Love as a Transgressive Impulse of the Boundary-Creating Self

The primary activity of the human intellect, at least as it exists in the Western (European) cultural and philosophical tradition in which I find myself, seems to be the creation of boundaries. Most of our mental representations, whether particular sensory images or broader abstract categories, can be understood as some idea of the boundary-suggesting form “this but not that,” and the fundamental principles of our logic are quite similar (e.g. the principle of non-contradiction). What’s more, we traditionally think of the intellect as belonging to, or synonymous with, the rational self or soul, an entity which we have gone great lengths to understand as distinct, ordered, and therefore bounded, psychologically but also metaphysically.

In the midst of this same image of human nature lies love, an exceedingly ubiquitous concept that is used or leveraged in such a wide variety of contexts that its meaning is difficult, if not impossible, to pin down. Toward my own ends, but also in light of the difficulty I face in creating a boundary around the concept, I would like the reader to consider love as something that specifically cuts across boundaries. This description seems variously appropriate, making sense of love as an impetus towards the transgression or destruction of boundaries, but also as a concept that itself transcends non-contradiction — love is often characterized as both practical and pathological, both free and determined. In another sense, love is also typically understood as something that the self does or feels, most often towards other selves. In light of these characterizations, we are faced with a paradoxical image of love as a transgressive impulse of the bounded, boundary-creating self. I find that this conception of love has a unique explanatory power within discussions about the nature of humanity and the human self, more specifically within the dialogue surrounding psychological fragmentation and a dualistic picture of human nature. In dialogue with literature and film, I hope to illustrate specific ways in which love can be understood as transgressive, and demonstrate how this understanding can motivate a non-traditional conception of self which sheds light on several philosophically intriguing elements of the human condition.

To understand love as transgressive, it essential to consider the boundaries love can be understood to transgress. These boundaries are both diverse and overwhelmingly available — consider erotic attraction as a principle target of traditional Western (Christian) moral boundaries, ubiquitous stories like Romeo and Juliet, a tragic love affair that cuts across familial boundaries, Henry the 8th’s rebellion against the Church’s political boundaries made on the grounds of divorce, or political and cultural uprisings concerning the traditional gendered boundaries of sexuality. The boundaries most relevant to my argument, however, are certain canonical definitions or norms of human nature and the human self.

In his Republic, Plato introduces a conception of the self as fragmented, a collection of distinct soul-parts, specifically reason, appetite, spirit. To the rational part, he attributes a desire for knowledge or wisdom, both generally, in terms of what exists, but also relationally or normatively, in terms of how the things that exist compare to one another, which he calls knowledge of “calculation” (438, 439d). To the appetitive part, he attributes a desire for material or bodily pleasure, namely food, drink and sex (581a). To the spirited part, he attributes a desire for honor or good reputation, but also a certain emotional or passionate quality — when the rational part fails to motivate an individual towards what it knows to be good, the spirited part rises up in anger (581b, 440a-b). He also suggests that the spirited part, as opposed to the rational part, is in some sense innate or natural, suggesting “even in little children, one could see that they are full of spirit straight from birth, while, as for calculating, some seem to me never to get a share of it, and the many do so quite late” (441a). Plato suggests that the rational part, with its knowledge and calculative ability, is best suited to rule the others, “since it is wise and has forethought about all of the soul” (441e). An individual whose rational part is authoritative over the others is understood by Plato to be a “just man.” In addition, Plato’s discussion of the tripartite soul occurs alongside a complementary discussion about the roles of groups of individuals in the State. He asserts the following parallel between his theory of a just city and his theory of a just man: “We surely haven’t forgotten that this city was just because each of the three classes in it minds its own businesses. … Then we must remember that, for each of us too, the one within whom each of the parts [of the soul] minds its own business will be just” (441d).

