Читать книгу Sad Love - Carrie Jenkins - Страница 8

Tell a philosopher you love her, and you’d better be ready to define your terms.

It’s funny because it’s true. Well, sort of. Some philosophers spend their entire working lives on questions of definition or the analysis of concepts. And this is not a pathology. It’s important. Put a concept such as love under the microscope and you see how vague and fuzzy it is. How layered. Where the spiky bits are. Patterns invisible to the naked eye suddenly become fascinating objects of study.

That’s why some of us spend our whole lives trying to get a better look. Philosophy, when it’s working well, offers us a treasury of intellectual and imaginative tools: new ways of seeing things. Conceptual microscopes, of course, but also conceptual telescopes, and distorting mirrors, and tinted lenses … we need all kinds of different approaches. We need to examine our concepts close up, but we also need to get a better look at the ones that feel remote, and we need ways to look at things from new angles, through different filters. That includes the things we think we understand, the things most familiar to us. In fact, it’s especially important to examine those, as they’re often highly influential in structuring the way we live (whether or not we appreciate their playing that role). Deflecting and diffracting our most familiar images can reveal something totally new, perhaps something we would never have imagined it was possible to see.

As I suggested in my preface, this particular book is an attempt to build a conceptual mirror. I’m trying to reflect back to us an image of ourselves, and specifically of our ideas and ideals of romantic love. It’s not an entirely flattering image, the one I end up with. It’s almost grotesque. No doubt there are some distortions. But, as I said, sometimes we need a new angle, a vantage point from which the familiar looks weird.

I start from a curiosity about the real lived experience of sad love – love that defies the assumption that love stories end in “happy ever after.” Sad love in our songs and stories tends to be a failure condition: a disaster and a tragedy. But I think there is much more to it than that. The realities of sad love are a clue that we’re not seeing something properly. Something is missed because we tell only certain kinds of love stories. Sad love can’t be happy ever after, of course. But it can be something else: something that I’ll call eudaimonic (more on this word a moment). Eudaimonic love has deep connections with creativity and meaningfulness, of a kind that the search for happy ever after doesn’t and could never have.

But who is this “us” I keep talking about? Words like “us” can be sneaky. Unless we’re paying attention, “us” tends tacitly to exclude a “them.” A simple word can mask swathes of assumptions about who one is writing for, who’s included and who’s excluded, who’s normal and who’s “other.”

For the purposes of this book, “us” means me and the people in the same boat as me, as far as romantic ideology goes. It means people who were fed the same cultural soup that I was raised on, who imbibed the same “received wisdom” about what (real) romantic love is. In the broadest terms, it’s those of us who grew up with the dominant (white, patriarchal, capitalistic and colonial) culture of North America and the UK serving as our baseline world-view. That’s a vague and messy way to define an intended audience, but the vagueness is intentional. It’s the only way to capture the group I have in mind, which is itself vague. This book is about – and for – those of us who are still swimming in that soup.

Much of the soup is made of stories. And our love stories are remarkably consistent, almost as if we are just telling one story over and over. Here’s the short-form version of it:

X and Y sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G.

First comes love, then comes marriage,

then comes baby in a baby carriage.

We teach this story to children. We teach them very early, before they are equipped with adult critical thinking, bullshit detectors, defensive armour of the mind. We feed kids this story, this bit of cultural soup, in simple rhyming packages, and that makes it easy for them to swallow and repeat to others. They receive it over and over again in fairy tales and stories and in snatches of adult culture – romcoms, romance novels, Valentine’s Day greetings cards. And, of course, children watch grown-ups, and grown-ups model the story. We are supposed to start living out the story when we come of age, or at least do our darnedest to conform. For the children. If we cannot or will not conform, we aren’t supposed to let the children see that.

It reminds me of something Wittgenstein said about rules: we just keep going. We call that “following” the rule. But, however it might feel from the inside, we’re not really “following” anything. The way we go on is not determined by pre-existing constraints: it’s up to us. We are creating the rule by going on the way we do.

