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ОглавлениеIs the Internet Good for Love and Friendship?
They met online, where he called himself “Prince of Joy,” and she called herself “Sweetie.” Their real names were Sana and Adnan. Each thought they had found a soul-mate with whom to spend the rest of their lives. They poured their hearts out to each other over their marital troubles. Sana, 27, said, “I was suddenly in love. It was amazing, we seemed to be stuck in the same kind of miserable marriages.” Finally, they decided to meet in person, and they discovered that they were married to each other. When it dawned on her what had happened, she said: “I felt so betrayed.” Adnan, 32, said, “I still find it hard to believe that Sweetie, who wrote such wonderful things, is the same woman who has not said a nice word to me for years.”
It would be nice to report that there was a happy ending, in which Adnan and Sana discovered Sweetie and Prince of Joy in each other. But alas, Adnan sued Sana for divorce on the ground that she was unfaithful to him in pursuing a relationship with his online persona.5
– Metro News
* * *
Facts are better than dreams. – Winston Churchill
MY SUBJECT IS intimacy, virtual and real. My question is this: “Is the Internet good for love and friendship?” Lovers, we know, are face to face. Friends are side by side. What kinds of “being together” are we fashioning in cyberspace and on our screens?
The subject is daunting. In assessing it, we must contend with the enormous complexity of intimacy itself and also with the surrounding circumstances of modern life, which have already created numerous obstacles to love or friendship of the sort we used to know and many of us still seek. We must contend also with the widely different ways in which people employ the Internet in search of “relationships.” Some use it only as a dating or matchmaking service, for purposes ranging from one-night stands to lasting marriage, while others get in touch with long-lost friends or lovers, to reconnect with times gone by or to rekindle old flames. Some engage in pornography and cybersex, while still others embark on true affairs of the heart in what amounts to an ethereal replacement for the epistolary romances of earlier times. Some Internet Lotharios are serious online predators, dissembling their identities and purposes, while others are openly indulging their wildest fantasies, simply to enjoy as an avatar the adventures or pleasures they do not or cannot know in real life. The possibilities are limitless, the rules nonexistent, and anyone can play.6
To make matters simpler and more manageable for myself, I will concentrate my attention on the more serious and sincere uses of the Internet: people looking for a genuine soulmate with whom to make a life, people seeking genuine and lasting friendship, and people desiring to find love, however we define it, marital or not. Leaving aside the notorious dangers – more prevalent online than off – of insincerity, deliberate deception, and sexual predation, as well as the sordid and revolting practices of pornography and cybersex, I want to assess what the Internet can do in the best cases, for the honest and decent seekers. To be sure, this narrowing of attention ignores the degree to which the more reprehensible uses of the Internet affect the general culture, in turn altering the sensibilities and expectations of all who come browsing for intimacy. As in the popular culture more generally, sewage produced by some will befoul the water drunk by all. But, as the enthusiasts of Internet relationships point out, what you look for and tolerate online is entirely up to you, and there is room for greater individual control and interactivity – but also, let’s be honest, for greater self-enslavement through screen addiction – with the Net than with many other aspects of mass culture.
In considering what the Internet means for love and friendship, I do not contend that its features and effects are utterly novel. On the contrary, the Internet is continuous with the long list of previous innovations that have given us increasingly remote and mediated communication – from the letter, through the telegraph, telephone, and television, to the text-messaging and photo-sending cell phone and Skype. But innovations differing only in degree may still make an enormous difference, sometimes yielding, eventually, a difference in kind. And besides, our failure to recognize the deformations in human intimacy caused by previous innovations should not be used as a reason to welcome the new deformations we might now be embracing.
To consider the meaning of the Internet for love and friendship, one must think first about the latter. If one does not know love or friendship, one will be unable to say whether and how going online helps or hinders. It will be said, not wrongly, that the meanings of love and friendship are, in part, culturally determined, and as culture changes, so do they. Yet I insist that such changes do not touch the heart of the phenomena. We still read with understanding and admiration about the friendship of David and Jonathan, or Jacob’s love for Rachel, or the courtship of Orlando and Rosalind, or the marriage of Kitty and Levin, or Pierre and Natasha.7 My students (over forty years of teaching) and I find much of Aristotle’s analysis of friendship in the Nicomachean Ethics to be relevant to our own experience. And regarding the enduring and essential core of eros and philia (and the other two loves), C.S.Lewis’s splendid little book The Four Loves offers accounts that seem to me profoundly true.
