Notes on the Order of Love (I)

-...A mathematician, I told to myself this morning after awakening in the rain and sitting next to the heating as though the light hours were still part of the same night on and on, perhaps one single night going on since Thursday evening, at least for me. And the fascination of the
strangers´ comfort never ceases to cheer me, as I go over and over the painter's line "You've become the eternal motif behind all my paintings". Then it takes me back to myself, with the Kingdom of God on earth... It's quite a pleasure not really having figured your intentions if any at all, for it leaves the "motif" of the painter's statement in the most abstract and contemplative terms...

- ..."You never cease to amaze me," said the mathematician to the philosopher. Awaken in the rain, did you? Were you so overcome with fatigue on the way home that you decided to spend the night on a park bench instead? I am still trying to make sense of Christmas eve, your

letter, and what all of this has to do with the Kingdom of God...

Ari Akermann and Guy Berger, December 2005

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Taking up a subject after almost entirely abandoning for three years is not always an untimely enterprise, specially for those who adhere so knowingly to what once said Etienne Gilson, "A man of seventy-five should have many things to say about his past, but... if he has lived only as a philosopher, he immediately realizes that he has no past", thus perhaps this is relevant only to the philosopher as such, it is not a matter of professional precision but of a certain attitude from the part of the maker, and this maker is certainly not a doer -the Platonic difference between the truth of the poet and the everyday concerns of the public man. The initial pursuance that led me to this impossible enterprise to write about love from a reflected postmodern perspective(1) and in the light of the political facts of our times, had manifold but yet uncertain motivations that I have more clearly developed in the years that followed. The issue at stake has gone far beyond a technical question about the uncommon usage of the term "love" in selected texts of Hannah Arendt and disturbingly it has become a pivotal question of general philosophical value, bearing in mind not its application as such -e.g. the abstract definition of love as attempted by moral philosophy and by natural theology in establishing the relatedness of love to the life of the human person in general, this question has been sufficiently dealt with in Christian anthropologies and similar hermeneutic exercises since antiquity, that is, a global question about the position of man in the world. The initial inquiry was not necessarily tied up with the currents of political theory/philosophy but derived from an older ontological position about the value and structure of the "world" in certain philosophical discourse. I have since long abandoned that positing of the problem because the question over the meaning of the world is in nature vertical, that is, a hierarchical tree of problem-solving and thus leaning toward the analytical attitude of "finding the fallacy" through a method that comes closer to a race where obstacles are overturned in order to comfront "pure, untainted truth" and this is but absolutely pointless in the quest for general knowledge, which is the only type of knowledge philosophy is aiming to, a panoramic about the situation of man in an age or another, rather than the positing and solving of timeless "life questions".

Before returning to the topic of love, some words on the general object of philosophy are in place. It is beyond doubt to philosophers in general (at least in the continental tradition, whatever the term might mean nowadays) that first and foremost philosophy is not a scientific discipline with the burden of bearing results because its knowledge is not specific in anyway, and more than a discipline we are speaking of a certain particular attitude intertwined with the historical situatedness of man, an attitude so general that the whole realm of knowledge of the specific relies upon it. Philosophers are not scientists and thus, their concern with truth is not bound to the particular data recollection or whether X is truer than Y, instead, the problem is posited in terms of the possibilities available to man in order to think out any statement or proposition regarding X and Y, considered as sub-units within the larger group of A bearing in mind the aporetic nature of X and Y as autonomous units at all in so far as they are concepts burdened by a historically-binded traditions and never or at least not anymore thought of as timeless concepts. The paradigm is certainly postmetaphysical and historical, but not historicist -does not follow a model of endless progressions either into apocalypse/salvation or into an ever increasing augmented perfectibility in deed or thought (corresponding to what was proposed by both Christianity and Rationalism). Things no longer follow the rule of necessity, however they are necessarily coherent in terms of the consequences of certain action opposed to another, but the outcome remains a contigent result of both historical processes, existential decisions, moral actions and perhaps, a sort of faith unbound by any traditions.

The belle-epoque of science obligated philosophy to withdraw from the absolutist positions inherited from its age-old marriage to natural theology, into positing specific questions with concrete solutions for man in the abstract. With the emotional impoverishment of our age that has decidedly replaced character as a category in classical moral philosophy with the prevalent "mood" of certain rather exaggerate hermeneutic models, all the theories of man have been overturned either to fit the scheme of revolutions or the despair of skepticism, and so far none of this theories, apparently coined by the hand of aesthetics and political philosophy with the claim of practical philosophy, have ever become applicable to any man in specific. What looms at large is that albeit philosophy is not an experimental discipline or attitude (no attitude is ever experimental, attitudes are always intuitions about a certain possibility and carry the utopian drive of a certain ideal situation posited as a paradigm and never as an ideal life-situation lest it be a borderline one), the struggle of modern thought has remained one in which there is a clear but not cleared ambiguity between the structural aspect of knowledge´s order and the experiential character of the world -experiental and not experimental, experience is in itself a reflection over the struggle between the ever elusive present and not yet consumated past, while an experiment is an unauthentic insertion of a pattern into an ever so immutable life-world. As a general trend there is a primacy of experiential hermeneutics over structural epistemology. Yet, all in all, it is not a theory about experience because such an enterprise demands to handle more information than what is available to thinking alone, this is to say that it is the experience of everyday men and women of the world that constitutes the sole object of inquiry and not the conceptual aggregates that build up into an anthropology of man.

(1) Referring to an strictly modernist position as elaborated by Agnes Heller, postmodern as an hermeneutic-historical position before an all-too-self-assured high modernism, rather than postmodern as an ontological situatedness of mood in lieu of condition.