You should know better by now...
The mess that is my mind.
Notes follow the text.
-Preface-
A person once said to me that they had no interest in justice - only in love. My own thought has always been that love, as everything else, must be predicated by that primal value of freedom. It is through this fundamental freedom that a love can be just, which I think love must be. A love which loves without reference to what is right is, at best, a potentially detrimental love, and at worst, not love at all.(1)
I once pointed out how an action will be ultimately assigned importance one way or another, and that for it to have the importance we wish, we must be conscious in choosing and defining why that action has been taken and what we hope to achieve by it. (2) So it is that I now set out in an attempt to determine this concept of love in its import with a mind towards the factors of the good (the just), freedom, and the defining choice.
Let us return to be beginning of this, following the path of the development of the idea of non-contingent affection which I began some years ago.
-Part 1-
First, the presumption of freedom as a necessity for just action. Incense the judge not to anger, nor sway the jury by emotion. A decision made under influencing factors which sway said decision unduly(0) is a corrupted decision, made with a less than clear mind. In the case of affection, let us take examples of contingencies which create unfree and thus false affections.
First, affection based on appearance. One of the most common and most easily noted and defeated. If we have affection for the beautiful only, does our affection cease when time renders its effects on that beauty? What shall we do then? We would have no choice but to move on to another object of affection whose beauty yet remained. But this is an unfair practice (ignoring the adage that all is fair in love and war). As time cannot be avoided, we are punishing our objects for their being ephemeral and subject to that time. In other words, we are holding them culpable, and basing our affection contingently on something over which our object can have no final control. Small measures can be made, but ultimately, time will overcome, should accidental circumstance not intervene beforehand. Thus, affection contingent on beauty is dismissed.
Next, let us assume an affection contingent upon the wealth of the object. They may have accrued said wealth solely by their own devices, but that remains unimportant to our contingent affection. The circumstances of the wealth’s becoming (and coming into the possession of this particular individual) are irrelevant, only its presence (or absence) matter. This materialist perspective could be easily countered by an assertion of non-materialistic value assumptions. However, let’s not dismiss the wealth but accept it as is - after all, wealth is capable of a great deal. Even so, it means nothing to affection in relation to the person of our affection, because that person is not the true object of our affection. The true object is the wealth the person has. If the wealth is our true object, then the person to whom the wealth is attached is meaningless and we may exchange one wealthy object of affection for another at whim (a whim most likely motivated by the amount of wealth or the freedom of its expenditure). Beyond the blatantly mercenary aspect of this contingent affection is the fact that its contingency lies not with its ostensible object-person. In other words, we do not hold the person in affection because of something they *are*, but because of something they *have*. (3)
This is of course the crucial point, that these contingent affections are based upon things that are incidental, not inherent, to the person-object of affection. It is incidental that a person is beautiful, rich, intelligent, male or female, or known to us. To love on these bases is to love contingently, to love the thing incidental to the person rather than to love the person themselves. But now, another example.
Say our affection is contingent upon our object returning or initiating affection for us. Again, our objection does not lie with the mercenary aspect of this situation (though such an objection could be lodged). Rather, it lies with making the affection contingent upon an incidental factor. If it is on the returned declaration of love or the firstly given affection that our own affection is based, then we are contingent upon a situation, rather than a person. Were one person to create the same situation with respect to us that had first been created by another, we would find ourselves in a bind. (4) It is not the person doing, but the thing being done, which predicates our affection in this case. So long as that action can be performed by another, our affection has no special bond with its object-person. This same argument can again be applied to other things with the same effect.
In response, one could say that we would therefore have to have affection for a person for who they are - in other words, for their personal history. Let’s allow this for a moment long enough to refute it. Assume we have affection for a person via their past. We have the same problem we saw above with returned affection, should elements of our object-person’s past be similar/shared/same as that of another person. If the elements are the same, then what decides between the two potentials? If we say the decision is made by other elements, we still have the same problem, just with a different and now more complex set of variables. If A and B share X in their personal history and we decide to distinguish between them on the basis of their possession (or not) of Y, then we will have another problem with A and C, who share X and Y, as we would with A and D, who share X, Y, and Z, should we seek to distinguish more and more.
What if we specifically state every variable so that the entire myriad constellation is satisfied by A and only A, what then? Well, that depends. If we are saying that we have affection for A, who has a specific constellation of history, we could be saying one of two things.