Still, for present purposes, I will observe only that relationships of love and relationships of friendship, however defined and notwithstanding the important differences between them, are both associations or conditions of mutual intimacy. To be intimate – from the Latin intimus, “inmost” – is to be very close, familiar, and attached, person to person, by bonds of warm affection and deep communion. Erotic relations generally involve also sexual intimacy, the giving and receiving of bodies, lover and beloved each to each and from the other. My question now becomes: How to think about and assess the new forms of intimacy, erotic or not, that exist on, or are assisted by, the Internet (including, of course, email), intimacies that dwell wholly or partly, or that were merely begun, in cyberspace? What does intimacy mean and become for the virtually intimate?
In one sense of “virtually” – meaning “in effect,” “practically,” “to all intents”; from the Latin virtus, “strength or power” – the virtually intimate are effectively intimate, in the same ways that human beings have always been. In this view, Internet friends and lovers are as good as intimate, whether formally so recognized or not. Many practitioners report enjoying the same pleasures and feeling the same emotions – often with even greater intensity – for their online partners as they do for their “offline” ones. (Note how our lingo now treats “on-line” as the default human condition, and “off-line” – that is, real life – as privative.) On the other hand, we still distinguish “the virtual” from “the real” or “the actual,” and regard the former as a simulacrum, perhaps with some of the same attributes, but very much not the real thing. This view would not deny that “virtual intimacy” is something “real” and really “something”; it only casts doubt on whether it is really intimacy – real love or real friendship. Not to beg the question, we should be open to the possibility that virtual intimacy, although different in kind, could be every bit as good, and good for us, as the real intimacy it simulates.
Not surprisingly, this latter view has many champions: lovers of technique and lovers of novelty always find reasons to exalt whatever is latest, quickest, and most convenient. But these theoretic defenses, which I will shortly consider, pale in comparison to those who are voting with their feet – rather, with their fingers – for intimacies online, and not just for pathetic reasons and sordid pleasures. Clearly, even discounting the contributions of fad and fashion, some widespread human needs, desires, and cravings are leading people to the Net. We must begin therefore by recognizing them and by giving the Internet its due.
Why the Internet? Benefits for the Lonely and Lovelorn
People are lonely. People looking for romance and love cannot easily meet suitable or desirable partners and mates. The alternatives of bars, singles clubs, and wild parties are, for the more high-minded, simply unappealing. Most workplaces are inhospitable to meeting someone special. People who do not regularly attend church or synagogue often lack other forms of association with like-minded people. Many people, especially women, are repulsed by or fed up with the hookup scene; they want to get to know someone better before taking off their clothes. Others are in unsatisfactory relationships, either cohabiting without the desired promise of commitment or in unfulfilled or failing marriages, and are looking for something better. Getting to know people takes time, which is in short supply, and people lack the patience required to start from scratch with a parade of strangers, knowing from past experience that they almost never measure up to hopes and expectations. Even the patient ones finally give up: they encounter no parade of strangers and their patience has not brought one forward. For all these people and for all these reasons, the Internet is a welcome ally, and we should acknowledge its real benefits.
Two in particular deserve emphasis. First, paradoxically, are the benefits of physical distance. In a sex-besotted culture, with modesty and restraint in tatters, we should welcome any intervention that might replace them or at least slow things down, placing lust under wraps so that intimacy and love might first emerge. The idea is as old and anthropologically deep as the Garden of Eden story, where the introduction of the fig leaf, mutually sewn by the newly sexually self-conscious pair, humanizes the sexual situation by changing its normal condition from “ready” to “not.” With the fig leaf, an obstacle is symbolically presented to immediate gratification of lust. By covering up ugliness and adorning beauty, clothing also allows the imagination to embellish and love to grow in the space provided by the restraint placed upon lust, a restraint opened by shame and ratified by covering it up. When, in the presence of love, clothing is eventually removed, the mutual and willing exposure of sexual nakedness will be understood by each partner as a gift to one’s beloved, and it will be received gladly and without contempt.
