The Unconditionality of Love: Value, Singularity and Sacrifice

Abstract

This article addresses the question of love’s unconditionality. Drawing mainly on Husserl, Scheler, Arendt, and Patočka, it shows how love is both ubiquitous and unnecessary. There is no limit to what can be loved, but equally, all things can be related to without love. Love is at once unnecessary and yet constitutive of relations. It is shown that this peculiar characteristic of love is indicative of the fact that in love the object of love is seen in its singular being, and its qualities appear as expressions of that singularity. Love in that sense is transformative of the relation with the love-object, and this transformation becomes manifest in the commitment of the lover to sacrifice, following the call of the beloved. This sacrifice is a ‘sacrifice for nothing’ (Patočka), reflecting the unconditionality of the love-object through a suspension of all instrumentality and exchange relations. This article concludes with a short reading of the ‘good Samaritan’ parable as giving exemplary expression to the unconditionality of love.

1. Introduction

Love is promiscuous with respect to its objects. We love persons, animals, plants, inanimate objects, artworks, professions, sports, activities, god(s), saints; the list is endless. Only their being, in the sense that they are, connects all these love-objects. Of course, for each lover, the list is much shorter, more selective. To bring some order to this most unruly situation we may be tempted to distinguish forms of love—classically distinguishing between eros, agape, and philia, for instance. But then one wonders why all of these can still be called ‘love’. Alternatively, we may think of love as a psychological state and try to understand what motivates the love attachment to any object. Phenomenologically, this is unsatisfactory as it fails to show how, if at all, love is constitutive of the beloved and the lover. The more fruitful approach is to take love’s promiscuity itself as a clue: nothing seems to be beyond love, this may indicate a structure of the phenomenon as such. That is indeed the thesis of this paper: what love indicates is the unconditionality of phenomena disclosed in the loving gaze.

The point is not to deny the distinctions which are drawn between different forms of love, particularly those classed under the Greek terms of agape, eros, and philia. Real distinctions have been rightly drawn between, say, the love for a stranger and romantic love. However, this paper seeks to find a commonality between these different forms of love, namely, that in each case love is aiming (in the phenomenological sense of intentionality) toward the unconditional in its object. The further point being made is that it is precisely through this aim that love discloses a reality hidden to the non-loving, a reality negatively expressed is the unconditional being of an entity. In this respect, far from being blind, love is reasonable in its insistence on such unconditionality. ‘Unconditional’ should be heard both in its Latin and German renditions: noncondicere—that which cannot be made a theme of discourse between us—and un-be-dingt—that which cannot be made into a thing. Both senses unfold what is implicitly meant when we speak of love as unconditional: that it escapes from all reification and all propositional thematicity.

We can approach this question only by exploring what it is about love that opens the gaze towards the unconditional and what I will attempt to show is that this is the preparedness to sacrifice. The movement of love is only possible through sacrifice. Love is the ultimate movement of transcendence because it is not simply a movement towards its object, but a movement that sacrifices itself through a recognition of its own nothingness, while paradoxically finding itself in the loving relation. It is this I take Heidegger to mean when he writes to Arendt: ‘we wish to thank the beloved and find nothing, which would satisfy them. We can only thank ourselves. Love transforms gratitude into fidelity to ourselves and into unconditional belief in the other’ [1] (p. 4). A further guide in this discussion will be Augustine’s statement of the core of love, one that recurs in the Arendt/Heidegger correspondence and is central to Arendt’s discussion of Augustine on love: ‘I will you to be (volo ut sis)’ [2] (pp. 52–54). This affirmation of the other in their being, without comparison to others, is what the loving gaze sees. This will be discussed in dialog with Husserl’s account of the love’s commitment, Scheler’s denial of love as an affirmation of preference, and Patočka’s account of sacrifice ‘for nothing’.

