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PJ and Dr. Michael Clune discuss whether we should make aesthetic judgments, as well the value of expertise in discerning good pieces of literature from works propped up by effective advertising.
Who thinks that they can subdue Leviathan? Strength resides in its neck; dismay goes before it. It is without fear. It looks down on all who are haughty; it is king over all who are proud. These words inspired PJ Wehry to create Chasing Leviathan. Chasing Leviathan was born out of two ideals: that truth is worth pursuing but will never be subjugated, and the discipline of listening is one of the most important habits anyone can develop. Every episode is a dialogue, a journey into the depths of a meaningful question explored through the lens of personal experience or professional expertise.
CL 58 Christopher Lauer
Today on Chasing Leviathan, we pursue the big question: What is Intimacy? My guest is Christ Lauer, the chair of philosophy at the University of Hawaii at Hilo. So come, have a seat with us, and learn to listen with me.
P.J. Doctor Christopher Lauer, tell us, what was your journey into philosophy, and how did you come to be a philosopher, if I can use that term? And what drew you to write a book about intimacy? What was that journey like?
Dr. Chris Lauer I guess for the philosopher question, it was sort of a two step process. I came to college not really even thinking that being a professor was an option. It was one of those professions, like a shoe salesman, that if you asked me about it I would have known that people did that, but I never even thought about doing it myself.
P.J. That’s the first time I’ve heard someone compare philosophers to shoe salesmen, and I love it! (laughs)
Dr. Chris Lauer So, when I got to college, at Berkeley, I took a class that at the time was headed by Judith Butler, who (I didn’t know it at the time) is a very famous philosopher. Although I didn’t take any classes with her, a number of the professors in the department had a similar orientation to hers, and kind of led us in the direction of being able to read her work (laughs), kind of. I think that was one of the goals, that by the time we graduated, we would be good readers of her work. So that made me realize that thinking could be something that mattered in a way that I hadn’t really thought about before. My default plan when I entered college was something to do with wind power, so climate change was the issue of our day. I didn’t know exactly what I would do, but I was good enough at science and other stuff that I figured I’d find a way to do something meaningful that way. But then, that all changed when I realized that ideas matter. It wasn’t until my final year of college that I decided that I wanted to study philosophy in graduate school. It was a kind of confluence of things; all the disciplines that call themselves “theory”, like political theory, postcolonial theory, gender theory, and so on, they were very exciting, but the metabolism was just too fast for me. Reading a book in a week and then to be expected to have an opinion on it–I just wanted to read more slowly, and that’s what led me towards a philosophy program. One version of that is I wanted to be more responsible with my scholarship than I had been as an undergrad, but another version of the story is that I wanted to let my mind catch its breath, and work through material more slowly. The irony in a wya is that as I’ve been teaching, I’ve moved more and more to the fast kind of reading as a teacher. That excitement that originally made me want to be an academic, that’s much closer to how I teach now than the plodding, spending 50 minutes on a paragraph style of graduate philosophy.
P.J. So, is that movement towards a faster teaching of philosophy, do you think that it’s a skill that you’ve gained? Or is it a change in style? What do you think is motivating that choice?
Dr. Chris Lauer I think it is more interactive with my students. I’m feeling their energy level, and I don’t have the discipline to enforce the rigorous plodding: let’s spend hours on this paragraph style that I did in grad school. So that leads me much more to the chasing squirrels style.
P.J. laughs
Dr. Chris Lauer Everything anyone wants to talk about, let’s do it. It’s exciting.
P.J. Okay, so they exercise you more, and your metabolism is a little faster. (laughs)
Dr. Chris Lauer Yeah. That’s not a terrible way of thinking about it, yeah.
P.J. So today we’re talking about your book, “Intimacy”. When is that coming out?
Dr. Chris Lauer Oh, it came out five years ago.
P.J. Oh, okay! Because I found you through the other book that’s coming out, that’s why.
Dr. Chris Lauer No, the other book is even older! Despite you fighting me on the new releases, I don’t have any new releases right now.