Kant captured and extended this point, economically and profoundly, in his commentary on the fig leaf:
In the case of animals, sexual attraction is merely a matter of transient, mostly periodic, impulse. But man soon discovered that for him this attraction can be prolonged and even increased by means of the imagination – a power which carries on its business, to be sure, the more moderately, but at once also the more constantly and uniformly, the more its object is removed from the senses. By means of the imagination, he discovered, the surfeit was avoided which goes with the satisfaction of mere animal desire. The fig leaf . . . – rendering an inclination more inward and constant by removing its object from the senses – already reflects consciousness of a certain degree of mastery of reason over impulse. Refusal was the feat which brought about the passage from merely sensual to spiritual attractions, from mere animal desire gradually to love, and along with this from the feeling of the merely agreeable to a taste for beauty, at first only for beauty in man but at length for beauty in nature as well.8
In place of the psychic and emotional distance once provided by modesty or restraint in the presence of sexual attraction, physical distance bridgeable only by being available online to speech provides a way to remain, at least for a while, unavailable offline to touch. This at-least symbolic barrier to precipitous and sticky entanglements provides opportunity to get to know someone’s soul, without the distractions of fetching bodily beauty or the arousals of “chemistry.” That the slow, safe, disembodied nearness of cyberspace can play such a role was well illustrated in the cheerful movie You’ve Got Mail, an Internet update on the epistolary romance in Ernst Lubitsch’s classic movie The Shop around the Corner. Unlike the older movie, restraint not being what it used to be, the characters played by Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan are each cohabiting, but unhappily, with someone else. In real life there is keen enmity between the two, yet their spontaneous, patient, warm, anonymous yet heart-to-heart disclosures as virtual friend to virtual friend enable each to gain sympathy and admiration for the other; and their gradually maturing intimacy, fueled by a generous imagination, makes love possible when they finally learn each other’s real identity.*
I do not want to exaggerate the kinship between the fig leaf (or true modesty) and the Internet. The former is an activity of deliberate withdrawal and reticence, undertaken with intuitive wisdom divining higher possibilities. Using the Internet is, in a sense, the opposite – an advance into disclosure, albeit from safe and uncommitted distance. But both cases permit imagining someone admirable to love and be loved by; both cases make it possible for psychic and emotional distance eventually to be overcome by emerging trust and nascent love. (On this matter of distance, more later.)
The second genuine benefit, not to be dismissed, is the possibility of successful matchmaking. Long ago, and even now in certain more traditional cultures, the matchmaker was an indispensable member of the community. To be sure, marriage was differently regarded, connections to family and larger community were crucial measures of suitability, and love, if anyone fell into it, came later. The marriage broker, usually older and wiser, worked not by science but by intuition and prudence, and in the best case was a good judge of compatibility. Looking beyond superficial triggers of erotic attraction, she had an eye for those qualities of character, class, religious attachment, and economic prospects that are more germane to the durability of any match than long blond hair, sculpted abs, or “chemistry.” Nowadays, expectations regarding marriage have changed and, except in very closed and settled communities, no one has the necessary firsthand knowledge to match prospects well. But given the high divorce rates, arranged marriages today could hardly have lower batting averages than the ones the young people are contracting all by themselves. Moreover, compatibility still ranks higher than sex appeal as a bellwether for marital success. Thus, it makes sense to proceed on the assumption that it is better to fall in love with someone who has first been screened and selected as a likely match, than to try to discover, under the glow of passion, whether you are well matched with someone you believe you have fallen in love with – especially under the present circumstances in which there are no boundaries or courtship rituals to discipline eros.
In the 1980s and 1990s, people began matchmaking for themselves, as it were, in the personal columns of newspapers, giving self-descriptions that were generally less individuating than the ads for used cars. Efficiency was improved with the advent of online dating services, where photographs can easily be added and where speed and interactivity make the self-selling process seemingly more efficient – though, no doubt, more open to false advertising and predation. A big step up, in my opinion, are the more professionalized and more marriage-oriented matchmaking services, of which eHarmony is one of the most popular and apparently most successful.
Psychologists for eHarmony construct a personal profile on the basis of an extensive, wide-ranging questionnaire in which the client describes himself or herself – personal characteristics, emotional temperament, social style, cognitive modes, relational skills, values, beliefs, interests – and describes also the attributes and qualities deemed important in a potential partner. A computer algorithm matches profiles around a series of measures “scientifically” shown to correlate with happiness in marriage, and then the computer gives you the names of persons, in your chosen range of geographic proximity, with whom you are likely to be highly compatible. It is all handled very discreetly, with respect for privacy, and guidance is also available for how to proceed, slowly, in making the early email contacts. On average (I learned from speaking with an eHarmony scientist), a client will receive two or three such matches at a time, up to twenty or thirty per week. The service functions solely as a winnowing screen, to locate people worth your meeting; it finds prospects you could never reach; it saves time and decreases the likelihood of failure. It assumes, not foolishly, that it is just as easy to fall in love with someone compatible as with someone not: first eHarmony, then chemistry – a revisionist sequence, to be sure, but one more nearly approaching “rational love,” one that promises duration and stability if not equal fireworks. Once you get the names, the rest is up to you. Should love or friendship develop, it is likely that the partners will soon more or less forget that the Internet played any significant initiating role.
