The Checkout Line

2005-05-18T01:13:00.000-07:00

I stumbled across this passage recently; I think of it now every time I find myself surrounded by the shrill, mindnumbingly monotonous chorus of checkout line magazine covers:

All that matters is that men and women should do what they really want to do. Though here as elsewhere we must remember that man has a double set of desires, the shallow
and the profound, the personal, superficial, temporary desires, and the inner,
impersonal, great desires that are fulfilled in long periods of time. The
desires of the moment are easy to recognize, but the others, the deeper ones,
are difficult. It is the business of our Chief Thinkers to tell us of our
deepest desires, not to keep shrilling our little desires into our ears
Man has little needs and deeper needs. We have fallen into the mistake of living
from our little needs till we have almost lost our deeper needs in a sort of
madness. There is a little morality which concerns persons and the little needs
of man; and this, alas, is the morality we live by. But there is a deeper
morality, which concerns all womanhood, all manhood, and nations and races and
classes of men. This greater morality affects the destiny of mankind over long
stretches of time, applies to mans greater needs and is often in conflict with
the little morality of the little needs.

-excerpt from DH Lawrence's essay, Apropos
of Lady Chatterley's Lover

One question for you, my friends: What are our deeper needs and how, on earth, do we figure them out? Ok, two questions, what do you think Lawrence means in his reference to "the little morality of the little needs"? I do not think I agree with Lawrence that personal desires are of necessity shallow, whereas impersonal desires are of necessity profound. Maybe one of you out there can help convince me of the validity of Lawrence's assertion. Nonetheless, I find it a powerful passage that rightly critiques the now ubiquitous confusion in our media of the little and deeper human desires. And it is not only the duty of our "Chief Thinkers" to remind us or call us to our deepest desires.

Love's Revolution

2005-05-13T11:15:00.000-07:00

“Love is a revolution, the most profound of all, but the most blessed!…The more profound the revolution, the more justice shudders.” -Soren Kierkegaard, Works of Love

“Nothing is more false than to say to somebody: since I love you and you love me,
I don’t need to get justice from you or you from me, for love eliminates the need for justice.” – Paul Tillich, Love, Power, & Justice

In the most recent attempt to capture Victor Hugo’s classic, Les Miserables, on screen, the personification of love and justice in the characters of Valjean and Inspector Javert portrays a world too small for both to exist, a world that must sacrifice one for the other if it is to meet the full demands of either. The scenes that serve as the story’s bookends highlight the prominence of this conflict as the film’s central theme. In the opening scene, a priest welcomes Valjean into his home, even after Valjean clearly identifies himself as a convict. After a warm meal and the offer of shelter, Valjean steals the priest’s silver and leaves him unconscious on the floor of his home. The next day, guards return Valjean to the scene of his crime under arrest, but the priest informs them that he gave Valjean the silver as a parting gift. Valjean is released, both from the shackles of his guards and, in the words of the priest, from the snares of hatred and evil. The film’s next scene finds Valjean a virtuous mayor leaving the viewer with the only possible conclusion that the priest’s act of love did indeed transform Valjean.

In enters Inspector Javert, Valjean’s old prison guard, and thus begins justice’s pursuit of this ex-convict who broke parole many years past at the behest of love’s lie. The rest of the movie tells the story of Javert’s relentless and obsessive pursuit of Valjean, the law-breaker. Kierkegaard writes that “purity of heart is to will one thing,” a characterization for which Javert surely deserves. At the end of the film, Javert captures Valjean, who has just recently saved Javert’s life from the young French revolutionists, much to Javert’s dismay. Javert informs Valjean that his singular desire throughout life was to be upright before the law. Valjean’s acts of forgiveness and mercy toward Javert have shattered his world; have made inexplicable the aim of his life. Divorced from his life’s end, Javert’s only recourse is to end his life, which he dramatically achieves by handcuffing himself and falling backwards into the enveloping watery grave of a nameless river. The film gives witness to a world where love and justice are irreconcilably at odds with one another, where they name two mutually exclusive ways of relating to the world. One cannot practice both love and justice.

