Why bother with philosophy when it doesn't help you live? And with philosophy I don't mean the stream-of-consciousness ramble that many steemians still consider philosophy. No, I mean theoretical, hardcore philosophy, getting stuck in a thought that you cannot shake and that isn't easy to get your head around. I mean words on a page that when you read them for the first time, you cannot understand them.
Ok, so what about love?
That squishy feeling, those watery eyes, that blurred vision when you are with that one special person... Ehm. Right. No, let's talk about philosophy of love. Which is not the same as talking about the object of your desire. And which is definitely not a personal rant on one's own experiences and truths.
Philosophy is a set of mental exercises, Pierre Hadot once said. Who is that? One of the teachers of Michel Foucault, and someone who tried to live philosophy, to incorporate it into his life, to not see those two things as separate entities. Something that makes sense - especially for philosophy. The way you look at things, at the world, at yourself, influences the way you behave, the way you interact with other people. Philosophy is not something you leave behind when you leave the ivory tower of academic philosophy. You carry it with you, and there is no other way than to annoy the people around you with your philosophical approach to everything. Something that might be annoying, sure. But it also forms the essence of what it means to be human, for a philosopher.
Yeah, fine. But what about love?
Well, today I wanted to look at something Alain Badiou has written about this topic. Basically he says it all in the following two sentences, which I will try to explain:
"The paradox of this type of truth is doubtless that love is both an exceptional infinity of existence - creating the caesura of the One through the evental energy of an encounter - and the ideal becoming of an ordinary emotion, of an anonymous grasp of this existence." Alain Badiou, preface to 'Logics of Worlds: Being and Event II' p.32.
Badiou is interested in events, in radical moments in which a subject (person) is completely changed. Such events form the basis of what Badiou calls truth. Truth is a state of exception, something we desire and which we try to find. But our thoughts and our behaviour cloud reality, make it difficult to reach for this event, this happening of truth.
Why is that? Well, we are all part of a world, we act according to its rules and regulations, and normally we don't even question the habits that belong to this world. When we walk on the sidewalk and a car passes us in the street, we are not amazed that we were not hit by that large metal thing on four wheels. No, we simple walk on, chattering about the weather. It's great that things work like that, because if they didn't, we wouldn't make it out of our beds every morning.
Love is an encounter of truth
Yet that is not all there is to life. There are exceptions to these rules, moments in which we can experience something beyond all of that. And according to Badiou, love is such an experience - can be such an experience. Love is a site for truth, he could say. Love is that phenomenon in which Two become One: this is a transformative moment. In that specific moment, a void appears. Yes, an actual void. A nothingness - there is in that moment, no longer a relationship to what was there before, nor is anyone thinking of a future. In the moment of love, everything else is forgotten. The subject that enters into this event, in the words of Badiou, becomes a loyal subject - loyal only to the event itself.
This is a destructive process, Two becoming One. The world is actively destroyed, and in its place, in the void that this previous world already contained but which we hadn't noticed, something comes into existence: truth. Truth is what we encounter at this moment of rupture, of the event. This is the paradox of truth. And the evental energy, the energy that this event brings forth, is the 'anonymous grasp' of truth. Anonymous, because we no longer possess an identity - our relationship to the world has been destroyed, and with it our understanding of ourselves.
Love is an encounter of truth. A shared truth between two individuals, that recreates them. Love is a secret that is only accessible in that specific moment. Whenever we refer to is later on, we have already lost that connection to the experience of it. When looking at it with the eyes of the world, we undo the internal logic of the event.
Hardcore Philosophy
Badiou was one of my teachers. Sitting in a classroom, hearing him talk about whatever it is he is thinking, developing, exploring, is something out of this world. It is something akin to how I think the students of Heidegger described his classes... that you see philosophy happening before your eyes.
If we keep introducing concepts only, and not explore the depths that philosophy has to offer, we loose out on the wealth that contemporary philosophy has to offer. Steem is maybe not the place for that kind of hardcore philosophy. Easy posts get much more attention, a quicker upvote. Yet I continue to believe in the long-term, in quality over quantity, in a lasting search for wisdom over easily obtained slogans that motivate you for a minute. What do you think? Do you think about this?
