Love,society and agape

This interview with Axel Honneth discusses whether the concept of love can be used not only when dealing with primary relations of recognition, as in the relations of family or friendship, but also regarding social relations in civil society. The issues refer to the categorical differences between the concept of love – as developed by Honneth in his theory of recognition – and that proposed by the concept of ‘agapic action’: a specific comprehension of love that is not reducible to affective bonds but that could be helpful in interpreting actions beyond such intimate relations. Considering an implicit theoretical background of the different understandings of love described by the ancient Greeks, such as Eros, Philia, Storgeē and Agape, the aim of the interview is not so much to clarify the concept of ‘agapic action’, but rather to offer further aspects that may add to a more precise discussion between this conceptual approach to love and Honneth’s one, contributing to a further possible clarification of the concept of ‘agape’ as an interpretative category. In his answers, Honneth presents a rather critical position regarding this concept, arguing that it could be too specific to analyze the phenomenology of the social that he defines in terms of solidarity. For Honneth, solidarity has a more neutral sense in relation to the religious connotation that the term ‘agape’ has received in the Christian tradition. The dialogue initiated by the interview can be seen as a starting point for a categorical clarification of agape in a non-metaphysical sense, as suggested by Honneth’s criticisms. In this way, the discussion between the concept of love and solidarity, as proposed in Honneth’s approach, and that of ‘agapic action’ can offer elements of a conceptual clarification that may be relevant in this continuing debate.

AH Axel Honneth; GI Gennaro Iorio; FC Filipe Campello

GI: In your research, how did you reach the point of studying the theme on love?

AH I’m not sure whether I’m really aware of all the earlier intuitions in my own work. What I know is that one of the decisive experiences I made was in reading, on the one hand, Hegel’s early stuff on love as a very specific form of mutual recognition, and on the other, becoming aware of the Romantic movement, also stressing the importance of love as a very specific kind of social bonding and of social debt. And I’m sure there were earlier experiences, and maybe even very personal ones. It is clear that the experience of love, be it from the side of your own parents, or when you become a little bit older, between you and a friend, always has an enormous impact on people, I think. And the whole atmosphere in which I grew up was definitely an atmosphere where the whole idea of, let’s say, a kind of sexual loving played a huge role in the self-understanding of a certain culture. But I think the philosophical starting point was definitely Hegel. He developed the idea that, if we try to understand subjectivity, we immediately become aware of the fact that the individual subject owns his or her self-understanding to a high degree to the experience of being loved by somebody. So in studying that kind of mutual relationship of loving, I think he developed the core factor of recognition, namely, that mutual recognition is the kind of reciprocal self-limitation, and that in that self-limitation, you remain not only free, but you probably become even freer, than if you had not had that experience. So I think he connected the idea of mutual love and this form of recognition together with it, from the beginning already, with a specific idea of freedom – namely, that freedom is best understood, and in its highest form is not something you can approach or gain individually, but which you gain only by having that specific experience, because in that experience you feel yourself at home with yourself, by limiting yourself. I mean, this is the core idea: to feel at home with somebody else, but in that specific way that without experiencing obligation, you limit yourself. So it is almost an obligation-free form of self-limitation, but feeling at home with somebody else. I think this is for him the core model or the paradigm for all the other forms of recognition he then is interested in. So, I think that was the starting point. I think that cannot be fully understood without the whole horizon of the Romantic movement, Hölderlin and the early Romantics, who also stressed that point. You see it already in Schiller and you see it as a counter-movement against Kant’s ethics. It was stretching a kind of morality which cannot be described with the model of the fulfilment of an obligation. That was the beginning. After that, I became more interested in the sociology of it, namely, to study to what degree this kind of concept, let’s call it the Romantic idea of love, in history influenced the self-understanding of people. It’s easy to see that it becomes an enormously powerful idea during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It’s one of the most powerful ideas, including the idea already of an equality in that kind of a relationship, even if it’s not fully developed in history, but I think that from the beginning, the Romantic idea of love includes the idea of an equal standing of two partners, includes the norm of understanding the other, includes the idea of trusting the other, so all the components of our present understanding of love, I think are already present in this early Romantic concept.

GI: Like Hegel, in your work, you have love as a starting point and at the same time you develop other categories for the sphere of civil society, which you have suggested as solidarity. Do you think is it possible to use love as a category for/in the social sciences?