Is this “love’s revolution” spoken of by Kierkegaard in Works of Love? Is Javert’s reaction indicative of “justice’s shudder” in the face of such a revolution? For Kierkegaard, the element, or distinctive characteristic of love is infinite debt, meaning that love only exists when it proceeds from the feeling of infinite indebtedness. He writes: “Yet love is perhaps most correctly described as an infinite debt; when a person is gripped by love, he feels that this is like being in an infinite debt. Ordinarily we say that a person who is loved runs into debt by being loved…but such talk is all too reminiscent of an actual bookkeeping arrangement…no, the one who loves runs into debt; in feeling himself gripped by love, he feels this as being in an infinite debt.”

This concept of love as infinite debt functions in two ways: first, being a good Lutheran, Kierkegaard is determined to leave each individual no other option than to recognize him or herself a sinner before God in need of grace. Because love is infinite debt, every pause, every calculation, every selfish motive, every falling out of love or failure to begin to love the neighbor puts all of us in debt to God for our poor love; but second, and most importantly, love as infinite debt destroys any circular economy built upon reciprocity. This means that you cannot give in order to get, stop giving because you haven’t gotten, or even worse, stop giving or refuse to give because you have not only not gotten but been taken. This definition of love as radical and continual self-giving leads Kierkegaard to the following formulation: “There are a you and an I, and there is no mine and yours! For without a you and an I, there is no love, and with mine and yours, there is no love.” Where there is no mine and yours justice flounders, or, as Kierkegaard puts it, “shudders,” because the task of justice is to ensure that each gets what is rightly his or hers. Justice is the angel with a flaming sword that both guards the boundaries between what is mine and what is yours, and, when those boundaries have been trespassed, attempts to redraw the boundary lines in order to compensate for intrusion. But this “wonderful confusion” that Kierkegaard speaks of, does it not put an end to our pursuit of justice? Is this not the world of Valjean and Javert, of love’s self-sacrifice and justice’s suicide? It seems to be strikingly similar. But are their depictions of love, justice, and their relationship right? Must love be opposed to justice? Must it cause justice to shudder at the prospect of its coming end?

I have been giving this question much thought. For those of you who may not know, I have been teaching an introductory course in Ethics for the past year. The way we understand the relationship between love and justice has important implications for the way we think about punishment, war, and retaliation or the language of “getting even” or “getting back.” To aid me in my effort to think critically about this issue, I have been searching for eyes that see a unity to love and justice, a common project. In his book, Love, Power, & Justice, Paul Tillich offers such a vision. He begins with an attack upon those who say, “Love eliminates the need for justice.” His suspicion is that “such language is used by people who want to avoid the obligations which are connected with justice…it is a clever way of trying to escape responsibility.” However, while we might know many people who use love in such a “clever” way, we also suspect that these same people use words they either do not understand or do not believe in. The priest in Les Miserables might be guilty of avoiding the obligations that are connected with justice, but he certainly is not trying to escape responsibility.

To those who say, “Love gives what justice cannot give,” namely self-surrender (infinite indebtedness?), Tillich responds, “there is much self-surrender which is the demand of proportional justice.” And, of course, Tillich is partly right: Proportional justice, which I take to be something akin to the idea of “eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth,” does limit my ability to pursue or act upon my deep-seeded desire for revenge, forcing me to give up part of what I want for myself.

Tillich goes on to say that love is not opposed to justice, but compliments justice by giving justice its proper end or aim: to be creative, which for Tillich means reuniting those estranged by guilt. Tillich would argue that Inspector Javert is representative only of that justice devoid of love. In fact, Javert’s relentless pursuit of Valjean is, in the end, less a product of justice than of Javert’s understanding of human nature. In one striking line, Javert asserts that science has taught us that people are by nature either law-breakers or law-abiders, and that nothing can change them. This refusal to acknowledge the possibility of transformation in Valjean’s life is, for Tillich, a refusal to believe in and practice creative justice. Love grants to justice the capacity to listen, give, and forgive, enabling justice to pursue its ultimate end: reunion. Justice is about recognizing what is mine and what is yours and then honoring those claims. For Tillich, nothing is more mine and yours than “the intrinsic claim in every being” for reacceptance and reunion.