2. Love Lacking Necessity

The reverse side of the fact that anything can be an object of love is that nothing needs to be an object of love. Love is not necessary to our being in the world. This is true of the constitutive relation to objects and to the roles, the broadly social roles, which we enact in our engagement with others and with things. In constituting the meaning of an object, I am recognizing it in its worldly relation. An object of perception—a person as much as a thing—appears for me horizonally, and its meaning is constituted through its inner and outer horizons, placing it in relation to me, to others, and to the world as the hanging together of objects in their relationality.1 Such constitution of meaning occurs without any loving relation and this is true even in the enactment of those social roles for which love at first seems essential: parenthood, marriage, companionship, citizenship, and worship.2 Each such social role brings with it certain expectations, obligations, duties, and modes of behavior that can be enacted and enacted well without any of this being an expression of love. Nor in such cases need the motivation be ignoble: obligations even those of parenthood can be performed out of duty even in the absence of love.3

If love is not necessary, is it then inessential, an emotion that may or may not accompany our activities and may give psychological motivation to our participation in particular roles and relationships, but which are not constitutive of them?4 Far from being unconditional then, love would be conditional, a psychological crutch. This would be a misleading conclusion to draw here. It can only be resisted, however, if we defend a rather counter-intuitive thesis, namely, that love is both unnecessary and yet constitutive across a whole range of relations.

Before pursuing this further, we need to make clear what is meant by necessary here. What is necessary is what cannot be avoided in the sense of forming the basis of the relation in question. All social relations function within parameters that have been formed and as formed are established with specific characteristics. However, what is established needs to be enacted and that enactment is every time new by those who enact them.5 Irrespective of how constrained, that enactment is an expression of freedom, as the enactment occurs through the experiential reality of a subject. What is enacted are inherited roles and behaviors that are products of a process, which we can understand retrospectively as the genesis of such products. A product is what has been brought forth (producere), and to the extent to which we find ourselves in social roles, we find ourselves as such products. However, in as much as the taking on of such roles requires an enactment of them, there is always a resistance at the heart of the irresistible.6 In enacting a product, we both identify with the product and differentiate from it. Identification with a product is itself necessary, inescapable. As parent, as university lecturer, as husband, as son, as man, as Irish, each of these forms of description point to products of specific traditions and processes, which are materially inscribed and which can be spoken of, can be recorded, and can be legislated for, or at least normatively policed.

If enactment is a free resistance even in the act of identification, it is so because the self-identifying through that act of identification distinguishes themself from the object, the role they are taking on. Love may emerge here and in doing so introduces unconditionality into what seems to be a conditioned situation. This is crucial because although love may be personal, it is embedded in social relations, whether they be those of marriage (and romantic relationships more generally), parenthood, worship, vocation, citizenship, and so on. Each such relation embodies social roles constituted by norms. To enact such a role is to engage with such norms whether obediently or critically. Obviously, the way in which a particular social role is enacted need not be directly guided by love: in enacting the role of citizen, I may have little or no love for my country, but I conform to expectations for the sake of those whom I love, my family for instance. In other words, the enactment of some (perhaps most) social roles need not be guided by love to the extent to which they are the means to that which I love. Love in this sense is a matter of ends. The commitment to a ‘love-object’ is the commitment to what appears as being beyond those qualities that function as means. Love, then, is constitutive of its object through recognizing it beyond its functional qualities.

The claim as to the constitutive action of love means that love transforms the way in which we enact the roles and behaviors with respect to the beloved object and thereby discloses that object in a manner in excess of how it appears within the mode of necessity. These are two aspects of the same event. The transformation of the enactment of roles happens in the disclosure of the excess of the object and the latter occurs only in such transformation. Take, for example, the case of a nurse. Through their engagement as a nurse, a person co-constitutes the world of care for patients. To do so, there are certain activities the nurse needs to engage in and certain skills they need to acquire. A nurse can have those skills and engage in a conscientious and excellent manner in being a nurse, but not love nursing. Their role as nurse may be for them a means to another end, say making money to care for their family. They may be by all objective criteria an excellent nurse, but nursing and the world constituted through it, is not what they love. It is a necessary means to those ends, which they do love. They may also recognize the value of the world of care, may take some pride in their role within that world, but this is something they understand conceptually, cognitively; the world of nursing is effectively where they play a part. But it is also possible for a nurse to love nursing, in which case nursing is not simply a job, a means, a role, but something to which they feel called. Nursing is that to which they responded, the call of which they obeyed not in the sense of accepting it for some other reason, but rather as that towards which they are harkened (ob-audire). This vocational moment is crucial in understanding how love transforms roles.7 Taking up a calling is the decision to commit oneself to the object of love. In this sense, as Husserl makes clear, love is both a feeling and a decision.8 The feeling is, however, not simply a state of mind but rather a deep desire enflamed by the love-object.