P.J. Oh! It must have come up as featured. Oh, that’s really interesting! They must like you that much. So, this book is out, folks! You can find it, it is “Intimacy” by Dr. Christopher Lauer. I enjoyed the read. I appreciated the high metabolism style, it makes sense. I kind of wanted to ask you about the methodology of it, but before we do that, what prompted you to write this book?
Dr. Chris Lauer The first book that you mentioned, “The Suspension of Reason in Hegel and Schelling”, there’s a bunch of reasoning in “Hegel and Schelling” that was my dissertation. It was my way of coming to terms with this challenge that we face in contemporary society, that there are so many forces of unreason, and yet the answer to the forces of unreason cannot be just doubling down on the rational. This intimacy book is part of a three book series on recognition. The idea is everything we care about is in some way based on either a need for recognition or a duty to give recognition to others. Pretty much every ethical imperative in some way fits into this scheme of recognition, as I see it. This is a hypothesis that was put forward in many ways: You can see it in Plato sometimes, Adam Smith as a version of it in his book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Hegel is perhaps the most famous for discussing this hypothesis, and he mostly gets it from his predecessor Fichte, and in the contemporary world, one of the most important thinkers arguing for recognition being at the center of philosophy is Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, Axel Honneth. The structure of this three book series is my own take on the three part structure that both Hegel and Axel Honneth give. Of seeking recognition in something first and foremost that is immediate, that I call intimacy, Honneth calls it love, Hegel associates it with the family, and then in something that is more formal and has more structure. I focus on value in that. Hegel’s was more on legal person-hood. The highest level in a way is solidarity, and I take that term from Axel Honneth. What we’re looking for in making our lives meaningful, and figuring out what matters more than anything else, is a way of telling our stories in a way that can cohere with or are at least compatible with the stories that other people are telling. So I just started with intimacy, because that was sort of the first part, but it didn’t hurt that I started writing the book shortly after getting married, and that I finished it up after my two children were born, so there was a great deal of material as a was living through some of those intense forms of intimacy. Luckily I didn’t make it to the final chapter during that period, which is all about mourning. The mourning chapter is mostly observed. I have lost people in my life, but while I was working on that chapter, there was no one in particular that I was thinking about in a mourning relationship.
P.J. Now when you talk about the third, you know the dyads and the triads, and you talk about adding kids into the mix of a marriage, I can see that your writing was so real to you in that moment.
Dr. Chris Lauer Yeah, and that really started speaking to me even before I got married. My wife and I only had one reading performed at our wedding that wasn’t written by a family member. The only famous text, as it were, was the introduction to Luce Irigaray’s An Ethics of Sexual Difference. It’s a passage where she talks about the importance of wonder, and how that can be disrupted by the involvement of a third, and in particular, couples, Irigaray emphasizes, tend to lose that sense of wonder for each other when they make their relationship about a third, so in most cases about a child, or with a religious couple, about God. That the meaning of a relationship is ultimately grounded in this higher or more foundational relationship to God, depending on the metaphor. For Irigaray, both of those are distractions from the wonder between.
P.J. Very good, It’s very clear, I’m sure this is coming out of your work with Schelling and Hegel, you dwell at length in the introduction on just your method. Your dialectic. If you don’t mind sharing with our listeners as you understand it, because it’s sort of nuanced, what is dialectic, and why do you use it for this topic?