AH: I think this is an interesting question, because probably in the beginning there are two intuitions working in Hegel, which probably are in a certain tension to each other. Namely, on the one hand, the more Christian understanding of it, where he sometimes speculates about a kind of loving community, so where he tries to extend the concept of love beyond the limits of a personal relationship and onto a whole community. This is definitely clear in his early writings. So he tries to develop the idea of a community of people loving each other, but their love does not have this romantic component. And, on the other hand, there’s clearly also the definitely only modern, non-Christian, romantic idea of love, which already includes – and it is also directly in Hegel – sexuality as a component. So you see in the early period, until the Jena writings, and probably still in the Jena writings, a certain tension. And I think the development of Hegel then goes strictly in the direction of excluding the more Christian component, and stressing mainly the romantic element. And that allows him then to use the concept of love also in an almost sociological way, namely, as a conceptual instrument to understand modern relationships. The way he understands modern relationships as being based on mutual love and concern is clearly an application of the more romantic concept of love, not of the Christian concept. I think he’s almost in opposition when he makes his personal relationships have Christian components. In Kant, you still have a certain Christian undertone, because Kant has somewhat the idea that marriage includes a somewhat Christian element. Marriage as a contract has a high rate. Whereas, for Hegel, the contract element of marriage does not play a big role, I mean, he believes the core of it is a certain feeling which has only developed in modern times, which is different from what happened between the sexes, between people in earlier times, where those modes of behaviour were more regulated. And it is only now that our emotions and feelings are somewhat liberated, and the whole idea of marriage is free from social constraint, so that we have in reality already established the idea of marriage as an expression of the love between two people. Only because we have all that, I think he believes that now love can be used as a sociological instrument. I’m not so sure where the more Christian element of this understanding, which is there in the early times, where that is to be found.

GI: Thus, we could distinguish here between a romantic sense of love – love as Eros – and another sense of love – as in the Christian tradition – love as agape. It is quite clear that this romantic idea of love that constitutes itself in affective bonds is close to your idea of love that emerges in The Struggle for Recognition, which is limited to the private sphere of the family, and concerns a relationship of affection among subjects in primary relationships (parents and children, relatives and friends). But do you believe that love as ‘agape’ could also have a public social dimension without negating itself as love? Do you believe that one can act ‘agapically’ in civil society?

FC: Thus, it seems more plausible to understand the extension developed by Hegel from primary to social relations by way of an account of love as agape rather than through the lenses of the romantic aspect of love.

AH: It is certain that we make a note to Hegel’s Interpretation or the Hegel debate, but clearly, in the early Hegel, you have the intuition that probably we should not base only personal relationships on the grounds of loving, but also that includes the larger communities. I think there’s an insight into the inevitability of the economic market, he shows that, it’s a kind of realistic change in his whole programme. He sees, through reading Adam Smith and others, that we now have to live with this new medium – the capitalist market, which, let’s say, interacts with the possibility of continuing to base society any longer on more ethical orientations. And I think that changes his whole view of society, because it makes him more similar to a modern sociologist who wants to investigate the mechanisms of social integration, which are at work in these societies. And what he then finds out is that there are, let’s say, three mechanisms of grounding the kind of relationship, namely, firstly, love in families, these primary relationships; then, the legal contract, which is working in the market and binds people only very loosely to each other; and then I think when he tries to deal with the state, which is, let’s say, a superior kind of social bonding and community, I don’t believe that he is any longer trying there to integrate the Christian element in it. I think he is more aware of modern powers such as patriotism or loyalty and stuff like that. I don’t think that he thinks of the relation of political citizens to each other as being grounded in, let’s say, a kind of agape. But he thinks of these relationships as being based on a kind of special esteem for carrying out your political obligations. And this is the basis, in this case, for a kind of patriotism. It’s really unclear what kind of patriotism it is, because he is not completely in favour of nation states, he’s not very nationalistic, but it is a patriotism based on, let’s say, the intellectual development of the modern state, which has enough power even to colonize underdeveloped states and communities, so it’s that kind of pride of the citizens of modern states he has in mind. But I think agape, if it played a role in the earlier writings, is somewhat disappearing. What you can say is that probably – that would be very much a speculative point to make – his whole understanding of that concept of agape may somewhat go over into his concept of spirit, because he is not giving up the idea of an absolute spirit. Probably, he thinks of the absolute spirit as having a certain structure of agape, connected to reconciliation.

