Negotiating a field of tensions: insights drawn from Hegel

Intimate life has never been able to rest within ready-made meanings and significance. From the beginning, its value has been up for grabs and subject to lively contest. According to Niklas Luhmann, this struggle has been formulated by a heated dispute starting in the eighteenth century between the claims of love and friendship as the two rival templates. At this time, love and friendship began to compete with each other ‘for the right to shape the code of intimate relationships’ (1986, p. 81). On Luhmann’s account, love, not friendship, ‘won the race’, in part at least, because the former was able to draw upon the ‘symbiotic mechanism of sexuality’ to differentiate itself and this ‘was not at the disposal of friendship’ (p. 82).

Also taking up the theme of the quest for normative resolution, Theodore Zeldin commented on the impact of nineteenth-century Romanticism. He too observed that the Tong debate in the eighteenth century as to whether friendship or passionate love held together more firmly' was settled by ‘the acceptance of the idea that sex was the best guarantor of harmony’ (1994, p. 325).

However, this was only to be a temporary resolution. More recently, friendship has strong advocates as the paradigm through which contemporary intimacies can best make sense of their value. Alan Silver is convinced that friendship is the ‘prototype’ for contemporary intimacies (Silver, 1996, p. 46). Ray Pahl (2000) interprets our investments in the intimate sphere through a grid supplied by the norms of friendship and Giddens too borrows the distinctive expectations set by friendships to describe the give and take reciprocity of the ‘confluent love’ that is for him the normative terminus of a self-transforming intimacy. Friendship can’t be confident that it has decisively won the race; love too continues to claim some weighty champions. Elizabeth Beck-Gernsheim and Ulrich Beck are persuaded that love is carried forward as a ‘secular religion’ (1995). Love’s promise of a dogmatic little world of feeling offers to lift the embattled self beyond the chronic uncertainties of the risk society. Honneth is also on the side of love. Claiming no moral grammar of its own, friendship distinguishes itself only negatively, lacking ‘the mutual desire for sexual intimacy and the comprehensive pleasure in the other’s physicality’ that makes love a unique form of personal attachment (2014, p. 147).

Love and friendship struggle to be the normative vessel for contemporary intimacies. But what hangs on their difference? Significant contrasts are not easy to spot: both celebrate choice and exclusivity and the affections of lovers as well as friends cannot be mandated. Eros does not have a monopoly on passion. Friendships can mean everything to us and, contrary to Honneth, can even accommodate sexuality. For all that, Immanuel Levinas seems to be right when he insists that love does not represent a particular case of friendship and that friendship is not a species of love (1969, p. 265). What, then, is the refractory aspect? Hannah Ar endt offers a clue when she observes that friendship does not feel itself ‘extinguished the moment it is displayed in public’ whereas love seems to be violated under the ‘bright light of the constant presence of others’ (1958, p. 51). While friendship and love are both exclusive, private affairs, friendship is worldly, it must be ‘about something’. C.S Lewis puts the difference this way; while lovers ‘are normally face to face, absorbed in each other', friends go ‘side by side, absorbed in some common interest’ (1960, p. 79). Friendship is a relationship, it exists only as a reciprocity (Vernon, 2005, p. 34). Love, though, knows all about unrequited feeling.

Friendship and love are different but we seem to be captured by an imperative to use one or the other as contemporary intimacy’s normative template. We saw that this imperative informs Giddens’ narrative of the transformations of intimacy and that it manifests itself also in Honneth’s reflections of the unaccountable feelings that bind the realm of particularity. However, this will-to-rationalize appears to mainly speak to the theorist’s interest in securing the importance of intimate life against a potentially deflating inchoateness. As a result, it incurs some costs, in the first instance against an appreciation of the complexity of the values we give to contemporary intimacies. It seems a good idea, then, to look for a framework that is more able to cope with a mix of values.