Dr. Chris Lauer That’s a great question. So Dialectic as far as I know is first used as a philosophical term in Plato. And for Plato, dialectics is the stage of philosophy that carries one up to that point where one can finally know the good and do real philosophy, where one can speak from the standpoint of knowing. So dialectics is that stage where you’re climbing up the divided line, as it were, where you’re formulating, and the greek word that Plato uses is hypothesis. Literally stepping stones, or things you put under your feet. Dialectics then, is an approach to philosophy that advances hypotheses: provisional ways of describing what is, what matters, and then working through the “what if” we pursue the hypothesis to the end? So of course, that is what Socrates is doing through many of the dialogues, especially when he’s emphasizing that he doesn’t know anything, and even though Plato always, especially in the middle dialogues, emphasizes, like in the fate of the republic, that there must be this point where the dialectics ends, you have got to have this point where you affix your knowledge, where you tie it down in some way. The dialectical approach doesn’t really do that. So the two most influential thinkers for me, methodologically, are Hegel and Beauvoir. They both use dialectical thinking, in a playful way that aims to be structured, but also emphasizes that there are ways in which our knowledge continually breaks down. In the nineteenth century, with both Hegel and Marx, there was an emphasis that dialectics isn’t something that is just going on between two interlocutors. It is something that is going on in the world in a kind of structure that we find in the world where certain hypotheses, or attempts to make the world meaningful or attempts to make the world work in a certain way–they tend to break down. That break-down of attempts at making something work, I think, Beauvoir here is my hero at describing the way that those attempts break down. But, in the specifics at least, I think Hegel is really good at this. Hegel is often seen from up on high, and read from the end. The point of Hegel is a goal of something that is called absolute knowing or absolute spirit in a mature system. What really makes Hegel worth reading is the acute sense of irony that he avinces when he explores the breakdown of all these different ways of conceiving one’s world. And Beauvoir has both that and a sense of humor about it. If we follow Kierkegaard, and say that humor is the next step beyond irony, then Hegel was very good at seeing the irony in the world. And Beauvoir can see a bit of humor in that as well. So the reason I think of recognition, in the first two books at least, as more dialectical–the third book on solidarity may have more of a narrative to it–but the reason I call it a dialectical structure is I want to explore the ways that intimacy is something that we can find meaning in through the break down of any way of conceiving it. I don’t think that there is an ideal of intimacy, and it’s not just that human beings aren’t equipped for intimacy, like there is some divine demand that’s put upon us that we lowly humans cannot meet–I think that is an incoherent concept. I think that intimacy can’t really mean anything at all–we can’t make a list of necessary or sufficient conditions for what would constitute intimacy. Each of the ten chapters in the intimacy book is aimed at showing a way that one of those hypothesis, one of those attempts at securing intimacy, breaks down in its own terms. So the reason why I chose a dialectical approach is I think that is how intimacy works. I think that that is how recognition in general works. When we’re looking for recognition, we’re looking for something that doesn’t even make sense. We can’t ultimately conceive what we’re looking for.
P.J. So you’re okay with intimacy being incoherent, because you think that ultimately recognition is incoherent? Or we don’t even know what we’re asking for, or would incoherence apply to recognition as well in this project?
Dr. Chris Lauer To say I’m okay with it would be saying too much because I’m haunted by these problems. But I do think that in applying a dialectical approach, we can find meaning even in the breakdown. One of my favorite quotes for organizing my thinking on this comes from Leonard Cohen and he says “There’s a crack in everything; that’s how the light gets in.” I think the dialectic approach is really good at exploring the ways that this brokenness concept allows light to get in. That’s one way that I contrast it with deconstruction. For instance, Derrida’s mature work, this is something that he’s also aiming for. He spent his career exploring ways that texts break down in their own terms. They have these conflicting aims just built into their structure as texts, so much so that you can’t even say that these texts have a structure. They are deconstructing themselves as they go along. That means that the mature Derrida is trying to articulate “What is this horizon that emerges out of this breakdown, what is this democracy to come that we cannot really articulate?” I think that that jumps to the end. It think that it says, “okay, we’ve done this, now where are we?” And what I like about dialectical approaches like Hegel’s and Beauvoir’s is no, it’s in living in that constant breakdown that we should look for that meaning. So these forms of intimacy, even though they are incoherent, you can’t actually achieve intimacy with someone through touching them, that doesn’t mean that we were dumb all along to be doing the touching, pursuing intimacy through touching. Instead we need to find some kind of meaning. Or rather, the structure of the meaning of intimacy appears in that breakdown of the concepts by which we might define intimacy.
P.J. Would any of this work with Camus’s version of the absurd? That we create meaning even when it breaks down?