GI: You say in The Struggle for Recognition that Hegel developed his early intuitions on love in a more abstract way that could be plausible for analyses of more complex relations in civil society. And you developed it as solidarity. What difference do you see between a kind of ‘agapic action’, or the relevance of the category of agape, as, for instance, in the work of Luc Boltanski, and your way of understanding solidarity that you have elaborated in depth as typical forms of recognition in civil society?

AH: My way of defining solidarity is more based on a specific form of mutual recognition, which is based on certain reciprocal, mutual completion. When I think of solidarity, what I have in mind as a paradigm is the political group, let’s say, the solidaristic group of those who are fighting for the same goal. They are in solidary relationships with each other. Then the question is to understand exactly that kind of solidarity, and I think the best way to understand it is to say it is based on the esteem of action which contributes to reaching, to accomplishing the common shared goal. So, my solidaristic attitude towards my companion or towards the other members in my political group is based on the fact that I esteem him or her for acting in a way which leads to an accomplishment of the goal we all share with each other. So, solidarity is somewhat based on accomplishment, on each estimation of accomplishment. It is a kind of specific way of social estimation, and has not so much to do with what in other traditions can be called pity or with agape. I think the place for agape, or Mitleid in the German sense, sympathy, is somewhere else. But the confusing element in the whole notion of solidarity is that we are using it with two different meanings. The first I have just developed, when speaking of solidarity as that kind of mutual bonding which integrates a political group, a group which is fighting for something. And that’s the way it was used in the nineteenth century and in the solidaristic movement in France, I think it’s mainly a movement of those who share with each other certain goals, and who are all active in reaching that goal. On the other hand, we are using the idea of solidarity also in a different sense, namely, by saying, for example, that we feel solidary with suffering people somewhere else. That’s also a common way of speaking: I feel solidary with those who are living in awful conditions, in hunger in Africa, we can use that kind of language. So we have two notions of solidarity, which are in tension with each other, and in order to avoid that tension, I normally try to reduce the notion of solidarity only to the community, which shares a certain goal, and the members of which are trying to reach that goal. And for that other form of solidarity, I am rather using words like pity, sympathy or even Nächstenliebe, which is partly the German translation of agape. So I make a clear distinction there, and I think it helps a little bit to avoid confusion as to what we are speaking of, because it’s necessary to avoid that confusion. Take Durkheim who is interested in studying the shift in kind of solidarity. I think he uses solidarity also more in my sense, namely, as having nothing to do with sympathy or pity, or with Nächstenliebe or agape, but it is based on forms of cooperation, and if they are based on very stable and fixed forms of cooperation, then he calls it organic solidarity, if they are based on more flexible forms of cooperation, then he calls it mechanistic forms of solidarity. I am more in that tradition, which is partly the French tradition.

FC: But probably there is also in civil society a kind of affective bond.

AH: Sure, I think one would not sufficiently spell out the notion of solidarity if one were to ignore that this solidary appreciation of the activities of the other does not include a certain emotional component, certainly. I feel affected by the fact that the other is acting in a way which helps our common shared goals to become real, so there is an emotional moment in it, sure. But I think it is misleading to describe it as agape or with notions close to it, I would make a clear distinction here. And then the question is, of course, what remains in society that one can call agape? It is clear that we cannot simply ignore that these feelings are present and the question is, where are they sited?, what reach do they have?, and where do they play a role?

GI: You developed love and also solidarity with a fundamental dimension of conflict. How do you connect love and struggle? They seem to be in contrast with each other and yet you put them together and have written that, according to a Hegelian approach, it is through a conflictual relationship that one has the constitution of individual identity. So through this connection you mentioned with self-negation, which is an element that would be transformed as a constitutive element of subjectivity, in what sense are they linked? How do you see the difference between the conflict element of love in the family sphere and that of solidarity in the social sphere?

AH: I think love in the family is mainly based on direct feelings of affection and has nothing to do with accomplishments: I am not loving my child or my wife or whoever else because of his or her contributions, but – and the question is difficult: ‘Why am I loving somebody?’ – because of the specific way in which this singular person is realizing his or her own individuality, but also realizing their own intellectual capacities. But I think it has nothing to do with any kind of relation to or reference to accomplishments, whereas solidarity has to do with reference to accomplishments, therefore it is based on social esteem, as opposed to love. For me, to understand solidarity means to understand what social esteem means. And social esteem means to estimate somebody because of or in view of his or her accomplishment.

