part0019

Some of the great existentialists are famous for their many love affairs. Nonetheless, as you might guess, the existentialists’ view of so-called romantic love is far from romantic. To begin with, in believing that there are no abstract, metaphysical essences, that nothing exists beyond particular things, they do not believe in love as a kind of power or force that exists in its own right. ‘Love is in the air’ is not a phrase that existentialists can allow themselves to take literally. Love is not a thing but a deep desire for total unity with a particular Other, a desire to be loved by a particular Other. The existentialists argue that the ideal of love, total unity with the Other, is doomed to fail.

Actually, whether or not you think the existentialists’ view of love is romantic depends on what your idea of romance is. If your idea of romance is Valentine’s Day love-hearts and kisses, soft tone candlelit dinners for two, big cuddly toys and walking hand in hand along the beach at sunset, then it isn’t romantic. If your idea of romance is somewhat more gothic and stormy, full of heartache, yearning and the thwarted desire to possess; breaking up, making up and breaking up again, tears before bedtime and tears in the rain, then maybe it is romantic.

So, romantic or erotic love is essentially Other related, and it is as an aspect of being-for-others, as considered in Chapter 12, that existentialists explore the phenomenon. The key question for them is: ‘Why does the lover want to be loved?’ To understand why it is that the lover wants to be loved is to understand what love is.

As you will know from your own experience, or from books and films in which the amorous tyrant imprisons her beloved, uneasily insisting, ‘You will learn to love me’, the lover is not satisfied with the mere physical possession of the Other. The lover may have contrived to have the Other physically close to her at all times, but if the lover does not possess the consciousness of the Other, if the Other does not choose to direct his consciousness towards the lover in a particular way, the lover will be deeply dissatisfied.

In desiring to possess the consciousness of the Other the lover does not want to enslave the Other. She does not want to possess a robot-thing whose passions flow mechanically in her direction, but a genuine Other who chooses at each moment to be possessed by her. The lover wants to be loved because she wants to possess the freedom of the Other. Not as an enslaved freedom that would no longer be a freedom, but as a freedom that remains free even though it is possessed, precisely because it continually chooses itself as possessed.

It is important to the lover that the choice to be possessed be constantly renewed by the Other. The lover will be dissatisfied with a love that continues to be given simply through loyalty to an oath, for example. Lovers are insecure and repeatedly demand pledges of love, yet lovers are nonetheless irritated by pledges because they want love to be determined by nothing but the freedom of the Other. The lover does not in fact even want to deliberately cause the Other to love her because a love that is deliberately caused by her is a love determined by something other than the freedom of the Other. Ideally, the lover wants to be loved by a freedom that is no longer free, not because this freedom has been enslaved or causally determined but because it continually enslaves itself and wills its own captivity.

Although lovers may pretend to a vast and noble unselfishness – ‘I’ll be there if you find you ever need me’ – they are nothing if not demanding. In wanting to possess the Other the lover wants to be nothing less than the whole world for the Other. She wants to be the meaning and purpose of the Other’s world, that around which and for which the Other’s entire world is ordered. The lover wants to be an object for the Other, but not the object that she is for those who do not love her, a mere being-in-the-midst-of-the-world alongside other objects, but a sacred object that symbolises the entire world for the Other and in which the freedom of the Other consents to lose itself.

The lover wants to be chosen as the limit of the Other’s transcendence. She wants to be that towards which the Other transcends the entire world, without ever being that which the Other transcends. Ultimately, the lover wants to cease being a contingent and indeterminate person, subject to her own shifting evaluations and the evaluations of those who transcend her, and instead assume for herself the absolute, untranscendable value she believes she would have for the Other if only the Other chose to love her.

Romantic love is doomed, according to the existentialists, because what the lover wants is ultimately unachievable. It is impossible for the lover to possess the freedom of the Other while the Other remains free, because as soon as the Other loves the lover he experiences her as a subject and himself as an object confronted by her subjectivity. The lover wants to possess the transcendence of the Other as a transcendence while at the same time transcending it, but in taking possession of the transcendence of the Other she will inevitably negate it and reduce it to a facticity. Transcendence is always the transcendence of facticity. The lover can only transcend the Other as a facticity and not as a transcendence.