We old-timers may shrug our shoulders, repelled by the cold-bloodedness of it all, the very antithesis of love’s ability to liberate us from calculating self-interest and self-preoccupation: “And Jacob served seven years for Rachel; and they were in his eyes like but a few days, because of his love for her.” It seems dehumanizing (1) to be reducing yourself to 29 scientifically tested, match-relevant “dimensions,” (2) to be advertising yourself on the Worldwide Web as marriageable material, your two-dimensional digitized self objectified and displayed in the ether 24/7, working for you even while you sleep, and (3) to be working overtime imagining, grading, and handling your received stable-full of prospects, trying to figure out – in Christine Rosen’s deft metaphor – which ones to test-drive. But once we concede the facts about our current cultural scene, we must also acknowledge the genuine benefits that such a service provides to the lovelorn and looking. As of 2013, more than thirty-three million people had used eHarmony’s services since they were first offered in 2000. According to a survey conducted by Harris Interactive and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, almost 4 percent of all new marriages in the United States between 2005 and 2012 were eHarmony couples.9 Should these marriages prove durable and satisfying, this could be culturally transforming – not least by providing stable homes and good examples for their children.
We should also reckon as a benefit, in the realm of friendship, the Internet’s service to all of us rootless cosmopolites who are disconnected from our own past or who are looking for others of like mind or with common interests to share. In my own case, a boyhood friend, not seen in over fifty years, found me on the Internet shortly before he died, and he apologized in the ether for nearly putting out my eye on his home-run swing’s follow-through at a friend’s eleventh birthday party, a blow that left his silent mark on the face in my mirror ever since. A second boyhood friend emerged out of the ether, also after fifty years, leading to an annual sharing of a meal and a White Sox game with a couple of other guys from the old neighborhood. My best friend from grammar school, whom I had many times tried to find online, located me on the Web after fifty-five years, which resulted in a shared meal and wonderful reminiscences with our wives and his married children. Each holiday season brings many welcome e-greetings and photographs from old friends and acquaintances far away, as well as news of births and deaths, illnesses and recoveries, successes and disappointments.
And yet, acknowledging all this, one cannot avoid the sense that these benefits of the Internet are beneficial largely, if not solely, because of the artificial, dispersed, thin and tattered social world that is modern American life, perhaps especially among the prosperous and mobile. Being Net-connected is a remedy for the distorted and intimacy-shrunken – even if successful and thrilling – lives that many of us connected people lead. Paraphrasing Madison, the Internet offers a rootless remedy for diseases incident to rootless times. But the remedies are not a cure. Indeed, in several respects they embody and may even exacerbate the underlying disorders.
Actual Harms of Virtual Benefits
Several features of Internet-mediated love and friendship that are highly praised by its partisans may in fact be intrinsically corrupting – not because they embody ill will or stupidity or vice, but because they are formally and materially at odds with the deep structure and deep meaning of love and friendship at their best. I emphasize “at their best,” even though the best is rare and not to be counted on, because it is the cultural ideal that informs people’s actual aspirations and hopes. If people come to think that friendship is being “liked” on someone’s Facebook page or exchanging emails once a year at Christmastime, or if people think that it is normal to enjoy “romance” as avatars or in disembodied words and emoticons sent through the ether, it will affect what everyone understands and how almost everyone proceeds, especially the pubescent young who rarely know possibilities other than the ones ruling the scene when they are hormonally thrust upon the stage.
Please understand: I am not suffering from nostalgia or the foolish belief that we can turn back the clock. But I do insist that a proper understanding of the moral hazards of virtual intimacy could help some individuals to resist them, some groups to create more humanizing forms to facilitate the growth of true intimacy, and everyone to understand yet one more price we are paying for progress. Even in the worst-case scenario, should the Titanic go down, it will be good for us to have a song proclaiming, “It was sad.”
Here, then, are six of the alleged advantages of Internet intimacy claimed by its champions.