The notion of being enflamed naturally suggests erotic or romantic love, rather than say philia or agape; however, it is important to also de-erotize the underlying metaphor here. To act lovingly, in any form, is not simply the engagement in an action, but is an engagement out of love. To act out of love means that the love-object excites a desire within the one loving. Such a desire is opened by the other as by a flame which draws the attention of love toward its object. The object, in showing itself as lovable to the loving gaze, impassions desire for it, be that the desire of the parent, friend, or stranger. The metaphor of flame in this sense is to be found in the Biblical account of agape, where, for example, in the road to Emmaus story the disciples speak of their ‘hearts burning’ at the words of the ‘risen’ Christ.9 This desire does two things, it discloses in the self an emptiness, a lack: the love-object promises that which that self does not have, shows that lack to the self, and in so doing, inspires in it a longing.10 But secondly, desire so awakened is drawn beyond the external qualities of the love-object and finds in it depths, which remain beyond its possession. In this sense, the love-object remains a mystery to the self.

It is this mystery that is disclosed in love. As Gabriel Marcel already showed, a mystery differs from a problem because while a problem is there before me, a definable obstacle, a mystery draws me in, it is that “in which I find myself caught up” [11] (p. 100). The sight of love sees the love-object in its depth as it draws me in, such that I cannot detach myself from it. The mystery of the love-object is the genuine sighting of love. Love sees beyond the surface to the fathomless depths of the love-object. Nursing, to remain with this example, is not simply the act of bandaging and giving injections, not only the commitment to looking after and reassuring, it is not just the activity of monitoring and reporting the patients’ state of health. It is all those things, but its significance is the value and vitality of those aspects, which all make up the intimacy of care. While all the tasks have clear outcomes and rules of conduct, the lover of nursing sees beyond those to that deeper meaning. Their attachment to nursing is to all the other qualities as they embody and express that ultimate meaning that it has for them.

The flame of love melts all around it not to destroy, but rather to decalcify. While the non-loving gaze tends towards abstract categorization, which petrifies its object as a thing, love seeks in its object that which is in excess of all objectification and reification. The loving gaze practices such dereification with respect to its object, its mode of being in relation to its object, and the world constituted through that object. The beloved object has clearly identifiable qualities. I have enumerated some of them with respect to nursing. But in expressing these qualities the lover and the one detached are speaking in a different register. For the latter, these are simply descriptive terms, designating the qualities of a particular object, in this case, a profession. In the case of a lover, the same words are not—or not primarily—words of description, but rather words of praise and glorification. We can see this most clearly in the case of romantic love: I can identify and describe my beloved, but flinch to hear them identified and described. This is so because whereas another fixes the beloved with their words, my words—to the extent to which they are loving—are words of praise; they are not descriptive but rather respond through glorification (doxa) to the beloved.11 The words point to the beloved as expressing what remains ultimately unsayable.

The unsayable is that of which in our speaking together escapes articulation. In Latin, such speaking together is the conditional, that of which we speak together (con—dicere). This is to be taken in two respects, first in the sense of that which can be identified as an object of our speaking together and, secondly, that about which we can agree. Here, the emphasis is as much on the dialogical as on the propositional: the unconditional is beyond or before the dialogical. The object of love is never present as an object, is never reducible to an identity. Love though coupling us to others does not disclose any quality identifying them. To say I love for no reason is correct, if what we mean by that is a reason that is open to conversation. Love flees from any such discourse and, in that respect, Arendt is right to understand it as the most unworldly of emotions. Nevertheless, it is clear that loving involves valuing in the sense both of affirming the importance of its object and being positively directed towards it. Love is an act of valuing, but it is simultaneously directed at the unsayability of its object.

3. Love as Valuing

The person loving deeply values the object of their love.12 Indeed, Husserl understands love to indicate a depth in the ego not to be found in other emotions [8] (p. 508). Love is a valuing of its object that does not end in the satisfaction of its valuation, but rather becomes continually enriched and deepened through the loving relation. This deepening of the ego is not justified by any qualities in the object. The ego is not simply seeing a quality that can be indifferently viewed. So, what in the object is motivating this movement of love? Husserl tends to see this as exclusively the act of the ego, which bestows value on its object [14] (pp. 431–450). Yet, the loving relation seems to be characterized by a sense that there is something in the beloved—the object of love—inspiring it to love. However, there is nothing in the object capable of giving a compelling reason for that love. Despite Aristophanes’ hermaphrodite myth, it seems evident that nobody is destined to love anyone or anything. Yet, in another sense, there is a compelling element: to love another is not simply a feeling in the moment, but is a sense of being called to commitment, to fidelity (not to be confused with exclusivity), to vocation. In loving the beloved, I am following what the beloved calls me not at the surface of my relational being but at a depth allowing me to recognize the beloved in its, her, his, own depth [14] (p. 434–435).