In seeking to take possession of the transcendence of the Other the lover runs the risk of being possessed by the transcendence of the Other, of being reduced to a facticity herself. The lover wants the freedom of the Other to elevate her to an absolute value, but she is playing with fire in that the freedom of the Other may suddenly look upon her with contempt or indifference and reduce her to an object amongst other objects.

It is important to stress that the lover is Other for the Other and that everything that has been said of the lover applies to the Other as well. The lover desires the Other to love her and thereby make her an absolute value. But if the Other loves the lover it is only because he wants her to make him an absolute value. Conflict, the essence of all human relationships according to some existentialists, is inevitable. To love is to want to be loved, so when one person loves another she does not in fact want, as the Other wants her to, to make the Other an absolute value. Instead, her love consists of wanting the Other to make her an absolute value.

The conclusion the existentialists draw about romantic love is that far from being the fine and generous emotion that it is often portrayed as, it is at heart the demand to be loved . Quite simply, as a pure demand, love can never supply what is demanded of it. The same dimensions and tensions manifest in romantic love are also manifest in what often constitutes the core of romantic love, namely sexual desire . Sexual desire is the theme of the next chapter. For now, I want to focus on that other great human passion, hatred .

Like romantic love and sexual desire, hatred is essentially Other related, it is yet another aspect of our being-for-others. The existentialists argue that any act on the part of the Other that puts a person in the state of being subject to the freedom and transcendence of the Other can arouse hatred. A person who is subjected to cruelty is likely to respond with hatred, but a person who is shown kindness may also respond with hatred rather than the expected gratitude. Both cruel acts and kind acts, in subjecting a person to the freedom of the Other, prevent that person from ignoring the Other.

Love, sexual desire, even masochism and sadism (see Chapter 15), aim at some form of union with the Other. Hatred, on the other hand, is the abandonment of any attempt to realise union with the Other. The person who hates does not want her freedom to be a transcendence of the Other, she wants to be free of the Other in a world where the Other does not exist. To hate is to pursue the death of the Other. This is not to say that hatred must involve actively plotting the death of the Other and usually it does not, otherwise murder would be far more common than it is. Rather, the person who hates seeks to realise for herself a world in which the hated Other does not feature and has no past, present or future significance. To hate is to want the death of the Other, but moreover it is to want that the Other had never existed in the first place.

Hatred should not be confused with contempt. Not least, there is often humour in contempt as displayed by ridicule. But hate, though it often struggles to disguise itself as contempt by pretending to laugh at the Other, takes the Other very seriously and is not at all amused. Hate does not abase the Other and to hate is not to have contempt for some particular aspect of the Other, such as his appearance. To hate is to resent the existence of the Other in general, with a certain grudging respect. Nietzsche writes: ‘One does not hate so long as one continues to rate low, but only when one has come to rate equal or higher’ (Beyond Good and Evil , 173, p. 179).

To hate the Other is to perceive him as an object, but the Other as a hate-object remains nonetheless an object haunted by a transcendence that the person who hates him prefers not to think about or acknowledge. This avoided transcendence lurks as a potential threat to the freedom of the person who hates. It threatens to alienate her and the hatred by means of which she strives to be free of the Other.

In hating, the person who hates strives to be free of the Other, strives to inhabit a world in which the Other does not exist and has never existed as a free transcendence. But the very fact that she hates the Other implies that she recognises the freedom of the Other. Hatred strives to deny the freedom of the Other by projecting the non-existence of the Other, but precisely because hatred is a striving to deny the Other it is an implicit affirmation of the Other.

Consistent with this analysis of hatred is the view that hatred fuels itself in so far as this implicit affirmation of the Other is given grudgingly and is therefore resented. She hates the Other all the more because her hatred of him obliges her to recognise his freedom. She blames the Other for the fact that her hatred of him cannot be the pure denial of him she wishes it to be.

