Abstract
How might we strengthen a political community riven by the egoism and atomism so common in commercial society? Can our pluralistic society overcome its deep divisions without recourse to the transcendent, using nothing more than the cognitive capacities available to all humans?
Ryan Patrick Hanley’s Love’s Enlightenment: Rethinking Charity in Modernity has some reservations on this score, but also offers hope. Hanley is sympathetic to Martha Nussbaum, Richard Rorty, Alain Badiou, and other philosophers who share his concern with a political community deficient in fellow-feeling. These thinkers have called for remedies such as a “politics of humanity” and a “politics of love.” Badiou, for example, argues that “the re-invention of love” can be a “possible point of resistance against the obscenity of the market” (1). Relying on merely human cognitive and affective capacities, these philosophers attempt to weave an other-regarding stance that is universal, deep, and immanent.
Though these authors draw on the modern canon to elaborate contemporary iterations of love, Hanley’s examination of three Enlightenment thinkers and their respective versions of other-directedness—Hume’s humanity, Rousseau’s pity, and Smith’s sentiment—argues that their concepts are far too weak to be the basis for something like Nussbaum’s “emotional participation in the lives of others” (57). While these Enlightenment concepts have done a decent job of asserting secular bases for restraining our most misanthropic impulses, none is robust enough to promote benevolent, other-regarding action. Worse, such sentimental theories leave us vulnerable to self-satisfied moral fantasies and smug quietism at the cost of genuine moral exertion. Hanley thus chastens recent enthusiasm for modern love even as he sympathizes with the project.
Perhaps more ancient notions of love might help us to recover the conceptual resources for constructing a more robust other-regarding sentiment? Hanley considers the ancient concept of eros expressed in Socrates’s dialogue with Diotima, whose famous discourse in The Symposium explains eros as a desire for another that ultimately points to a higher love. Eros, in other words, draws us toward the transcendent. Similarly, agape or neighbor-love requires transcendence before one can extend love to another. In the Christian conception of agape, love of neighbor flows from one’s love of God; agape thus follows from an experience with the transcendent.
As robust as these ancient and Christian visions of love may be, they are, unfortunately, unavailable to our modern, secular, and more pluralistic political community. The Enlightenment understood that transcendent love was unviable as a broadly applicable political notion, and so tried to “ground our ethical commitments in categories and claims that are available to and apparent to all, independent of faith or other belief commitments” (15). Without access to transcendent notions like eros and agape (or caritas), new ethical commitments would have to be built on epistemological assumptions available to all (16). Yet, Hanley thinks, something has been lost along the way to a morality built on the immediate and palpable. Namely, an other-regarding sentiment robust enough to effectively compel us to beneficent action.
There is hope, however. Kant, riding in on rationality and cloaked in the categorical imperative, is love’s unlikely hero. In Hanley’s view, Kant represents a major turning point in the development of modern love. He challenges the sufficiency of other Enlightenment thinkers’ concepts of sentimental other-directedness even as he agrees with them that humans naturally possess other-directed sentiments resistant to self-interest: “the weal and woe of another touches us directly: the mere happiness of another pleases us in the telling” (139). In Kant’s view, however, these mercurial sentiments are hardly a basis for moral action. Moreover, equating morality with sentiments will likely result in a surfeit of useless moral feeling at the cost of genuine moral action. In the second Critique he makes clear that “the direct opposite of the principle of morality is the principle of one’s own happiness made the determining ground of the will” (147). “Good-heartedness,” he writes, “arises through the culture of moral but inactive sentiments and is a moral delusion” (140).
Passages like these, in which Kant dismisses sentiment with almost comical wryness, do little to rehabilitate his reputation as an inveterate rationalist with little appreciation for the biological, emotional, and psychological basis of human attachment and other-regarding behavior. To his credit, however, Hanley looks past the dominant narrative and succeeds in demonstrating how Kant forms a far warmer and livelier notion of other-directedness than his fellow Enlightenment thinkers. Practical love, far from being based in sentiment, is proper self-love extended by reason to others in a way that can meet the universalizing test of the categorical imperative (151). When we possess a well-ordered love of ourselves (as universal a human trait as there can be), and when we demand of others that they recognize the claims we make on our own behalf, we can then understand how other humans might also be justified in demanding the same of us. In this way, Kant bases love of others in resources that require no transcendence, but are rather universally available to all humans. The strength of Kant’s love is that it does more than simply restrain our misanthropic impulses; it can also compel us to benevolent, other-regarding action.
One of the most ingenious aspects of Hanley’s project is to cast Hume and Kant against type. Hume is no longer the down-to-earth advocate of a human-friendly morality, and Kant is no longer the cold rationalist offering an abstract and inaccessible morality. Instead, Hanley’s Hume is the purveyor of an admirably universal yet uninspiring humanity. Illuminating on this score is Hanley’s consideration of how Hume rewrites Diotima’s dialogue with Socrates. In the original dialogue, Diotima praises eros as a longing that leads us towards transcendence, as two halves forever seek one another in the hopes of becoming whole again. Hume, by contrast, omits any reference to self-transcendence and ends his story with two equal halves voluntarily agreeing to join together via contract. It is a deflating rewrite, and the reader can sympathize with Hanley’s suspicion that Enlightenment thinkers may have lost something in translation when they redefined ancient and Christian concepts of love in universal, immanent terms.