I don’t think all rules work this way, but a lot of them do.¹ In particular, most of our “rules” for romantic love are created by our own choices about how to go on, individually and in social groups. By practicing love in a particular way, by representing it as being that way, we are constructing the rules and norms and expectations for what a loving relationship should look like. We teach all of this to children. We keep going, and call that “on.” It’s not only about creating the rule, it’s also about creating the “us.”

It doesn’t stop when we grow up, of course. The cultural messaging comes blaring at us all the time. It comes in at us from every direction and can occupy any and every available medium: magazines, news, music, friends, colleagues, family members. Anything can become an avatar, a conveyance of cultural soup. (Have you ever noticed how much text is on display in your bathroom while you are brushing your teeth?)

We cannot exactly tune all this out, but we can stop paying conscious attention. Indeed we have to stop paying conscious attention, because we have to use our attention – that limited and precious resource – for other things. So most of the time we just let the messaging wash over us, and it seeps into our subconscious unchecked. This makes it even more powerful: the less attention we pay to all these messages hiding in plain sight, the more easily they reach into the most intimate parts of our lives. (These days, I wear underpants only from the company that advertises on all my favourite podcasts.)

But let’s tune in for a moment: let’s pay some conscious attention. There’s more than just stories in the soup. There’s also received wisdom. For now, I’m not going to analyze or critique this. I just want to lay it out, as cleanly and simply as possible.

1 A good life is one full of love and happiness. A bad life is one with neither.

2 Love and happiness (the best things in life) are “free.”

3 In order to live a good life, one should pursue love and happiness (as opposed to crass things such as wealth, power or fame).

These three messages may sound very familiar and homey. Perhaps they seem “obvious.” But my hope, in writing them out so starkly here, is that I can begin to defamiliarize them a little bit. What might we think of these messages if they were entirely new to us? If we were strangers to the social world they define?

When you listen in to that third message, the one about what one should do in order to live a good life, you might hear some moralistic overtones. Something like: it is unethical to pursue money, power and fame. That’s what evil people do. But in this context I am calling attention to message number three, not as an ethical proposition, but as a piece of strategic advice. A “good life” in this context is not necessarily an ethical life but the kind of life that is good for the person living it. The kind of life we would wish on our friends, or that a loving parent wants for their child. That’s what I’m homing in on here. And, in the context of the first two messages, we can see how the third message makes sense as strategic advice. If you want a good life, you’ve got to pursue the things that constitute a good life, right?

The messages might strike us at first as simply discouraging avarice. We are advised to replace the pursuit of worldly goods with that of immaterial, abstract things. But it’s not that simple. There may be ways to live a good life that do not involve the pursuit of any of these things. Indeed, that’s where I think eudaimonia comes in. But, before we go there, let’s take a look at where sad love fits into this cultural soup.

Sad love is all over the lyrics of popular music. Think of U2, for instance: “I can’t live with or without you.” Or Nine Inch Nails: “I hurt myself today, / To see if I still feel. / I focus on the pain, / The only thing that’s real.” Or Amy Winehouse: “We only said goodbye with words. / I died a hundred times. / You go back to her, / And I go back to / Black, black, black, black, black, black, black.” Sociologist Thomas Scheff makes a case, in his 2011 book What’s Love Got to Do with It, that pop music’s image of love has been trending negative since at least the 1930s, with more and more songs depicting it as overwhelming and intensely painful (as well as self-centered and alienating). I largely agree with him that love as depicted in popular music is an extreme of feeling: either intense, ecstatic happiness or excruciating longing, loss and desperation. And that it’s more usually the latter.

It’s not just pop music that’s obsessed with tragically sad love, though. The same thing occurs all over so-called high culture as well. Doomed, disastrous love drives the entire plot of classic novels such as Anna Karenina or Wuthering Heights and operas such as La Bohème and La Traviata. Juliet immediately wants to die when she finds out she can’t be with Romeo, and vice versa.

