecting on a poem of his friend, Bertold Brecht, Walter Benjamin remarked that “Friendship does not abolish the distance between people, but it makes it vibrant . . .” (quoted in Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt. For Love of the World, 161). A spoken word is the signature of friendship, loyalty, “a sign of truth”.

[27] Cacciari, Europe and Empire, 53.

[28] Emmanuel Levinas called this the preeminence of the Said over the Saying.

[29] “The process by which ‘concentration’(i.e., totalitarianism) muzzles the human word is, alas, only too familiar. It leads to the reduction of man to a thing and the substitution of a thought system of the thing for the thought of man. In the universe of “concentrational” things, man can no longer speak, because each of his words is spoken for him, before him, around him. The individual is brainwashed and then inundated by the general and the impersonal, and his passive reactions can only repeat and reflect words accepted by everyone, undiscussed, indisputable” (Neher, The Exile of the Word. From the Silence of the Bible to the Silence of Auschwitz, 104).

[30] The Anarchy of the Imagination, 173.

[31] Nemo, Job and the Excess of Evil, 70.

[32] The medium of cognition is the concept, that of transcendence the word. Psychology might be very adept at manipulating concepts. But it is entirely deaf to that resonance of transcendence which shines through the word. Is it any wonder, then, that the vast bulk of psychological literature in our age is virtually unreadable? The appalling rape of language perpetrated by the discourse of psychology, a discourse that fills libraries and research institutes with millions of pages of turgid, pseudo-scientific drivel, should be evidence enough of psychology’s“blunt refusal of everything that comes from the heart of silence” (ibid., 65); Nemo goes on to point out that there is “no meaning . . . when one objectivizes words as simple media of communication between two subjects in the world. It is always for a soul, torn between good and evil and floating before the engaged commitment, that there is, or there is not, a meaning in a sign” (ibid., 146)

[33] They are also likely to see it as modern, whereas as Nemo shows through the example of Job’s friends and their religio-moralistic construction of Job’s “guilt”, the “reductive enterprise” of psychology has been with us for a long time.

[34] The phrase is from the German Romantic poet, Schiller, and is quoted in Viktor Klemperer, The Language of the Third Reich, 15. There’s probably never been an age in which certain linguistic habits and ways of speaking are so effective in shaping how we understand the world and ourselves.

[35] Again, much of this is a product of laziness. The fact is that nowadays, most people are not prepared to try to think for themselves. Psychology aids and abets this trend, since it aims to console rather than provoke any kind of serious reflection. The vast bulk of popular psychological language oozes with all kinds of anthropological pathos. In this respect, it indulges to the full what is, in contemporary people, a typically vulgar petit-bourgeois trait- sentimentality. In its popular format, psychology is the language of consolation. Here it takes over in a secular form many traits of Christian religiosity.

[36] Levin, The Arena, 60.

[37] Ibid.

[38] Philippe Nemo, Job and the Excess of Evil, 146.

[39] The notion that words, conventional names for things, are mere “sound and smoke”, and as such obscure higher, spiritual realities, is the age-old conviction of mysticism: “Call it happiness! Heart! Love! God!/ I have no name/  for it! Feeling is everything / The name is sound and smoke/ Enshrouding heaven’s glow” (Goethe, Faust I, lines 3454‑3458).

[40] Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, Hallo trans., 151.

[41] Discussion thematizes, turning the question or issue into a subject or area of investigation. When God becomes a topic for discussion, embarrassment is transmuted into ideology, whereas “The other way begins in embarrassment, and, rising from insight to insight, arrives at a vision of one transcendent Being, Whom one acknowledges as a source of embarrassment” (Heschel, The Prophets, Volume 2, 54). In times past, the reduction of the Divine to a theme went by the name of theology. But who bothers with theology anymore? Nowadays, to whip up a stirring evocation of the ‘question of God’, it seems all you need to capture people’s attention is a quick race around the globe on the track of world religions, a smattering of comparative mythology and a good dose of the currently fashionable doctrine of cultural relativism. Throw in a bit of pseudo-existential philosophy, along with a touch of cynical psychology for good measure, and the picture will be complete. Scientists are often the worst offenders in this respect. One often sees them lapsing into supercilious speculation and casual thematizing of religious questions. Here I’m thinking in particular of the writings of Richard Dawkins, for whom the following remarks of Massimo Cacciari apply: “The disenchantment of interminably building up certainty is then mere publicity, since its practice is understood to be effective and it is the very idea of the effect, of solution, that displaces that of substance: either the particular substance of fact or the substance of the subject that comprises it” (Posthumous People, 23).

[42] That doesn’t mean that people are not involved personally when it comes to expressing themselves on the level of opinion. The problem is more the mode of such involvement. When people assert their opinions, there is a surplus of personal, emotional investment. In discussions that work on this level, a tremendous amount of emotional and affective energy is expended on the act of self-assertion itself. Now people generally feel driven to assert themselves when they feel insecure. The problem is that such insecurities are liable to make them conceal more than they reveal. So a discussion on the level of opinion does not necessarily reveal what a person really feels or thinks.

[43] As Maurice Blanchot put it, “There should be interesting events and even important events, and yet nothing should take place that would disturb us” (Friendship, 67).

[44] Against Identity, section 18.

[45] ‘The Age of the World Picture’, in Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, 138.

[46] Thus Karl Krauss, in his essay, ‘In These Great Times’, writes of “the empires bereft of imagination, where man is dying of spiritual starvation while not feeling spiritual hunger” (quoted in Manfredo Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth, 274). Krauss probably had in mind the following passage of Amos, 8:11 – “Behold days are coming . . . when I will send a hunger into the Land; not a hunger for bread or a thirst for water but for hearing the words of the Lord . . .” (on this passage see also the Midrash of Genesis Rabbah, chapter 25, section 3).