Dr. Lauer Possibly. But when I read Camus, it’s just too much of a black box for me. It’s just that there’s this radical openness that emerges with the absurd, and you can go anywhere now. It’s kind of like at the end of the matrix when you’ve got all that code, and “Oh, crap! I can fly now!” and that feeling of “I can do anything now.” Code is just a bunch of scribbly stuff that’s on the screen that way. Although I think it’s a similar move, and although I think that Hegel recognizes that in the breakdown of our rational ways of understanding the world, there is kind of a radical freedom that emerges. There’s not much more to say at that point; “okay, we’re free.” In Hegel’s words, it tarries with the negative. It just hangs out in those various attempts at making sense of the world and plays around with them, and is even willing to say “what if this way of trying to live one’s life, what if it were just subtly different?” Like, we know it didn’t work out for the Romans, or we know it didn’t work for this particular form of life, but maybe there is a different way that you can be a stoic and still make your life meaningful. And you work through it, and through a kind of dialectic imagination, other problems keep arising. And that effort just to play around at these doomed hypotheses, that’s what gives dialectics its substance.
P.J. To make sure that I’m following you, many times when I’m talking to philosophers, they talk about the importance of foundational concepts. Then they describe their project as a house, and you have to make sure that the foundation is secure and then move on. In this case, dialectics just rejects that model entirely because its foundations are things that can be subtracted at any time when they are shown to not work.
Dr. Lauer Yes, I think that’s right, although there is still a structure in dialectic approaches like Hegel’s. The later chapters make sense because they follow the earlier ones. So it’s because we failed to achieve intimacy through giving a gift, for instance, that we can seek new ways, but not that we have to try these new ways.
P.J. That’s an important distinction between you can do something and you have to do something. For me it sounds like there’s a metaphor even as I was writing questions. One of the questions is “What have you learned about intimacy on this journey?” Because it does feel like it has more of a journey and a history aspect to it than perhaps a housing structure. There’s still a structure to a story, for instance, but it’s different. So, cracks in the wall of my house in Florida let in light, which is all very well and good, but those cracks let in a lot of other things besides light. (laughs) So am I tracking with you there? What are your thoughts on that?
Dr. Lauer That’s great! I think there can be a tyranny of stories though. So, yes, we’re the type of beings that find meaning especially in stories, and in a relationship, of course, one of the ways we build intimacy is by telling our stories together. I think that’s even more crucial at the societal level when we talk about solidarity. But, stories are always told in the way of retrospect, even when you are telling the story of your future, you’re telling the story of what will have been. For Hegel, that’s the attitude of what he calls “reason” in a formal sense. His technical term for “to reason” is the ability to see a whole, and to find in that, what it is that guided everything. Something that is beyond the x caused y caused z. But rather, in Kantz’s terms, the “unconditioned”. So it’s the power of reason that looks to the past and tells a story. And that’s crucial for Hegel to being a citizen of the world. If you don’t look to the past and try to understand what’s rational about it, then you’re just floating. But that’s not the end for Hegel. For Hegel, reason is in his analogy of spirit, chapter 5 in an 8 chapter book, in the middle, it’s something that we eventually overcome. We can’t live with our lives being solely meaningful because of this story that we tell. Camus is aware of this too. It’s this need for an openness. If everything that I’ve done is justified by some story, and from something that is operating beyond the sequence of events that I’ve lived through, then we’re not really free. So yes, telling a story is a part of how we often try to find meaning, but that story is never going to be something that is shared. If a couple just has their story, they find their meaning when at a dinner party someone asks them their story and they love it, and they interrupt each other, and that’s what elevates them more than anything is “their story”, they just find it really charming and cute and whatever. That’s what I call a fettish.
P.J. Yeah.
Dr. Lauer That is something that is external to the between, or whatever it is, that would be there for the couple. And granted, there is no between, that’s an incoherent idea too. But it’s something that ultimately each of them is going to have a different relationship to. It’s something that even if it’s their story, it’s going to be one person’s relationship to the story, and then the other person’s relationship to the story.