This, then, is sad love as we collectively imagine it through our songs and stories: a failure condition. Never mediocre or boring, but spectacular and devastating and explosive. Not the daily grind of greyscale depression, but a melodramatic tragedy in gloriously (if horribly) intense technicolor, or …, well, black. We aren’t presented with a subtle range of experiences. It’s as if there are only two love stories: one a blissful fairy tale and the other a total, utter tragedy.

Notice, too, that these two stories have a lot in common: tragic love and happy ever after love are all about intense feelings, whether those feelings are positive or negative. Sadness and happiness are positioned at opposite ends of a scale for evaluating an individual’s state of mind, from positive (happy) at one end to negative (sad) at the other.

Art and life are not so very separate from each other. Popular songs and classic novels wouldn’t be popular and classic unless they resonated with millions of people. In fact, there is a tight circle of mutual influence between the two. The fact that life influences art is somewhat obvious: these songs are intentionally written to speak to as many people as possible and connect to their real (if extreme) emotional experiences.

The less obvious – but equally important – fact is that art influences life too. I argued in What Love Is that the socially constructed aspect of romantic love can be thought of as akin to a composite image. If you compile thousands of depictions of a face, the features they share in common emerge in the composite image as clearly defined contours. In just the same way, as we keep piling up our cultural representations of love, the features they share in common emerge from the composite image as clear features of love. These features can (and do) go on to shape a stereotype of what love looks like and a kind of script that we are expected to follow.

As a consequence, the ways we represent love as “happy” or “sad” can exert a powerful influence, not just on what we expect (from ourselves and others), in the sense of what we anticipate, but also on what we expect in a more normative sense: which kinds of love are socially acceptable and which are stigmatized or disfavoured. For instance, consider the power of representing queer love in movies or on TV. If we never see such love represented at all, we may have no conception of its being so much as possible. If we see queer love represented, but only between ridiculous or stereotyped characters, we are encouraged to distance ourselves from it and to laugh at it. What happens if we see queer love represented but only as sad?

Think of it this way: these composite images – stereotypes – generated by our cultural representations of love serve as a kind of roadmap for life. If the only road we can see that leads to “happy ever after” is the one labelled “Normal Relationship,” we are discouraged from taking any other road. And not only that, but we are also subtly manipulated into dissuading our friends or family members from trying a different route. After all, we don’t want the people we care about to be miserable.

While it makes for good art, tragic love is not supposed to be anybody’s idea of a good life. When we say that “a good life is full of love,” we don’t mean a good life is full of Romeo and Juliet style suffering and suicidal despair. We mean that a good life is one full of happy ever after love. It’s OK for real-life love stories to be sad and dramatic for a little while, as the “protagonists” overcome some initial obstacles to their union, but, in a good life, that process should resolve before too long into a happy ever after relationship.

I’m not trying to suggest there is something intrinsically wrong with the fairy-tale romantic story (boy meets girl, etc., etc., and they lived happily ever after). That’s a perfectly fine story, and a life that looks that way can be a perfectly good life. The problem is just that, if we tell the same story over and over, without telling any others, it becomes not just a story but a script, or a norm. And, once it’s reached that status, it can be weaponized. It can be policed. Go off-script, and you are made to suffer. This is one reason why our stories matter so much. Being a social construct, our stereotype of romantic love is in a sense “made up”: it’s grounded in our fictions and fantasies, and these stories play a crucial part in maintaining its cultural dominance. But that doesn’t mean there is nothing real going on here and nothing dangerous about it. The socially constructed norms of romantic love are “made up,” but not in the same way that Sherlock Holmes is made up. It’s more akin to how the law is made up. Sure, we made it up, but now it’s real and you’d better treat it as such.

As I see it, however, romantic love is not simply a social construct. I think it has a dual nature: it’s part social construct, part biology. Romantic love has a biological aspect in the sense that it does things to our brains and to our bodies. Love is in that respect quite a concrete, tangible thing, grounded in our evolutionary origins, susceptible to scientific study. It also has a socially constructed aspect, comprised of scripts and rules and traditions and expectations. These things are powerful² (just like biology is), but they shift as quickly as our values do, so love’s socially constructed nature is best understood not by reaching back into our evolutionary past but by taking a well-informed look at our contextual present and our relatively recent history.