Despite its notion of diversity within the self, Plato’s illustration is filled with normative boundaries, both distinguishing boundaries, seen in his judgement that parts should mind their own business, and hierarchical boundaries, seen in his judgement that the rational part should rule, or be considered greater than, the other parts of the soul or self. I want to be clear, however, that the full, nuanced extent of Plato’s argument is neither within my grasp nor the focal point of my critique. Rather, I would like to focus on what seems the overarching effect of Plato’s understanding — the one that traditional Western culture seems to focus on: that we should understand the apparent drives of our selves as both discrete and normatively ordered, both of which predicate a certain boundedness.

The divisions which Plato suggests in Republic can be mapped onto a more contemporary conception of psychological fragmentation usually attributed to Freud, a conception that makes them more appropriate within a modern, evolution-inspired understanding of human nature. While Freud also presents a tripartite division of the self, is it not drawn along exactly the same lines as Plato’s. Instead, the parallel I am referring to is one between Plato’s soul-parts and Freud’s levels of awareness, the conscious and unconscious. It should be clear that Plato’s hierarchy is drawn along somewhat similar lines — the rational part can be considered conscious, while the appetitive and spirited parts can be considered, to varying degrees, unconscious — at least in the sense that they seem, by description, less under our control. Plato’s appetitive desires are similar to what we generally consider animal instincts, which we attribute to animals as unconscious, and Plato characterizes the spirited part as emotional and innate, descriptions which also seem to point to a place of unconsciousness. In the context of this particular conscious-unconscious mental dichotomy, I believe love can be understood to transgress both the distinguishing and the hierarchical boundaries suggested by Plato.

If love is to cut across boundaries that distinguish discrete parts, it needs to challenge the assertion that the just self’s soul-parts should always mind their own business. In modern discourse, it is questioned if our conscious, rational ability even can be disconnected from our less-than-conscious psychology: Freud’s ideas about unconscious impulses certainly suggest this — “a part of the ego — and Heaven knows how important a part — undoubtedly is unconscious” (Id, 6). Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind suggests love plays an interesting role in the transgression of these distinguishing boundaries. Joel makes a conscious decision to erase Clementine from his memory, but during the procedure, the recollection of fond memories with his lover prompt him to doubt his decision. The film’s creative layering of consciousness allows Joel and Clementine, in a seemingly conscious state, to traverse Joel’s own memories and intentionally hide Clementine in a memory they assume will be impossible for the erasure specialists to find, one that is strong specifically because it is (or will be, after the procedure) unconscious. Clementine’s final words to Joel — “Meet me in Montauk” — later cause Joel to catch a last minute train to the beach where they met, suggesting the success of this endeavor. The film’s portrayal of a love-driven decision to arrange for the unconscious to achieve a desired end seems to motivate the conclusion that love can transgress the discrete boundaries we place around the parts of our psyche. If we choose to believe that Joel and Clementine, with their unique yet seemingly complementary set of self-related anxieties, are actually good for one another, this might motivate the additional conclusion that love should transgress these boundaries.

If love is to cut across the hierarchical boundaries which suggest the rational, calculative part of the soul is always best equipped to lead the self towards goodness, it needs to motivate the idea that the unconscious, instinctual, emotional or innate impulses of the self are at least sometimes better suited to this end. The kind of love we fall into, pathological love, is one such impulse. When the self falls in love, it experiences an overwhelming attraction towards something outside itself — the other. While this attraction can certainly manifest as self-interested, the same pathological attraction can undoubtedly also manifest as passionate interest the other in its particular form. The attraction, without any apparent reason or calculation, is for a particular individual, and no other can satisfy it. Iris Murdoch suggests this other-interested species of love involves a radical reorientation towards reality, and that “anything which alters consciousness in the direction of unselfishness, objectivity and realism is to be connected with virtue” (369). She stresses that reality-oriented love is one felt with “unutterable particularity,” one “most intensely concerned with the most individual thing” (215). If an individual desires a person, it could be for sex, companionship, material support, or a variety of other goods. If the calculative, rational part went searching for the best person based on a measurement of these metrics, it seems a decision would not be made with an appreciation for the particularity of the other, but rather the needs of the self. Murdoch’s argument touches on this as well:

It is in the capacity to love, that is to see, that the liberation of the soul from fantasy consists … What I have called fantasy, the proliferation of blinding self-centered aims and images, is itself a powerful system of energy, and most of what is called “will” or “willing” belongs to this system (354).