P.J. That’s interesting, I can see the point that you’re making. For me, it seems like a dead end anyways, because at some point, if telling your story is the most important thing, then living forward doesn’t make any sense, because if all your meaning is wrapped up in telling the past, then telling the story itself starts to take up space and time. And I can’t imagine telling a story about telling your story and considering that meaningful.
Dr. Lauer Well, it get’s boring pretty fast. Of course couples do, they love telling a story, because “He always tells it this way”, it’s like this meta level of I know him because I know he’s going to tell the story this way, and he’s going to skew this one part.
P.J. You always get that one part wrong! (laughs) yeeah.
Dr. Lauer But, yes, you’re right. You get diminishing returns the more that you get into the stories about your stories.
P.J. I think that really comes out in the Fettish Chapter as well. Before we go too far into that, what was the motivation behind the ten, could they be called movements? Dialectical movements, and especially, why start with the gift? What motivated that for you?
Dr. Lauer That’s the hardest question, and in the book I have various ways of getting around that question. That’s the obsession of Hegel too, that he’s always asking “With what must a philosophy begin?” And ultimately, the way he does philosophy is that you’ve got to leave that beginning behind no matter what. But he also doesn’t think that it’s purely arbitrary because, we talked about the structure previously, it’s not a foundation that needs to be secure. But at the same time, where you begin does shape the possibilities that come after. It does feel natural to me to think of this one way that the desire for intimacy feels so acute but is so far away is wanting to give a gift. So I’m thinking of teenagers who think of intimacy in terms of what they have to offer. Like they’ve never had a serious romantic relationship before, and they understand this romantic relationship is different in kind from all the other relationships they’ve had before in a way that they can’t really articulate yet, and so they look for the perfect gift. You want to secure intimacy through a gift, and you don’t really want the gift to ask for something in return, because then it’s not really a gift. You want it to be a gift, and you want it to be perfect and welcome, but not something that you hand in and then run away. Intimacy is pretty quickly dissolved.
P.J. Oh, I can so see this teenage boy! I can see Napoleon Dynamite doing that right now. (laughs) That kind of awkwardness, which is the exact opposite of intimacy. Even though it’s really what he wants.
Dr. Lauer I wouldn’t go as far as to say awkwardness is the opposite of intimacy. I think that you can see in it something that is so sweet if you understand what it is, but it breaks down as a form of intimacy very quickly. It’s the opposite of intimacy in that it’s very low level and far away from anything that might be a consummate intimacy.
P.J. Yeah, actually that’s my mistake, thinking that awkwardness is the opposite of intimacy. It’s not. You can have awkward intimacy, understanding of course that your version of intimacy here is an incoherent concept. But I can definitely see the intimacy in that moment between them that is still at the same time awkward.
Dr. Lauer Yes, and I think what you’re describing there is the dialectic between the between and the beyond. I talk about these terms in relationship to both Beauvoir and Kierkegaard for them, dialectics are kind of foreterms, in that you’ve got both parties, and you’ve got what’s between them, and what’s beyond them. If we’re watching a romantic comedy sequel to Napoleon Dynamite, where he finally starts to approach a girl–I’m assuming that he’s straight because I don’t remember the movie well enough–he approaches her and has this awkward intimate moment with the gift. I think makes it intimate for us in a way is them sitting for a moment with that awkwardness, and it highlights the beyond. Sometimes when you’re deeper into a relationship, that between needs the beyond, needs the reminder that there’s something that transcends whatever it is that can be held between both parties. And so for Irigary, this means that we need to always or repeatedly find ourselves in a state of wonder, and be drawn to the fact that there isn’t any totality in what is achieved between the two of us. There’s something that points beyond that. That non-consummation is what makes that awkwardness feel good in a way, especially from a third party perspective. And when we can tell the narratives of ourselves and we can say part of our story was not only that between but also the beyond. But what the dialectical approach shows us is that intimacy was never really there in your recapitulation of it, in the between and the beyond, the partners shared and didn’t share. Rather that awkwardness was not a consummation of intimacy. It really is a failure. These two people are not connecting in a crucial way too. They are different and they don’t know what the next step is to achieve a regular give-and-take, say, of what I call a heartbeat.