Qualities are universalizable in the sense that they are in themselves indifferent to their bearers. Beauty, intelligence, wit, integrity, harmony, all the qualities we might speak of, when speaking of our reasons for loving, have a long sequence of iterations and will continue to have them. Furthermore, the qualities we listed with respect to nursing, for example, can be found also elsewhere. Similarly, if we are talking about love of a romantic partner, a parent, a country, etc., there is no case in which the beloved uniquely possesses a quality. But if that is so, then it cannot be the qualities of the beloved alone that are being loved, because if they were then love would be a matter of preference. We value qualities in preferential terms, color, sound, taste, feel, smell, and all involve relations of preference, whereby I value some and disvalue others. The same is true on the cognitive level, the qualities of numbers as opposed to words are such that someone may prefer mathematics to literature. As Scheler already showed, love cannot work on such a logic of preference and does not do so because what is decisive in love are not qualities [13] (p. 153). And yet, if they are not decisive, love still cannot be indifferent to qualities. This is so because it is those very qualities that first drew the lover to the object of their love. If asked to give reasons for their love, they will speak of those qualities but will speak of them concretely, in fact in the most concrete manner, namely, with respect to the singular being of the beloved. Singularity is shared by every being in the sense that each being is singularly themselves and it is in this sense a most abstract term. Yet, in seeing the singular being of the beloved, the loving gaze sees them as unique in the sense of being the only one of their kind. In seeing the beloved in their singularity, the loving gaze sees beyond generic terms, in seeing the beloved as being outside any register of comparison. In recognizing this, the sense of mysterious depth in the beloved begins to gain a phenomenological sense.

The lover is not at all blind to the qualities of the beloved but sees them as the singular expressions of the beloved’s being. This is true irrespective of the nature of those qualities. In the case of a parent’s love for a child, the birth of the child happens and is ultimately a matter of chance, of fortune (hap).13 To love the child is to love a being without any knowledge of who or what that child is to become. The act of love is an act of commitment to an unknowable future and to a being with only emerging identity. The parent loves the child in the emerging of its qualities, loves the child not for its qualities, but rather loves its qualities as expressions of the child’s self, and loves the child even when—due it its qualities—disliking them (which is the source of that heartbreaking declaration of a parent who loves while disliking their child). The love is not for the qualities but for the beloved as a singular expression of those qualities. In that sense, we can understand the words of Augustine (which were of such significance to both Arendt and Heidegger) ‘volo ut sis (I wish you to be)’ [15] (p. 102), [16] (pp. 103–104). What is valuable in the child is that this child is.

Love sees past all in the beloved object that is describable in propositional terms, by seeing any such description as merely its surface being. The ‘that it is’ of the object is what love sees. Yet arguably that is the most basic of all, seen by all. However, what love attends to is the ‘that it is’ which is singular, irreplaceable. In seeing value in the beloved, it does not see the other as exemplifying values which it has independently chosen, but rather is instructed in what is valuable by the singular being of the beloved. Love’s reason cannot be indifferent either to the singular being of the other or to its qualities, those qualities, namely, that make it what, as much as who, it is. It is rather that the beloved manifests qualities that the self sees now in their concrete manifestation and sees them as if for the first time. In this, love effects an ‘unthinging’ of the love-object, revealing its unconditional singularity. Love lacks necessity because constitutive of it is the valuing of the beloved in their singular being rather than in the roles they play. Fundamental therefore to the unconditional nature of love is the singular being of the beloved. Only through appearing in its singularity can anybody be the object of love.

