The Amorous Imagination

Individuating the Other-as-Beloved

D. Andrew Yost

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781438484754
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Fenomenologia in filosofia

In The Amorous Imagination, D. Andrew Yost builds upon Jean-Luc Marion's phenomenology of love to argue that through the interpretive activities of the imagination the Beloved appears to the lover as this Other, not the Other. Weaving together insights from Romantic thought and contemporary French philosophy, Yost describes the distinctive role the imagination plays in individuating another person so that they appear radically unique, special, and unsubstitutable. This radical uniqueness—or haecceitas —emerges out of the lovers' engagement in an "endless hermeneutic, " an ongoing process of creative and responsive meaning-making that grounds the lovers' lives in each other and opens them up to new possibilities. All of this, Yost argues, is made possible by the amorous imagination. Drawing from the deep well of love poetry, mythology, philosophy, and literature The Amorous Imagination comes to the provocative conclusion that without the productive power of the imagination love itself could not emerge.

1

The Philosophy of Love

A New Opening

The Traditional Typology and the Romantic Turn

Where to begin with love? Just mention the word and you are sure to get a reaction. Some people worship it, others resent it, and some just roll their eyes at it. “Ah, you’re such a romantic,” they say, dismissively. But no one is indifferent to it. So how does one start to think about love? And to think philosophically, no less. The question of beginnings is difficult to answer but the answer makes all the difference. I want to begin with a question: How does the Other become the Beloved? How is it that someone comes to experience certain Others as radically particular, unsubstituable, irreplaceable? Philosophy usually begins with divisions. According to the traditional typology, there are different kinds of love: eros (love as inquiry, desire, or passion), agape (love that does not seek its own), philia (love as joyful friendship), storge (love as natural empathy), etc. Philosophy has developed a rich history of thinking about love in these terms, but a number of problems arise from the typology too. Once the different kinds of love are pulled apart it is hard to bring them back together again. Perhaps impossible. How if at all do the types of love relate? Beginnings makes all the difference.

On the traditional model, love is multivocal. There are different kinds of love. Each speaks with its own voice. And yet, almost intuitively we know that love seems to be both multivocal and univocal; that is, while love does indeed manifest in different forms, each form seems to share something in common with the others, some je ne sais quoi that unites love’s various manifestations. I know that I love my wife, and I love my son. Those loves are very different, but I also sense that they “come from the same place,” that they are rooted in a certain kind of encounter with another person who holds a unique position in my life, someone who is radically particular, who has a certain “thisness,” a haecceitas, as Duns Scotus put it. My point here is not so much to establish a logical premise as to signal toward what some might call an “intuition” (in the colloquial, not phenomenological sense), or a lived experience to which most of us can relate. There is something “there,” so to speak. While the intuition is elusive from an analytical point of view, it is at the heart of the problem of the traditional typology: love seems to exceed the boundaries set by eros, philia, and agape, suggesting both a unity and a plurality. An account of love according to the typical categories leaves something important unsaid, unaddressed, or unexplained. This paradox has haunted the philosophy of love for millennia.

The traditional typology is problematic for other reasons too. It carries theological baggage that can divert attention away from the phenomenon of love itself, replacing the rich, lived experience of amour with unresolvable, metaphysical problems. Can divine agape and carnal eros be reconciled? Anders Nygren and Martin Luther say no. Thomas Aquinas and Augustine say yes.¹ The ontology of love implicit in the traditional typology produces intractable logical problems, recasting love as a riddle to be “solved” rather than a phenomenon to be described: Do I really love you, or just your qualities? Is love subjective? Are there objective qualities in the Beloved that are universally adored? Are there good reasons to love him? Is love freedom or bondage? Conundrums abound.² Some philosophers attempt to think love qua love but end up reducing it to desire, passion, or disposition.³ Philosophy treats love as derivative, secondary to some other line of inquiry, rendering it the handmaid of epistemology, metaphysics, or ethics. In Plato’s Symposium, Diotima declares that love (eros) is the desire for the perpetual possession of the Good.⁴ But love is more than desire, more than an idea. The philosophy of love should not be limited to analytical categories. I agree with Jean-Luc Marion: the whole enterprise could benefit from rethinking.