P.J. Yes, and that kind of back and forth is important in this story, this structure. I’m curious, obviously, you choose these moments and these occasions for dialectics to take place. I was kind of surprised by–and it’s funny because your project is about recognition–I thought that knowing or being known would maybe be one of those moments. Is that something that would fit, maybe as an additional chapter or show up later in your project of recognition?
Dr. Lauer Mostly what you are talking about is in the value book, in being known as something. In being known as good or wise or hot, or whatever value that I want to be associated with me. So with our partners, we don’t just want intimacy, we also want a pursuit of value. Sometimes in part, it is that we want to be valued, and sometimes it’s more that we want to live our values together, and sometimes it’s more about “I want to be able to have valuable things and have valuable goals and I want to make sure that my partner is able to do that with me.” Those desires complicate relationships to a great degree. You’re absolutely right to ask “Isn’t that important in a relationship too?” I just don’t think that those are ways that we pursue intimacy. In wanting my partner to think I’m beautiful, for instance, it’s a natural enough desire, but I don’t think that what I’m looking for there is more intimacy with them. It’s more wanting to be valuable in this particular way.
P.J. I think I’m tracking with you, but let me give a for-instance. This was kept coming up in my head when I was reading the book, and maybe I’m misunderstanding the terminology, I’m happy to be stupid. That’s the story of my life so far. As we think about this, when a moment happens, and there’s a variety of interpretations–my background is in philosophical hermeneutics, so this is kind of how I think about it–you meet eyes with someone across the room, and there’s so many different things they could be thinking. But in a way that even seems to transcend interpretation, you know exactly what they’re thinking. That to me typifies a kind of intimate moment. But to me that feels like, oh, I’m being seen, I’m being known, and I’m knowing the other person. But maybe I’m using the terms incorrectly, or maybe I’m misunderstanding intimacy. How would you explain that moment? It kind of showed up a little bit in the humor and the irony, right? Where you have this situation, and it could be thought of in a variety of ways, but you almost can’t help stifling laughter, and you meet eyes across the room and sometimes that’s what friendships are formed on, are those moments.
Dr. Lauer Good, yeah, I think there are different things that could be going on when you have that meeting. One possibility obviously, is that it’s completely one-sided, and there’s a feeling that one person has and actually their attitude is much more like that of a stalker.
P.J. laughs.
Dr. Lauer They are projecting an intimacy that isn’t there.
P.J. (Laughing) We just happened to meet eyes, and it only looks like they’re connecting. Yeah, I’m understanding.
Dr. Lauer But when it’s a joke, and no one else seems to be on the verge of laughter in the room and the two of you are barely containing yourselves, that’s irony. What makes it intimate, is you are actually enfolding everyone else in the room into something that the two of you are sharing. What makes this moment so meaningful is the two of you get something about the situation and really about life itself, and if it’s genuinely funny to you, then probably what you’re sharing is the breakdown of the meaning of everything at all. What makes humor so delightful is just this break between the intense build up of tension and the collapse of all meaning at all. That’s not my reading, that’s Kant’s basically, humor, supplemented with some contemporary evolutionary biology. But yes, that’s what I call irony. It’s a way of pursuing intimacy by sharing the fact that others can’t share this moment with you. That means that you’re basically enfolding everyone else into the relationship. So it’s a more complicated version of the third, that we began with in our talk today, that this intimacy is defined by the fact that the two of you can share something that others aren’t sharing. And that the non-sharing of those other people is something that is pretty contingent. My favorite example of irony, which I discuss in the book I think, came during one of the years that there was a riot following the Stanley Cup.
P.J. Yes, you did mention it, but go ahead.
Dr. Lauer I think it was in Vancouver. There was this beautiful picture taken of where this boyfriend had reached down to help up his girlfriend who had fallen during the riot, and in the background you see police with riot shields, flames in the distance, and he’s kissing her, and it’s a beautifully composed photograph. So you think “What perfect intimacy!” and the structure of that intimacy is irony, because all around things are burning and there’s chaos, but we can have this one perfect moment. But that unfolding is always liable to be refolded by the relationship that each partner has to other people. So the guy in the photograph got called onto these morning shows to talk about what happened, and so this private moment is something that he’s sharing with whatever morning host he’s talking to.
