The Distance Between Us Belongs to Love, Reason, Trust

We continue our correspondence of last month, a closing reflection for our series of mini-series. Next month, Katherine will finish the entire set of five mini-series with the last installment of Starting Out in Philosophy.

March 28, 2023

Portland, Oregon, USA

Simone Weil House

Dear Sidra,

There are times when it is right to pay attention to what is closest to us, or to meet demands to be “relevant.” But your letter made me wonder about distance.

I wrote to you last month that I expect that philosophy will help me to sort out my life. I want philosophy to be an occasion to dredge up unexamined thinking or build up insight to help me relate better. I was, and am, searching for meaning and truth.

But in this habit of reading, I would read something only if I thought it would challenge or change me and put something down quickly if I felt it had nothing new to say. I didn’t think I needed much of a program of study: I could figure out the questions that were most salient for me, and then I would read around it myself or take a class. Like Jeremy commented: things did not have time to show their meaning. Or like you said: things can become clearer when we take a distance from them.

But here’s something else. It is not just that reading a “classic” or immersing myself in a tradition may prove more relevant to me than I would’ve been able to know before embarking on that study and that these make the wait worthwhile. These things might not be relevant to me at all. A text, a canon, a discipline—they are not about me.

All of these things can take me outside of myself. Think about the way to read fiction or memoir. Well, one way to mis-read them is to only think of how it affects you. Let it exist on some of its own terms! To look for a work of fiction or a memoir to unsettle me, or to pose some challenge to how I might live, is narrow. It’s often the way I fall into reading fiction, looking for some argument within it. But consider instead talking with a friend about life, not having an argument where one of us is trying to convince the other. Leaving the conversation, maybe we haven’t changed ourselves, but something between us is built up. Fiction, memoir, a good conversation: after any of them, maybe we feel a gentle pull to be a little different than who we were, but I think the most important thing is to see whatever was happening for what it is.

In my excitement to figure out my own life, and my urgency to do so, I have no time for this. I put the same pressure on my school studies to be relevant to me.

If relationships were to help structure our inquiry, including honoring people and traditions beyond the extent they speak to us, I think we respect distance. Not distance in a bad sense, but distance that allows something else to exist besides me and allows me to exist in relationship with it. That’s how a loving relationship with another person works, and perhaps philosophy can be a loving relationship between people!

I wonder if this is strange for philosophy. I know how radical and powerful it is to think that anyone can exercise their ability to reason to understand our world. Nothing is off limits to questioning, certainly not claims to authority. But in thinking that we should be able to reason over everything, does that somehow make the world our own property? Like something that has to justify itself to us, using our terms? Does reasoning bring the world too close? That’s just a thought I had. Here’s a question: How can we reason in a way that keeps alive the distance between us and the world or whatever object we are speaking about? A distance where something—maybe love—has room to happen? Can philosophy do that?

With love,

Katherine

P.S. Here are two paintings I love. I saw Fra Angelico’s “The Dormition and Assumption of the Virgin” at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston and Jared French’s “Evasion” at the Cleveland Museum of Art.

~

April 8, 2023

Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Dear Katherine and Jeremy,

Thanks for your letter, Katherine. It gave me a lot to think about as I was grading papers this past week. I found your thoughts about distance especially important.

We typically associate distance with indifference or coldness, as, for example, when someone turns away from us or keeps us at bay. Your letter shows us that distance can be congenial, a form of carefully attending to someone or something. This loving distance does not overdetermine what appears but gives it room to be the kind of thing it is.

When I don’t appreciate the distance between myself and the other, I fall into narcissism. Rather than attuning myself to their meaning and truth, I fashion the other in the image of my fantasies. Kierkegaard’s “The Seducer’s Diary” captures this sort of relation as Johannes, the devious author of the diary, ensnares and manipulates his lover Cordelia, reducing her to an instrument of his own purposes. For Johannes, Cordelia is hardly real. She appears to him only as far as she can play a role in his egotistical schemes. Here is someone who has failed to honor the distance between himself and the other.

This sort of self-serving relationship is not limited to relations between people but describes a general way of relating to the other, whoever or whatever they may be. I see loving distance as an alternative to narcissistic relationships. And I experience it when a vibrant yet placid space opens up between myself and the other and time dilates along the lines of how Martin Buber describes relating to a tree in I and Thou:

“[I]t can also happen, if will and grace are joined, that as I contemplate the tree I am drawn into a relation, and the tree ceases to be an It. The power of exclusiveness has seized me….The tree is no impression, no aspect of a mood; it confronts me bodily and has to deal with me as I deal with it….Does the tree then have consciousness, similar to our own? I have no experience of that. But thinking that you have brought this off in your own case, must you again divide the indivisible? What I encounter is neither the soul of a tree nor a dryad, but the tree itself.”

Buber’s description implies that honoring the distance between myself and the other has a temporal dimension: letting things appear as they are in their own time. I worry, though, that the frenetic pace of the information coming through on our devices which have become such a central part of our lives, combined with the ideal of efficiency and productivity that structures our projects, has transformed our sense of time. I wonder if we inhabit the kind of temporality that can enable loving distance.

