Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving (Love and Solidarity)

…[N]ot so evident is the connection of care and responsibility with individual love; it is believed that to fall in love is already the culmination of love, while actually it is the beginning and only an opportunity for the achievement of love. It is believed that love is the result of a mysterious quality by which two people are attracted to each other, an event which occurs without effort. Indeed, man’s loneliness and his sexual desires make it easy to fall in love and there is nothing mysterious about it, but it is a gain which is as quickly lost as it has been achieved. One is not loved accidentally; one’s own power to love produces love – just as being interested makes one interesting. People are concerned with the question of whether they are attractive while they forget that the essence of attractiveness is their own capacity to love. To love a person productively implies to care and to feel responsible for his life, not only for his physical existence but for the growth and development of all his human powers. To love productively is incompatible with being passive, with being an onlooker at the loved person’s life…

In spite of the universalistic spirit of the monotheistic Western religions and of the progressive political concepts that are expressed in the idea “that all men are created equal,” love for mankind has not become a common experience. Love for mankind is looked upon as an achievement which, at best, follows love for an individual or as an abstract concept to be realized only in the future. But love for man cannot be separated from the love for one individual. To love one person productively means to be related to his human core, to him as representing mankind. Love for one individual, in so far as it is divorced from love for man, can refer only to the superficial and to the accidental; of necessity it remains shallow. While it may be said that love for man differs from motherly love inasmuch as the child is helpless and our fellow men are not, it may also be said that even this difference exists only in relative terms. All men are in need of help and depend on one another. Human solidarity is the necessary condition for the unfolding of any one individual.

Care and responsibility are constituent elements of love, but without respect for and knowledge of the beloved person, love deteriorates into domination and possessiveness. Respect is not fear and awe; it denotes, in accordance with the root of the word (respicere = to look at), the ability to see a person as he is, to be aware of his individuality and uniqueness. To respect a person is not possible without knowing him; care and responsibility would be blind if they were not guided by the knowledge of the person’s individuality.

Um allein zu leben, muß man ein Tier oder ein Gott sein – sagt Aristoteles. Fehlt der dritte Fall: man muß beides sein – Philosoph. English Translation: To live alone you must be an animal or a god – says Aristotle. He left out the third case: you must be both – a philosopher. – Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

Alain Badiou, Thinking the Event (Philosophical Situations)

…[W]e are asking ourselves: to what extent does philosophy intervene in the present, in historical and political questions? And in the end, what is the nature of this intervention? Why should the philosopher be called to intervene in questions regarding the present?…

There is a first, false idea that needs to be set aside, which is that the philosopher can talk about everything. This idea is exemplified by the TV philosopher: he talks about society’s problems, the problems of the present, and do on. Why is this idea false? Because the philosopher constructs his own problems, he is an inventor of problems, which is to say he is not someone who can be asked on television, night after night, what he thinks about what’s going on. A genuine philosopher is someone who decides on his own account what the important problems are, someone who proposes new problems for everyone. Philosophy is first and foremost this: the invention of new problems.

It follows that the philosopher intervenes when in the situation – whether historical, political, artistic, amorous, scientific… there are things that appear to him as signs, signs that it is necessary to invent a new problem. That’s the point, the philosopher intervenes when he finds, in the present, the signs that point to the need for a new problem, a new invention. The question then becomes: on what conditions does the philosopher find, in the situation, the signs for a new problem, for a new thought? It is with regard to this point, and in order to lay out the grounds for our discussion, that I want to introduce the expression ‘philosophical situation’. All sorts of things happen in the world, but not all of them are situations for philosophy, philosophical situations. So I would like us to ask the following question: what is a situation that is really a situation for philosophy, a situation for philosophical thought? I am going to offer you three examples, three examples of philosophical situations, in order to give you some grasp of what I am referring to.

The first example is already, if I can put it like this, philosophically formatted. It can be found in Plato’s dialogue, Gorgias. This dialogue presents the extremely brutal encounter between Socrates and Callicles. This encounter creates a philosophical situation, which, moreover, is set out in an entirely theatrical fashion. Why? Because the thought of Socrates and that of Callicles share no common measure, they are totally foreign to one another. The discussion between Callicles and Socrates is written by Plato so as to make us understand what it means for there to be two different kinds of thought which, like the diagonal and the side of a square, remain incommensurable. This discussion amounts to a relation between two terms devoid of any relation. Callicles argues that might is right, that the happy man is a tyrant – the one who prevails over others through cunning and violence. Socrates on the contrary maintains that the true man, who is the same as the happy man, is the Just, in the philosophical sense of the term. Between justice as violence and justice as thought there is no simple opposition, of the kind that could be dealt with by means of arguments covered by a common norm. There is a lack of any real relation. Therefore the discussion is not a discussion; it is a confrontation. And what becomes clear to any reader of the text is not that one interlocutor will convince the other, but that there will be a victor and a vanquished. This is after all what explains why Socrates’ methods in third dialogue are hardly fairer than those of Callicles. Wanting the ends means wanting the means, and it is a matter of winning, especially of winning in the eyes of the young men who witness the scene.