P.J. And you also said that his mom was like interviewed and talking about how romantic he is, which to me removes some of the romance. (laughs) “He’s such a romantic boy.”
Dr. Lauer Oh, yeah, the mom. (laughs) I think when you say “Mo-om” in that way, you’re reacting to the sudden re-orientation of the meaning. One of the reasons parents are so cringy, is that when you’re trying to live your life, especially with the intensity that a teenager or a young adult tries to live their life with, this reminder that there is another very square perspective on the same phenomenon, totally kills the mood. Yeah, that’s the irony reading of what’s going on.
Back to the couple meeting eyes across the room. There’s one more possibility that I want to throw out there. Maybe what you’re doing is seeing the real possibility of a future together, and what makes that feel so intimate is that idea that no matter what comes to us, and I know there will be many unexpected things that come to us, I believe that I can spend my life with this person. If that’s the intense thought that you’re having, it’s either shared or not shared. If it’s not shared, then it’s just like that stalker situation I began with, but if it’s shared, then that’s what I call the future in the next to last chapter. I think even orienting your relationship to the future, with all its openness, and not having any concrete plans that would be a fettish, if you said we have to achieve these concrete goals, so not anything concrete, but I think even an open acceptance of the future is still not sufficient to be a closeness beyond closeness, or a form of intimacy. It would still be projecting something outside of who the couple is that would ultimately secure their meaning. So, for some religious people, this can be something like a second coming, or some kind of messianic approach. In Judaism, for instance, the work we all do to establish peace on earth so that we have this second coming. So no matter how rich the detail you enfold into that future without making it a fettish, it’s still not going to be our intimacy, and therefore, we’re going to have to think about the fact that we’re going to die, and either we don’t stay together forever, or one of us sees the other one dead.
P.J. Hm. Unless you pull in–and it’s a gruesome song, but–my wife and I both love it, it’s the Smiths, and “There’s a light that never goes out”. I don’t know if you’re familiar with it. It’s like “If a ten-ton truck were to kill us, to die by your side would be such a heavenly way to die.” But in either case, there’s always going to be one who doesn’t mourn the other. Which, you make that point in the last chapter, right? So mourning can never be the fulfillment of intimacy because there’s always someone who isn’t doing the mourning, even if you both happen to pass away at the same time.
Dr. Lauer Yes, or even the Romeo and Juliet situation where both get to mourn each other because they both see the other one die. But still, that mourning is not shared. Each one of them does that mourning alone. I mean, it’s not strictly alone. We’re haunted by the people we’ve lost. So we can’t entirely say that it’s something going on inside a single person’s head. That’s too reductive, I think. I think that mourning really is a way of pursuing intimacy, but it can’t really hang its hat on anything. It can’t really say that I’ve done the mourning. So I’ve talked with my wife since early in our dating about our deaths, and we’ve both established that she should be the one to die first because she would not be okay with me dying, and I want to know what it’s like to lose her, and then six months of that and I’ll be done with life. Obviously there’s something absurd about this planning. We can’t plan for how we’re going to die, but the ways that we look for that meaning in the fact that the other is going to die. What I want out of that is consummating the relationship in some way, and the consummation is really doing it all. But as I wrote about that, I realized, no, that’s not a consummate relationship, that’s not doing it all, that’s just a completist urge to have the whole relationship. It’s still is an abstraction that fails to really get everything that there is in a relationship.
P.J. It would be really odd to say “I’m looking forward to mourning you.” (laughs) I mean, I could see situations where someone could say that, but I’m pretty sure that would create some distance in the intimacy! But, I want to be considerate of your time. You talked about the future, and it almost seems like there’s a present where you enfold yourselves, you know, you’re imbedded against the world. I’m curious, when we talk about eyes meeting across the room. Let’s say two parents. Christmas morning, the kids are opening presents. Is there a way in which meeting eyes across could be a way of looking back at the past, and that could be another intimate moment where there’s a sense of completion, of satisfaction of what we’ve created is good?