Tillich almost had me convinced after I first read his argument for the unity of love and justice. Love acknowledges the injustice of others, holds them accountable for their injustice through some proportional form of punishment, and then by such punishment declares them just once again and reunited with those from whom they were previously estranged. To practice creative justice means that you must be willing to forgive those who have deeply hurt you or those that you love. Creative justice means that to seek justice is to seek to be reunited with your enemy! It is a beautiful thought, but there is a darker side to this view of creative justice rooted in proportionality. Its beauty is a façade. One line in particular strikes me: “Creative justice includes the possibility of sacrificing the other in his existence, though not in his being as a person.” Tillich’s creative justice destroys the lives of others. Tillich can reunite the estranged person by ending the estranged person’s life. He attempts to mask this contradiction with, in my estimation, what amounts to philosophical bullshit: this distinction between existence and being.

Ivan Karamazov, in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, wonderfully captures this comedy of contradictions in his story about Richard’s execution. As a shepherd child, Richard is raised in utter poverty and abuse as a savage, as “a little wild beast.” One day he is strong enough to run away, and so becomes a thief in Geneva. He eventually robs and kills an old man, and is sentenced to death. While he is awaiting execution, Pastors and members of the Christian brotherhood teach him read and write and share with him the Gospel. He is converted and writes to the court that he has found grace. At his execution, people of the town rush to his side, kiss and embrace him, and say, “You are our brother, you have found grace.” Richard responds with much thanksgiving, “I am dying in the Lord.” The crowd greets this thanksgiving exclaiming, “Yes, Richard, die in the Lord; you have shed blood and must die. Though it’s not your fault that you knew not the Lord, when you coveted the pigs’ food and were beaten for stealing it.” Ivan ends his account, “And they chopped off his head in brotherly fashion, because he had found grace.” And I hear the words of Tillich: “creative justice includes the possibility of sacrificing the other in his existence, but not in his being as a person.”

But what of the lives and testimonies of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi: Are they not the expression of the perfect union of love and justice? They demanded to be treated justly but denied the logic of proportionality. They continued to love without its reciprocation, but believed that this love would bring about reciprocation (the priest represents a similar view of love). Love was for both King and Gandhi the most powerful weapon against injustice. And yet Kierkegaard's revolution calls the example of even these great heroes of peace and ambassadors of satyagraha, or love force, into question. For Kierkegaard, love cannot be a weapon of change. To use love in this way is to deform love because it is tantamount to saying, "I love you in order to change you into an image I find lovable." But Kierkegaard insists that in love you must love the person you see, without any hope that the person will become other than they are (And this is perhaps where SK's views are most suspect: love cannot have as its telos the hope of changing its object). Does love not want justice for others? Does love not want others to be loved? No. For Kierkegaard, love wants only two things for others: that they love their neighbors and that they love God. Love is a radically outward expression and is never concerned with how the lover is treated, but always how the lover treats.

While love is a radically outward expression, justice is a radically inward expression for Kierkegaard, demonstrating how opposite they are in nature. Justice exists only as a tool for self-examination. With justice you judge yourself and your ability to forgive. It is inward because it is introspective. Justice is not concerned with how others have treated you, or how others have treated the ones you love. This is how love redefines justice and forms a union with it in Kierkegaard's thought. He writes, "you have only to do with what you do unto others, or how you take what others do unto you. The direction is inward; essentially you have to only with yourself before God." Justice says, "forgive, then you will also be forgiven." This is Kierkegaard's "like for like," in which justice is finally reserved for God. Everyone else, by merit of their poor love, stands equally, which is infinitely, indebt to God (a concept Nietzsche abhorred), and thus to judge another for their poor love is to judge oneself. If one is incapable of forgiving another, then that person cannot possibly believe in their own forgiveness. Kierkegaard concludes, "God is actually this pure like for like, the pure rendition of how you yourself are...how could a person truly believe in forgiveness if his own life is an objection against the existence of forgiveness." Kierkegaard's concept of love and justice are radically rooted in his concept of the individual before God. I think much of Kierkegaard's articulation of love makes sense apart from an individual's relationship with God, but I wonder how much of it is truly dependent upon that relationship; how much would not make sense apart from that relationship. Can love only look this way with God?

In one scene from Les Miserables, Valjean has gone to retrieve Cosette’s lover, Marcius, from the front lines. Marcius, full of the idealism and passion of youth, tells Valjean that if the revolution is not successful, there will not be a future to keep and nourish the love that he and Cosette share. Valjean replies, love is the only future God gives us. Kierkegaard would add it is also the only revolution—the only true revolution—worth dying for.

The Benediction of Water

The Checkout Line

Love's Revolution