How we live time changes how we see ourselves, our tasks, and each other. The expectation that things move fast gives rise to impatience, making it difficult to establish a space where a real encounter with the other can take place. As you explain in your recent book, Jeremy, wonder generates this space. If wondering has a slow-going temporality, what place can it have in a hectic life? 

Take grading, for instance. If efficiency is the sole aim, grading can become something onerous that I need to get out of the way as quickly as possible. But when I slow down, I give myself a chance to think about the meaning of the task before me and how I choose to relate to it. If I lose a sense of how I relate to my tasks, I see them as impositions and end up feeling hindered and stifled by them.

This way of seeing things can seep into everything as one ages and settles into routines. Soon “get it out of the way” is how one is directed toward most things. Life becomes something one copes with or undergoes rather than something one lives. Oscar Wilde’s remark (though it has become a bit clichéd) rings true: “To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.” To live rather than merely exist requires patient attunement. You are right, Katherine, that the pursuit of meaning and truth cannot be rushed.

I don’t want to suggest that our experience of loving distance and its temporal dimensions depends on nothing more than our own choices. It is true that we structure our own lives, but our lives are also structured in turn. I am thinking now of the many women whose sense of meaning and freedom is impaired by the onslaught of household chores. Is it really up to them to slow down, to let the meaning of what they do in all its political implications come alive? I think, too, of someone who lives under conditions of precarity—do they have the luxury to slow down? 

To turn to your thoughts on college, we need alternative forms of education that deepen our sense of time, revealing that rather than constricted, one-dimensional, the domain of tasks and deadlines, time is, in fact, deep and abundant. Your interview with Laura Nelson brought to light alternatives to efficiency-driven modes of study and the communal settings that are needed to make these novel experiments in education possible. It is a liberal illusion that individuals can modify their world on their own. To liberate meaning and freedom from the grip of speed, we need contexts that deepen time, open up the loving distance where things can unfold, and let us turn to them in wonder.

Sidra

~

April 3rd, 2023

Shaker Heights, OH, USA

Subject to the Treaty of Greenville, 1795

Dear Sidra and Katherine,

In what may have been my favorite post to write during our work together, “American Ecstatics: A Surfacing,” I claimed that:

"[T]he vast, Eurocentric picture developed from [the book under discussion] amounts to [the author] not actually having a good sense of reasoning as a loving relationship between people" [emphasis added].

Against the romanticism implicit in the book and its tradition, I then went on to emphasize that:

"[Rather than romantic mysticism,] I’m much more interested in ordinary, good relationships that continually chafe against oppression and domination, because relating ain’t like that."

By “relating ain’t like that,” I meant to echo colloquial expression in the Cleveland metro region where I live. It ain’t like that. We don’t need mysticism; we need to have ordinary, good relationships where our discussions with each other are expressions of being loving. Expressions low-key to very intense, depending on the circumstances and the issue.

In other words, I reject the distinction between reasoning and loving if that distinction implies opposition. The point here is conceptual, not moralistic: true love is non-narcissistic. It is grounded in wonder, letting the other be in their own right, genuinely considering them on their own terms. As such, love depends on consideration. Consideration structures its very sight. But reasons are considerations in favor of some belief, action, or relating. So, reasons help structure love’s vision, not as reasons to love but as reasons of love. Without reasoning, love is unfocused.

And without love, reasoning is impersonal, even sometimes inhuman. Love is the name for authentic relationship between people where each person remains the person that they are and the relating takes on a life of its own, personalizing each person more deeply over time. If we reason with others without love, we reason outside the space of the interpersonal. Strictly speaking, we lose the other as other, i.e., as a person on their own terms for whom being in touch, personally, is necessary for people making sense to each other. That is, our reasoning becomes the reasoning of a cogitant or an agent, but not the reasoning of a person. Provided that we can be people, i.e., are not incapacitated from being people, then to fail to reason with some love admixed is to even become inhuman.

Reasoning is needed for love, and love is needed for personal, humane reasoning. I reject the opposition between reason and love.

But I am not sure what this means for academic philosophy, except that in so far as one has witnessed unloving academic philosophy, one must call that an impersonal, even inhumane practice. We know what that means for love, too: it’s not just passion or lust, arbitrariness or “the outside.” Those things may just be part of love, but without consideration, they cannot amount to a loving relationship.

The thing that we are stuck with in our society is the social alienation that divorces things this important: reason and love. It makes things so confusing. Are my studies meaningful? They would be if they were loving. Do my relationships make sense? They would dive into the search for it if they involved consideration of life’s meaning, if to relate were always in part to wonder.

This talk of academia is so far downstream from where we need to be. We need to be upstream where we approach each other in some degree of wonder, even if only out of the corner of our eyes, in our hesitations and night restlessness—and where we study because we are in love.

Jeremy

~

This is the final installment of Into Philosophy.