Hatred fails as an attempt to abolish the Other because it cannot help being an implicit affirmation of the Other. Even if the hated Other dies or is killed by her he is not thereby abolished for her. Death does not make it that the Other had never existed, and for her hatred even to attempt to triumph in the death of the Other requires her to recognise that he has existed. She desires the death of the hated Other in order to be free of him, but with his death what she was for him becomes fixed in a past that she is as having-been-it. The fact that she cannot influence what she was for the Other once he is dead means that he continues to alienate her and to get the better of her from his grave.

Hatred is hatred of the Other as Other. As the hatred of otherness hatred is, arguably, hatred of all others in one Other. Hate is a person’s revolt against her being-for-others in general. However, even if a person could entirely suppress or destroy all others, as tyrants attempt to do, she would not thereby reclaim her being-for-others or free herself from others. Once a person has been for others she will be forever haunted by her awareness that being-for-others is a permanent possibility of her being. To have been for-others is to have to be for-others for life.

It is worth noting that existentialists identify a further attitude towards other people that involves neither love nor hate. This attitude is indifference . Indifference is worth exploring in a chapter about love and hate because it provides an interesting contrast with love and hate that serves to shed further light upon them and upon the phenomenon of being-for-others in general. The overall conclusion, as you will see, is that it is far better to love or even to hate other people than to be indifferent towards them. To be indifferent is to be truly isolated and more or less dead inside.

The indifferent person is wilfully blind to the being of the Other as a transcendence and thereby to her own being-for-others. The indifferent person does in fact comprehend that the Other exists and that she is a being for the Other, but she practices evading this comprehension through a blindness maintained in bad faith. That is, she does not suffer her blindness as a state, she continually makes herself blind. She practices a sort of solipsism , acting as if she were alone in the world. ‘Solipsism’ is derived from the Latin words ‘so¯ lus’ (alone) and ‘ipse’ (self). ‘Solipsism’ literally means self-alone-ism . It is the philosophical theory that one’s own mind is the only thing that exists.

She engages with the Other as an instrument or avoids the Other as an obstacle, recognising only the Other’s function or lack of function. She refuses to imagine that the Other can look at her, that she can be an object for the Other’s subjectivity, that the Other can render her a transcendence-transcended. She looks at the Other’s look only as a modification of the mechanism that the Other is for her, as something that expresses what the Other is rather than what she is for the Other. She certainly does not look at the Other’s look to stare the Other down and render him a transcendence-transcended. She has perfected a studied indifference towards the transcendence of the Other and has no interest in a battle of wills with the Other.

The indifferent person appears to have discovered a way of no longer being threatened by the Other’s transcendence, but in fact it is because she is so threatened by the Other’s transcendence that she persists in her indifference. As she is indifferent to the Other, she cannot be shy, timid or embarrassed before the Other, and so comes across as self-confident. But her self-confidence is not a confidence before the Other as Other – she will not allow the Other to exist for her in that way. It is rather a confidence in her practiced ability to manage the instrument or obstacle that the Other is for her.

Indifference, then, is premised upon a deep insecurity and involves a profound isolation. The indifferent person is alienated by her alienation of the Other. In cutting herself off from the Other she is cut off from what she could be for the Other and from what the Other could make her be.

Her indifference to the transcendence of the Other means that she can neither transcend the Other’s transcendence to become a subject for the Other, or be transcended by the transcendence of the Other to become an object for the Other. She can only be the unjustifiable subjectivity that she is for herself. She is stuck with herself, unable to find any relief from her ambiguity, indeterminacy and contingency in what the Other makes of her, in the evaluations he imposes on her.

Sartre, as seen, famously argues that ‘Hell is other people’ (In Camera , p. 223), meaning that it is hell to exist for the Other and to be at the mercy of the Other’s judgements. This analysis of indifference, however, which Sartre fully endorses, recognises the deeper hell of refusing to exist for the Other and of isolating oneself in one’s own subjectivity.

Being-for-others is undoubtedly a source of distress, but it is also a source of solace and pleasure. Only by acknowledging the existence of the Other, and in so doing her existence for the Other, can a person feel proud or flattered, for example. In allowing herself to be reduced to an object by the Other’s look she may be pleased to discover that she is a pleasant or fascinating object for the Other and so on. The Other is a source of positive as well as negative evaluations, but the Other cannot be a source of any evaluations unless his otherness is admitted.