Under this conception, while the conscious, rational part might very well be typically fit to rule the soul, it seems that an unconscious, pathological species of love is in some contexts better equipped to lead the self towards virtue, transgressing the normative hierarchy asserted in Plato’s Republic. Perhaps there are more of these cases than we like to think.

Another canonical definition of the self is offered by Descartes in his Meditations. Writing after the Copernican Revolution, which spun both science and philosophy into doubt, Descartes uses doubt as the first principle of self-awareness. After doubting everything he thinks he knows, he asks himself, “What then am I? A thing that thinks. What is that? A thing that doubts…” (45). I think, therefore I am. Apodictic about his awareness of his own doubting self, he proceeds in attempting to prove the existence of a perfect self, God, of whom he has an idea: “It is clear to me by the light of nature that the ideas that are in me are like images that can easily fail to match the perfection of the things from which they have been drawn, but which can contain nothing greater or more perfect” (50). Since Descartes’ doubting self is clearly less perfect that an omniscient and omni-benevolent God, his idea of God could not have come from himself, or anything less than God himself, so God must necessarily exist. Since God exists, and, as a perfect God, is therefore not deceptive, and since Descartes has an idea of bodies existing all around him, those bodies must also exist: “I fail to see how God could be understood not to be a deceiver if these ideas were to issue from a source other than corporeal things … consequently, corporeal things exist” (64). Descartes’ proof, based strictly on “human reason,” creates an epistemic basis for the other that is entirely derived from the self, but also a hierarchical duality between body and mind, in which the fundamental reality is mental.

I have glossed over a nuanced philosophical argument once again, but again my concern is less with the details of the argument itself and more with its conclusion’s effects on (and continuity with) traditional Western understanding. Descartes’ mind-body duality can be understood as the foundation for a number of boundaries that we have become attached to: a boundary between humans and non-humans, and a boundary between the metaphysically and psychologically distinct subject and the object it perceives or understands. Mind and body, human and non-human, subject and object: these are just a few of the binary oppositions which occupy — or haunt — the Western mind. Binaries create discreteness, or boundaries, within the understanding. I hope to demonstrate that love is especially relevant within this context, in the way it transgresses the boundaries of our binaries, but also in the sense that the traits we attribute to love are sometimes contradictory or binary-transcendent.

Blade Runner depicts a dystopian future in which production has transcended its mineral and agricultural limits — humans are now producing copies of animals, including animals that look just like their creators. Four such “replicants” have escaped their bondage and come to Earth, and we are introduced to them as somewhat complex selves, capable of behavior that resembles emotion and even love. Rick Deckard, a blade runner, is employed to exterminate these non-humans, but first he must administer a test to determine if they are human or not. During his investigation, Deckard is introduced to an advanced replicant, Rachael, who was given human memories at conception, such that she is better prepared to develop human love and emotion, traits that seem to drive her to save Deckard’s life. Eventually, the two fall in love. While modern human society, laws, economics and philosophy are all fundamentally guided by our boundaries between human and non-human (us humans tend to use, manipulate or deemphasize everything not like us, while ideally attempting to protect everything like us), love does not appear to play by the same rules. Rather, love is portrayed as a force that transgresses the boundaries of our binaries, revealing our categories and distinctions as less discrete and more continuous than our reason has led us to believe.

