Phenomenology as Love: Reason and the Promise of Fidelity

To the extent to which phenomenology is an exercise of the vocation of philosophy, in thinking phenomenologically we need to think the loving relation to wisdom. Love here translates philia, friendship and this friendship with wisdom has often been understood erotically as a drive to self-fulfilment through mastering knowledge. But if we take seriously Husserls sense of philosophy as a vocation and the philosophers task as a calling (Beruf), then we need to consider the manner in which love gets articulated in terms of this vocation. The love of wisdom in such an understanding requires a fidelity in which the philosopher commits herself in the loving promise of future fidelity. In binding herself, she is making claims on her future self, claims which she promises will be renewed by herself through time. There is inherent in such a promising a kenotic agapeic movement of the self, whereby the self empties herself for the sake of that to which she gives herself. To what are we freely submitting in such a promise towards philosophy? From its earliest manifestations the love of wisdom is a commitment to reason. In this sense the love of wisdom expresses a fidelity to - and of - reason. The entry into phenomenology is not, however, a triumphant declaration of the rational, but rather emerges out of the humiliation of the rational: the rationalization of life fails to account for experience, indeed as becomes clearer every day, threatens the very possibility of the lifeworld as that world in which our dwelling is possible. We need to take seriously this humiliation of the rational and indeed the dread in the face of the realization that our rational systems are increasingly beyond our control. To reason against such rational systems is to refuse their relentless consistency, the drive from principles to conclusions, which Arendt shows to be characteristic of totalitarian systems. Reason is an activity: There is no reason without reasoning. As with all activities, we never reason from the beginning or from nowhere and we cannot be indifferent to the responses to our reasonings. We cannot reason without being faithful or not, we cannot reason without faith and we cannot reason without being responsible and being guilty. The love of wisdom then requires a fidelity of reason whereby reason is faithful to itself and we the lovers of wisdom are faithful to it. If we think this fidelity as love and think that love as agapeically centred and erotically charged friendship, what emerges is an understanding of reason as itself an expression of love. The inherent faithfulness to wisdom means that in reasoning we are concerned not with our own interests but with the being between (inter esse) in which we find ourselves. It is further a love which occurs in the middle voice. It is neither appropriation nor passive submission, but a letting be affected by the apparent in its appearing. Such a letting appear is not the rational construction of systems on the basis of propositions, but the letting come to language of what is in the manner of its appearing. Reason is in friendship with others, responding to the diversity of voices, reasoning in the sense of welcoming of the other, which requires a mutual loving engagement. Such reasoning is a seeking for understanding guided by the being of that which is to be understood. In this sense the phenomenological reduction is a loving gesture, because it aims to let appearance appear freed from the possessive presuppositions of the investigating factical self