4. Singular Being of the Beloved

When asked, or when I ask myself, why do I love (someone), the question seeks reasons. Yet, these cannot be reasons in the propositional sense. This is so because any such reason will take the form of addressing certain qualities of the beloved or perhaps certain qualities in me, but never actually reach the beloved themselves. Love is in each case singular. This does not mean that I cannot love many objects, but rather that in each case it is this singular being which is the object of my love. The ‘object’ of my love is and is not an object. It is the one I love, in that sense, it is the object of the movement of my love. But in loving, it is not an intentional object that is before me, but rather it is that one to whom I am already subjected. My love has happened through my being drawn out of myself by that other. But this being drawn out of myself is not something anyone does to me. Even if the other acts to provoke my love, in the smile of a newborn baby or the coquetry of a potential lover, these are not acts upon me as much as the exposure of an other to me, an exposure inviting my own exposure in turn. Such exposure, however, is not essentially a matter of choice or will. At most someone can allow themselves to be exposed, but the exposure happens even despite their own best efforts.

Such exposure is for sure an exposure of qualities, to appear at all is to appear as having certain qualities identifiable in a double sense: as those of the exposed being and as having sense abstractable from that being. Again, there is no quality in the object that identifies it in any absolute sense: all its qualities are shared in the sense of having a meaning beyond that of the being in question. Hegel demonstrated this in the famous ‘Sense Certainty’ section of the Phenomenology of Spirit: this being is unsayable, it vanishes in the articulation of language [17] (pp. 58–66). Hegel makes the concrete sense object an empty abstraction, but that is so only by moving into the register of language, indeed that of writing. What Hegel shows is that language can only speak of ‘this’ sensuous being through reference to the universal, and hence, ‘it is not possible for us ever to say a sensuous being that we intend.’ [17] (p. 60 [translation modified]). However, the beloved by being in excess of all qualities surpasses language also. It is precisely this ineffability that is disclosed in love, that which we earlier discussed as mystery and which is being indicated by the claim to the unconditionality of love. It is not that the lover fails to see the qualities of the love-object, but rather sees those qualities not anymore in abstraction, not that is in propositional terms, but in their concrete and singular manifestation. The beloved is not more beautiful than another, but is uniquely the manifestation of beauty, the love-object is not the most caring profession but is uniquely the manifestation of care, and so on. Love discloses not quality as such but rather a singular expression of a quality that now appears as an origin of that quality of which all other manifestations are pale images.14

Singular expression is not simply manifestation but is the movement of something showing a manner of being in the world as beyond compare. This is a happening, in the sense of showing a sense-giving in the world. The qualities of the singular being express its constituting action within the world: its surface being traces the movement towards others in the horizonality of its being.15 As a lover, I find myself within that horizonality seeing its being in its singularity. This relation to the expressive singularity of the other is a basic phenomenological datum. But my normal perceptual, agential, and knowing relation to the object remains at the level of abstract sense. What love discloses is the singular movement of expression that is for the most part levelled off through the taking of the other in general terms. The latter is a seeing that remains blind to the singular expressive movement of its object, a blindness suspended through the call of the other, a call provoking my attention.

Such attention is not an attending to the love-object with respect to its qualities, but rather an attending to it as a unique manifestation of a manner of being in the world. In loving it, I find myself willing it in a manner fundamentally distinct to any means/ends relation. In the latter situation, I will the object in its functionality for something else and will it only in that functionality. However, love does not aim beyond the beloved, but dwells with the beloved. This tarrying with the beloved is the commitment of love. It is this which is indicated in the already cited formulation ‘amo: volo ut sis (I love: I want you to be)’. This is not a desire for anything from the beloved, it is rather a being in relation to the beloved, willing it only in the singularity of its own being. As Arendt puts it, parsing this Augustinian phrase ‘I love you, I want you to be’ and not ‘I want to have you’ or ‘I want to rule you’ shows itself capable of the love which supposedly God loves men whom He created only because He willed them to exist and whom “He loves without desiring.” [16] (p. 136). It is to such ‘loving without desiring’ we need now turn.

