What love does to us
Essay #12*
Everyone needs the love and closeness of another. However, love must not be a shackle. It only unfolds when each person leaves the other free space to develop. Love is based on mutual trust and offers the opportunity to show oneself as vulnerable. Love is an essential prerequisite for developing the strength and courage to face new challenges in life.
Love is often inconspicuous. It is sometimes so tender that we do not recognize it. Only in retrospect do we realize that there was something there. That’s how fleeting and vague love can be. “‘Do you have a handkerchief’, my mother asked me every morning at the front gate before I went out into the street,” the German-Romanian writer Herta Müller explains in her Nobel Prize speech from 2009. “I didn’t have one. And because I didn’t have one, I went back into the room and took a handkerchief. I didn’t have one every morning because I waited for the question every morning.” The handkerchief conveys the experience of bonding and letting go between mother and daughter. She leaves her mother on the threshold of the house and yet she is with her throughout the day thanks to the handkerchief. “The question ‘Do you have a handkerchief’ was an indirect tenderness. Direct tenderness would have been embarrassing, there was no such thing among the farmers. Love disguised itself as a question.” We learn the basics of love in childhood. At first, it is often very intimate and familiar things to which we give our love and attention. A doll is given a home-knitted woolen jacket. The toy excavator is given an additional function thanks to an ingenious construction. What we experienced as a child playing with things prepares us for life. Later, a broken spectacle frame from a hike is provisionally repaired with a suitable wooden stick and wire. We call something loving when we sense that someone is devoting all their dedication to something. It is similar to the small piece of wood that the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke refers to in his homage to the French sculptor Auguste Rodin: “This small forgotten object, which was ready to mean everything, familiarized you with thousands by playing a thousand roles, being animal and tree and king and child, — and when it stepped back, it was all there……You have experienced everything human about it, about its existence, about its somehow-appearance, about its final breaking or its mysterious slipping away, deep into death. You hardly remember this, and you rarely realize that even now you still need things that, like those things from childhood, are waiting for your trust, your love, your devotion. Those who are able to retain this dimension of experience from childhood know what love can be and discover that it appears in many forms. This something, worthless as it was, prepared your relationship with the world, it led you into events and among people.”
The seed of love unleashed has been in literature since the Middle Ages. What we call “great love”, the idea of a unity that encompasses the sensual and physical and the spiritual of two people and sets itself as autonomous and absolute, is an invention of courtly poetry. Based on legends dating back to the 6th century, Tristan and Isolde became the classic lovers of Middle High German literature. Sung about by Gottfried von Strasbourg in the 13th century and chosen as operatic heroes by Richard Wagner, they were the first couple in German literary history to defy the conventions of courtly society in the name of higher morals. In the lines to an unknown lover from the famous 18th sonnet by the English poet William Shakespeare from 1605, the immortality of love is only realized in the realm of poetry: “Shall I compare thee to summer’s day?/ Nay, not so sweet is it, nor so mild; / How often the storm of spring’s buds hath broken,/ And summer dwells but fleetingly in the field! / But never an end to your summer threatens, / Loss of beauty never what belongs to you;/ Death never boasts of overshadowing you, / When you are transfigured in eternal songs; / As long as a breath blows, an eye sees, / This song lives and gives you life.”
While literature was the most important place for love fantasies until the 19th century, the mass medium of film and advertising photography became increasingly dominant at the beginning of the 20th century. Every day, city dwellers experience themselves surrounded by unknown crowds in a stream of sensual stimuli. Oversized billboards transport offers of goods with devotedly smiling ladies who seem to be offering a love service, but which turns out to be a can of shoe polish. It’s confusing and has nothing to do with real love. Everywhere, the male gaze dominates women who seem to make themselves constantly available to the male world. In the 1920s, the contradiction between illusion and reality was cultivated in the movie palaces of the big cities. Life-size female figures appear on the screen, embodying a great promise that is softly drawn into the timeless and has little to do with the eroticism experienced in reality. The French film „Et Dieu .. créa la femme” by Roger Vadim from 1956, starring Brigitte Bardot, is the epitome of the stylization of the female as a mere object of male desire. The film’s worldwide success is based on the staging of an unbridled, almost animalistic lust, which Juliette embodies provocatively and sensually when she dances seductively on a table and tosses her long, blonde hair to the rhythm of the rumba. Brigitte Bardot thus becomes the erotic projection screen for an entire generation of men. At the same time, the sexualization of the female body turns it into a commodity for sale on the market of the capitalist economy. The fact that behind the façade of the seductive Juliette lies a young woman who has lost her parents and grown up in an orphanage, searching for recognition and affection, is an often overlooked, subtle and sensitive dimension of the film. The love of Michel, played by Jean-Louis Trintignant, for Juliette, the lover of his brother Antoine, is based on a deep sense of her vulnerability. When Antoine demotes Juliette to a playmate and she is declared a shameless person in the village who should return to the orphanage, Michel decides to marry her. He wants to offer her protection but exposes himself to the ridicule and envy of the male villagers. Even when Juliette breaks out of the marriage and cheats on her husband with Antoine, Michel holds on to his love and the commitment of the relationship. The film thus addresses the ambivalence between permissiveness and romantic love, which presents itself as a permanent conflict within a modern capitalist society because both models are offered in parallel on the market of emotions.
