symposium on love by guggenheim public

The anthropology of sentiments: rethinking 'love'

Concepts such as love tend to be considered as dealing with something absolute, whose manifestations are central in the very fabric of human condition as one of the essences of being human . Expressions of such a way of thinking go from the theory of instincts -love, as well as hate, are universal 'instincts'- to a monumental amount of contributions in fields such as mythology, literature and fine arts as a proof that love has always at the center of both humn thoughts and actions: they tell, we use to say, always the same story. In fact, to be honest, all we can say refers to a time span of a few thousand years, from, say, the invention of writing to the present. But theories are generally satisfied with such a glimpse on human life: we are all used to consider a couple of thousand years as the passage from the 'ancient' to the 'modern' in man's history.
Before going further, I need to make clear that by speaking of human evolution I do not have in mind a linear progression from something backward to anything better, more functional or refined. Adopting a less naive, less optimistic and, yes, more modern point of view, by evolution I simply refer to the modifications incurring in practically all aspects of humanity being induced by the historial process of change, from the environment, the process of social life, and the cultural impact of artifacts, knowledges and ideas.
The elements themselves that we choose to take into consideration as factors of human evolution are culturally and historically bound, so that we should better consider our idea of evolution as coming not so much from an objective 'natural selection', but rather from our historical consciousness of a 'cultural selection' of what we decide to take into consideration as proofs of an evolutionary change.
Since we have come so close to our scientific ancestor, Charles Darwin, let's try to reconsider in culturally and historically other terms his famous expression 'the survival of the fittest'. In nineteen-century's Weltanschaaung, the meaning of the first term referred to the problem of escaping the endless perils of a harsh environment where it had to be considered a success to be still alive at the end of the day; while the second term suggested that to acheive survival one had to be stronger, better equipped to face dangers, to fight against enemies. The same law that caused the success of manhood at its origins and the prevalence of Homo sapiens sapiens in the course of time, applied in the more civilized world of the Victorian age and justified the 'white man's burden' of colonization and domination by force.
We can now interpret differently the same expression in the present historical situation and with our cultural perception and sensitivity. We no more live in an age of scarcity, goods and chances are not so much limited but ill-distributed, perversely accumulated, enormously differentiated from man to man. The fittest in this situation could be considered the one who pursues not an individual success at the expenses of others, but rather one who is able to embrace the most of human condition, through empathy, compassion, love, being able in this way to expand his human potentialities by sharing them with as many others as possible. Making her/his life public. Fittest to express humanity. Survival, on the other side, can abandon his darwinian, defensive meaning of escaping death and destruction -a pessimistic and rather depressing view of human destiny-, to literally signify 'living over' the present limitations to acquire new dimensions, abandoning the idea of the necessity to fight against something or someone for personal success, towards the concept that realization of one's self can be reached through communication and communion with the other.
The consideration of scarcity of means accessible to the individuals and the consequent idea of the necessity to fight in order to acquire them has dominated man's -and predominantly male's- history. In order to reach the disposal of means necessary for one's own day to day life, men and women initially depended on the environment, and metabolism was guaranteed by gathering food, while shelter was also a natural supply. But soon -so the story goes- men had not only to fight against natural obstacles, but entered in conflict and competition with other animals, thus developing a functional instinct of agressiveness to be suitable for the fight. The more so when he decided to put some animals on his table.
A not too different story is told to us with respect to reproduction, another vital aspect for the long-term survival of our species. In order to have access to the more fertile, and therefore more attractive, females and to take them from outside groups, in order to expand their own power, adult males developed a functional psychological attitude of aggressiveness, while females learned to become defensive, during the male chase, and in turn, later, aggressive for the vital function of protection of their offsprings.