In the end, Callicles is defeated. He doesn’t acknowledge defeat, but shuts up and remains in his corner. Note that he is the vanquished in a dialogue staged by Plato. This is probably one of the rare occurrences when someone like Callicles is the vanquished. Such are the joys of the theatre.

Faced with this situation, what is philosophy? The sole task of philosophy is to show that we must choose. We must choose between these two types of thought. We must decide whether we want to be on the side of Socrates or on the side of Callicles. In this example, philosophy confronts thinking as choice, thinking as decision. Its proper task is to elucidate choice. So that we can say the following: a philosophical situation consists in the moment when a choice is elucidated. A choice of existence or a choice of thought.

Second example: the death of the mathematician Archimedes. Archimedes is one of the greatest minds ever known to humanity. To this day, we are taken aback by his mathematical texts. He has already reflected on the infinite, and had practically invented infinitesimal calculus twenty centuries before Newton. He was an exceptional genius. Archimedes was a Greek from Sicily. When Sicily was invaded and occupied by the Romans, he took part in the resistance, inventing new war machines – but the Romans eventually prevailed.

At the beginning of the Roman occupation, Archimedes resumed his activities. He was in the habit of drawing geometric figures on the sand. One day, as he sits thinking at the sea’s edge, reflecting on the complicated figures he’d drawn on the shore, a Roman soldier arrives, a sort of courier, telling him that the Roman General Marcellus wishes to see him. The Romans were very curious about Greek scientists, a little like the CEO of a multinational cosmetics corporation might be curious about a philosopher of renown. So, General Marcellus wants to see Archimedes. Between us, I don’t think we can imagine that General Marcellus was well up on mathematics. Simply, and this curiosity is a credit to him, he wanted to see what an insurgent of Archimedes’ calibre was like. Whence the currier sent to the shore. But Archimedes doesn’t budge. The soldier repeats: “General Marcellus wishes to see you.” Archimedes still doesn’t reply. The Roman soldier, who probably didn’t have any great interest in mathematics either, doesn’t understand how someone can ignore an order from General Marcellus. “Archimedes! The General wishes to see you!” Archimedes barely looks up, and says to the soldier: “Let me finish my demonstration.” And the soldier retorts: “But Marcellus wants to see you! What do I care about your demonstration!” Without answering, Archimedes resumes his calculations. After a certain time, the soldier, by now absolutely furious, draws his sword and strikes him. Archimedes falls dead. His body effaces the geometrical figure in the sand.

Why is this a philosophical situation? Because it shows that between the right of the state and creative thought, especially the pure ontological thought embodied in mathematics, there is no common measure, no real discussion. In the end, power is violence, while the only constraints creative thought recognizes are its own immanent rules. When it comes to the law of his thought, Archimedes remains outside of the action of power. The temporality proper to the demonstration cannot integrate the urgent summons of military victors. That is why violence is eventually wrought, testifying that there is no common measure and no common chronology between the power of one side and the truths of the other. Truths as creation. Let’s recall in passing that during the US army’s occupation of the suburbs of Vienna, at the end of the Second World War, a GI killed, obviously without recognizing who he was, the greatest musical genius of the time, the composer Anton Webern.

An accident. An accidental philosophical situation.

We can say that between power and truths there is a distance: the distance between Marcellus and Archimedes. A distance which the courier – no doubt an obtuse but disciplined soldier – does not manage to cross. Philosophy’s mission is here to shed light on this distance. It must reflect upon and think a distance without measure, or a distance whose measure philosophy itself must invent.