It might seem odd to turn first to Arendt for some suggestions here. After all, her disdain for modern private life, interpreted by her along Aristotelian terms as a function of natural needs, is well known. Yet alongside this commentary, Arendt also refers to the private domain in modern terms as a sphere of intimacy and she is fascinated by its normative complexity and its rich ambiguities. Today, Arendt observes, we call private life ‘a sphere of intimacy ... whose manifoldness and variety were certainly unknown to any period prior to the modern age’ (1958, p. 38). She is intrigued also by its double characteristics of innovative cultural potential and frail ineffectiveness. Elaborating itself on ground cleared by modern processes that rolled back the functional place of the domestic sphere, the intimate domain could become the site of a new individuality bent on exploring its subjective potentials. This absence of any rationalizing purposes proved a source of ‘enormous enrichment’ to intimate life and permitted its distinctive experimental ambiguity. Remarking on ‘how rich and manifold the realm of the hidden can be under the conditions of intimacy ’(1958, p. 72), Arendt is struck also by its cultural dispossession. Unlike the private household, intimacy ‘has no objective tangible place in the world’ (1958, p. 39). In the end, however, Arendt is persuaded that contemporary intimacy cannot provide the grounds through which new ways of thinking and acting can appearand her hopes for a robust individuality go with political action enacted in the public sphere. Arendt’s hostility to the modern public/private divide takes over. It seems that she is not going to be able to help us unpack further the normative complexities of contemporary intimacy.

Arendt's appreciation of the rich ambiguities and experimental fluidities of private life under conditions of intimacy sets us looking for a way out of familiar normative crucibles. We have seen that Honneth has already claimed Hegel to head one paradigm in the contest over the value of intimacy. Hegel, he points out, is drawn to the significance of the involuntary ties of affection that bind the intimate marriage, against Kant's account of its contractual underpinnings. However, this reading seems to overlook the significance of observations that Hegel also makes about the normative tensions that have to be negotiated within the affec-tional ties of the intimate marriage. These may form the ground for a third paradigm that Honneth fails to contemplate.

Hegel was intrigued by the expanded meanings that bourgeois marriage had acquired within early-nineteenth-century German society (Hegel, 1991). He noted that narrowly functional determinations of the value of marriage (securing inheritances, forming commercial alliances and subduing rivalries) were making way forks importance as the site of a new mode of interaction, the sphere of intimacy. Hegel drew particular attention to the ethical significance of the newly voluntary character of the union. Bourgeois marriage was a relationship based on the free

The rationality potentials of intimacy 121 choice of two individuals who consented to give up their ‘natural and individual personalities' and to ‘constitute a single person' (1991) Hegel upheld the enlightened proclamations of the Civil Code of 1804 that stipulated that differences in social strata were to be irrelevant to the choice of spouse and that the free will and consent of two adults was to be the only material point of view (Benhabib, 1996, p. 34). As he saw it, the Code provided the political framework for the ethical character of modern marriage. Only if marriage is formed as a voluntary union can it promise to be the grounds of a newly self-conscious subjectivity. The self-awareness that is grounded in and fostered by the chosen character of the marriage anchors the ‘subjective moment’ of the free individual that is, for Hegel, the chief strength of the modem state (Benhabib, 1996, p. 32). So the ethical union of the bourgeois marriage does not simply draw upon an already constituted subjectivity, it promotes its self-recognition and it does so in the most self-contradictory fashion.

Hegel, as we already learnt from Honneth, made the point against Kant that ‘marriage is not a contractual relationship as far as its essential basis is concerned’ for the ‘precise nature of marriage is to begin from the point of view of contract— i.e. that of the individual personality as self-sufficient unit in order to supersede it' (Hegel. 1991. p. 203). Hegel went on to draw up significances that are elided in Honneth's account. The ethical love that is the basis of the modern marriage is, Hegel suggests, ‘the most immense contradiction’ (1991, p. 199). Plato told us that we become what we love and Hegel too observed that in love ‘I find myself in another person ... I gain recognition in this person ... who in turn gains recognition in me’ (1991, p. 199). However, love cannot be rationalized around its ethical, self-choosing aspect. Love cannot be rationalized at all. It is ‘a feeling'. The puzzle which understanding ‘cannot resolve’ is that love claims to be both the grounds of an ethically self-fashioned subjectivity and ethical life in ‘its natural form'. The passionate, unwilled character of love is not simply a corruption of the essentially ethical character of the union but is its condition also. We cannot direct ourselves to love nor can it be arranged for us.