The first is that the person we hold affection for, we do so specifically because of that person’s history (which amounts to a list of demands, in other words contingencies, such as having been born to white parents, raised Protestant, attended a business school, worked a job with good income, etc). This will bring us back to the objection we have been putting off from above - that the affection is contingent (in this case, on history) and thus discounted once more on the same basis as the other contingent affections were - namely, directing affection away from the individual to one of their incidental qualities.(5) However, the second possible meaning is different. We could say that we have affection (non-contingent at that) for “this person”, where we distinguish “this person” by means of referring to their unique constellation of personal history. The difference between the two is that the object of the latter affection is distinguished by, but not dependent on, said unique history. (6)
Let us make one final, and admittedly extreme, example in this current vein. Our affection must additionally not be based on our knowledge of the object-person of our affection. Phrased as a question - is it any less possible for a person we do not know to be loved by us when compared to one we do know? Or, is our love dependent on that knowing? If we say yes, we remain in the realm of contingency. (7) And it is contingency, of course, that we are truing to avoid in this consideration.
The question now begs of itself, “why?” Why avoid contingency? Why not accept it as an element, perhaps inevitable, of human affection? The answer is simple enough: because we do not wish to love that person of our affection with a lesser love, which is what we have assumed a contingent affection to be. The reason why a contingent affection is a lesser one has been addressed in the examples given above. A contingent affection’s basis is the thing which it is predicated on and not the person to whom that basis may be incidentally attached. Contingency is therefore a lie.
To say “I love so-and-sp because of such-and-such” is a lie - or, at least, a deceptive and misdirecting wording. This statement’s true meaning is rather “I love such-and-such, which so-and-so has” or even more accurately “I love such-and-such, which so-and-so happens to have.” The difference of the wording between the two is important as it makes apparent to us the implicit meaning happenstance, of circumstance, of incidence, that contingent affection bears. Again, we see the division between a person and an incidental attribute upon which the person is given our contingent affection. Should the attribute happen to be possessed by another, that person would be as equally a valid object of our affection as our current one is - in so much as our affection is contingent upon this attribute.
An important factor underlying this problem of person and attribute is that of the individual versus the role that they play. With any person against whom we stand in relation, we are faced with both the unique of that individual and the universal of the role they are fulfilling. The universal’s contents are comprised of value assumptions and our own personal logic. The nature of the universal’s contents have the potential to determine the persons which may fulfill that relational role as a normalizing effect born of our value assumptions. What is being argued here is the case for a universal which is as inclusive (as free and as equitable) as possible. If the universal is qualified by various attribute (the object’s appearance, wealth, sex, lineage, personal history, etc)… this is the problem. This act of qualifying leads us into the realm of contingent affection, and that same problem of not loving the person for themselves but for an incidental attribute (or set of attributes) they may possess. (8) What we are seeking, then, is an unqualified universal, which any may fulfill. Having thus settled the matter of the who or what of our non-contingent affection, the how and why still remain.
-Interlude-
If I do not love you for your beauty,
For what do I love you?
If I do not love you for your frailty,
For what do I love you?
If I do not love you for your health,
For what do I love you?
If I do not love you for your wit,
For what do I love you?
If I do not love you for your wealth,
For what do I love you?
If I do not love you for your strength,
For what do I love you?
If I do not love you for your vulnerability,
For what do I love you?
If I do not love you for my needs,
For what are you loved?
If I do not love you for my wants,
For what are you loved?
If I do not love you for my plans,
For what are you loved?
If you are not loved for the past,
For when is this love?
If you are not loved for the future,
For when is this love?
If this love is for nothing,
How can this love be for you?
If this love is for you,
Why is it so?
If this love is for me,
It cannot be otherwise
Than that I have decided.
-Part 2-
To continue, if the affection is non-contingent, then it is, in one sense of the word, baseless. Being dependent upon no attributes of the object-person, it exists merely on the fact that it exists. It does not serve a mercenary purpose, which would imply a dependency of the action on possible returns or higher causes. Further, existing as it does, non-contingent affection predates its object in the course of an individual’s linear perception of their life. If affection did not precede its object, it would be dependent upon that object, and thus contingent.
The picture of non-contingent affection thus far is this; that it precedes that which it takes as its object, and that the object so taken is the bare subject without reference to its attributes or image. Universally extant and universally applicable, we thus come to the question of how this non-distinguishing entity comes to distinguish a particular object as its own. There are a couple of possibilities.