1. The conquest of space and place. The diminished importance, not to say irrelevance, of physical distance or presence, replaced by beam-me-up onscreen nearness, with you at my place and me at yours, is a great catalyst of emotional closeness. We can be as near as we can possibly be from the very first moment, because you and I are “occupying” the same spaceless space of cyberspace. Moreover, possibilities for friendship and love are globalized, and the whole world can be fished and trolled for intimacy. People can be friends or even lovers without being together, and without even knowing where the other is. Detached attachment, or “detattachment,” is a wholly new form of human closeness, especially attractive for risk-free nonmarital or extramarital affairs of the heart.
2. The conquest of time and unwelcome mediation. Internet communication is said to be much more immediate, not only because the speed and convenience of exchange quickens the pace of getting to know you, but also because there are no third parties or publics that can interfere in the one-on-one. No one has to contend with the critical eyes of family or friends; no one has to worry about what anyone else sees or hears or says. No strangers intervene to induce corrosive self-consciousness. It is unmediated and unobstructed intimacy, just you and I. In addition, each partner is sole master of the times for responding, and neither partner’s daily schedule is exposed to disruption by ringing phones, verbal importunings, or inconvenient synchronous appearances in the flesh.
3. The advantages of “disembodiment.” With no bodily distractions or exigencies, Internet intimacy can be mind-to-mind, soul-to-soul, and therefore, at least in principle, a more spiritual encounter. Carefully chosen words, the embodiment of pure mind and reason, carry all the weight. To be sure, the cues provided by nonverbal communication are missing, but, as a result, reason and speech can stand forth in all their glory: ideas, thoughts, witticisms, genuine questions, authentic and expansive answers, all composed at leisure, not under the pressure of someone’s gaze or desire to interrupt. Each person can have his or her say, at the desired length, without fear of opposition or contradiction and without being distracted by irruptions of the body, yours or mine. Physical investment being little, mental investment can be unadulterated. If only Shakespeare could see how the Internet eliminates all impediments to “the marriage of true minds”!
4. Directness and sincerity of communication. For the less (or more) than perfectly rational, the anonymity and safety of the Internet encourage people to be freer in expressing their wishes, their fantasies, their inner hopes and fears. The informality and casualness of all Internet communication is here extended to obviate the need for politeness or “beating around the bush.” Inhibitions fall away more easily, people can be more emotionally transparent with each other, fantasies can be shamelessly shared, explicitness and directness are the norm. There is less noise from outside distractions, less constraint from public norms, more opportunity to say and be who you really are, or who you would like to be, if only the world and your scant self-confidence would allow you.
5. Control and self-command. Because all are physically remote, and because one is ever free to respond or not – and to choose how, when, why, and at what length to respond – everyone is more in control of his social relations online than off. There is no sad face, no anxious gestures to constrain you, so you are free to compose your own speech while freely imagining the other’s response. When you have something to say, you don’t have to be listening or waiting your turn. A few typed words, or many if you prefer, sent whenever you are ready, with a simple click – your offerings are as much under your complete control as are your other online choices and purchases. And getting out is even easier than getting in: all you need do is nothing. Delete the unwanted message or refuse to answer – a clean break. As one cybersex enthusiast puts it: “The cool thing about cybersex is you never have to talk to the other person again if you don’t want to. It is a lot harder to do that in real life” – a comment, by the way, that illustrates Dr. Paul McHugh’s sage observation that men don’t pay prostitutes for sex, they pay them to go away. With online communication, you don’t even need to pay. It’s low-investment and low-risk, requiring you to surrender little if any of your autonomy.
6. Greater comfort and safety. There is less embarrassment for the shy and less pain for the rejected. Anonymity diminishes exposure. Cyberspace cannot transmit venereal disease. To be sure, predators lurk and caution is necessary, especially when it comes time to meet. But while online, you are safe and sound at your computer, hazarding as little as you please, immune to danger and even to the disappointments of offline – that is, real – love.
I want to suggest that all of these alleged advantages are at odds with genuine intimacy. True intimacy requires embodied and exposed human beings, who are grounded and synchronously together in real space and lived time, and who use tacit and tactful rather than explicit and unvarnished modes of communication, including modes of expression that are deeper than speech itself. True intimacies are translucent rather than transparent to one another; self-surrendering rather than controlling; embedded in networks of ties and obligations to families and communities, rather than isolated atoms utterly free to create themselves ex nihilo; adventurous rather than playing-it-safe; guided by hope and trust rather than by calculation and information; face to face or side by side, hand in hand or arm in arm, as much as mind to mind; and driven less by the self-centered desire to find what you were missing than by an eagerness to become all you might become by being fully present to, and concerned for, the well-being of the other, who will also be fully present to, and concerned for, you and your well-being.
