‘Between the Shadow and the Soul’

In ‘The Charterhouse of Parma’, by Marie-Henri Beyle, (a.k.a. Stendhal), (1783–1842), Count Mosca is very much in love with Gina Sanseverina, and as he observes her departure in a coach, accompanied by a young Italian nobleman, Fabrice del Dongo, he expresses to himself a note of apprehension: ‘If the word ‘love’ arises between them, I am lost’. What is his concern here? How are we to interpret it?

Stendhal wrote on the subject of love, appropriating the concept of crystallization to characterize the process by which lovers transmogrify the attributes of their newly acquired love into perspicuous, alluring, glistening jewels: ‘Crystallization is a mental process which draws from everything that happens new proofs of the perfection of the loved one’. To begin with, there is admiration; then there is the thought on how pleasurable it would be to kiss her, to be kissed by her; and similar thoughts ensue. Then there is hope, her perfections are noted, and now is the time that the woman ought to yield, in the interest of consummate carnal gratification: ‘Even the most reserved women blush to the whites of their eyes at this moment of hope’, wrote Stendhal. ‘The passion is so strong, and the pleasure so sharp, that they betray themselves unmistakably’. And so love is born:

‘To love is to enjoy seeing, touching, and sensing with all the senses, as closely as possible, a lovable object which loves in return. The first crystallization begins. If you are sure that a woman loves you, it is a pleasure to endow her with a thousand perfections and to count your blessings with infinite satisfaction. In the end you overrate wildly, and regard her as something fallen from Heaven, unknown as yet, but certain to be yours’.

Stendhal provides examples of such crystallization. For instance: ‘You hear a traveller speaking of the cool orange groves beside the sea at Genoa in the summer heat: Oh, if you could only share that coolness with her!’

‘One of your friends goes hunting, and breaks his arm: wouldn’t it be wonderful to be looked after by the woman you love! To be with her all the time and to see her loving you … a broken arm would be heaven … and so your friend’s injury provides you with conclusive proof of the angelic kindness of your mistress. In short, no sooner do you think of a virtue than you detect it in your beloved’.

In the light of this, how are we to interpret Count Mosca’s anxious contention: ‘If the word ‘love’ arises between them, I am lost’? There are at least two possible interpretations. Perhaps the implication is that at the outset love is not so much a consciousness of love as it is a consciousness of the appeal and attraction of the loved one. Having thus far been beguiled by the beloved’s charms, for the word ‘love’ then to be uttered would kindle in the mind of the lover the thought of being in love. Alternatively, however, Count Mosca may, by his utterance, be suggesting the liberating potential of a word, the release it can grant from an, until that moment, unrecognized or unheeded preoccupation. The action of naming frequently affords us a kind of bulwark against the minatory potency of that which is named, or at the very least it denies that which is named the prerogative of encumbering us with a burden of which we may well have been incognizant.

JULIET

………..O, be some other name!

What’s in a name? That which we call a rose

By any other word would smell as sweet.

So Romeo would, were he not Romeo called,

Retain that dear perfection which he owes

Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name,

And for that name, which is no part of thee

Take all myself.

ROMEO

I take thee at thy word.

Call me but love, and I’ll be new baptized.

Henceforth I never will be Romeo.

(‘Romeo and Juliet’, Act 2, Scene 2).

Romeo is indeed willing to doff his name, but only to be baptized anew in the name of ‘love’; the word ‘love’ has arisen between him and his new beloved.

Stendhal’s phenomenon of crystallization would appear to be symptomatic more of the second interpretation of Mosca’s words than the first, for although they both describe unreflective, or subconscious, responses, (from which reflection may emerge subsequently, however), only in the second interpretation is action posited as a requirement from the lover, consequent upon the action of naming; as he muses upon his love, he correspondingly assumes his love, that is to say, he instigates within himself states of amorousness; and lacking in spontaneity they may be, but they are nevertheless authentic.

There is a problem, however, for a simple word in itself cannot perform either of these functions in the absence of the subject that pronounces the word thereby going beyond the word to the word’s referent, the idea behind the word. For the word expresses an idea, and it is the idea that liberates; and the word itself, having been voiced, may then be either reassimilated into a stream of consciousness, or merely established in its own pronouncement, conjuring up the kind of emotive or evaluative associations that can discharge themselves subsequent to a physical event that is left to its own devices. Here, as with any other concern of philosophy that has to do with the peculiar human mode of being, the philosopher’s endeavours have to be grounded in a recognition that such a mode of being does not exist as a brute fact; rather, it exists in a double sense, so to speak; it is inseparably both fact and value; it is existing, and it is attitudinizing. Our engagement with words is therefore susceptible to a double response: we may adopt a reflective attitude toward it; or we may persist in unreflective behaviour, bolstering an unreflective attitude that was there from the very beginning.

