The severe practicality of love

At the very end of Plato’s Republic, Socrates tells a story about a warrior called Er, who was killed in battle. After some days, just as Er was about to be burnt on the funeral pyre, he unexpectedly came back to life, bringing back news of what he had seen. Er tells how he had journeyed in the company of a great troupe of pilgrim souls, right to the end of the world. There, laid out before them, were all the possible lives, samples of the possible ways to lead a life in the world. They were then asked to choose a life as their own. The first soul off the mark chooses the life of a powerful tyrant, not understanding until too late that the life of tyranny destines him to devour his own children. The soul of the warrior Ajax chooses to be a lion rather than a man and Agamemnon chooses the life of an eagle, because they remember too acutely the terrible injustices done to them as men. Another soul chooses the life of a nightingale, while some of the musical birds present at the scene choose to be men. Odysseus draws the last lot, and having now recovered from his love of honour, chooses the obscure life of a private man. The choosing of lives completed, the pilgrim souls are despatched from the scene, and finally are sent, shooting like stars, to the beginning of the new lives that they have selected.

The story of Er asks us this: when it comes our turn to judge the worth of different lives, what would we choose for our own, and how would we choose? As Plato puts the question: how then shall we live? There is no more urgent, more practical, or more noble question than this: how shall we flourish and not merely scrape by in the life we have chosen to lead?

In relating the story of Er, Socrates cautions us that it is a matter of great significance that we seek out the knowledge to distinguish between the good and the bad life. Indeed, this matter of judgment is “the whole risk for a human being”. Socrates phrases this quest as one that involves working out who will provide us with the capacity and knowledge to distinguish the good from the bad life. In other words, the development of moral competence is not about giving assent to a set of teachings, but turns on an encounter with another human being whose bearing in the world elucidates the meaning of the good life with a force that can stop us in our tracks.

Raimond Gaita’s work invites us to think through with him the question of the good life, the life well led. This question is one of such seriousness that it can seem out of place in our world, in which everything seems to conspire to discourage us from taking ourselves and how we lead our lives at all seriously, as anything other than “entertainment”.

We certainly don’t talk about these matters very often, and most of us shy away from even raising them in polite company. Most of us lack fluency in any kind of language in which we could speak of and about these matters. As Andrea Dworkin writes: “There is an awful poverty here, in this time and place: of language, of words that express real states of being; of search, of questions; of meaning, of emotional empathy; of imagination.” If we are aware that there is such a language that might be spoken, we are usually inarticulate in and embarrassed by our attempts to speak it. As Gaita has said of his own difficulties on this account: “I am, I admit, a little embarrassed about talking, as I so often do, of the preciousness of each individual human being, not least because it can sound precious, or sentimental or soft-headed.” But as he notes, at least in our world, it is hard to find any “better way of speaking”.

Of course, we seldom find ourselves in Er’s company, with the possibility before us of choosing our life whole. We usually choose our actions one by one, and through each of those actions the form of our entire life gradually takes shape, little by little, day by day. But this simply means that every day is a day of judgment for us. That is, every day we get to make our life and fashion our self as a human being, through each of our actions and words. In Gaita’s perspective, the “preciousness of each individual human being” should form the lodestone to guide those actions and words if we are to lead a life that acknowledges the condition of the world as one of common humanity.

The idea that individuals are infinitely precious in this way is, according to Gaita, “what turns human life upside down”, at least if we take it seriously. A story around which his work circles relates his encounter as a young man with a nun at a hospital for the mentally disturbed. Where most of us are discomforted and turn away from the spectacle of disturbance or suffering in others, the nun looks the afflicted person in the face without condescension. She dignifies the human being whom she faces. As Gaita tells the story, it remains a little mysterious what the nun actually is or does that endows the encounter with such gravity. The nun in Gaita’s story elucidates the matter of a human life not by the teachings or rules to which she adheres, but by the wonder her bearing conjures. The purity of her love, Gaita argues, is revelatory of a common humanity, disclosed by the encounter.

It is not necessary for us to encounter a nun to be struck by wonder, of course. The tenderness of the parent by which the child awakens to love is as strange and wondrous to the child, even though the memory of that awakening is often only dimly recollected by those who are most in need of it.

At the centre of Gaita’s work is the seeming inexplicability of the power of love in our lives. His work is also filled with a dazzling awareness of how love is not only unjustly refused to those who share the world with us, but also how it can be besieged by ill fortune, as in the lives of his parents, Romulus and Christina. In Romulus My Father, Gaita writes

The philosopher Plato said that those who love and seek wisdom are clinging in recollection to things they once saw. On many occasions in my life I have had the need to say, and thankfully have been able to say: I know what a good workman is; I know what an honest man is; I know what friendship is; I know because I remember these things in the person of my father, in the person of his friend Hora, and in the example of their friendship.

But the memory of love can be even harder to hold on to in the face of a world that seems at times intent on stamping it out (even before we recognise the devastation wreaked by our common mortality).

The recollection of the purity of love that should guide our judgment is easily lost in a world where unfairness and even violence rule our individual and common lives, where justice barely flickers. Sometimes it can be found only in the case of lovers for whom the shelter of each other is a calmness that would “deny misfortune the power to drive us to despair” (as Gaita writes about a slightly different question of Plato).

For Gaita, love is about the “head” as much as it is about the heart. It is about knowledge more than having certain “feelings”. And it is a severely practical and worldly matter, underpinning and mandating recognition of the entwined vulnerability of human beings in a common humanity. Unless I accept the humanity in the other who faces me, the world remains in an important sense unknowable. Order and meaning in the world take form through the mutual revelation and disclosure that takes place (and time) between human beings. Without love, the world is rendered simply unintelligible: we are neither knowing nor are we known, but remain strangers to the world and estranged from those who live in it. “Not reconciled”, to use Heinrich Böll’s evocative title.

Freud noted that for every choice and action there is a price to be paid. Those, like Ajax or Odysseus, who turn away from the world and from its suffering in an attempt to become invulnerable to others, pay for that choice in the life of privation they lead. To refuse because of racism the very possibility that we might be answerable to others, about which Gaita writes so eloquently, is to turn from the world of humans. The price in that case is not only the violation of the humanity of others, but the estranged and stunted life that follows that refusal to share the world fully with others, the deprivation of the grace of being fully known in all one’s dignity.

Questions about the good life come down, in Gaita’s perspective, to the mystery of love. Gaita himself notes: “The question of whether one really loves or grieves is not far from the question of how one should live.” Not at all far – and there could be few finer occupations for a woman than to think deeply about this mystery, and to pay reverence to it by being open to both the joys and sorrows of the world and its citizens, even if I remain baffled by it. Gaita suggests that it is the very inexplicability of love that makes it worthy of our faltering attempts to know it. As the Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar writes in Love Alone is Credible, “Genuine love is always inconceivable, and only thus is it a gift.” Those who refuse it – through racism most clearly – may still belong in the world, but they are hardly worthy of it, or do justice to it.

This is a response to Raimond Gaita’s Talking Points session at the 2015 Melbourne Writers Festival. You can watch video of the session here and keep the conversation going in the comments below.