[47] Quoted in Gyorgy Lukacs, The Theory of the Novel, 29.

[48] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, 162.

[49] ‘New Years Eve’, from the collection, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities and Other Stories, 106.

[50] It is important to underline this willed element. For again, in Nietzschean terms, the will to negate, this desire for the nothing, is the foremost expression of a consciousness that would “rather will nothingness than not will” (The Genealogy of Morals, 163).

[51] In fact, experiencing a feeling of homelessness, of disconnection, is the only way such a person is able to feel ‘at home’.

[52] Phenomenology is a “systematic discussion of what appears”. This definition is from Henri Frankfort’s illuminating study of ancient concepts of kingship and the divine in Egypt and Mesopotamia, Kingship and the Gods, x. The approach herein to the historicity of concepts also takes its cue from the following comment of Frankfort: “Our treatment, then, will be unhistorical; but it will be so only because it disregards, not because it violates, historical truths” (Ibid.).

[53] Emmanuel Levinas, Unforseen History, 68. To this extent that, as Levinas explains in his primer on Husserlian Phenomenology, “we study the way things manifest themselves”, this is because “the only existence of which we can reasonably speak is the existence that reveals itself to consciousness and that is grasped in consciousness exactly in its ways of revealing itself” (ibid, 34).

[54] Ibid, 59.

[55] Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, Galli trans, 27.

[56] Since it is “the relation to the object that is the primitive phenomenon, and not a subject and an object that must go toward each other”, it follows that “the fact that the subject goes towards the object cannot be a problem” (Levinas, Unforseen History, 36).

[57] Ibid., 58. For instance, it’s noticeable that those people who use the word God unselfconsciously and freely generally encounter few problems. To this, cf. the following anecdote jotted down by Vasily Grossman: “An old woman says, ‘Who knows whether God exists or not. I pray to Him. It’s not a difficult job. You give Him two or three nods, and who knows, perhaps He’ll accept you” (A Writer At War, 27). What this woman recognizes is that God is an existential, not a conceptual problem.

[58] ‘The Negative Vision of Robert Bresson’, Robert Bresson, 444.

[59] The Body of Faith, 5.

[60] Ibid. My feeling is that with this distinction between intelligence and reason (or intellect), Wyschogrod is describing a peculiarly Jewish trait. It has often been noted that one finds a disproportionately high number of Jewish individuals amongst those contributing notable and high-level achievements in the fields of science, the arts, commerce and other areas of human endeavour.Of course, its also true that a great deal of intellect “can be invested in ignorance”, especially when there is a need for illusion or self-deception. Again, in this respect, arguably one of the outstanding features of Jewish accomplishments of both a theoretical and practical sort is a quality of discernment. The latter is the difference between intelligence and mere cleverness. Intelligence without the capacity for discernment and judgement is almost always stupidity.

[61] This was Franz Rosenzweig’s approach in his masterwork, The Star of Redemption.

[62] Unforseen History, 60. Thus “the immediate, the individual, and the human [is] the sphere where all true comprehension takes place and through which every object must be grasped” (ibid., 59).

[63] Michael Wyschogrod suggests that an ability to live with failure is the first step on the road to genuine spirituality. See The Body of Faith, 14-16.

[64] Cacciari, Europe and Empire, 51.

[65] Wyschogrod , The Body of Faith, 33.

[66] Cacciari, Europe and Empire, 52.

[67] Ibid., 51.

[68] Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, 118.

[69] Ibid., 118.

[70] Of course, words are not the only medium in which a person may communicate to others what they see. They may, for example, choose to express themselves in the form of music or art. But the particular media through which a person chooses to express themselves is not innocent and carries with it certain important implications.

[71] “. . . neither thoughts nor language in themselves form a realm of their own . . . they are only manifestations of actual life” (Marx and Engels, ibid.; emphasis in original).

[72] But this does not mean words are an end-in-themselves. See previous note.

[73] Heschel, The Prophets, Volume 2, 53.

[74] Ibid., 53. Cf.: “Translating insights into words is not done in the light of conceptual criteria, but under the impact of incomprehensible facts. Ignoring the tension of the moment and the paradox of the endeavour, one would retain the concepts but lose the facts” (Ibid., 55).

[75] Wyschogrod, The Body of Faith, 7.

[76] Cacciari, Posthumous People, 19. As Cacciari puts it, the word leads us irgendwohin‑to “some place”, a ‘somewhere’ that is always occluded, however, by conceptuality. The word is transcendent, but the important thing here is that there can be no transcendental resolution of the transcendent. This is another reason for taking existence, rather than thought, as our point of departure.

[77] Every new exposition on the subject of God which appears in the media seems to want to present itself as definitive. At last, so it would have us believe, the question has finally been settled, once and for all. Is this continual recurrence of the ‘God question’ a return of the repressed? Does it betray a certain collective anxiety in relation to a question which, it seems, just won’t go away?

[78] Dobbels, On Robert Antelme’s The Human Race, 168.

[79] “Everything can, at a pinch, be done one-sidedly, but two are needed for love, and when we have experienced this we lose our taste for all other one-sided activities and do everything mutually” (Franz Rosenzweig, from a letter to Edith Hahn, January 16th, 1920. Quoted in Glatzer, Franz Rosenzweig, 90).

[80] Here I am thinking of Franz Rosenzweig’s remark in his essay, ‘The New Thinking’, that “theological problems want to be translated into human problems, while human problems want to be driven into the theological” (Rosenzweig, Philosophical and Theological Writings, 129).

[81] Europe and Empire, 66.