FC: So there is a difference between the normative component. In your paper ‘Love and Morality’, you begin by giving a critique of utilitarianism and morality in the Kantian perspective, and you suggest, on the one hand, a new position of the concept of love as a source of morality, and on the other hand, the constitutive limits of morality. You discuss this in reference to Harry Frankfurt who highlights the contradiction of a normative dimension that is fundamental in the process of the individualization of subjects which, at the same time, have to be essentially free and without obligation. According to you, how can this ‘morality of love’ be developed and how can it at the same time implicate fundamental freedom? How is it possible to perceive the normative dimension which is specific to love without having to resort to juridical norms?

AH: One way to understand the specific morality of love would be to make a distinction between the two concepts of Pflicht or obligation. In English, we have the distinction between obligation and duty, and I don’t know if in Italian you have a similar distinction, but in Germany we don’t, we have only one word, and I think in order to understand what love means, we have to understand what Hegel means by self-limitation. Loving means a specific kind of self-limitation, in view of the other whom you love. And self-limitation, I think, means taking on certain responsibilities and obligations – better, duties, I think – as almost self-evident. Not as something which comes from outside, as a kind of moral law to which you have to subdue yourself, but which is coming from inside, so loving includes treating the other in a specific way, namely, in a way that automatically includes a lot of duties, and therefore love is constitutive of certain moral duties, not obligations. The distinction between duties and obligations would be that duties are what appear more in an everyday sense, and are not experienced as something which is putting you under pressure, but they are coming or appearing as something which you by yourself have constituted by certain actions. And, therefore, I don’t experience the normal responsibility I have, for example, towards my child as something which I would be able to describe in the Kantian sense, namely as an obligation which is coming from a moral law. But I would describe it –and I experience it – as a kind of internal component of my interaction with the child, it is what makes my relation towards this child specific, what makes it specific is that I act in a specific, let’s say, duty-following way. Therefore, I think the morality of love is based on this kind of duty. I think that’s the way Hegel described it, who believes that, for his time and in the kind of families he has in mind, duties are appearing as something self-evident, not very limitative. The experience of these duties is not something which limits you, but which belongs to the experience of being in that kind of relationship. There are internal components of that kind of practice.

FC: Maybe it leads the way to how to think of the specific meaning of normativity. As we see in the case of love also a dimension of freedom, how could a normative theory keep love as its constitutive free component, and at the same time understand love as a category of a normative theory?

AH: I think that as a whole, the whole point of Hegel’s re-description is, by saying that in this kind of respecting, or in this way of doing your duty, you feel yourself free. That’s the whole idea. And I think that’s right. I’m completely convinced that that’s the best way of describing it. You don’t experience these obligations, or better duties, as something alienating you from yourself, but you experience it – if everything is fine, not if there are crises or so, but if everything is fine and it’s flowing – then you experience those duties not only as belonging to yourself, but almost as constituting your freedom.

FC: When you take Hegel’s view of love as a self-limitation, which at the same time leads to this process of subjectivity and let’s say to a complementary dimension of subjectivity, would it not be possible to conceive it also in civil society, as a kind of relationship that has a normative model, namely, this kind of double movement between self-limitation and constitution of the self?

AH: Under very fortunate conditions, I would say, but not normally. You see, it is a very fortunate condition that in a civil society, people, the members, really do experience their relation with each other as a freely constituted community, and this is not always the case, or is very rarely the case. One has to mention one example of that, and one very bad example of that, probably, is nationalism. I think that in specific high times of nationalism, there is this kind of experience of freedom that makes it so dangerous. If you take certain moments of experienced nationalism where most of the members of a nation state have the experience of belonging to that one nation, there you have that kind of experience, which, as I’m saying, is in that respect dangerous. But I think it is so powerful because it is experienced as Hegel would describe it, as being at home with yourself in the others, and therefore feeling free, and a higher form of freedom, namely self-expression: you express yourself with all what makes yourself, in the community with others. But certainly, the best way of understanding a certain demanding form of civil society would be along those lines. But, again, I think there are difficult questions connected with this, namely, on what are these feelings based? And one way to understand it would be to say they are based on the experience of certain contributions of others to our way of life, to our kind of political community. Then it is based on social esteem. The danger is that it makes a contribution to political community almost a kind of virtue, and then the conceptual danger is that you understand the political community of a civil society as a kind of virtuous community, so that those who do not enact those virtues don’t belong with us. So there is a certain tension to pluralism, because we accept in our times living in pluralistic societies, which means that we cannot require that everyone shares the same kind of virtues or shares the same kind of political activity, or the same kind of political behaviour, or an active contribution to civil society and to political community. Therefore I’m not sure how far that can go.

