I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Tuesday Book Club, I share an idea from a book.
On Day 19, I offered an answer to the question why are we here? And my answer was: love.
Philosopher Søren Kierkegaard examined this same question: what does it mean to be a human being? And, how are we to reach our highest purpose as human beings? His work may offer a refinement of the answer: we are here to learn how to love.
Kierkegaard wrote his book Fear and Trembling (1843), about the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac, partly as a critique of Danish theologian Hans Lassen Martensen’s Hegelianianism.
In Philosopher of the Heart: The Restless Life of Søren Kierkegaard, biographer Clare Carlisle writes that Kierkegaard disliked Martensen and his importation of second-hand German idealism into Denmark. And he disagreed with the Hegelian idea that the individual human is subsumed under a great march of history and spirit:
Martensen claims that Hegel’s philosophy elucidates the truth of Christian teachings, and embraces Hegel’s ambition to show how this truth unfolded over centuries, through the progress of history. But Kierkegaard will argue that this devalues faith, and that the most essential truth unfolds within each human heart over the course of a lifetime – for love, the essence of God and the longing of every soul, is the deepest truth of Christianity. Learning to love is a new task for each individual: ‘Whatever one generation learns from another, no generation learns the genuinely human from a previous one. No generation has learned to love from another; no generation can begin at any other point than at the beginning, no later generation has a shorter task than the previous one, and if someone here is unwilling to abide with love like those previous generations but wants to go further, then that is only foolish and idle talk.’
The idea I want to write about today is that “learning to love is a new task for each individual.” And I want to propose that learning to love is the most important task for each individual.
Children learn to love through their own unique stories and paths. One child might have a teacher who sees what she needs and provides it to her out of generous unconditional care. Another might experience it through the attention of a loving aunt or uncle who sees them without demands, unlike parents, who almost always put some expectations onto their children.
My children learned part of the truth of how to love through the dogs my ex-husband and I raised with them. Black german shepherd Smokey and pointer mix Lucy were constant companions to them both before and after the divorce. Through their relationships with the dogs, my children learned unconditional loving, meeting someone where they are, allowing for and acknowledging otherness, and the deep care one can find in a loving relationship, even with an animal (perhaps especially with an animal).
In my own life I see my own attempts at learning to love and how they drove the arc of my life. The hinge point of my life was my divorce: there was the before, and there was the after, and I was changed and transformed from the before to the after (but only through many years’ time and much struggle and suffering).
Before, I hardly knew how to love. Yes, I said “I love you” to people. I participated in a long marriage with someone I called, at the time, love of my life. I cared for and loved my children, and my sisters, and my parents, but not in the same way I am able to now.
I watched my father learn to love only after his divorce from my mother. It was like he had been in a dream before that and didn’t know what real love could be: nontransactional, generous, and day-to-day.
I experienced something very similar. My attempts at love in the before were prosaic, self-centered, transactional. In the after I had to learn a new way to love: mystical, other-oriented, unconditional.
Sometimes I’ve asked myself, “Is there progress in life or are we doomed to spiral, repeating mistakes in different ways again and again? or worse to take some random walk through life, sometimes doing better, sometimes worse, until we die?”
I like to think there is progress in life, even though it repeats itself, that as we come back again and again to choices that resonate with choices and happenings from our past, we always have the chance to choose better.
Perhaps these repetitions, the spirals, are life’s way of introducing again and again the need to learn to love. You don’t learn it in one lesson. You keep confronting again and again the need for compassion and the requirement that you set down your ego if you are to truly show love.
In Byung-Chul Han’s achievement society, the demand is that each person drive their self to greater and greater external material success. What would a society look like if it were based around learning to love?
Not surprisingly, I might look to female philosophers to draw this out. It was Simone de Beauvoir who added the requirement to existentialism that not only should you ensure you act out of freedom, you should also ensure that other people can. Women, because of motherhood and because society demands they show care, tend to recognize the important of care and love and actions taken for others sometimes more than men can.
Carol Gilligan’s 1982 book In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development critiqued existing theories of morality for their lack of attention to relationship, responsiveness, and interdependence vs. autonomy and mastery. Her approach serves as a counter to Han’s burnout culture. Instead of self-optimization, the point of life becomes mutual flourishing.
In her book Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (1984), feminist philosopher and educator Nel Noddings proposes that our ethics should be based on caring. Noddings believed that education should be about learning to become more relationallly capable, not higher performance in the achievement realm.
This changes the frame of what I’m writing about a little. Perhaps what needs to be learned is not merely to love but to care for one another. In Noddings formulation, caring is an active exchange in which the carer must exhibit engrossment (thinking about someone so as to gain an understanding of them) and motivational displacement (directing their motivations towards what the cared-for needs). Then the cared-for must respond in some way, so that the caring exchange is completed.
As an almost trivial example, I think of when Lucy the pointer mix would settle into a chair or a bed to sleep. Sometimes she would scratch around on the cushion to try to make a nest. One of my children would notice, and would go find a blanket for her and wrap her up. And then Lucy would grumble in satisfaction. This experience gave my children some of their first experiences of caring for another, and the satisfaction that comes with it.
I’m glad to have wound my way around back to Noddings’ work, via Kierkegaard.
It saddens me that Kierkegaard died young and perhaps without experiencing a progressively more advanced understanding of what love and care looks like as a person ages. He was focused on religiosity in his 30s and 40s and then died.
Today I feel grateful that I have a chance to keep developing my own abilities to love and care as my life proceeds onwards.