5. Love and Sacrifice

It is important to be clear here that such ‘love without desiring’ is not a love bereft of desire, but rather a love which desires nothing from the beloved. This is not to say that love does not give pleasure and fulfillment to the self, but rather that love is not for the sake of such self-enjoyment. It is rather directed at the other for the other’s sake. By not making its desire for the other conditional on the other’s qualities, but rather valuing the other’s qualities as expressions of the other’s singular being, love aims to let the other be. Its call is to attend to the beloved in its being: to subject myself to the love that binds me to the beloved. This being bound to the beloved is one beyond all functionality, a being bound to the other as an end.16 It is such a being bound that reveals itself in the willingness to sacrifice for an other, which is the mode of response to that other exposed in the singular expression of its being. Seeing the other in love is the transformation of my being in response to this singular being called forth: the response of sacrifice or preparedness to sacrifice. It is such sacrifice that tends toward banishing all sense of the thingness of the other, dereifies it, and places me in a singular relation to its singular being.

Immediately we find ourselves in a difficult place here. Although the word itself is only used in passing, de Beauvoir’s critique of the woman in love can be understood as a critique of sacrifice [18] (p. 696). De Beauvoir’s response is to argue that love is dependent upon autonomous decision-making.17 But to concede a conditionality of love is in effect to replace one structure of conditionality with another. Love becomes an almost contractual relation: two or more autonomous beings enter freely into a loving relationship. Understood in this way love is not necessary in the sense that it is free, but as contract it is conditional.

Following Patočka, we can here distinguish between sacrifice for something and sacrifice for nothing.18 In his account, sacrifice as exchange for something is governed by an instrumental rationality. This is also the relation between survival—bare life—and living. The one who remains within the exchange economy has no sense of living, no sense of a value for which they would be willing to sacrifice. Patočka, referring to the sacrifice of Jesus of Nazareth, calls this ‘living entirely in devotion, beyond concern for his own interest’ [22] (p. 178). This act of self-surrender responds to that in the beloved which is no-thing, nothing exchangeable, in the terms I have been using up to now, the singular being of the love-object. As Martin Koci notes, this is a kenotic movement in Patočka’s account [21] (pp. 230–234). A kenotic sacrifice, where there is nothing to be gained because it is a response to nothing, the unthinged, unconditional being of the beloved.

But if this is the response to the beloved in its no-thingness, it is one fraught with tensions, conflicts, contradictions indeed. We can see this by examining four possible movements of sacrifice: the lover who sacrifices for the beloved, the lover who must sacrifice one love for another, the lover who sacrifices an unloved (possibly hated) other for the sake of the beloved, and lastly, the lover who sacrifices the beloved for the beloved’s own sake.

To address the first variant, the sacrifice for the beloved, one can think of the parent sacrificing for their child. This can be as extreme as a parent giving up their own life for their child; but the very begetting of children in love is a withdrawal for the sake of the other. Sacrifice is the free acceptance and active engagement in this generative reality. The generative relation is one through which the parent accepts their own mortality in the sense of giving rise to the generation that will replace them. In that sense, sacrifice for the beloved is inherent in the parental relationship from the beginning. But many further degrees of sacrifice are present in the parent-child relation from the parent going hungry so that the child can eat to increasingly heavy sacrifices. They do this without any gain, not in exchange for anything. As Koci puts it, such sacrifice ‘is both kenotic and heroic, yet without dangerous pathos possibly associated with both attitudes. The kenotic moment restrains the heroic one; an authentic heroism is kenotic because it does not want anything for itself, it does not moralize, it does not exchange.’ [21] (p. 233).19

The sacrifice of one love for the sake of an other is the ever-present tragic possibility of love. Our loves are many and diverse. In following the call of these loves, we make the sacrificial commitment to them. They can in a banal sense come into conflict: between the demands of a vocation and the needs of a spouse or a parent needing to give more of their attention to one child over another, because of their greater requirements. But there are times when the demands of both loves are so in conflict that it appears necessary to sacrifice one for the other. Three examples we may think of are those of Abraham and Isaac, Sophie’s choice, and the child marrying in the face of their parent’s disapproval. In each case, the lover loves both, it is that which makes it a sacrifice, but they need to give up one over the other, more, they need to sacrifice one over the other. These situations are tragic precisely because there is no possible comparative scale by which to make a judgment. Outside of love, this is not the case; if Abraham or Sophie or the putative about-to-wed child did not love one or other of both of their love-objects, the situation would be very different: Abraham would make the calculation that his future is better served by having god’s good will20, Sophie would calculate the relative usefulness of her children to her [25], the fiancé would make a cost–benefit analysis of the value of spouse over parent. In the case of love, however, no such calculation is possible. The sacrifice of one love over another is not for the sake of a gain. Nothing is gained, there is only loss. The situation demands that one love is sacrificed and precisely because of the singular being which love discloses, the decision is an impossible one. This is not to make any claim as to the irrationality of love, but rather to say that love’s reason is not calculative and cannot function through comparison. It cannot do so because love precisely delves beneath the surface of comparable qualities.