Jean-Paul Sartre, (1905–1980), was led by such considerations as these, and by this particular approach to the study of consciousness, (phenomenology, an approach that we may deem to be a kind of descriptive psychology), to believe in love as a project that is doomed to failure. Even when in unreflective mode, consciousness is always aware of itself, it can never be oblivious to itself; the abasements that it suffers can only be undergone with its consent; that is, with a consciousness of giving its consent; that is, with its abasements performing the functions that correspond to its own potential for release from obstacles or hindrances. Consciousness is impeded to the extent that it can gain release; it exists, but it has the capacity for an internal rupturing whereby a prior attitude is overthrown, to be replaced by another.

Imagination is just such a capacity, for ‘imagination is not an empirical or superadded power of consciousness’, said Sartre, ‘it is the whole of consciousness as it realizes its freedom’. Through imagining, consciousness is untrammeled by the real, and yet, in imagining, the imaginary products of consciousness are merely reflected back upon it, and they are in themselves incapable of answering to its wishes as it searches for some reassurance of its own value with regard to its being. In love it searches for another being that is mutable to its wishes; it pines for a look from another in which there is no animosity; it desires to be favoured by a partiality that is directed toward it alone; it longs to hear an echo of its own confirmations. And yet, upon finding it, disappointment sets in, and the love is shunned, for abject approval is of no assistance to it, love and judgment profits it but little if it does not come from a freedom on a par with its own.

In Sartre’s ‘Huis Clos’, a play about three damned souls in Hell, the coward Joseph Garcin initially desires Estelle Rigault, believing that she will deal with him as a man, and accordingly he will assume manliness. But, his project fails, for the third person there, Inès Serrano, directs him towards an understanding of Estelle’s well-disposed judgment, that it stems merely from physical attraction. Garcin’s sparkling image is set in amber, that is, the look of another; an image that is directed towards rendering null and void his own sense of being; an insupportable burden, as the sense of vanity, fragility, and unreality, that such an image delivers, imposes itself upon him.

And perhaps also a sense of narcissism. Narcissus, alarmed by tangible, flesh and blood presences, retires to a pool, encountering his reflection, succumbing to love for his own image. But, as we have already noted, an image cannot answer to our wishes. Narcissus encloses his appeal within itself, consigning it to a nebulous mode of being, alienated from the real. Narcissus is adrift, infatuated by an image of a countenance that, were he to attempt to take hold of it, it would disperse:

I am so close to you I could drink you

O visage! … My thirst is a naked slave…

…………………………………………………….

I find in the eye such a treasure of impotence and pride….

…………………………………………………….

How much you resemble all my wishes!

But fragility makes you inviolable,

…………………………………………………….

The disorder of the shadows will soon shudder!

Tree reaches dark members blindly toward tree

And searches hideously for the tree that disappears….

Thus is my soul lost in its own forest,

Where power expresses its extreme forms…

Soul, soul of night black eyes, touching gloom itself,

Becoming immense yet encountering nothing…

Between death and itself, a singular gaze!

(Paul Valéry, (1871–1945), ‘Fragments du Narcisse’).

The image is indeed impotent, and yet, (I am here still following through Sartre’s thought that love is necessarily a doomed project), if one were to encounter, neither an image nor a thrall, but another actual source of infinite possibilities, a continuous wellspring of surprises, then the roles become reversed, and is it not then inevitable that the one in love will increasingly become the other’s thrall in turn? The lover posits the beloved as a free being, not as a possession to do with as he wills but as a continuous source of new discoveries, and capitulates to a kind of euphoria in which consciousness becomes estranged from itself, and negated.

Sartre’s description of consciousness as a mode of being that resists anything that is not in itself a force for resistance or liberation indicates that a yet fuller description is required, one in which consciousness consolidates itself to become conscious, through a corresponding having-to-be, with which the being of consciousness can be realized. The example of love can assist in our understanding of this, as the lover is presented with alternate possibilities and is free to adopt a supposition of reality, or of unreality. In the first case, the attitude of love is directed towards the imaginary realm, the beloved fixed and set in an image the lover produces for himself; but an image is impotent and the lover is continually to be disappointed and dissatisfied. In the second case the lover takes on an attitude of indeterminate expectation, whereby the freedom of the beloved is esteemed, and the lover’s being melts away in blessed musings on the subject of his affections. And love just is this prodigious struggle to harmonize two opposing attitudes, all the while maintaining the integrity of the loving consciousness, and the worth it obtains for itself in reaching towards another consciousness.