FC: Thus, these feelings also have a normative component, but they are not enough to offer us a whole normative point of view. The logic of these normative categories shows us this character of a self-restriction which leads to this constitutive dimension of the self. Then we could say that this logic that we find in the category of love could somehow also be applied to civil society, even if the normative component of love as feeling, as an emotion, is not enough.

AH: Yes.

GI: Whether you accept the Aristotelian vision of dividing the concept of love into Eros, Philia and Agape, because love is not only Eros, then it is possible to think of this dimension of agape as a dimension of rationalism, sentimental as well, but rational and voluntary too, and components of it in groups or institutions – the relational aspect of love.

AH: As I said, I myself try to avoid that language. I see the distinction which is clear, and the question is to what degree does this specific attitude, which we can describe with the notion of agape, to what degree does it constitute specific forms of social bonding in modern societies? That for me is the decisive question. And what I believe is that it doesn’t constitute social networks in modern societies, which are constitutive for those societies. Because the emotional or personal resources from which these constitutive networks arise, by which they are constituted or, let’s say, produced, they are different, they are, as I said, either arising from love in the more narrow sense, or coming from solidarity, or coming from law as another specific form of social integration, but they are not arising, as I would see it, from agape. But, you see, that’s a question of how we describe certain forms of networks of relationships. If you take friendships, I would say friendships are based on a specific form of love, so I would put them in the register of love in opposition to agape, so they normally have a specific kind of erotic component in it, they are based on feelings of closeness, of trust, so all what is already there in love – let’s say friendships are pre-forms of love, not expressions of agape, and then the question is, where is agape? As I said. I would say the modern way of describing it would be probably sympathy or pity, but that’s definitely not what you have in mind, I guess. And that would be the core of our discussion.

FC: In the civil society, on one hand, the aspects of friendship, like trust or this erotic component, are quite different. But, on the other hand, we could also say that is a kind of relationship that, even if it doesn’t have this strong affective dimension, has at same time also this relational component of love as agape.

GI: How can we explain, for example, Schindler, or a boy in China who remains standing in front of the bulldozer, for liberty, against the regime? How can we interpret this phenomenon, of a person sacrificing him or herself for an idea, for justice?

AH: It depends very much on the specific case. Schindler probably can best be understood in terms of solidarity.

GI: Solidarity with the other? In that case, we could say love.

AH: No, you see, why did Schindler risk sacrificing himself? Because he had the strong conviction that those Jews who were treated by the Nazis as they treated them, they did not deserve it because they – that’s one way of understanding it, and there are different ways of understanding it, and one would have to go into the details – one way is to say that he had the conviction that they previously belonged to the same kind of solidary community to which he belongs, and because they belonged to it, we have to see them as having already contributed to that kind of community, which most of them did, and therefore they deserved the kind of solidary help he is offering, and he is in fact doing so. Another way would be to understand it with the help of the notions of sympathy or pity, which are very normal feelings, at least for most of us; he sees people suffering, which then motivates him to help them. This can be a very natural reaction for us, which we all have to a certain degree, when we are sitting in front of the television and see starving people, we have that kind of spontaneous reaction, almost a drive to help them. I don’t know whether I need the notion of agape. But I think one component of the question is, is agape a notion which today mainly refers to a kind of emotional attitude, which was formed by certain Christian convictions? And I wouldn’t deny that that plays a role today. We still have Christian communities which are based on the conviction that we almost have a kind of God-given obligation to agape. And these communities behave in the sense of agape. So I think when Christian communities engage in helping starving people in Africa, it would probably be misleading to say that they are acting out of sympathy or pity, it would be better to say that their own feelings are formed and socialized by a certain Christian tradition, that they behave out of those feelings, which have a long history and are formed by certain deeply rooted convictions. The question is whether one can transcend this notion beyond the limits of these Christian formed communities and their attitudes. And because I don’t see that, and because I have a certain tendency to deny it, I would prefer to say, with respect to other communities or other people, who have not been socialized in these Christian convictions and Christian sentiments, not to describe them as being moved by agape, but as being moved by either solidarity or by sympathy. That is probably the difference, but an interesting difference.