The third modality is possibly the most problematic of all. For the sake of the beloved, I sacrifice another. We might think here of Girard’s account of the scapegoat [26]. What is crucial here is that the beloved is saved through a transfer of qualities to the sacrificial victim. Sacrifice in this sense works through the identification of the victim with the sins of the beloved. This is a sacrificial practice, which through such identification bolsters the identity of the beloved, namely as a member of a community. To sacrifice someone for the beloved is to implicate the beloved in one’s sacrificial act. While the sacrifice of the self for the beloved sacrifices so that the beloved might be, sacrifice of the other for the beloved identifies the beloved as not being the stranger, and in doing so, introduces a conditionality into love.

The fourth modality reinforces this form of conditionality. We can see this best in the case of the parent/child bond, but it resonates throughout all loving relations. The child is born into a community, but that fact needs to be enacted on the child, which in its infancy is polymorphic [27] (pp. 179–194), [28] (pp. 214–220). The coming into community is a process of curtailing, cutting off. This is a sacrifice that those who care for the child make on its behalf. It is an act of sacrifice in the sense that it involves the subordination of the singular self to the community, how the child should be—the idea of what it should become—is that in terms of which decisions are first made for the child, so that in turn the child will come to make those decisions for itself. Entry into a culture—a community—demands sacrifice of the polymorphicity of the infant. In many cultures, this is marked by the removal of a part of the body. Those who fail or refuse to achieve this belonging can become themselves the victims of sacrifice—exclusion, confinement, even death. The ‘I’ in becoming ‘we’ sacrifices many of its own desires in order to become a ‘we-self’. But such exchange is not a matter simply of economy. That which is sacrificed is not itself exchangeable but is a part of the self that ironically needs to be given up in its becoming a ‘we-self’ within its own community. That which is gained is a new being, a being with which the self identifies in a bond of love. In this sense, we can think of the community as an erotic collective.

These four variations of sacrifice can be distinguished in terms of the movement from a sacrifice so that the other be (volo ut sis) to a sacrifice to institute or maintain what an other is. To sacrifice so that the beloved be is to empty both oneself and the other. It is a self-emptying in the sense that it forsakes all interests for itself. It empties the beloved for reasons proportional to those whereby it empties the self: the beloved is intended in such sacrifice as nothing, no identical thing, but only in the activity of its own self-identifying as this being, that is. The sacrifice for another is unconditional when it empties both the lover and the beloved in the act of loving. The beloved is not loved on the basis of what it is, but simply loved for its own sake as the singular being that it is. The singular that-being of the beloved is what love intends. However, this is not to idealize love, because the love that sacrifices for the beloved can betray the unconditional singular being of the beloved for the sake of love, love precisely as sacrifice. The very exposure love demands can lead to the suffering of the imposure of conditionality, sometimes violently, in its very sacrificial movement. Yet, such imposure arises from a prior disclosure of the singular being that love intends. To sacrifice another for the beloved or to sacrifice the beloved for its own sake is to limit from the outset the range of love. It is to establish an essential space in which love can occur and outside of which it is rendered impossible. This is not to deny love here, because there remains some attention to the singular being of the beloved and thereby a movement of sacrifice not wholly reducible to exchange. However, there is undoubtedly a foreclosing of love before its own depths, the acceptance of tradition as a limitation on love. In terms which I have employed earlier, it is to confine both the object and expression of love to an already established product and to set out in advance limits to the enactment of the productive process constitutive of such products.