To do so requires that we breathe new life into old ideas. Romanticism, for example, represents a watershed moment in the history of the idea of love because it introduces the novelty of the imagination as a means by which lovers engage one another and harmonize or even merge their beings with Nature.⁵ Thinkers and poets such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Friedrich Schlegel saw that the creative imagination was the key to sympathy. By imaginatively “reaching out,” the protean lovers could experience each other as part of themselves. They could bond with one another, transforming their world and propelling the lovers into a state of ecstatic rapture. At its idealized height, the imagination was even a way to transcend death. Sitting next to his lover’s tombstone, imagining her pulling him into the next world, Novalis contemplated the Night’s ability to dissolve boundaries and return the lover to his origin. Like the Night, Novalis believed the imaginative faculty was the amorphous site of transcendence that allowed for fusion with the Beloved, even beyond the grave. The Romantics ushered in a new way of thinking about love that up to that point had been weighted down by the theological moorings of eros, agape, and philia. Thanks to the Romantics’ attention to the power of the imagination we can now think about love in a way that was not accessible to us prior to their insights; namely, that love fundamentally involves the creative engagement of the imagination. But the Romantics might have gone too far. While they celebrated sympathy as a way to dissolve the self and merge with the Beloved, they failed to see the potential violence inherent in the desire for oneness. They reinforced rather than overcame a metaphysics of the Absolute, which animated the lovers’ desire for union. Despite their attention to the experiences love can bring, the Romantics rarely if ever examined love on its own terms. Instead, love became a vehicle, a way to access the Absolute.

These critiques notwithstanding, the Romantics were onto something about the relationship between love and the imagination. They were not beholden to the traditional typology. Many of them saw the imagination’s creative-responsive activity as the thing that unifies love’s various manifestations. They did not begin by dividing love into categories, and so they were able to avoid many of the problems that come with the traditional typology. Romantic accounts of the imagination opened a new way of thinking about the role love plays in individuating the Other as the Beloved, one that can easily be overlooked in light of our contemporary aversion to Romantic metaphysics and our watered-down use of the term romantic love. Three brief examples illustrate the point: Novalis’s idea of sympathy, Stendhal’s theory of “crystallization,” and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s concept of merging. Each offers a different Romantic insight into the relationship between love and the imagination, and each depicts what one might call “early versions” of the amorous imagination at play within the broader Romantic movement. These Romantics were the first to articulate a vision of the imagination as a transcendental faculty with the power to “remake” the Other into the Beloved; that is, with the power to individuate him. Understanding their accounts will lay the foundation for an understanding of what I mean by “amorous imagination” as the book develops. We turn to these Romantics now to get a sense of what it means to say the imagination plays a central role in love.

Sympathy, Will, and Imagination in Novalis’s Hymns to the Night

In Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith describes what he calls “imaginative sympathy,” or the human person’s ability to become another person and “enter into his body” through an act of imaginative contemplation.⁶ Through sympathy we can represent to ourselves what another is feeling, experiencing, or sensing. On Smith’s account, “[t]he imagination heightens and vivifies our awareness of another’s feelings, until those feelings dawn into reality for us and we feel them just as intensely as he does—perhaps more so.”⁷ And when the object of our sympathy reciprocates, or when we discover that another has sympathized with us, we experience a kind of binding pleasure. Smith’s idea of reciprocal sympathy bears within it the seeds of imaginative projection and ontological merging emphasized by later Romantics such as Novalis and Shelley. Sympathy for the Romantics became one of, if not the premiere experience afforded by the imagination.

According to the eighteenth-century Romantic poet Novalis, the imagination held not only the key to sympathy, but was the “one power, or way of effecting change and movement.”⁸ Through it the poet could fuse together art, philosophy, and religion. He could lead humanity into a new world by developing a symbolic language, birthing a new story, or transforming mundane folk life into a “higher and happier transcendentalized existence.”⁹ The sympathetic imagination provided the poet access to the Other and the ability to poeticize the Other by imbuing her with meaning and significance. And when the Other was gone, when she died, the sympathetic imagination became a vehicle to transcend death and maintain access to the Beloved.

In 1794, Novalis fell in love with Sophie von Kühn. Young Sophie was the “great love of his life.”¹⁰ Novalis brought his transcendental understanding of the imagination to bear on his experience of Sophie. The result was the imaginative generation of a new reality, given in a double sense:

In the first place, imagination lifts and enhances [Novalis’s] sense of life, and with this a new, though entirely subjective reality is created. But in the second place, imagination works on the outside world like a magnet. It draws something out of the other person that is really in her. By the power of the imagination a person transforms himself and the other.¹¹