The relationship between love’s biology and its socially constructed nature, or so I argued in What Love Is, is like that of an actor playing a role. It’s as if we took certain ancient, evolved biological machinery and cast it to play the (heavily scripted) role of “romantic love” in a show called “Modern Society.” We expect our brains and our bodies to perform in certain ways. We don’t, as a rule, question the casting decision.

This book continues to focus attention on romantic love, so perhaps a word is in order about why. It’s not because I think romantic love is the most important kind of love. Far from it. It’s because romantic love is where I see all the most urgent philosophical problems boiling over. The romantic ideal and its accompanying romantic ideology are, in every sense of the word, problematic.

Many of the problems are in fact clustered around the idea that romantic love is the most important kind of love. The word “amatonormativity” was coined by philosopher Elizabeth Brake in 2011³ to refer to the idea that it’s normal and desirable for every adult to be in a romantic love relationship (of the “normal” – monogamous, permanent, marriage-like – kind), and that a normal person’s life will be centered around that relationship, that it is the most important kind of relationship. Amatonormativity positions romantic love as special, as naturally taking precedence over all other connections to family, friends or community. The “plus one” you’re expected to bring to an event is a romantic partner – or at least a prospective one, a “date” – not a sibling or a friend. The same goes for who you’re expected to “settle down” and set up a home with. These assumptions are rarely spoken out loud, but they are everywhere, and they form the backdrop to all our decision-making. That’s not to say we can’t contravene them but that, if we do so, we’ll be defying expectations.

Amatonormativity itself didn’t pop into existence in 2011; the phenomenon is much older than its name. But a name is a powerful thing. Once we can name it, we have a handle on it. It’s time we got a grip. Amatonormativity is not just old. It’s a tradition, which is a far more serious matter. Traditions can run deep, to the core of our selves, informing our identities in complex ways.⁴ The cultural practices with which we identify help to shape our sense of who we are, where we come from, which people are our people, and (of course) how our people do things. As a child, I learned how my people do love, and that, like it or not, became part of how I understood myself.

There is, then, a fourth piece of “received wisdom” that I want to add to the previous three. While amatonormativity is a complex and multifaceted phenomenon, the element of it that I want to focus attention on is simple:

1 Romantic love is the most important kind of love.

Again, for now I just want us to notice it and wonder about how it might strike us if it weren’t already such a well-ensconced baseline expectation.

Let me round out this introduction with a summary guide to the rest of this book. To lay my cards on the table, the book’s primary agenda is to urge that we replace the romantic conception of love with a eudaimonic conception. The romantic conception aims at an ideal (not realistic, but idealized) “happy ever after” – that is to say, a state that is pleasant for the individuals involved and is permanent. This ideal is what our current ideas about marriage are modelled on: monogamous and (mostly) heteronormative, and hence conducive to the creation of nuclear families which are culturally idealized as the locus of the happiest and most permanent kind of love. By contrast, the eudaimonic conception of love ditches the focus on pleasure (or “happiness”) and orients instead towards meaningful, creative co-operation and collaboration. This can occur in a wide range of forms and configurations, not all of which look like the nuclear family structure.

My understanding of what eudaimonic love is, and why it matters, came about through thinking about sad love. I called this book Sad Love for that reason. Sad love was my intellectual spark because it spoke back to romantic ideology so directly, demanding that I pay attention to the “happy” in the happy ever after and ask why it’s there, what it’s doing, and what is left of love when it goes away. But my goal isn’t merely to talk about sad love or sadness per se. I am trying to frame a conception of love in which sadness has a role to play as something other than a failure condition. A eudaimonic conception of love has room for the full range of human experience, because it isn’t oriented towards the “positive” emotions.