6. Conclusions: The Good Samaritan

Love is not necessary because it does not concern the relationality, instrumentality, or goals of social relations. It remains in excess of these because it is directed to its object unconditionally. Such unconditionality runs contrary to normal social relations, because in its directedness to the singular being of its object it refuses to see its object in generic terms. For the most part, however, in our engagements, we allow the that it is of things to be covered over by the what-being of them as products. The modes of loving relation while aiming at the singularity of the love-object through the practice of sacrifice, tend in many instances to fall back, as we have seen, into the logic of exchangeability, where directedness at the ‘that being’ of its object becomes compromised by considerations if its ‘what being’. These considerations indicate something essential not alone about the reason for love, but about reason itself. Pascal’s famous line about the heart having reasons of which reason does not know [29], (p. 78 [aphorism 277]).21 is a crucial insight not just about love but about reason too. If love has reason, it is a reason that cannot be understood in the register of preference, hence of comparison, or of instrumentality. Neither is it a process of reasoning that can be rendered in propositional terms. Finally, it is not a dialogical reasoning because the object of love never appears as such in discussion. But reasoning is the process of thinking on the basis of what shows itself as evident. To deny what is evident, tends toward irrationality. When the loving gaze sees the other in their singular being, that gaze has seen everything it needs to see to know the other as lovable, as a being calling out to be loved. Reasoning, of course, sees other things, sees relations, sees comparisons, categorizes, and follows deductive steps within a categorical apprehension of being. But such reasoning becomes unreasonable when it fails to see, within and beyond all such relationality, being as singular. It is precisely such reasoning that lies at the core of one of the most quoted parables in the New Testament that of the good Samaritan. A reading of that parable can serve as a conclusion to this article.

This story is chosen because it exemplifies the apparently excessive, indeed hyperbolic, command to ‘love your enemies’. But at the core of that command is an injunction not to treat the other in terms of qualities and categories predicated to it but as a singular being. The unconditionality of love, understood as agape, far from being exaggerated or exceptional, demonstrates love as beyond necessity, valuing the singular being of the other and doing so through a movement of sacrifice. It is precisely that situation of a loving gaze upon the singular being not because of but despite their qualities (as enemy, as unclean, as defeated), which this story shows better than any conceptual description can tell.

The story of the Good Samaritan is found only in one of the Gospels, Luke’s [9] (Luke, 10:29-37), which might indicate how radically threatening it was and is. Jesus is asked, ‘who is my neighbor?’ [9] (Luke, 10:29), and in response tells the story set along the road between Jerusalem and Jericho, which was a ‘no man’s land’ of lawlessness and banditry. The story has four characters: the victim of bandits, a priest, a Levite and a Samaritan, who for those three Jewish characters was a foreigner, a member of a distrusted, if not hated, community. The Priest and the Levite were those who would have been seen to be bound by the law of love, yet they passed the man beaten up and left for dead without coming to his aid. In failing to act, they were not behaving unethically or unmorally, if we understand these terms to refer to the ethos and mores of their group established through the sacrificial acts of the erotic collective, discussed in the last section. For the Samaritan to act as he did was in that sense of community ethos unethical, as he was acting towards an enemy as if he were a friend. But, the Samaritan looked upon the stricken man and was filled with compassion [9] (Luke, 10:33). The Greek term here—splagxnisthe—refers to the heart. The Samaritan had a change of heart, a conversion, his inner disposition was moved by the sight of an other living being. The identity of this being—that he was an enemy—was not hidden to him, indeed his conversion needed to overcome that realization. Neither did he give up his own identity, nor for that matter establish a lasting relationship with the injured man; the parable does not even make clear whether the latter knew who had saved him. The Samaritan made a sacrifice beyond the lines of any identity, beyond his ethos, and in so doing saw the stricken man as a neighbor. As Kierkegaard puts it: ‘Christ does not talk about knowing one’s neighbor, but about one’s self-being a neighbor, about proving one’s self a neighbor, as the Samaritan proved himself one by his compassion.’ [30] (pp. 288–289).

To be a neighbor is to be nothing, to transcend one’s self, one’s ethos, allegiances, identities and do so in recognizing another pathos, another being in the exposure of their singular being. The command to love, indeed the command ‘to love your enemies’, is not a hyperbolic exaggeration, but rather characterizes the core of love as the self-sacrificial response to an other. The singular being of each possible love-object gives reason to be loved. It does so in the very happening of its—in each case singular—being. Each being can be unthinged, can appear as in excess of any generic terms. This is what the unconditionality of love demonstrates and to respond to it is to follow love’s reason. The capacity to love is indeed finite, but for all that, the limits we place on it are symptoms of a certain blindness and a failure to listen to the heart. This does not indicate the inessentiality of love, but rather that that love is a free expression, where the decision to love is fundamental, a decision to see and often not to see. For the sight of love, the reason to act is forever greater than the capacity to do so.