Kant, on the other hand, emerges as a full-throated defender of love. Hanley debunks the stereotype that Kant’s morality is decoupled from human sentiment or cognitive capacities. Kant does indeed accept the premise of a universal disposition to other-regarding sentiment—he simply judges it insufficient for morality. Moreover, far from promoting the categorical imperative as an inaccessible and abstract moral exercise, Kant promotes it as a way of nurturing a more powerful love that is still commensurate with universal human cognitive capacities. Both Kant and Hume are dedicated to constructing morality through a philosophy of immanence; Kant is simply more successful. In this way, not only does Love’s Enlightenment issue a challenge to recent historians of political thought who celebrate Hume’s humanity as a resource for a natural morality, his analysis would be even more profitable reading for the coterie of philosophizing neuroscientists, evolutionary psychologists, and biologists who align themselves with Humean naturalistic ethics in opposition to what they perceive to be an excessively cerebral Kant. Hanley is thus a resource for enriching engagements between philosophy and the natural sciences.
Another strength of Hanley’s work is its attention to the evolution of each of the author’s concepts. For example, Hume develops the concept of sympathy in the Treatise, but in the Enquiry, he adopts humanity as the superior notion (41). Why replace sympathy with humanity? Hanley’s careful parsing of Hume’s epistemology connects sympathy with mere contiguity. Sympathy is thus a cognitive process born of experience and proximity, and is therefore susceptible to the distortions of circumstance. Humanity, by contrast, is associated with resemblance. Resemblance requires judgment and reflection, cognitive processes that help to correct the partiality of our circumstances. Moreover, unlike sympathy, humanity is not dependent on sensory perception; it takes place entirely in the imagination, which is common to all humanity (48). Hanley’s dissection of Hume’s epistemology ought to be required reading for ethicists still plagued by the is/ought distinction.
Hanley also skillfully parses evolutions in Rousseau’s concept of pity—the extension of our self-love to others—by emphasizing the transformation undergone by human psychology, desire, and cognitive abilities from the state of nature to the state of civilization. Rousseau is presented as a character beset by an unrequited longing for transcendence, and pity is an ultimately untenable restraint on self-love. Hanley’s analysis is at its best when it describes Rousseau’s pity in this way: as an embodied, historically evolving sentiment with an impossible tension at its core.
Readers might be less convinced by Hanley’s conclusion that Rousseau’s pity is a cold and weak concept that aims modestly to merely neutralize our self-love, “precisely in keeping with the minimal morality of liberalism” (94). Certainly, the extension of self-love to others is a fraught and even doomed exercise in Rousseau—for evidence, look no further than Julie’s or Sophie’s death, or the social contract’s dissolution—yet one still feels hard-pressed to describe Rousseau’s intentions for other-regarding sentiment as “minimal.”
Moreover, Hanley’s analysis of the evolution of Rousseauian pity feels a bit strained when he relies on some fragments of Rousseau’s very early, slightly embarrassing poetry, composed when Rousseau was still living with Mme de Warens, more than two decades before he published the First Discourse. Hanley may set out to place pity within a Christian genealogy, but he merely ends up illustrating the limits of Rousseau’s genius.
Though Rousseauian pity may be the least convincing demonstration of Hanley’s thesis, his analysis of Adam Smith is the most convincing. Hanley’s Smith is a principled bachelor whose entire opinion of love is that it is a sentiment that “privileges the particular over the universal” (107). Smith’s assumptions are diametrically opposed to Diotima’s, who assumes that love of another can lead to transcendence. For Smith, love of another can only ever be mired in the particular (108).
Sympathy, Smith’s core moral concept, is meant to mitigate our self-preference. Yet it is an incredibly weak concept that only occasionally functions to ameliorate the egoistic excesses of Smith’s commercial society and is incapable of transcending deep social divides (121). Worse, our natural tendency to prefer the well-being of others may actually cause us to be repelled by and avert our gaze from the misery of the poor (122). While sympathy may ensure that the minimal bonds that hold liberal society together are not “broke asunder” (123), this is not because it compels us to care about others. Instead, sympathy causes each self-loving person to want to be liked by others, something unlikely to happen if we relentlessly indulge our natural self-preference. In other words, sympathy helps us to tamp down our own self-love just enough so that others might love us too. A minimal vision of other-regarding sentiment indeed!
In the end, perhaps these philosophers’ supposedly weak concepts imply stronger conclusions than Hanley lets on. Hume thought humanity to be universally experienced and “capable of forging bonds with even the most distant others” (46). Rousseau thought pity substantial enough to abolish slavery or to equate our own self-interest with the interest of our co-citizens. For all their thinness, these philosophers still intended for their concepts to do some heavy lifting. At the very least, Love’s Enlightenment should encourage more critical appraisal and spark productive debate about the strength or weakness of other-regarding sentiment in Enlightenment theories.
Hanley grants that Enlightenment thinkers did an admirable job of constructing notions of universal other-regarding sentiments suitable for their more secular, pluralistic, and commercial age, but he is also convinced that we require stronger medicine. Our contemporary political divisions are deeper and more complex, he argues, since the hyper-individualism of a more developed liberalism and capitalism has ostensibly made social connection that much more difficult. But is our own current political situation really so much more divided than that of eighteenth-century Europe? A chorus of decapitated aristocrats begs posthumously to differ. Nor is it clear that people in the past were less susceptible to moral fantasies, or more inclined to beneficent action. More likely, we simply feel our own moral and political ills more keenly than we do theirs.
Whether one takes or leaves this moral nostalgia, Hanley is undoubtedly correct that humans are far more willing to delude themselves into feeling like they are moral than to really be so. Tackling this thorny bit of human moral psychology is what makes Love’s Enlightenment such compelling moral and political theory, since Hanley is not content with theorizing about moral feeling, but insists on the more difficult goal of moral action. Love’s Enlightenment tempers our collective optimism about sentiment with sober analysis and challenges the reader to reevaluate the political thinkers she thought she knew. In doing so, Hanley produces a significant and original work of political theory.