Let's continue to play the game that pretends to explain in scientific terms what really happened to humanity and ultimately what we are made of. The rhetoric of scientific thinking, with all its different theories and internal debates, always tends to present to us 'logical' arguments of explanation, something that can make sense to us. The scientific story of evolution gives us the rationale of why we are how we are, now, not only looking in a mirror, but also exploring the deepest sides of our psyche. By basing their arguments on the proofs coming from the hard facts of scientific discoveries, our ideas of the world and ourselves become reified truths. Not very different from those coming from a voice of God. But, then, luckily, theories change, and facts too. Today, for instance, we have computers, and scientists are busy explaining us that our brain, our whole body functions as a network of informations. Man is made of bits (and made in pieces). So, how to be surprised if man is presented as a naturally aggressive animal? We have built an extremely aggressive world around us, aggressiveness is a plus to have success in this world, now. The horrors of such a behavious are in front of us. But, we are told, we don't have to be too worried, or feel guilty for that. This comes from a very remote past, in a linear evolution of our species. Aggressiveness, yes, can be destructive; but is also a powerful sign of energy, a positive source of vitality, the discharge of an erupting, internal strenght. This primary source of energy is so pervasive that to no surprise it is told to be found in love. From the deepest manifestations of romantic love, where it so often likes to play with death, to a common way to present the sexual act of penetration as the natural expression of a drive toward domination from the male side and reception from the female side. Pleasure would be nourished by the vital energy of desire, that often explodes in a violent way.
From our violence-imbued observation point, one can look back to a long history of mankind behind these rationalizations. A history where man found an immediate reward in his violent behaviour and was then more and more encouraged to try to affirm his psychological inclinations and his ideas imposing them by force, on one side, and accepting them on the other. In particular, in the inevitable conflicts between the two parts of humanity, men and women, a too evident divide. And again, progressive, historically-based rationalizations attributed cultural meanings to these impulses. Let's only think of the 'delitto d'onore', just to mention something close to us in time and space.
All what I said is but a way to introduce my main argument, that is the extreme plasticity of the basic aspects of human psychological characters, their continuos process of adaptation to and dependence from the external world. The book of man's behavious is wide open in front of us, if often difficult to read. That's why science is right in trying to read it again and again. But probably it would be wiser if, instead of looking in it in search of eternal truths, we would content us to read it like any book of fairy tales, that is as a fascinating way to tell us through simbols -princes and whiches, Neandertals and Lucys- what we like to be told, that is how we think the world is - and we are.
In saying this, there is no intention whatsoever to diminish the importance -we may even say the objective importance - of scientific knowledge, on the contrary. Rather, since we are dealing with man, we are bound to think that to the data usually taken into consideration and deriving from observation and inferences, another set of equally important data should be added, stemming from the human mind's activity and resulting in cultural inventions. We are, now, the product of both biological and cultural evolution, and of the many intricate interactions between the two dimensions that we separate in our mind in an effort of understanding, rather being separate themselves.
We certainly have a strong aggressive 'imprinting' (I am using this term metaphorically): the world around us, full of blood and hate, is a tragic proof of this. Moreover, we continue to widely extend the use of this pattern of behaviour to fields other than those strictly connected with it, in human interactions, and to an even wider extent metaphorically in culturally-specific expressions. In the first case, we tend to behave aggressively towards people we like, or love, as a distorted way to express our strong involvement in the relationship. In the second, we use this power to produce cultural artifacts, works of art, and to give life to a set of characters of various kinds, gods and heroes in the often tragic representation of man's destiny, staged in a culturally-specific mise-en-scène. Myths, allegories, dramas, as well as any kind of ideological representations, in people's imagination or else in the social arena need action and confrontation between opponent characters. Too many plots start with passionate love and end with hate and destruction for not having deeply influenced men's thoughts and behaviours. Examples of this are endless, starting from Western classical culture, where, as Nietzche has reminded us, harmony and disorder, two equally vital, at the same time incompatible and complementary, human qualities, had been represented by respectively Apollo and Dionysos, to the presence of apollonian and dionysiac patterns in non-western cultures, as Ruth Benedict revealed to us. Similarly, our idea of love could hardly be left alone, and often we find it best identified by its dramatic conflict with death, often voluntary death (like in the shinju, the romantic double suicide in Japanese tradition), or its contrast with hate. Here is where, in man's imaginary, a positive impulse named love encounters the destructive force of aggressiveness and sometimes uses it to become manifest in form and action. In the course of history, we have accumulated so many examples of the playing of these opposing forces and we have become so familiar with the destructive drives, that we have ended by considering natural these contrasting interactions. And psychoanalisis, by making all of us little Oedipuses, has greatly helped to legitimize ambivalent impulses of love and hate towards our closest relatives, by generalizing them and attributing them to something universal, therefore 'natural' .