GI: I am interested in agape as a category for the interpretation of behaviour, I’m not interested in studying agape internal to a Christian community. A person who cares about the environment, or cares for the permanently handicapped, or a Palestinian who loves a Hebrew, these phenomena cannot be interpreted through gifts or other categories. And this behaviour has social relevance. My conceptualization as a sociologist isn’t sufficient in order to meaningfully interpret these behaviours.

AH: Why would you not allow another interpretation, which would say that there is a chance today to extend our relationships of solidarity beyond certain limits, in view of the fact that we all are dealing or struggling with the same kind of challenges, universal challenges? So it is an extension of the spirit of solidarity, it’s still connected somewhat to the idea of contribution, because you can see the other in the perspective of contributing to, let’s say, struggling against these challenges. But it would be then a more secular way of understanding those kinds of feelings, which I wouldn’t deny, we don’t deny the empirical fact: there are these characters, there are these movements, and there are these attitudes. The question is how to understand them best. And my scepticism or my hesitation has to do with the fact that I believe that agape is somewhat a Christian informed attitude, or the attitude which is the result of a certain socialization process within a certain belief system. As you were saying, it is based on the belief that we all are children of the same Father. Why should a Palestinian have that kind of conviction, who has grown up in a completely different belief system? So therefore to understand him, maybe we should use other, more moral resources and more modern emotional components, emotional resources. I think it’s a question of the best interpretation of certain behaviours. And take the example of these mine workers in Chile, I’m sure that the whole world, that almost everyone had a certain feeling of belonging and a certain hope that they would be rescued. How to understand this feeling? I think because we all have enough experience in our own history about what it means to struggle with such a situation, that we can easily understand the attitude, the fears of the relatives, the hopes, the sentiments, the depression, and so on. It’s very easy to understand them, because in a sense, we are already living in a global community, and all these communities have certain similar experiences, in their own history. Germany had such an accident 40 years ago, of the same kind, and I’m sure other countries too, so it’s very easy to somewhat identify. It’s a very powerful experience. The question is how to understand it.

FC: Maybe there is this difference here between that religious notion of brothers and sisters, but there is also an emotive component, as human beings, something that binds me with someone who is on the street, or starving in Somalia. But instead of something abstract, I would prefer to understand it as more concrete.

AH: That’s something we did not have 100 years ago, because of globalization and the internationalization even of our feeling of belonging, and I’m sure that that is growing. Also the media plays a huge role, the media brings these events much closer to us.

GI: Before concentrating on the subject of love, you reflected on the critique of power; do you think that agape can also be understood as a critique of power, in the sense that it can also be used as a category for a critical attitude of social configurations?

AH: I think it comes back to the same kind of difference, probably. I would say yes, but again, the main question is, does it endow us with a kind of universalizable kind of attitude? And there again I would have doubts. I think the core question is, is agape connected to and restricted to a community which is socialized in a certain set of beliefs, or not? And if you defend the idea that it’s not, and that agape is a more general attitude, which is already disconnected from the presupposition of certain Christian beliefs, then I would agree. I think it comes down to the same kind of question. I don’t deny at all that feelings of agape can be a resource and are a resource for struggling against, let’s say, certain elements of power in society. The main question is whether these resources are bound only to those who share a set of Christian beliefs, or whether we should understand these attitudes and feelings as having a much broader significance. I would say it is only one of the many resources in our societies which inform struggles against power, but a resource which is deeply rooted in that set of beliefs, of religious beliefs. So that there are other resources, like solidarity, like sympathy, and everything is coming together and forming probably a network of emotions and feelings which help us to struggle against power, but it’s not only and exclusively agape.

GI: Relationships in production are particularly conflictual. Is it possible for there to be agapic action in the workplace? Is there a relationship between love and the working dimension?