The first would seem initially to be antithetical to all that has been said to this point. Here, the non-contingent affection is attracted to a particular individual by specific attributes they possess. However, we must take note, and this is the important hair to be split, of the fact that the affection is not founded or predicated by these attributes, but rather first drawn in their direction (the direction of their embodiment in the unique constellation of a particular individual) by said attributes. Thus, when the lover says to the beloved in this case “You’re beautiful, I love you” or “You’re wonderful, I love you” or “You’re brilliant, I love you”, the lover is not indicating that their love is based upon these aspects of beauty, benevolence, or brilliance. Rather, they are indicating a particular specific attribute of the beloved that stands out in their (the lover’s) image of them (the beloved). This is not to indicate that the affection itself was drawn by the particular aspects, but that rather the attention - the consciousness by which the affection is manifested - was drawn toward the object by virtue of said attribute.
To prevent misunderstanding, let us reiterate that the attribute is an attracting, not deciding, factor in the affection’s turning towards the object. Think of this example. The specific attribute or attributes (whatever they may be) could be present in any number of individuals, and thus any individual possessing them is an equally likely candidate to receive the affection on this basis.(9)
What then is to decide between the candidates of equal likelihood or between them and the candidates of lesser likelihood? (10) It cannot be the attributes. If it were, no candidate of lesser likelihood would ever be the object of our affection. If it were, we would be at an impasse for choosing between the candidates of equal likelihood - not without adding further attributes until only one candidates remains (which would be conditions). If the attributes decided, we would be contingent once more. (11)
Thus, an external to the attributes must decide the matter. And that is raw choice itself.
This raw choice is one of the most fundamental existential elements and is frequently overlooked or has its credit given to other factors. A person may say that it was inevitable that they should come to love A as opposed to B, when in truth loving one is functionally equivalent to loving the other.(12) Perhaps, as some say, people will prefer the sense of inevitability, fate, karma, Providence, God’s will, psychological predispositions, or sheer blind chance to facing their own responsibility for their choices and the shape of their life. But whether conscious of it or not, those people have made their choices of who to love.
This is the most common of manifestations. It is also the closest to a contingent affection in nature, which can make it the most potentially hazardous manifestation. It does not share the same quality as contingency, only to differ in the quantity of that contingency. It is, in fact, non-contingent. But the delicate subtlety of its distinction from a contingent affection makes it difficult to tell the two apart.
The crucial difference can be said to be a matter of fetishism, in which the individual, rather than making a raw choice, invests the awesome power and terrible burden of responsibility for decisions into a particular object (the attributes of the contingency). This object becomes both salvation and damnation for the fetishistic individual. They are saved from facing the crushing reality of their own humanity-godhood by believing in an irresistible force, a necessity, an undeniable inevitability and fate that they may fall into, diverting responsibility away from themselves into the festishized thing. But they are simultaneously damned to an unfreedom to remain in this state, and they are damned to their freedom, which they must face and accept in some way (no matter how small), should they wish to break the hold of the fetish that they have placed over themselves and choose freely once again (if only to establish yet another fetish). The individual with a contingent affection is a fetishist and therefore a slave (if to nothing else but a part of themselves or a previous choice), and no slave may love freely and fully. The individual with a non-contingent affection is free from these fetters and can love fully, having freely chosen that beloved.
This manifestation is a love which has found its object and lies satisfied. Is may be called common love.
Another manifestation is similar to this first one, but is distinguished by a greater degree of self-awareness. This affection is always conscious of its having been a chosen affair. Whereas the first may make a choice without having realized it, this affection manifests (it had already existed, recall) solely on a conscious basis. The chooser is aware of their choice, aware that it is a choice, aware that no matter how much it may feel like it was meant to be, the fate was formed through our own having accepted it.
A possible side effect of this awareness is that the choice may either be undermined or propped-up by our awareness of it being choice. Faced with the situation of absurd, empty choice, one may feel themselves justified in dismissing the choice once made in favor of a new and contravening choice which undoes the former. And one would be justified in this feeling, as it is nothing other than our choice that makes it so. Being such, we are entitled not only to our whim, but also to acting upon it. Thus, the situation has a sense of permanent instability, as it may be unchosen at any time. And yet, this self-same absurdity gives the choice an unassailability. Having been based upon sheer choice (and self-aware of this), it is subject to no efficacious assault, as nothing can undermine its baselessness, nothing can subvert its non-causality - not even death, separation, or failure.(13)
Given this double-nature, a person who comprehends the fact of their choice but not both aspects of it could be either capricious or dogmatic as a result of the unbalanced recognition. Meanwhile, a beloved which apprehends this fact in her lover could see him as coldly unpredictable (he may change at any time) or frighteningly obsessive (he will never change, ever). The concept of absurd, empty, raw choice is more difficult to understand (and perhaps accept) than that of certain attributes of the self having attracted the lover to the beloved.(14) Make no mistake though, this affection is none the lesser of our first manifestation for its rarefaction.