But to analyze the meaning, the importance and the changing role of love (such as anything else), little help comes from the often impressive and spectacular interplay of opposites, so dear to the structuralists. While it may well be an efficacious tool for thinking, it leads to pure abstraction, when what we need is contextualization and reference to a specific, historical situation.
If we adopt this kind of approach, we can find within the context of the age we are living in the first signs for a future obsolescence of the aggressive behaviour, as something no more functional for the success of the individual and the group adopting it. In this hypotesis, the obsolescence of aggressiveness would derive from the changing external conditions, social and environmental, making unnecessary and therefore undesirable an approach of dominance over others and the outside world in order to have access to limited means. External conditions would rather praise our expansion, by embracing as much and as deep as possible what is around us, to reach the largest gratification and realization of our self, in communion rather than in conflict and competition with others.
New external conditions would then promote new internal, psychological attitudes best suitable to the changing living context, through gratifications, mimesis and the production of newly invented cultural patterns and representations. The key of these new patterns of representations and human interaction would be love and empathy. But the very term 'love' would have to change his semantic meaning by referring to different cultural meanings. The term, such as we are using it now, is so deeply imbued of references to a mythical and historical past and to outdated scientific interpretations, that it will be difficult to decontextualize and recontextualize it, as we have to do now.
Let's try to leave aside the enormous amount of literary and poetic references in many cultural contexts and historical periods. In modern times, we have deeply interiorized the psychoanalitic credo that love is but a sublimation, o a mask, of a sexual libido. More generally, it is common sense to refer to love's basic pattern as the relationship between two adults, that in principle are assumed to be of different sex.
But, following Eibl-Eibesfeldt, an authority in the behaviour of the human animal, "love is not rooted in sexuality, but uses it for a secondary reinforcement of the tie". And elsewhere he says that love "developed, primarily, from the relationship focused on childcare".
The parents-child relationship, and much more so the dyadic relationship mother-child, are among the very few aspects having accompanied uninterruptedly the evolution of mankind and that are still present well and alive in every human culture. Following Takeo Doi, Japanese culture, to which he belongs, and that Westerners like to represent as the birthplace of martial arts and the expression of a hyerarchical, group-oriented society, has one of its foundations in what he calls amae, or the pleasure of dependence. So gratifying is, in childhood, the loving dependence from one's own mother , that the entire adult society with its institutions is modelled following that ideal pattern. There is no room in amae for confrontation, dominance-submission and patterns of this kind, but only for sweetness, altruism, nurturing pleasure and gratification for the other person's affirmation in her/his own role.
Amae, in Japanese society, is what can explain much of the otherwise incomprehensible behaviour of their members at the eyes of many Westerners.
This is a very culturally-specific case, but one that can help us to understand the often obscure ties between the private, psychological sphere, and the public domain of social relationships and actions.
In a world of hyper-communication, metropolitan contacts, over-production and ill-distribution of goods, cultural dissemination and intercultural hybridization, contamination of ideas and global responsabilization, there will be an expanding space for individual's expression of altruistic, public love, with which to embrace our mates and share with them a common destiny.
In a situation where any person on the earth can appear any time on the screen of our domestic TV, asking us to share his/her problems and hopes, all the people have become our virtual neighbours. While, at the same time, our real relatives and neighbours have disappeared from our sight.
Parallely, our sentiments and feeling are in a process of remodelling to respond to unprecedented situations.
As always, and always in a new form, we human beings are at the same time the product and the producers of the world we are living in. This is, probably, what makes us humans.

Antonio Marazzi