On For The Love Of
‘What can we know enough to love?’
It’s been 4 or so years since I first started talking to myself this way. I’ve yet to find out whether it’s a funny angle I fell into drunk on a nightmarish cocktail of online and classical rationalism or the real heart of philosophy. It was, in retrospect, the moment it turned out I was a spiritual person.The let’s say classical (maybe ‘a modern classic’) way to think of action is in ends and means — states of the world held in the mind and interventions that move the world to these states. But this is not exactly how we think of the actions we take within activities like dancing or improvisation or playing a game or having a conversation with a friend.
In some activities, let’s call them ‘practices,’ we aren’t so much acting-for as acting-from. We act so as to constitute a link in the unfolding of a process. I said dancing, improvisation, playing a game, conversation with a friend — those are almost uncontroversially practices. But the more ‘spiritual’ one’s orientation is the more one sees reason and action as guided by practices, by the logic of process rather than the logic of ends and their means, across the board: math, democracy, art-scenes, fashion, revolution, life (individual), life (species), life (as such).
You start to see ‘the good’ not as detachable states of the world we act to turn from hypothetical to actual but as the unfolding of processes that live in individual and collective human action. Or at least processes that welcome individual and collective human action into their unfolding. And you may ask yourself ‘did I becomes religious in some sense!?’
What makes a practice rational?
There’s a wrong way to take this question. Wittgenstein gave us, and ungave us, one puzzle about rationality and practice: what is it that makes one action and not another the right next step in a practice? Let’s not talk about that one. That’s not what I’m asking. I’m asking a question about love.
If you’re a certain kind of person you’ve spent lots of time hissing at other people that they’re arguing over words. ‘The map is not the territory’ you said and felt like a God hovering above the surface of the water. You spent a lot of time reminding people that things don’t have essences, that any question we ask of a type or whole we better turn into a question of tokens or parts.
The rationality of practice is the rational love of a process. It’s love of a process over and above the moments that unfold it. A love that dare not speak its extension. We live a practice just because we cannot look over its shoulder, because living it is the only way to think it through, or thinking it through is the only way of living it.
But this rational love is only possible if we can know a process well enough to love it. And do we ever? Do we now? Does anyone? Does everyone?
And so we step into a world of names and essences and grasping and beings and Beings and devil know what besides to ask after our love.