THE RISKS OF LOVE AND THE AMBIGUITIES OF HOPE

Abstract

This paper explores the intimate connection between love and hope. Building on insights from Pamela Sue Anderson’s writings on vulnerable love, it focuses on the often-overlooked insight that love is saturated with risks, including the risk of rejection. Even though love intensifies vulnerabilities, it remains creative, albeit in a dangerous way. Hope addresses the problems love poses by temporizing them, but hope is not without risks and ambiguities itself. The distinction between “hope for” and “hope in” someone, a move which is crucial for a Christian understanding of love and hope, can help to address this insufficiency.

Keywords:

• love
• hope
• vulnerability
• risk
• social ontology

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

This essay was written with the generous support of a grant from the Enhancing Life Project (http://enhancinglife.uchicago.edu/).

1 Pamela Sue Anderson, “Arguing for ‘Ethical’ Vulnerability: Towards a Politics of Care?” in Exploring Vulnerability, eds. Heike Springhart and Günter Thomas (Göttingen and Bristol, VT: Vandenhoeck, 2017) 147–62.

2 A basic assumption woven into the following remarks is the idea that love is not a disposition but happens to be communicated in various media of communication (Günter Thomas, “Die Kommunikation von Glaube, Liebe und Hoffnung als Gestalt christlichen Lebens” in Liebe: Jahrbuch für Biblische Theologie, vol. 29, ed. Martin Ebner (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 2015) 283–301).

3 Niklas Luhmann, The Reality of the Mass Media, trans. Kathleen Cross (Cambridge: Polity, 2000) 97.

4 On the differentiation of risk and danger, see Niklas Luhmann, Risk: A Sociological Theory. Communication and Social Order, trans. Rhodes Barrett (New York: De Gruyter, 1993).

5 Pamela Sue Anderson, “Lost Confidence and Human Capability: A Hermeneutic Phenomenology of the Gendered, yet Capable Subject,” Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture 4.4 (2014): 31–52.

6 The literary tropes of love’s naivety, blindness, spontaneity, willingness to be exploited, and eventually to be foolish.

7 An interesting case in point is the command to honour one’s parents in Exodus 20.12. Honour and support are enough; love is not asked for.

8 All utopian communities which wanted to abandon the rule of law ended in terror (Keally D. McBride, Collective Dreams: Political Imagination and Community (University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 2005)).

9 Michael Welker makes a similar point in emphasizing the role of mercy in the development of law. Mercy operates outside of law and at the same time is one of the driving forces for its development – when what is at a given moment just mercy becomes a new law – without destroying the distinction (Michael Welker, “Security of Expectations: Reformulating the Theology of Law and Gospel,” Journal of Religion 66.3 (1986): 237–60).

10 Lilie Chouliaraki, The Spectatorship of Suffering (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2006); Lilie Chouliaraki and Shani Orgad, “Proper Distance: Mediation, Ethics, Otherness,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 14.4 (2011): 341–45.

11 Hannah Arendt, Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin: Versuch einer philosophischen Interpretation (Berlin: Springer, 1929).

12 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, 3rd ed., ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson; trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2017).

13 Mark Lilla, The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics (New York: Harper, 2017).

14 “With friends like these, who needs enemies?”

15 This insight is spelled out lucidly by Raimond Gaita in A Common Humanity: Thinking about Love and Truth and Justice (London: Routledge, 2000) 17–20. Unlike Gaita, we would hesitate to generalize this discovery of the shared basis of humanity as much as he does.

16 Eva Feder Kittay, Love’s Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency (New York: Routledge, 1999).

17 These are the questions one can often hear from people in very old age. Absolutely and radically selfless love is beyond human beings. Conceptually speaking, the conceptual separation of eros, philia and agape – and henceforth the designation of the three elements to different experiences – seems to be misleading. Both religious and secular welfare systems had been very creative in their set-up of a mixed set of awards.

18 One might call this differentiating process a shadow of tragedy. It is the shadow of unintended effects.

19 René Girard’s theory is all about this type of second-order observation, also the first murder in the biblical tradition (René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1977); The Scapegoat, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1986)).

20 In Goethe’s Faust (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, ed. Albrecht Schöne [Sonderausg., textidentisch mit der 4., überarb. Aufl. von Bd. 7/1 der Goethe-Ausg. des Dt. Klassiker-Verl. ed.] (Darmstadt: Wiss. Buchges., 1999)) the eternal moment can be read in two ways. It can be interpreted as the exclusion of any extension of time. It is the intensification of time, the ecstatic moment. At the same time, it can be interpreted as the total extension of time, because this moment is supposed to last for ever and to remain.

21 This is always an open experiment, in which the past is permanently rewritten. Think about divorce counselling, where the most puzzling question often is: if the shared life was always so terrible then why did the couple not stop it in the first place and why did they stay together so long?

22 Even forms of highly selfless love do not remain in the sphere of emotion and contemplation but try to shape reality by interventions.

23 Even contractual relationships – be they real or fictitious ones as in social theories or theories of justice – share this moment of selectivity as a basis of their efficiency and reality. Even if we follow Luke Brunning’s plea for seriously analysing the phenomenon of polyamory, the dividing line of selectivity is only shifted. Polyamorous relationships among finite human beings are still based on acts of “discrimination” (Luke Brunning, “The Distinctiveness of Polyamory,” Journal of Applied Philosophy (2016): doi:10.1111/japp.12240; accessed 10 June 2019).

24 In Friedrich Schleiermacher’s eschatology this notion of inclusion leads – against Thomas Aquinas’ joy about the suffering crowd in hell – to an utterly empty hell. As long as the believers would enjoy the pain of the non-believers in hell their own love would not and could not be perfected (Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, trans. J.S. Stewart and H.R. Mackintosh (Edinburgh: Clark, 1999) section 163).

25 On second-order observation: Niklas Luhmann, Social Systems, trans. John Bednarz Jr with Dirk Baecker (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995); “Deconstruction as Second-Order Observing,” New Literary History 24.4 (1993): 763–82.

26 Exemplary is Rowan Williams, The Tragic Imagination (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2016).

27 One of these necessary utopias is a thick understanding of human rights. Jürgen Habermas spells out their utopian character in “The Concept of Human Dignity and the Realistic Utopia of Human Rights,” Metaphilosophy 41.4 (2010): 464–80. With a more pessimistic undertone: Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA: Belknap P of Harvard UP, 2010).

28 This is explored lucidly by Paul S. Fiddes, The Creative Suffering of God (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988).

29 Pamela Sue Anderson, “Postmodern Theology,” The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Religion, 2nd ed., eds. Chad V. Meister and Paul Copan (London and New York: Routledge, 2013) 569–80.