To defend these intuitions, we need an account of the anthropology of intimacy – an account of the engagement of embodied souls becoming near and dear to one another. I offer here some elements of such an account, relying heavily on a short essay by the late neurologist-psychologist Erwin Straus entitled “Shame as a Historiological Problem.”10
Toward an Anthropology of Intimacy
I start with a fundamental distinction, learnable from Aristotle. Liking (or the analogous erotic feeling) is an emotion, but friendship and love properly so called are settled dispositions or “holdings” (hexeis or haltungs, habits) of soul, where not only warm feelings but also good will and mindful concern are directed steadily at the beloved or, to coin a term, the “befriended.” Moreover, this settled disposition to love or “to friend” – not in its cyber-meaning – is, though central, merely the capacity or capability; the real thing, loving or befriending, is found fully only in activity, in the manifest being-at-work (energeia), here and now, of these settled dispositions. Friends who rarely or never see or speak with one another enjoy but a sleeping friendship. Wakeful and energetic friending and loving require active being together, sharing and enjoying one another’s company as well as common interests and activities.11 Effort, attention, and care are of the essence, and good will must become beneficence in times of need and trouble. Sharing thoughts and speech is silver, but deeds of love are golden. This should settle the question of whether the worldwide but millimeter-deep friendships à la Facebook and Friendster deserve the name, and whether the Internet’s emotion-generating powers despite physical separation are an asset for true love. While absence makes the heart grow fonder and familiarity often breeds complacency if not contempt, love and friendship thrive in physical closeness, not in separation. We crave that our dear be ever near. We long for and rejoice in the presence – the real and bodily, not merely virtual or verbal, presence – of the other.†
There is, of course, a complication regarding distance in the case of lovers, a complication not present among friends. For potential lovers, as we noted with the fig leaf, sexual attraction is suffused with a concern for approbation and a fear of rejection; each seeks to win not just the body but especially the heart of the other. Each seeks approval, praise, respect, and esteem; correlatively, each seeks to gaze admiringly at the beautiful beloved. A new dialectic is introduced into the dance of sexual desire: approval, admiration, and regard keep lovers at the beholding distance, even as their desire for one another drives them toward fusion at no distance whatever. The special and mirthful intimacy known only to lovers emerges partly out of the delicate need to preserve and negotiate this distance and its closure. The wordless embrace, the deep drink of meeting eyes, and the caressing or playful words of purely private import are among the intimacy-making and intimacy-expressing fruits of this dialectic of the erotic face-to-face – near, nearer, but also not too near.
Notice, please, that the gazing distance requires and permits mutual beholding: by gazing or beholding I mean something other than “looking at”: it does not objectify the beloved, but is a form of communion. The exchanged look, which today goes by the wretched name “eye contact” – as if eyeballs were billiard balls – is always an invitation to or the expression of a mutual meeting of souls. Voyeurs, incapable of giving themselves to love, keep their distance, as do users of pornography. Theirs is a one-way viewing, incommunicado, with the object of their attention treated not as a unique woman to be loved but as a generic woman to possess and to satisfy one’s own lusts and fantasies. Says Erwin Straus, “The looking of the voyeur” – and, I add in my own name, the face-browsing of the Internet date seeker – “is as different from the looks exchanged by lovers as medical palpation from a gentle caress of the hand. In viewing, there is a transition from the immediate I-thou encounter, i.e., mutual participation, to a unilateral intention – a transition from the I-thou relationship to the subject-object relationship proper. All looking and being looked at is a lapse from immediate communication.”12
To be sure, all of us lovers are at risk of lapsing into the psychic mode of the voyeur, seeing the beloved solely from the outside, objectively, as an object to be possessed and enjoyed, not as the living being who graces you with the opportunity to take a lovers’ journey into mutual self-revelation and self-discovery. But where love is present, you do not love her for her long dark hair but for herself alone. “There’s beggary in the love that can be reckon’d.”
The crucial anthropological and psychic fact about intimacy is what Straus called immediate experience and the sphere of immediate becoming: the important distinction is not between what is public and what is private (in truth, a special case of the public), but between the public and immediate modes of being.
