Abstract
This paper traces the distinction between the claims of love and the claims of morality in the work of Raimond Gaita, and disputes it using examples from Gaita’s work – particularly his use of “decency” in place of morality – which I try to understand better through this scrutiny. I disclose in Gaita’s work the tension between highlighting love and praise of decency and I try to show that the tension between love and decency indeed remains present in his writing, but not as a contrariness of claims from both departments. Though they constitute two different claims, their mixture is imaginable and valuable even if, by taking part in it, the sense of both love and decency changes, which, however, might be seen as an opportunity to open new horizons for working both of them into human life.
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Notes
The locus classicus is Plato, for example Phaedr. 247a, 253b, 255b: aphthoniá (generosity) and eunoia (goodwill).
Historical Socrates is not far from Gaita’s interpretation of the meaning of Weil’s words “love sees what is invisible”. Socrates polemicises on traditional pederasty, in which the boy has to accept subordinate passive position and satisfy the lover. Instead of love he is allowed to experience maximally a certain form of friendship to the lover experiencing love. Socrates attacks asymmetry, imbalance of relationship: the relationship does not bring any satisfaction to the boy who is consumed by the lover as by a predator (Chrm. 155d-e; Phaedr. 241d1) or by community where the boy is accepted by the act of subordination. Socrates, by contrast, associates the boy with a god to whom the lover is in many aspects subordinate and obliged. Simply, Socrates in his time proclaimed what Gaita (Gaita, 2000) in his conception perceives as the nature of true love: “treat me as a human being, fully as your equal, without condescension.” In Socrates time children, here specifically boys, were “invisible to the moral faculties of their fellows” and Socrates notified of wealth (divinity on which only one can base humanity), which is in them. The fear for loss of the art of love as a fear for loss of sight (Phaedr. 243a) shows that love, for Socrates, is the thing that enables to see divine preciousness in the young. With Socrates’ polemics on traditional pederasty, see Vlastos (1991: 39).
For different forms of the erotic triangulation, see, for example, Carson (1986).
Calhoun (2015: 75 ff.), where basic concepts of common decency, which I use in this paragraph, are defined.
Velleman, with Kant, discerns the ground determining unconditional goodwill not in any expected result, but rather in the rational will, which is the true self of a person. (1999: 357) As I will show in the following paragraphs, Gaita seeks the true self in the “loving will” or “loving reason”.
“If a young girl is being forced into a brothel she will not talk about her rights. In such a situation the word would sound ludicrously inadequate […] the concept of rights is of itself inadequate to an understanding of the terribleness of what the girls suffers … the concept of rights is a ‘mediocre’ one … rape, torture, and other forms of cruel and degrading treatment … are not only crimes against a person but, when committed as an act of warfare, are crimes against humanity”. (Gaita, 2000: 80) But to see humanity, human rights, etc., demands more than eyes of the mediocre, average man – similarly, as in music, it is necessary to have a few geniuses to reveal music that average people do not hear – and then, with the help not of geniuses but of well-educated musicians, for this new music to be put before the educated audience.
Young (2014: 179, 184) proved that love, which “Gaita has in mind has a great deal in common with partial love”, and that even saints as lovers creatively respond to “a worth every individual possesses … [saint] particularizes the patients in the same way that a loving relationship particularizes the beloved over the course of the relationship”.
Chappell continues: “… we learn to be kind, then fair, then just, and so impartially benevolent, by being involved in relationships of love; and that as such a late development, benevolence has to fit into the patterns already laid down by love”.
Start from the beginning, Gaita suggests: “Love is constitutional for our moral concepts …” (Gaita, 2000: 14–15). In terms of the introductory words about love that enables us to see the truth, we can be more specific here, given that Gaita’s point is conceptual: “It is about the concepts that must be available to us if we are to see things in a certain way, in this case, if we are to see people who are radically afflicted in a way that enables us to respond with a compassion that does not condescend” (Gaita, 2004: xix).
For the terms and concepts of both “oughts”, see Calhoun (2015: 113).
“Sometimes, however, his tone and demeanour expressed something different from admiration and respect for courage, integrity and nobility. It was love of the goodness that he had read about or seen in the people in his village in Romania …” (Gaita, 2011: 17); “… his sensuous love of the sun and the water … In that virile, sun-drenched, summer-coloured humanism I found food to nourish hope. The physical details I have dwelled on express the embodied nature of our at-homeness in the world” (Gaita, 2011: 20).
Compare the classical (Christian) connection of the commandment to love with the fulfilment of the law – for example Rahner (1966: 439–459). An association of love and decency (law, morality) may be seen and explained in a sequence to the long tradition of the union of both systems in European philosophy and theology (see Jeanrond, chapter 6) rather than in the context of the Anglo-Saxon philosophical tradition dealing with love as a union of two or more people. Even if Gaita does not talk about the union of the love of God and concrete love (of neighbour), we can still trace in his work the unity of love and law (morality) in the connection between the commandment to love and the mystery (even if not explicitly the mystery of God’s love, but rather Gaita’s love of the saints) and conditioning of the fulfilment of the law (love of neighbour, love of human beings). Compared to other moral commandments, love (as based in something mysterious, analogous to the love of God) is the basis and the goal of all moral or law commandments (compare Rahner 1983: 70–1, quoted in Jeanrond 2010: 150: “only a person who ultimately loves God can ‘manage unconditionally to abandon himself or herself to another person, and not make that person the means of his or her own self-assertion’”).
Vacek was an immigrant who lost his mind, visibly insane, homeless, “sometimes cooked in his urine” etc., but Romulus and Hora befriended him and treated him as fully their equal, without condescension.
Thanks to his living with Romulus and Hora, young Gaita participated in the concept “available to us if we are to see things in a certain way … if we are to see people who are radically afflicted in a way that enables us to respond with a compassion that does not condescend”; in other words, he participated in “the language of love, historically shaped by and shaping the work of love, [which] yields to us a sense of love’s object that makes the love seem right” (Gaita, 2004: xix, xxiii). Love, compassion, etc., as expressed by Gaita’s authorities Romulus, Hora, the nun, Charles and others, are “conditioned by a particular understanding of what it means to be a human being”. In his work, Gaita himself has been “trying to outline the conceptual space that reveals that dimension for what it is and where it [the behaviour of the nun] can be seen without distortion” (Gaita, 2011, p. 63).
And page 63: “… if her behaviour was indeed wondrous, then it is because she did superlatively what the psychiatrists did only very well. But that is untrue to my experience … For me, her behaviour was not wondrous in the way a feat or a performance or a moral or psychological capacity to do something can be wondrous.”
I do not agree with Young‘s thesis that “the direction of influence in revelatory love is from partial to impartial love”; it is true that “impartial love would be non-existent if the language and practices of partial love did not exist”, but the same is true also on the contrary: partial love would not work and be seen if the language and practices of impartial love did not exist and were not perceived (see hereinbefore).
Gaita (2011: 40): “He wasn’t expressing scientific puzzlement or even astonishment. He was expressing his reverence for life …” Similarly, on p. 39: “his sense of wonder at life, at the human world and at nature. Wonder, conveyed with a desire to share it, was the spirit of his conversation.”
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Hejduk, T. Decency and Love (One or Two Paths to the Life of Goodness in Gaita’s Work?). Philosophia 50, 1879–1893 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-022-00487-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-022-00487-y