But what conditions must be in place for love to develop? And what role does the relationship to our physical feelings play in this? The German philosopher Gernot Böhme argues as follows in his 2008 publication Ethics of Bodily Existence: “To be able to love does not primarily require the ability to act, but much more fundamentally to be able to let oneself be affected by the other.” This means opening yourself up to the other person, allowing yourself to be addressed and inspired by them. According to Böhme, the real art of love, also in the erotic and physical sense, is “going along with the suggestions that arise from the affection of the other.” Falling in love then means exposing oneself to passion without giving up one’s autonomy and consciously perceiving one’s own body and that of the other person. However, it seems that modern man has become so alienated from his bodily impulses that he has forgotten how to interpret them “as the experience of feelings.” The fact that someone has “butterflies in their stomach” is only understood as metaphorical speech and less as a real physical sensation. “The fact that emotional participation in the world consists precisely in these bodily impulses that show that something is close to me,” argues Gernot Böhme, “is something that hardly anyone who sees themselves as modern will concede. But only when you experience bodily movements as ways of being affected have you understood what it actually means to say: my heart, my stomach, my chest.” However, this approach presupposes a different relationship to one’s own body and the body of the other. It is about “appreciating the person in their bodily existence.” In this way, love becomes a borderline experience that enables every form of ecstasy and sensuality, but in which the physical integrity of the other person is preserved.
The great basics of love are based on a desire that can take hold of people in many different ways. In this context, it is interesting to note that philosophy means nothing other than the “love of wisdom”. Philosophizing is therefore an extremely erotic process, as Plato pointed out in his Symposium. Eros is therefore not just a sensual drive, but a passion for knowledge, wisdom or beauty. The pursuit of truthfulness in the poet’s work is just as imbued with eroticism as the dedication with which a craft or artistic product is created. However, the erotic dimension of ancient philosophy has been largely lost in modern times. The French philosopher René Descartes in particular elevated reason to the measure of all things and cut it off from any reference to physical existence. For the German philosopher Olivia Mitscherlich-Schönherr, Descartes thus “disembodied and de-eroticized reason and devalued the erotic to a sensual drive.” She therefore advocates overcoming the “alienation of rationalist philosophizing from the erotic contexts of life”. This requires reference to the other. The joy and happiness of achieving a satisfying result or solving a problem together with other people are erotic experiences that can be characterized by bodily sensations of co-creation. For example, theater work only functions in a joint creative action that is permeated by love or affection for the texts and characters of the staged poetry. This generally means that it is important to enter into other meaningful relationships beyond the romantic and sexual relationship in which our love and affection can unfold, as the Israeli sociologist Eva Illouz explains. These can be relationships within the family, a community that we have not chosen, but into which we were born. Or friendships that are characterized by mutual recognition and sympathy.
Love is an energy that defies convention, crosses boundaries and can give us the strength to face new challenges in life. It requires the courage to be vulnerable and to give each other the space to express what is depressing, disappointing or limiting. Love is thus characterized as a strong but fragile feeling that likes to elude immediacy, as the German poet Wolf Wondratschek describes in a poem: “We are not sure what love / wants from us, what its coming and going / does to us, what the wine we drink, / what the summer dress you wear, even if / it’s snowing outside. But we thank the years, / the old ones past and the young ones to come. / Someday it will happen. We will rise / to fall. And will fall in love with everything we / don’t understand.”
*This essay is written complementary to Thesis #12 of our paper 48 Theses — How we can live together better, that you can find at https://48thesen.de/en/. This series will be continued. Further information about the author on my LinkedIn profile https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-udo-g%C3%B6%C3%9Fwald-077a711a7/.