Similarly with knowledge, which Plato, (428/7 BC — 424/3 BC), compared with love. He quotes Parmenides, (b. 510 BC), who, when speaking of creation, said: ‘First among all the gods she invented Love’. And yet it is reported that Socrates finds this oldest of the gods difficult to praise. When at a dinner party it is proposed that the guests should each make a speech in praise of love, they describe love neither systematically nor with much regard for veracity or exactitude, as Sartre endeavours to do; rather, they make a mere show of knowing what they are talking about, adorning love with spurious excellence, charm, and allure, without which their praise would not be possible; leading Socrates to concede, (with his customary irony):

‘I perceived how foolish I had been in consenting to take my turn with you in praising love, and saying that I too was a master of the art, when I really had no conception how anything ought to be praised. For in my simplicity I imagined that the topics of praise should be true, and that this being presupposed, out of the true the speaker was to choose the best and set them forth in the best manner. And I felt quite proud, thinking that I knew the nature of true praise, and should speak well. Whereas I now see that the intention was to attribute to Love every species of greatness and glory, whether really belonging to him not, without regard to truth or falsehood — that was no matter; for the original proposal seems to have been not that each of you should really praise Love, but only that you should appear to praise him. And so you attribute to Love every imaginable form of praise which can be gathered anywhere; and you say that ‘he is all this’, and ‘the cause of all that’, making him appear the fairest and best of all to those who know him not, for you cannot impose upon those who know him’.

Seth Benardete, (1930–2001), accounts for Socrates dilemma, asserting that: ‘The truth about Eros is terrifying’; in which case it is perhaps not so wise to delve too deeply. But if love is an impossible project, this is so for Sartre because of the descriptions he provides concerning the structure of consciousness. To continue, in knowledge it is thought that is ruptured. In thinking, the object of the thought is estranged from the thought as it takes hold of it, withdrawing from the object its obscurity; an ongoing process that corresponds to the immediate awareness that is present in conceptual thinking. And to understand a concept is to know how to use a word; to conceptualize is to name, which brings us back to the Count of Mosca. Naming can be an instrument for exorcism, purging and clarifying; possessing the object named as its strangeness is retracted; as Jesus, (c. 4 BC — 30/33 AD), exorcised demons from the man whom they possessed through asking for a name:

‘When he saw Jesus, he cried out, and fell down before him, and with a loud voice said, What have I to do with thee, Jesus, thou Son of God most high? I beseech thee, torment me not. (For he had commanded the unclean spirit to come out of the man. For oftentimes it had caught him: and he was kept bound with chains and in fetters; and he brake the bands, and was driven of the devil into the wilderness). And Jesus asked him, saying, What is thy name? And he said, Legion: because many devils were entered into him. And they besought him that he would not command them to go out into the deep. And there was there an herd of many swine feeding on the mountain: and they besought him that he would suffer them to enter into them. And he suffered them. The demons came out of the man and entered the pigs, and the herd rushed down the steep bank into the lake and drowned’. (Luke 8. 28–33).

Which is to say, once the demons are named Jesus then loses them as things; this is an apt analogy for that which ensues upon our act of naming; the relinquishing of any endeavour to know what is real. However, thought does have the capacity to assume a different attitude, that is, mere perception or passive observation, in which thought is compliant in being informed by the object as it is in itself, locating itself at the level of the object; submitting to an empiricism in which thought becomes estranged from itself by merging with the real. This is the option we are left with, concerning love: laying hold of that which is real no longer; or having nothing with which to lay hold of anything, for thought is present no longer.

But then, there is a problem with Sartre’s methodology. Phenomenology takes its cue from René Descartes, (1596–1650), who aspired to make philosophy a rigorous discipline that avoids error.; for after all, philosophers do not appear to be able to agree about very much, unlike those of other disciplines, mathematicians, for instance. Edmund Husserl, (1859–1938), desired philosophy to be a presuppositionless science that takes nothing for granted, and Descartes thought that error can be avoided by affirming only that which appears to us clearlyand distinctly, without obscurity, and without confusion, which is to say, phenomena, that which we are directly aware of. Phenomenology then, for Husserl, although Descartes himself did not go this far, is to confine itself to descriptions of phenomena, without drawing inferences from the phenomena to something of which we are not directly aware.

Sartre’s phenomenological method does not provide us with arguments, it only describes; and there is the problem, for with description there is always the possibility of misdescription. So, too, with poetic description, and yet, with their mastery of language, and given that conceptualizing is an ability in the use of words, maybe the concept(s) of love that the poets work with describe more authentically, if in sometimes surprising ways, our experiences of this divine madness, (as Plato characterized love).

I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.
I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.
I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way
than this: where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.

(Pablo Neruda, (1904–1973)).