If, as I claim, love is a ‘natural duty’, does the rest of nature love? Some creatures are monogamous, others aren’t; some have sex consensually, others rape with great brutality; some exhaust themselves to feed their young, others clear off, not giving a toss. Every now and then the sort of video appears on YouTube in which a bear in a zoo fishes a drowning crow out of a pool, and biologists and anthropologists and ordinary punters say it shows empathy or it doesn’t according to their sympathies but without much proof. I doubt there’s useful evidence to be found in directly anthropomorphic parallels.
Animals show aggression to establish territories, but that is all. There is no hatred or blood-thirstiness in their killing for food. A lion is no more vicious in killing a gazelle than a swift slurping up midges or a rabbit nibbling lettuce. [Footnote: Ted Hughes is unfair to pike ‘Killers from the egg: the malevolent aged grin’ but clearly they unnerved him as the rats do me, sitting in the kitchen ‘with the hair frozen on my head For what might move’] Most creatures seem to follow my ‘humane compromise’: they kill only for need, they respect each other’s haecceities. The earth would be a safer and cooler place if we could persuade humans even this far.
Can I claim love to be natural then? Yes, because nature is not self-destructive, and lovelessness is. Our intelligence – an integral part of our haecceity – can see this. Wisdom is intelligence used naturally; stupidity is either a neglect of intelligence or intelligence perverted to selfish and acculturated purposes. In all walks of life, but most publicly in politics, we encounter people for whom ‘thinking’ is merely a certain ingenuity in fashioning evidence to support their prejudices, rather than a path to the truth of any situation. Rather disappointingly, our education system, focussed on results rather than learning – ends rather than means – often encourages this.
The love that I have expounded at some length is essentially that of the Golden Rule, most familiar to me from Jesus’s commandment ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself’ but espoused as widely by philosophers as it is ignored by everyone (including philosophers). Jesus is, in fact, quoting Leviticus [Footnote: quoting, in other words, that Old Testament Jewish God so often portrayed as unfailingly angry, bloody and vengeful. ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself’ is some way in advance of liberal democratic capitalism as a progressive philosophy.] Rabbi Hillel concurs: ‘What is hateful to yourself, do not do to your fellow men. That is the whole of the Torah and the remainder is but commentary.’ Confucius is on board: ‘Never do to others what you would not like them to do to you,’ and Socrates: ‘We ought not to retaliate or render evil for evil to anyone, whatever evil we have suffered from him.’ Muhammad tells us ‘None of you truly believes till he wants for his brother what he wishes for himself’ and St Paul chips in too: ‘Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you’. Meanwhile in India, the Jain Mahavira says, ‘All beings share the same nature, and must be treated with the same courtesy and respect that we would wish to receive . . . May I have friendship for all creatures and enmity towards none.’
Karen Armstrong, pointing out that many of these thinkers from the ancient world were practical men engaged in public life and politics rather than mere theorists, concludes, ‘They were convinced that empathy did not just sound edifying, but actually worked.’
The biographer Phyllis Rose suggests, ‘Perhaps that’s what love is – the momentary or prolonged refusal to think of another person in terms of power.’ STA insists on seeing others as individuals and not as statistics or demographics, and not as having an ‘identity’ other than their own. It recognises the human in the machine – the little boy in the education system, the sick woman hidden in the patient data.
It is not anti-social, but pre-social. It happily participates in society, but does not treat it as the fundamental reality on which to base one’s life. Reality for sustenance, society for added spice. It knows too that a focus on human activity alone and in isolation is delusional and dangerous. It hopes that every personal relationship will be warm and fulfilling, but is aware that this is unlikely, and reminds us that reality can provide a sure foundation and a safety-net. STA is certainly unsentimental about family or romantic ties but, in practice, need not be insensitive about them. ‘Pre-social’ is not ‘farouche’.
‘We should have wives, children, property and, above all, good health … if we can: but we should not become so attached to them that our happiness depends on them. We should set aside a room, just for ourselves, at the back of the shop, keeping it entirely free and establishing there our true liberty, our principal solitude and asylum. … there we should talk and laugh as though we had no wife, no children, no possessions, no followers, no menservants, so that when the occasion arises that we must lose them it should not be a new experience to do without them,’ says Montaigne with stoical benignity.
Brancusi’s Kiss has always seemed to me like the epitome of a loving relationship. They appear as if carved from a single block, as though they complete each other. They may not be the best-looking couple in art, but if one were to be taken away, if some catastrophe prised those arms apart, the other would still be left standing. Though they are bound as tight as can be, they still have their individuality and integrity.
When one loses a cat, everyone tells you to get another. If one’s wife or husband dies, people generally think it tactless to say the same. It is understood to be a much more serious business. And yet, perhaps love is the thing: the capacity to feel and care and want the best for someone other than yourself, the embodied unselfishness, the externalised delight and wonder, the permission to expend your good intentions and sensitivities, to broaden and ramify, with the assurance that the willing object of your love will benefit too. The loss of Ipsy has shown me that loving an individual acts as a gateway to a wider love partly, though not solely, for the obvious practical reason that it habituates us to considering another creature, taking time to be kind. Since she has gone, my alertness, attention and empathy have shrunk: I am less fully involved with the world. Without the everyday practice of loving, it is easy to forget to be kind, even to yourself. Perhaps all of us need a familiar, a creature – human, cat, dog, the species is irrelevant, just a creature with whom there is sufficient intersubjectivity – not for consolation, but by whom we vitalize our own wider generosity.
Hence the arrival of Phlo. I hadn’t thought I would get another cat, but my sense that my lovingness was drying up, the nerve-twisting presence of the rats (who, according to my bleedin’ stupid STA principles, could not be killed unless they were really threatening severe damage or disease), the unanimous advice of friends, and the consideration that an older cat from the CPL might have more road-sense and experience and would, in any case, need a home (and what a lovely, warm house with a vole-rich garden this is), combined to persuade me. She has been here a month, content for the moment not to go outside but instead to sit on me whenever I am stationary. And the rats have departed. I wish them well – elsewhere.
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