This second manifestation is a love that has found an object and lies content so long as it continues to accept itself. It may be called absurd love.
There is the possibility of a third possible manifestation which involves the omission of a particular object, but will not be dealt with here.
So ends our consideration of non-contingent affection, its premises, and its manifestations for toady.
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Asides
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Aside 0 - Problem: what is undue influence?
Aside 1 - Of course, it is arrogance to declare another’s love to not be love. Unfortunately, there is no other alternative to the condemnation of others via the affirmation of myself. In deciding for myself, I decide for the world what is good and what is bad. A thing which is bad for me, I declare as bad for others as well, in accordance with the fact that I declare as bad for myself those things that are a priori bad - that are bad universally by an application of my personal logic with is basis in my value assumptions. My rejection of this excluded thing is the natural outgrowth of my having formed an opinion on the matter. (A) It is however, balanced by the idea of “to each his own” in general, and that idea of “Each must love in their own way and be loved in their own way” in particular. So while it feels bad to reject as love what another thinks love is, I find it to be an unavoidable conclusion.
Sub-aside A - Is this why I avoid forming opinions, as to be as inclusive as possible? Inclusiveness is an essential element of freedom, which must first assume as many potentialities as possible. Or is it of a desire to avoid “being wrong”? (For whatever sense wrong may have in the case of an opinion - which is a real sense if the opinion runs counter to an objective fact or a system of thought and value assumptions we take as an objective fact.) Is it part of or a side effect of the project to be unassailable?
Aside 2 - In other words, a reflective life must carry on its act of reflection before the chosen act, so that the choice may be made more consciously of the values which may inform it (the psychoanalytical project - to expose our own controlling impulses to light so as to better understand our own actions). Of course, at the same time, being human, our choice does not equal reality (though, at the same time, in another sense, it does). Thus, this reflection is also an a posteriori. Only after viewing the effects can we see the fruition of our choice.
Aside 3 - Of course, this will lead us into a discussion of what is an element of a person’s having versus a person’s being.
Aside 4 - This bind is often called up in stories, which only speaks to the disheartening presence and proclivity towards this sort of thought among people - that a love returned is the only love.
Aside 5 - A person is not (merely) their history (objective, external, history) and that history is not a necessary history, besides.
Aside 6 - More on this will become clear in the discussion of the first manifestation of non-contingent affection later on.
Aside 7 - Yet another phrasing could be, is the affection based upon the knowing of information about the individual? This formulation is more directly applicable to our everyday situations. Example: we know an individual and know a specific quantity of information about that individual (by direct communication, observation, reliable testimony, it does not matter how). Do we love a person based upon knowing that person? Do we love more, the more we know? If so, affection is here being reduced to a quantitative matter of information exchange. More on this will be addressed in the discussion of the person-themselves versus the image of the person and our formulation of that image in Aside 8, sub-aside A.
Aside 8 - This formulation begs a metaphysical question as to what an individual is. Is the person merely a sum of their attributes? If so, then a person is no other than what they have been, which would excuse us to a contingent affection, as there is nothing else to love a person for than what they have been, for they are nothing other than that. The future is excluded in the formulation, as it does not yet exist and therefore cannot be taken into consideration. The result of this is that we are sunk into time and our affection is necessarily contingent upon time past. This means that, in time to come, our love may end as its historical bases are removed if those bases were, at the time of the affection’s beginning, currently continuing aspects. If the affection is based on a permanently passed fact, it is less contingent in the sense that it will not change with time, but nonetheless remains contingent due to its basic dependency upon the past.
Given these facts, we must assume a distinction between an individual and their attributes (thus, an isolatable self) as a base premise for a non-contingent affection. Not only for the case of the object-person, but also for ourselves the giver of affection. There must be an element which is free of attributes (and thus the consideration of attributes which is the basis of contingency - beyond, perhaps, the attributes existing (A)) if there is to be the possibility of non-contingency.
Sub-aside A - Even this attribute (existing) is questionable and results in a gray area. By the definition of non-contingency we are working towards, it is possible to love a non-existing “person”. Imagine loving a fictional literary character. One could object there is no body. In a sense, the text is their body - those words by which they are made known to us (as an existent body makes the person known to us by its actions, including speech). If we held correspondence with another (real) person and felt ourselves to love them, though there has never been a body presented to us as such, would we feel it right that this affection be dismissed on account of non-corporeality? (This begs the question of what a “body” is, which will not be dealt with further here.)
