The pragmatics of love

Not too long ago, I wrote two pieces on love for Thought Leader, and because of events in my own life the subject has been on my mind again lately.

These events have compelled me to take a serious look at what one might call “the pragmatics of love”, because, no matter how convincing some of the philosophical understandings of love, which I addressed earlier, may be — Scheler’s, for example, which amounts to the affirmation of the beloved person being uniquely valuable to you — it is still inescapably the case that one’s actions, or behaviour towards someone you love (and who presumably loves or cares for you too), may either destroy that love or enhance it.

A love that is possessive, for example, could be every bit as destructive as one that is characterised by a certain degree of indifference — in fact, from a normative point of view, one may argue that neither of these would, strictly speaking, qualify as love in the “true” sense of the word. And yet, at a purely factual level, it is undeniable that there are many cases of “love” between people that manifest themselves precisely in those ways. Perhaps such instances could be considered as being perversions of love in the normative sense, that is, of what love could be at its “best”, when it is most fulfilling.

A clue to what this “normative” meaning of love is, is found in Plato’s account (which I have discussed before), and bears on his perspicacious observation, that love is “lacking” (mired in “poverty”) and resourceful at the same time. Any love relationship that somehow eradicates these aspects of love, will result in a perversion or distortion of love — such as in the many cases of marriage where the individuals involved do not experience any desire for the other any longer (if they ever did), “desire” being the marker of that “lack” which is inseparable from love. If two people feel that they “possess” each other to the degree that there is nothing in either that fuels the other’s desire any longer, love has disappeared. This is where the “pragmatics of love” enters the picture.

There is a well-known poetic statement from William Blake (which I recall here from memory) which captures well, metaphorically, what is at stake in the pragmatics of love — that is, it could be taken as a rough guideline for those seeking to know how they should keep love alive, or rekindle it, between themselves and their beloved. Blake remarked that (and forgive the patriarchal language; his words are true of men and women): “He who binds himself to a joy, does the winged life destroy; but he who kisses the joy as it flies, lives in eternity’s sunrise.”

What this means, should not be difficult to understand — it is perfectly commensurate with Plato’s notion of love, specifically as far as the “lack” in love implies that one’s love could never coincide with the distinctive being of one’s beloved. If it does, one has, perhaps inadvertently, unknowingly, “bound” oneself to the “joy’ that is one’s beloved. “Kissing” the joy “as it flies” implies, paradoxically, that unless one “frees” or “lets go” of one’s loved one, the love will be smothered together with the freedom required for reciprocal love.

This may sound like an easy formula to implement, as it were, but don’t be fooled by the deceptive exhortation, that one should “kiss the joy as it flies” — it is THE most difficult aspect of the pragmatics of love. But why should this be the case? Not only because, I believe, in most people there is a strong desire to exercise at least some degree of control over their lives, itself born from a need for psychic security, and therefore to try different strategies to “secure” their relationships with others — strategies that invariably end up undermining the imperative, to “free” one’s beloved.

There is another, stronger, reason why this is so difficult, however. Whether we like to acknowledge it or not, interpersonal communication is a darn sight more difficult than one would like to believe, not merely for all the usual reasons adduced for such difficulty, such as linguistic obstacles, different values, and so on. Too few people have recognised that individuals are configured differently in psychic terms — it is not merely the case that, as Aristotle said, humans are “rational animals”, nor even that the psychoanalytical corrective to that long-standing, traditional view (that our vaunted “rationality” is all too often tripped up by unconscious motives of which we are not consciously aware) points to a seriously complicating factor in our attempts to understand others or to communicate with them.

One should add to this — as Andrea Hurst’s theoretical elaboration on Lacan’s theory of the human subject so persuasively shows — that every human being’s psyche is articulated, not merely in a complex inter-linkage between the registers of the imaginary (the register of the self as ego), the symbolic (that of language as the medium of the social) and the real (the order of that in us which surpasses the ego as well as language). One of these usually dominates a person’s psychic life as motivating force, but WITHIN each of these registers there are also, to complexify things further, three possibilities of psychic inclination or dominance: the tendency to stabilise, totalise or control things, the countervailing tendency to break things up or incessantly question, undermine or fragment them, and thirdly the paradoxical tendency to negotiate the former two inclinations in the guise of a liberating and yet not completely shattering tendency, conjoined or alternating with a relatively, but not excessively stabilising (“control-freak”) inclination.

I have not here used the theoretical names that Dr Hurst has given these tendencies; that should be left to her to make public. Suffice it to say that she has articulated this novel theory on several occasions, most recently in a keynote address at the International Theoretical Psychology Conference in Nanjing, China, and that a paper by her on the theory will appear later this year in the South African Journal of Psychology.

The point of referring to her work is to emphasise that there are many factors at work to complicate, compromise, disturb or otherwise derail even the most sincere attempts at communication, and this ineluctably affects the pragmatics of love. The best that one can or could be expected to do in a love relationship is to try to fathom what the “dominant” psychic inclination is on the part of one’s beloved, and to keep that firmly in mind in all attempts to communicate with her or him.

The upshot of this is that, where lovers are not on “the same psychic wavelength”, compromises have to be made for such relationships to survive and, perhaps, to flourish.

In a world where love in the normative sense, with a corresponding pragmatics (however imperfect), is, in my judgment, something comparatively rare, I believe that it is worthwhile for people who love or care for each other to do their utmost to cultivate, at the level of a pragmatics as briefly conceived here, this psychic “ground” for the possibility of a fulfilling love relationship. But make no mistake — it is not easy. Much more could be said about this, but that must wait for another time.