Love and finitude

But what if all that stuff about “kissing the joy as it flies”, which I wrote about some time ago here (see “The pragmatics of love”), just does not seem to work, or work out, and despite all one’s attempts to do justice to one’s beloved — albeit within the inescapable limits of one’s humanity — she (or he) just seems to slip further and further away from you, until it becomes a slippery slope and you cannot stand on it any longer, and eventually you start sliding, and then … you fall?

It happens. It’s life, they say. Affairs of the heart, the French would say, are fraught with difficulties and pain, alongside all the excitement and joy that they may bring. Put more philosophically, one might say that it is one of the many manifestations of human finitude — the inescapable existential condition of ultimately failing, shattering in the face of the goals we set ourselves, and of the desires that have us in their grip most of the time without us even being consciously aware of it. Put more concretely, no matter how hard one believes one is trying to live up to one’s love for someone, your own failings and frailties, as well as the impact of these on one’s beloved, can suddenly cause what one thought to be a “good” love relationship, to erupt in one’s face. And no matter how hard you try to put the shards of the love-vase together again, you turn out to fail, like all the king’s horses and all the king’s men with Humpty Dumpty. Even the king’s men are finite, and fallible.

Someone from whom one could learn an invaluable lesson in this regard is the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard. In the course of presenting readers with different “models” of human existence, Kierkegaard argues that neither the “aesthetic” model of existence (which entails living a fragmented life of reflective “enjoyment”, where one does not really have a “self”, but rather a series of masks), nor the “ethical” model of existence (where one “becomes” an “integrated” self through commitment and “doing battle” with time), can really do justice to what a human being fundamentally is.

It is only in the religious model, for Kierkegaard, where one truly discovers one’s finitude, that is, where one discovers that, “as compared to God’, all our finite attempts are like nothing. In other words, even our very best attempts amount to sitting between two stools in the ashes, as it were, for neither the aesthetic, nor the ethical way of existence teaches one to embrace your finitude and fallibility resolutely — it is only the religious mode of existence that can teach one this, through the realisation that a chasm separates our limited existence from the infinite. And unless we accept and resign ourselves to the truth of the inadequacy of even our “best” human endeavours, we will never be able to live fulfilled lives.

Even when one strips Kierkegaard’s third model of its religious language — and it is not really necessary to do so — it still teaches one a profound truth: not that one should give up trying one’s best in carrying out the (presumably morally acceptable) tasks confronting one, but that IF one fails, one should do so without rancour and resentment, because humans are not infinitely powerful, omnipotent beings, but fallible and finite. Nietzsche calls such resentment the “spirit of revenge against time and its ‘it was’ “.

It is infinitely difficult to resign oneself to one’s inherent human limitations, of course. We always seem to want to turn back the wheel of time through our words of explanation, of compensation, of promise and renewal of commitment. But fact is, we have failed, and we have to accept the consequences. Even if one’s beloved can bring her or himself to the virtually impossible point of forgiveness, that is no guarantee that all will be well again, because in finite creatures the love for someone that we sometimes (often) believe we will have in our hearts forever, is all too susceptible to the ravages of time. It could also happen — because we are here not only in the realm of the finite, but of complex human capacities, too — that forgiveness may happen against all odds, and that such an act of forgiveness rekindles love, however improbable it may seem. But true forgiveness is difficult, if not impossible.

Why should forgiveness in the face of a moral misdemeanour, or an ethical outrage, be “virtually impossible”? Jacques Derrida has valuable insights on this. He distinguishes two kinds of forgiveness — the one conditional (or “economic”) and the other unconditional (or “aneconomic”). The first kind is usually accompanied by all manner of conditions, and has the form: “I will forgive you as long as you will do such and such”, while the formal structure of the latter amounts to the paradox: “I forgive you because what you have done is unforgivable”. This second kind of forgiveness is what really counts, of course, because — and this is the point Derrida is making — something that is “forgivable” (a mere peccadillo), does not really call for forgiveness. But something “unforgivable” does — something like what was perpetrated by the Nazis during the Holocaust, or what was done to black people under apartheid, or what a person in a love-relationship does, out of fallibility, to alienate him or herself from the other.

This is why, even if one feels incapable of doing it, for forgiveness to happen, one should make the effort at performing the “excessive gesture” of (“aneconomic”) unconditional forgiveness, even if, in the end, some version of the “economic” variety actually comes to pass. (If anyone is interested in finding this in his work on forgiveness, as examples Derrida discusses the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, as well as one’s position on the Shoah or Holocaust in Germany during the Second World War.)

Nevertheless, even if someone can make the impossible gesture of forgiveness, this does not mean that, in the case of a crisis of love between two people, love will of necessity be resurrected, if it faltered in the course of what happened to erode it in the first place. But it is also just possible, precisely because such forgiveness, when extended, is the event of the impossible.