I have repeatedly depicted love as a force or impulse that we do not necessarily choose, or as something that happens to us, but there are certainly examples in our repertoire that depict love as something we might be equally unwilling to do, or which we have a duty to do — the Gospels’ commands to “Love thy neighbor” are certainly evidence of this. The simultaneous attribution of practical and pathological natures to love is one accessible example of love’s apparent transcendence of non-contradiction, but it is not the only one. In Plato’s Symposium, Diotima’s initial characterizations of love are all of this sort. Love is the son of Poros and Penia — “resource” and “poverty” (63). Love is “by nature neither immortal nor mortal,” “never completely without resources, nor … ever rich,” and “between wisdom and ignorance” as well (63-64). Earlier in the same passage, Diotima even implores Socrates to understand to not “force whatever is not good to be bad” (61). While Diotima’s descriptions can be understood to motivate the importance of need or desire within our concept of love, which I will discuss in conclusion, it is certainly fitting to the theme of transgression that love, even as a static concept, repeatedly transgresses the boundaries we attempt to place on our concepts and abstract categories.

Finally, in the midst of a philosophical tradition which posits an intellect that can derive itself from itself, suggesting a metaphysical and conscious self-sufficiency, or the lack of necessity of the other, it seems love’s most rich, subversive and philosophically interesting transgression is across the binary boundary between the self and the other. Freud suggests the following:

Towards the outside, the ego seems to maintain clear and sharp lines of demarcation. There is only one state in which it does not do this. At the height of being in love, the boundary between ego and object threatens to melt away. Against all the evidence of his senses, a man who is in love declares that ‘I’ and ‘you’ are one, and is prepared to behave as if it were a fact (Civilization, 66).

Love — something that we predominantly understand the self to do or feel towards an other, something that is mythical, ubiquitous, and even descriptive of the original, divine, perfect self (“God is love”) — is undoubtedly central to our cultural conception of the self and our subject-object distinction. Hegel, in “Lordship and Bondage,” a passage central to his dialectic theory, suggests the following:

Self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another; that is, it exists only in being acknowledged … Its moments, then, must on the one hand be held strictly apart, and on the other hand must, in this differentiation, at the same time, also be taken and known as not distinct (178).

In a paradoxical yet entirely appropriate manner, Hegel has characterized what I understand to be the most important facet of the self, and what Socrates, in the Symposium, understands as central to the concept of love: need, or desire. The subject needs the object in order to be itself. In Hegel, the master needs the slave to be a master, just as the slave needs the master to be a slave. Hegel’s assertion also suggests that, due to their interdependence, the distinction between the self and other is both positively and negatively known. He later suggests the self “does not see the other as an essential being, but in the other sees its own self” (179). Here we are presented with an illustration of the binary relationship between the self and the other than is almost entirely devoid of boundaries, one that is characterized by need or desire, one that is characterized by love.

The reader might inquire: how does this really help me understand love better? I am convinced the answer is clear. In a world where the boundaries human draw seem essential to our survival, but are also the cause of the unbridled destruction and abuse of both other-ed individuals, groups, and the very ecosystem we inhabit, it seems we would do well to take a serious appraisal of boundaries we’ve created for ourselves, even — especially — the ones that are most dear to us and fundamental to our world-views. Perhaps this is what love is all about.

Works Cited

Descartes, Rene. Meditations on First Philosophy, in Modern Philosophy: An Anthology of Primary Sources. Ed. Roger Ariew, Eric Watkins. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2009. pp. 35-68. Print.

Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents, and The Ego and the Id, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Ed. and trans. James E. Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1995. Print.

Hegel, G. W. F. The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977). Print.

Murdoch, Iris. Existentialists and Mystics. New York: Penguin Press, 1998. Print.

Plato. Republic. Trans. Allan Bloom. New York: Basic, 1968. Print.

Plato. Symposium, in Plato on Love. Ed. C.D.C. Reeve, trans. Alexander Nehamas, Paul Woodruff. Indianapolis: Hacket Publishing Company, 2006. pp. 26-87. Print.