Love, context, 'truth'

Love as a poetic matter—love spoken, made, written—must go beyond the commonsensical (which is to say the cliché, standard, orthodox) without losing sight of its responsibility to its context. The experience of love has no single, unifying standard, although from within it may seem to, and most narratives of love present themselves as though that ‘truth’ does or can exist.

There can be no metaphysician here; the lover cannot assume that “the presence of [her] own final vocabulary ensures that it refers to something that has a real essence” (Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 74)—if there is something essential here, that is, it is in my own perception of it. Or in yours. And that ‘essence,’ which is really only subjective experience, but is no less full of portent, emotion, and reverberation for that subjectivity, requires “solidarity…based on a sense of common danger, not on a common possession [such as a value or ‘truth’] or a shared power [linguistic, political, etc.]” (Rorty, 91). I am responsible to and for the world exterior to my beloved and myself precisely because I want to increase, as Rorty puts it, “our chances of being kind” (91; his emphasis); it seems, therefore, fundamentally (and perhaps contradictorily) important that I respect the other and that I am aware of others’ “susceptibility to humiliation” (Rorty, 91).

If the ‘consulting lover’ must “make his own truth,” (Barthes, Roland. A Lover's Discourse, 215) , still, that truth is only ever true as far as the limits of the lover’s own skin. For the lover, writes Barthes, “for a thing to be known, it must be spoken; but also, once it is spoken, even very provisionally, it is true” (215). But how can the word 'truth' even be attached to an experience as private as that of love? No; in the end, perhaps, to adapt Richard Rorty’s terminology, this lover is an ironist lover. She (or he) is intensely private, but somehow involved in, aware of, and implicated by the world. This awareness is “the origin of our responsibility to others,” (Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 62) and also “inherently a private matter” (Rorty, 87).

The implications of this seem to be of a narrow breach between the loss of what is particular to the love relationship—its intense inwardness; its regard backwards and forwards at once, watching for the return of its earliest instances—and what is necessary for the lover and the beloved to live in the world. How can love be acted, created, lived, in a way that is at once innovative, bold, personal, daring, and which also does as little damage as possible to the surrounding world? Can love, in its ideal state, extend similar care beyond the beloved, so that I can love his (her) context as well as I love him (her)?