AH: Traditionally, what plays a role in these workplaces is, on the one side, emotions of solidarity, and again, this is the paradigm case, whereof the power of solidarity. Why? Because I think the workers’ movement is based on shared feelings of respect for the other members, because they all are connected by the same kind of goals, namely, overcoming the conditions of exploitation and of damnation in the capitalist work sphere. There is the home, let’s say, of feelings of solidarity, I think it even comes from that. The question would be, why replace that traditional concept with another concept, is there any need to do that? The other problem I slightly have is it depends on how you want to use agape; do you want to use it as that kind of attitude which those people have who are outside the work sphere for those who are suffering under working conditions? Then I think that the danger would be to no longer think in terms of social rights, but instead of certain social gifts, and there I would see a certain danger. We should keep to the language of rights here, because that’s the huge accomplishment of the workers’ movement, that they were able to establish certain rights and that they were not talking in terms of pity for workers but in terms of rights for workers and the suffering workers. Therefore, I would prefer here another language. You see you get only relative, reserved answers.

GI: How is it possible – if it is indeed possible – that the attitude of care described by you as a ‘type’ of love can assume social relevance through a revision of welfare politics?

AH: I already feel my reservation. The main accomplishment of welfare politics was to establish social rights, which means basing welfare on legal respect for anyone: they deserve welfare because they are respected legally as an autonomous person. That’s the source of their merit, specific forms of welfare, and I always have certain doubts when this legal concept of welfare is replaced by another one, because it is a huge accomplishment that you don’t have to be grateful for welfare, because you could understand welfare as something you deserve as a legal person. So disconnecting welfare from its legal component is always risky, especially in times like this today, when the rich people are only waiting, I think, for the moment when they no longer have to pay taxes, and instead can be grateful and can show pity to the poor people down there. And therefore I would be very cautious.

GI: At a time which in many ways is post-traditional and anti-metaphysical, what role can agape play to resolve the conflicts which global society faces? In this way, we don’t want to understand agape in a metaphysical approach.

AH: Yes, but the problem comes back all the time, we can’t simply ignore that. Sure, there are certain traditions of solidarity, meanwhile, and there are definitely certain global attitudes of sympathy with those in danger or in horrible conditions. How to understand that, how to understand these transcending feelings and transcending kind of emotions between the members of the whole of humanity, and I think we have post-Christian ways of understanding these feelings, as I tried to say, in the spirit of solidarity, where every member of the global humanity is seen as being confronted with the same kind of dangers and challenges, so that the notion of solidarity probably would do the same job. The question I would throw in your direction would be whether agape can be disconnected from these specific Christian presuppositions. Can it be disconnected from the presupposition as you spell out, of the one God, of which we all are sons and daughters? Because if it cannot be disconnected, then it will not do the job, because it’s too much based on a very specific culture. If it can be disconnected, then sure, then we probably come to a notion of agape which is almost close to that of solidarity.

FC: Just a concluding remark in this way. I have the impression we are talking about similar ideas, namely, that solidarity could be understood as a non-metaphysical reading of agape, as action. I think that when we are talking about agape here, we don’t want to reduce it to a Christian point of view and it doesn’t have to be understood as a metaphysical category. If we try to understand it in this way, the question turns again on the difference between solidarity and love, but now love not understood just as a feeling, but love as agape, which requires a different kind of concrete action.

GI: The Durkheimian view on solidarity – in turn – has a moralistic approach, which does not underline the subjective aspect of action, more typical of contemporary social theory.

AH: Yes, he at least is struggling with it. I think you are right that he has a lot of difficulties with making the emotional element in solidarity clear enough, and there is the question whether you understand solidarity in the Durkheimian tradition, or whether you are still able to understand this emotional component, because it’s relatively abstract. It’s more based on, let’s say, certain modern convictions, and a modern understanding of cooperation, and probably the emotional elements in it are lost. Even when he doesn’t want it, I think. He wants to rescue the emotional component of traditional solidarity, and he wants to apply it to modern society. The question is whether that really helps. I think, for example, if you try to understand why our German welfare system is still working under worse conditions than 10–20 years ago, if you really want to understand why the rich are still paying taxes, without reservation, and accept that kind of social worker system, the best way to understand it is that they at least have an understanding of the fact that others are contributing and are doing a lot for the kind of society in which they are living and from which they are profiting. And if that were true, then it is more solidarity, they at least vaguely have the understanding of the kind of accomplishment of others, so that they cannot simply get out of paying taxes, for the high standard of living in which they find themselves. And it wouldn’t be sympathy for the poor which motivates them to pay taxes. It is probably the same kind of bonding Durkheim had in mind.

GI/FC: Thank you.

AH: You are welcome.