Hegel, as we have seen, eschewed the crudity of the attempt ‘still to be found in Kant’, to interpret marriage merely as a civil contract (1991, p. 201). However, Hegel was no Romantic and he repudiated also the reduction of love to its ‘transient, capricious and purely subjective aspects’ (1991, p. 201). While the passionate, unchosen nature of love is at once the condition of its unique significance as ethical life in its natural form, this reference to ‘feeling' could also be the grounds for the destruction of the ethical character of love. Hegel was alert to the dangers of the Romantic reduction of love to passion untempered by the commitments to the self-choosing ethical dimensions of a loving intimacy. He chided Schlegel for advocating a point of view ‘not unfamiliar to the seducer’ when he upheld the freedom and intensity of a love that simply asserts itself as a need (1991, p. 164). So, for Hegel, the natural, unforced ethics of the intimate marriage at once refers itself to an impulsive, untutored feeling and is, at the same time, placed under threat from the caprice of love. Hegel’s own nervousresponse to this normative instability was to seek to secure marriage within an account of wider social purposes. ‘Since marriage contains the moment of feeling, it is not absolute but unstable, and has within it the possibility of dissolution’ (Hegel, 1991, p. 199). Accordingly. Hegel invoked the role of marriage in the socialization of children in an attempt to secure the value of bourgeois marriage against the disturbing instability of ties that refer themselves only to an ethics of intimacy.

Hegel was finally unnerved by the prospect of an ethical intimacy seated within and called upon to constantly negotiate a raft of tensions. If the intimate union was to survive, it needed to draw upon its various ethical dimensions and use each as the measure of the excesses of the other. This looked too precarious and Hegel, we saw, turned to the stability of the legal contract. However, we don’t have to be so cautious. It might be that an ethics of intimacy which rests upon the elaboration of distinct normative poles that form the grounds for a mutual and ongoing assessment of each other can help to push through the stalled ‘either’/’or’ constructions encountered so far.

We start to see some advantages if we compare Hegel’s account of the complex mix of values that inform the intimate marriage with Honneth’s one-dimensional view of an ethics of intimacy. We have noted that Honneth finds that respect and justice have no organic presence within an intimate sphere that is bound only by untutored feelings. Only by adopting the point of view of the public actor can we import grounds for weighing the ethical character of intimate interactions. However, this perspective seems to be out of step with the dynamic self-reflexivity of contemporary intimacies. Dissatisfactions with intimacies as intimacies appear to speak to a complex set of investments. The broken hearted are not persuaded that they must rail only at their own blind folly when loves’ promise of eternity is snatched away, for the loss can also be experienced as a betrayal of reasonable expectations of reciprocity, mutuality, care and forbearance that are knitted into the intimate union by the many threads of contemporary intimacies. The mix can also be complementary. Sometimes we experience a blend of values as an emancipatory gain and as a boost for a developing individuality. Although Kristjan Kristjansson (2006) offers a one-dimensional account of the modern parent/child relationship identified as a ‘true’ friendship, he is surely right to some extent: expectations of reciprocity and a degree of voluntariness do construct patterns of expectations between parents and children today. However, other values have crucial parts to play as well: an agapic love, full of tender, self-denying sympathies and care, is also tributary into the flows of parental love. A mix of anxious sympathy and egalitarian respect can sometimes lead to emotional trauma, but it can also have a potent ethical effect. How else can we account for ennobling instances when convention-bound parents are drawn out of their deep prejudices to support the unanticipated sexual choices of a loved child? Stephanie Coontz also reminds us of the degree of ethical uncertainty in the contemporary intimate marriage that is full of negative but devoid of positive, heuristics. Today ‘[m]arried couples no longer have a clear set of rales about which partner should do what in their marriage. But they do have clear set of rales about what each partner should not do’ (2005, p. 309). No simple or one-sided approach to the intimate sphere can cater adequately for such complex and ongoing negotiations between competing values.