Novalis calls this process of transformation “Romanticization,” which is “nothing but a qualitative exponentiation” of both the lover and the Beloved.¹² Take note: for Novalis, imaginative sympathy does not result in delusion. It is a new way of seeing the Beloved. The old distinctions of “real” versus “illusion” no longer obtain in the new world created by the sympathetic imagination. That is the point of Novalis’s project: to collapse the distinction, or to imbue earthly life with beauty and a “higher and happier transcendentalized existence.” Sadly, on March 19, 1797, Sophie died. Ever reflective, Novalis seized her death as an opportunity to explore the horizons of imagination by turning inward toward the creative power of Nature expressing itself within him. This strange, unknown power he called “will.” “At bottom, each of us lives in his will.”¹³ The will is the active, “magical” power that animates us, gives us movement, thought, and bodily function. Novalis thought that if we can marshal the will and direct it we can become our “own physician” and even follow the Beloved in death by “crossing over from one form of life to another by the exercise of will alone.”¹⁴ For a year, Novalis visited Sophie’s grave almost daily, slept in her bed, and imaginatively willed himself into death with her. But he was not looking for an end. He sought a transformation. “The longing for death is in truth the desire for enhanced life, which he will attain by the power of his will and the magical attraction of the transfigured image of the beloved.”¹⁵ He experienced “lightening-like moments of enthusiasm” sitting next to Sophie’s grave.¹⁶ He felt her pulling him toward her. Through the power of the imagination he envisioned himself reunited with Sophie in an imaginary afterlife.¹⁷ A year after her death and his engagement with magical idealism Novalis penned Hymns to the Night. In the third hymn he poetically recounts his experience at Sophie’s tomb. There, he refashions the image and the reality of the Night (for they are one), reconstituting the Night as an amorphous site of union and fullness rather than an abyss of annihilation. It is his love for Sophie that has allowed him to overcome the night of old and enter into the new Night of origin. “More heavenly,” he writes, “than these flashing stars seem to us the infinite eyes which the Night has opened within us.”¹⁸ To enter into the Night is to reenter the beloved and the earth: “Just a short time / And I shall be free / And lie in love’s womb / Drunkenly.”¹⁹ Imagining the world of Night, rendering it real through the act of imagination, Novalis experiences love as an enthusiasm for death; that is, for Night itself, for union with all that is or can be.

We may draw several insights from Novalis’s theory of the imagination and its role in love. First, sympathy for Novalis is about imbuing things with meaning, be it other objects, mankind, or the Other. Imagination enriches experience. Through the imagination we can “romanticize” the Other, drawing out her qualities and enhancing what was already there. Second, the imagination is a creative-responsive faculty. It responds to the world that it encounters and it creates anew from that world. This activity does not result in a subjective delusion; rather, it collapses the distinction between “reality” and “illusion,” opening up a space to experience the world as a “magical,” enchanted, and meaningful place. We come to see the Other as the Beloved not through something as trivial as self-delusion, fancy, or sexual desire but through an imaginative act of “qualitative exponentiation.” Finally, the imagination allows the lover to confront, address, and in some poetic sense even overcome death by sympathetically merging with the deceased Beloved. This amorphous experience staves off the finality of death while at the same time embracing it. Taken together, these qualities constitute an early version of the amorous imagination as a creative-responsive faculty with the power to render the Other a Beloved and creatively interact with her, even after her death.

“Crystallization” as Amorous Imagination in Stendhal’s Love

In his 1822 work Love, Stendhal describes how the Other becomes the Beloved through the idealizing activity of the lover’s imagination. Through the imagination, he claims, the lover imbues the Beloved with certain qualities that may or may not “really” be there but that the lover sees in the Beloved due to his imaginative engagement with her. He employs a pseudo-scientific method to provide his account and at times implicitly suggests that romantic imaginings are more akin to an aesthetic delusion rather than an ontological transformation, as we saw in Novalis. But nevertheless, like Novalis, Stendhal is keen to the fact that through the imagination the Beloved is transformed in the way the lover “sees” her.

According the Stendhal, love emerges through stages. The lover moves from admiration to delight, to hope, to enjoyment, and so on, deploying a process of what he calls “crystallization” along the way.

The first crystallization begins. If you are sure that a woman loves you, it is a pleasure to endow her with a thousand perfections and to count your blessings with infinite satisfaction. In the end you overrate wildly, and regard her as something fallen from Heaven, unknown as yet, but certain to be yours.

Leave a lover alone with his thoughts for twenty-four hours, and this is what will happen:

At the salt mines of Salzburg, they throw a leafless wintry bough into one of the abandoned workings. Two or three months later they haul it out covered with a shining deposit of crystals. The smallest twig, no bigger than a tom-tit’s claw, is studded with a galaxy of scintillating diamonds. The original branch is no longer recognizable.

What I call crystallization is a mental process which draws from everything new proofs of the perfection of the loved one.²⁰

Crystallization is a “mental process,” an imaginative process. It renders the Beloved beautiful, special, individuated as against all other Others through the creative “visioning” of the imagination and its ability to “see” an object in the as if. Like salt deposits clingin...