Dr. Lauer Definitely! So it can be a recognition of the work that both parties have done, and this way it can also be a kind of recognition of value that each party contributed something to this moment. It could be each love them so damn much, and it’s like the fettish, or irony, or the third imbedding that our meaning is there in the love of our children, and it’s also still, probably a recognition of the future. We’re going to get more things like this, but not exactly like this. Our kids will never be this young, and they’ll never be excited in exactly the same way, but the two of you understanding in the same way what that future holds, it can feel very intimate. But intimacy is never a feeling. If it’s just a feeling–a feeling is something that only takes place inside one person–
P.J. Which you reject just because of the stalker thing, right? Just because a stalker feels intimate with somebody doesn’t mean that intimacy is happening, especially as he watches someone who isn’t even aware of his presence.
Dr. LAuer And also because of touching. Our relationship to our feelings is asymmetrical even when I touch you and you feel me touch you, we have different relationships to that. We’re not really sharing the touch. I think that so long as we emphasize feelings, we are farther away from that. Which is another reason I find both Hegel and Beauvoir to be useful guides. They’re always reminding me to get over myself. In fact, that could be the tagline of the phenomenology of spirits. Phenomenology of the spirit or Get Over Yourself.
P.J. Laughs. Might help it to make New York Times Best Seller List.
Dr. Lauer laughs. Yeah, maybe you’d have to get rid of the first part too.
P.J. Yeah, “Get Over Yourself: A Radical Translation” (laughs.)
Dr. Lauer I think that although feelings are always useful guides that can’t be dismissed, there’s a lot of intelligence that’s built into when we feel the way we do. When we think that the feeling is what’s most real, or what matters most, that’s when we’re being our most solecistic
P.J. Yes, which is the opposite of what intimacy should be. Our last question, for our listeners, as you’ve taken this dialectical journey through intimacy, what have been the most important things that you have learned? Or what were the most important parts of those journeys for yourself?
Dr. Lauer (long pause, thinking) I just emphasized that what I get out of Beauvoir and Hegel is “Get over yourself”. So now I’ve got to move in the opposite direction to say “Why did this book matter for me?” So how can I integrate this dialectical narrative into a narrative of my life and my achievement in becoming who I am. And I think I want to beg off that question, actually. But I’ll at least try to do it in a personally informative way so that it doesn’t just
P.J. I was not looking for intense personal examples of intimacy, my apologies! (laughs)
Dr. Lauer Oh, not at all! But, in a Hawaiian context especially, where I am right now, someone is only really worth listening to if they are willing to put themselves into the discussion to some extent. That’s something that I naturally do anyway just because of the way that my mind works, I just show up in the narrative. I will share, that the reason I don’t want to make this book about me, is there is too much of a tendency for–though this is all audio, people aren’t seeing me, I’m a white guy–so much of the stories that we’ve told about the history of philosophy have been emphasized in the way that they mattered for white people, and for white men especially. I don’t think that having the journey of self-discovery of a white man highlighted is doing anyone any favors. We don’t need to know anything more about that. The romantics covered this, back with the sorrows of young Verter, andthe intense, the term” buildance roman” was invented for this kind of journey of self discovery, and for what it means in struggling through a particular kind of work to come to a deeper understanding of yourself. I think it’s one contribution that one can make to understanding what it means to be a human being, but I think that there are enough of those stories out there, that I don’t need to add any. If I had a really good one, maybe. If I had a really good story to that effect I would add one because why not? But I don’t have it and I don’t feel all that bad about not having prepared one, because I don’t think that’s where philosophy needs to be right now. I just don’t think that we need more of those kinds of stories.
P.J. Thank you, I appreciate that very thoughtful answer, and one I just want to thank you for coming on today, and two, thank you for your book, it was an enjoyable read.
Dr. Lauer Thank you so much. This was fun!