…My third example is a film. It is an astonishing film by the Japanese director Mizoguchi, entitled The Crucified Lovers. Without a doubt, it is one of the most beautiful films ever made about love. The plot can be easily summarized. The film is set in Japan’s classical era, the visual qualities of which, especially when it comes to black and white, appear inexhaustible. A young woman is married to the owner of a small workshop, an honest man of comfortable means, but whom she neither loves nor desires. Enter a young man, one of her husband’s employees, with whom she falls in love. But in this classical period, whose woman Mizoguchi celebrated both in their endurance and their misfortune, adultery is punished by death: the culprits must be crucified. The two lovers end up fleeing to the countryside. The sequence which depicts their flight into the forest, into the world of paths, cabins, lakes and boats, is truly extraordinary. Love, prey to its own power over this hunted and harassed couple, is enveloped in a nature as opaque as it is poetic.

All the while, the honest husband tries to protect the runaways. Husbands have the duty to denounce adulterers, they abhor the idea of turning into their accomplices. Nevertheless, the husband – and this is proof indeed that he genuinely loves his wife – tries to gain time. He pretends that his wife has left for the provinces, to see some relatives … A good, honest husband – really. A truly admirable character. But all the same, the lovers are denounced, captured, and taken to their torture.

The film’s final images, which constitute a new instance of the philosophical situation. The two lovers are tied back-to-back on a mule. The shot frames this image of the two bound lovers going to their atrocious death; both seem enraptured, but devoid of pathos: on their faces there is simply the hint of a smile, a kind of withdrawal into the smile. The word ‘smile’ here is only an approximation. Their faces reveal that the man and the woman exist entirely in their love. But the film’s thought, embodied in the infinitely nuanced black and white of the faces, has nothing to do with the romantic idea of the fusion of love and death. These crucified lovers never desired to die. The shot says the very opposite: love is what resists death.

At a conference held at the Fémis, Deleuze, quoting Malraux, once said that art is what resists death. Well, in these magnificent shots, Mizoguchi’s art not only resists death but leads us to think that love also resists death. This creates a complicity between love and art – one which in a sense we’ve always known about.

What I name as the ‘smile’ of the lovers, for lack of a better word, is a philosophical situation. Why? Because in it we once again encounter something incommensurable, a relation without relation. Between the event of love (the turning upside down of existence) and the ordinary rules of live (the laws of the city, the laws of marriage) there is no common measure. What will philosophy tell us then? It will tell us that “we must think the event”. We must think the exception. We must know what we have to say about what is not ordinary. We must think the transformation of life.

…These are the three great tasks of philosophy: to deal with choice, with distance and with the exception – at least if philosophy is to count for something in life, to be something other than an academic discipline.

At a deeper level, we can say that philosophy, faced with circumstances, looks for the link between three types of situation: the link between choice, distance and the exception. I argue that a philosophical concept, in the sense that Deleuze speaks of it, which is to say as a creation – is always what knots together a problem of choice (or decision), a problem of distance (or gap), and a problem of the exception (or event).

The most profound philosophical concepts tell us something like this: “If you want your life to have some meaning, you must accept the event, you must remain at a distance from power, and you must be firm in your decision.” This is the story that philosophy is always telling us, under many different guises: to be in the exception, in the sense of the event, to keep one’s distance from power, and to accept the consequences of a decision, however remote and difficult they may prove.

Understood in this way, and only in this way, philosophy really is that which helps existence to be changed.

…The philosophical relationship to the situation stages the impossible relation, which takes the form of a story. We are told about the discussion between Callicles and Socrates, we are told about the murder of Archimedes, about the story of the crucified lovers. So, we hear the tale of a relation. But the story shows that this relation is not a relation, that it is the negation of relation. So that ultimately what we are told about is a break: a break of the established natural and social bond. But of course, in order to narrate a break, you first need to narrate a relation. But in the end, the story is the story of a break. Between Callicles and Socrates, one must choose. It will be necessary to break absolutely with one of the two. Similarly, if you side with Archimedes, you can no longer side with Marcellus. And if you follow the lovers in their journey to its very end, never again will you side with the conjugal rule.

So we can say that philosophy, which is the thought, not of what there is, but of what is not what there is (not of contracts, but of contracts broken), is exclusively interested in relations that are not relations.

Plato once said that philosophy is an awakening. And he knew perfectly well that awakening implies a difficult break with sleep. For Plato already, and for all time, philosophy is the seizure by thought of what breaks with the sleep of thought.

So it is legitimate to think that each time there is a paradoxical relation, that is, a relation which is not a relation, a situation of rupture, then philosophy can take place.

I insist on this point: it is not because there is simply “something” that there is philosophy. Philosophy is not at all a reflection on anything whatsoever. There is philosophy, and there can be philosophy only because there are paradoxical relations, because there are breaks, decisions, distances, events.