I will argue that the contemporary romantic ideal tends to make us miserable. But there are insights to be drawn from a close look at why that is the case and, indeed, why it’s actually a predictable result given what we already know about how humans work. That’s where I’ll start in chapter 1. One thing philosophers have been trying to tell us for a long time is that, when we are deliberately trying to make ourselves happy – that is, when we are pursuing happiness for its own sake – it doesn’t work. This is what’s known as the Paradox of Happiness. This first chapter also surveys the contemporary context, against which this old philosophical idea sits somewhat awkwardly: North American positivity culture positions individualistic happiness as a core ideal, and the “pursuit of happiness” is baked right into the dominant ideology of my time and place. Against this, the Paradox of Happiness emerges as an important clue about who and what we are. It suggests important failings in a positivity-oriented culture, which will turn out to have analogues in the context of romance.

Chapter 2 begins by tracing out those analogies. I argue that, just as pursuing happiness doesn’t work, pursuing the romantic happy ever after doesn’t work either. In fact this, too, tends to make us miserable. I call this the Romantic Paradox.

In chapter 3, I discuss a well-known response to the Paradox of Happiness, which I think will also help us with the Romantic Paradox. This response requires us to distinguish happiness from something else. The “something else” is often called eudaimonia, which tends to be translated as “flourishing” or “well-being.” And so the classic resolution to the Paradox of Happiness, then, is to recognize that eudaimonia is more important than happiness and to engage in activities that promote eudaimonia (which may, as a side benefit, bring happiness in its wake).

It’s one thing, however, to appreciate that eudaimonia is different from happiness. It’s another – much tougher – thing to say what eudaimonia is. The concept of eudaimonia is ancient and is generally associated with the philosophy of Aristotle. But he didn’t invent it.⁵ In any case, we have all kinds of tools at our disposal now for sharpening the concept that Aristotle didn’t have, such as twentieth-century literature and contemporary empirical research. Conceptions of eudaimonia inspired by Aristotle do not appeal to me, and some of his ideas about “human flourishing” all too easily spill over into ableism, or even eugenics. So in the remainder of chapter 3 I take up some of the tools available to me and try to fashion a very different conception of eudaimonia.

I take my cue from the etymology of the word eudaimonia, calling attention to the daimons – literally, “spirits” – that shape our loves, and indeed our lives. Daimons don’t have to be understood as literally supernatural, but the daimon metaphor can be extremely useful for thinking about everything from an individual’s “vibe” to the environment of a workplace, the spirit of a nation state, or the intangible presence of capitalism in our lives.

Chapter 4 brings further ingredients into the mix that I will use to expand upon what eudaimonic love is. It begins by surveying some of the (serious) methodological challenges that face anyone trying to understand love and happiness, which I try to locate in the context of general difficulties with “knowing ourselves.” This leads into a conception of who and what we are that draws from existentialist philosophical traditions, emphasizing our agency in the process of creating ourselves.

This in turn can be applied to help me explain how eudaimonic love differs from romantic love, to which I turn in chapter 5. One of the most important differences is that eudaimonic love is active and dynamic, while romantic conceptions are typically passive and static. In the romantic framework we talk about “falling” in love, as if it were something that simply happened to us, like falling into a pit. Or being struck by a bolt of lightning (another common romantic metaphor). In eudaimonic love we choose our own way, guided by what makes our lives and our projects meaningful. Such choices are constrained by circumstances and the choices of others, but I understand these constraints by analogy with the role of constraints in artistic creativity. I also draw on research concerning “job-crafting” (a process by which employees craft their roles, adding to or even going against their job descriptions) to develop an analogous notion of “love-crafting,” which is the creative practice of tailoring loving relationships to the skills, needs and values of the people in them.

Ultimately, I argue, we need to stop hearing “romantic” as a positive description. It’s actually something that should raise a sceptical eyebrow. I urge that we move towards understanding ideal love as eudaimonic, not romantic. I also think we would do well to stop thinking so much about whether our partners “make us happy” and focus instead on whether they lovingly collaborate with us in the co-creation of meaningful work, and of our selves.

That, then, is this book’s destination. Its starting point is a conversation I had a few years ago, with my American husband, about “the pursuit of happiness” …