We belong to the public in the ways we are described – e.g., by our name, title, position, status, profession, etc. . . . If we meet a stranger in public, we usually ask two questions: “Who is he?” and “What is he?” The name identifies someone in the social space of the family, of the birthplace, of the chronicles. To the question of the What of his being, we answer by stating his profession, his position, etc. The specification points to something general and repeatable. (Le roi est mort. Vive le roi.)‡ These are general and repeatable functions that the individual assumes in public. The intimate person is always initially concealed by his public figure. It is possible to participate in a public figure with a non-committal, one-way kind of general interest; but the intimate person opens and reveals himself to understanding only in mutual and immediate participation. . . .
Public being is characterized, as we have seen, by objectification, reflection, generality, repetition; the outcome is non-committal, one-way participation. Immediate being, on the other hand, is not objectified, it is singular, unique becoming and calls for reciprocal sharing.13
When we live immediately, we live on the way, in process, in medias res, unfinished yet seeking, tentatively yet honestly and organically yet responsively disclosing to another – and, a crucial point, also to ourselves – not some prefabricated finished “self” but the unfolding mysteries of what we really think and feel, and the translucent truths of who we are aspiring and striving to become – God willing, with your help. As Kurt Riezler remarks, thanks to love, “the relations between human beings can be such that the I and the You build up a We as the whole of an intimate world in which they are obliged to be to themselves what they are to each other and are permitted to be to each other what they are to themselves.”14
A crucial but silent psychic force, what Erwin Straus calls “protective shame,” stands guard over intimacy and the sphere of immediate becoming, keeping out the necessarily objectifying looks both of the outsider and of our own corrosive reflective consciousness.
The secret that shame protects is not, . . . as prudery makes the mistake of believing, one that is already in existence and only needs to be hidden from outsiders, for those who are in becoming are also hidden from themselves. Their existence is first made explicit in their shared immediate becoming. Youth keeps its secret still, while age has become knowing. Thus, youth is impelled to youth.15
In the Garden of Eden story, the new self-consciousness manifested in the discovery that “their eyes were opened and they saw that they were naked” was a breakdown of protective shame, a new self-reflective doubleness in the soul that shattered the unselfconscious being-together of immediate experience. The act of concealment (the fig leaf) was an effort – an unsuccessful one – to recover the undivided consciousness of living immediately that we human beings so rarely enjoy – save when, thanks to love and friendship, we are able let down our guard, shed our public faces as namable and complete beings, and enter wholeheartedly and unreflectively into life’s immediate and present possibilities. But, note well: the dialectic of reticence and exposure that guide the pace and extent of self-disclosure is governed solely by growing trust and intimacy, and it differs greatly from the calculated need- or fear-driven controlled release or withholding of information that governs nonintimate speakers. Indeed – and this is another crucial point overlooked by enthusiasts of virtual intimacy – intimate speech is not a means of exchanging information but rather of disclosing souls, of revealing who we are (also to ourselves) by eliciting the blossoming self-revelation of a friend or beloved.
As already noted, the two modes of being are correlated with two modes of communication: the explicit, clearly articulate, perfectly transparent, no-beating-around-the-bush “speech-about,” and the largely tacit, feeling-tinged, translucent and incomplete “speech-to” of mysterious self-disclosure. The desire for clarity and transparency – a form of objectification – is the enemy of intimacy; lovers shun the bright light of the clear and distinct, but relish the concealment of the half-light where their unavoidably incomplete and therefore indistinct thoughts and sentiments can be conveyed, often silently. Those who complain, rightly, that the purely articulate mode of Internet exchange leaves out crucial nonverbal communication do not always appreciate the profundity of what is missing. The so-called nonverbal cues are not just a different way of speaking; they are gifts of spontaneous, unselfconscious, and wholly embodied engagement with the other. An immediate gesture of acceptance and encouragement (or the opposite) is deeper and truer than speech can ever be about the mystery of self and the power of love.
No one knows and shows this truth better than Tolstoy, who fittingly does not argue for it (as I am doing) but enables us to witness and embrace it wholeheartedly. I commend to your attention especially Levin’s (successful) proposal to Kitty in Anna Karenina and the account of the speech between the married Pierre and Natasha in the First Epilogue to War and Peace. (Both are excerpted in Mrs. Kass’s and my anthology, Wing to Wing, Oar to Oar: Readings on Courting and Marrying.)