But now a second objection comes. A fictional character has only as much history as is directly written, no more; whereas the correspondent has history other than what they have told us.
Perhaps. However, we the reader do not know what this other history of our fellow correspondent is, as our only means of knowing is what the text-body has borne out to us in its information-acts. Thus, whether this correspondent has any other history or not, it will have no bearing on our affection anyway (whether the affection is contingent on information received to date, or non-contingent), as the possibility of its existence is not taken into account - only what is known is considered (in the case of contingency, non-contingency will not take account at all).
Very well, says the objector, the remaining element is that you can’t interact with the fictional character, whereas you can with the correspondent.
But what if the correspondence where one-way only? What then? Would it be possible to have affection for someone to whom we could not communicate in return? Or, more accurately, is it possible to have affection for a being we may be able to make a communicative act towards, but cannot expect a reply in any certain terms? (God, anyone?) Is it possible to care for someone in an irrecoverable coma? Is it possible for us to love someone who is dead？Is it, for someone who was never born? Yes, because we don’t specifically love the person themselves, but our idea of the person, which is dependent upon their existence (one way or another, “real” or not).
But, our objector intones, is this not contingency again, to love the idea of the person?
No, I say, it is not. Loving the person or idea of them is functionally the same, as an entire object has been taken for our affection. However, so long as that object has not been adopted on the basis of its constituent attributes (or what we perceive to be their attributes) the affection will remain non-contingent. The person-themselves and the person-as-we-see-them (the image) are functionally the same to us, as these two both serve as the ultimate entity in their respective cases. To have affection for the person based on their attributes is the same as having affection for the image of that person based on the attributes of that image. In both cases, we are taking a part of the Whole and subsuming the importance of that Whole to that selected part.(a)
Sub-sub-aside a - Of course, the recognition of the distinction between person and image inserts and additional difficulty. It could be argued that the image is the attribute of the person upon which we have made our affection contingent. However, this would be inaccurate. First, the epistemological reason for why this is not so. We cannot know everything about the person with perfect precision and certainty. And even if we did, this would be nothing more than a collection of facts, and to stand in relation with facts is nothing else than to know (or not know) them. There can be no true affection for mere facts. Where there is, we have our contingency - where affection is elicited by the binary on-off switch of the facts’ existence or non-existence in relation to the individual. Our images are not merely facts. Images are what is known and what is thought about what is known. However, we will admit here that our objector from above is half right.
If the knowing, the what is known, and the what is thought/felt about what is known decide the affection, we are once again contingent. And yet this is not an inevitable matter. Non-contingency is still possible; the matter is one of direction.
Our affection, if non-contingent, is directed towards the person. But we know the person only as far as we have an image of them. If we learn more of the person, and thus must adjust our image of them, this will not effect the existence of our affection, which remains firmly fixed. This is the essence of non-contingent affection: our affection is for the base subject of the person and is not lessened or strengthened, not begun or ended, not predicated at all, on the basis of the first layer of attributes existing or on the second layer of those attributes we have apprehended (the image).
This leads us back to the starting point of Aside 8, the metaphysical consideration of the object-person. There is a bare subject, and it is to this bare subject that our affection is directed, irrespective of the intervening layers of attributes-real (all those existent in the person-themselves) or attributes-known (the image, which may contain attributes known erroneously). In turn, this tells us that the universal of a non-contingent affection is the bare subject. By this universal, any and all beings (including those of debatable existential status) are eligible objects of our non-contingent affection: male-female, beautiful-ugly, alive-dead, rich-poor, foolish-wise, known-unknown, real-unreal, all are capable of becoming the object of our affection.
This will now call into question the how of non-contingent affection, now that we have settled the who and the what (the why remains unsettled and will be resolved simultaneously with the how).
Aside 9 - This doesn’t mean that those and only those individuals possessing the attracting attributes are candidates; just that they are more likely candidates than those who do no and equal candidates among themselves. The matter is a quantitative and not qualitative one. Lack of the attribute does no exclude the lacking individual wholesale, just makes them unexpected (as the attention may is less liked to be turned towards them). How many couples do we see where one seems to be a very unlikely match for the other?
Aside 10 - Though we must be mindful that, ultimately, all candidates have equal standing due to what the deciding factor of the choice is.
Aside 11 - Additionally, we must be wary of potential temporal comparisons. Two candidates could be perfectly equal, but we entertain an image of their futures wherein they take divergent paths, one of which is more favorable to us. This future is the attribute of potentially manifesting that future and is thus no different from any other attribute at the present(A) and thus bears nothing more on the decision than another attribute would (or rather, should). Were it to do so, we return to contingency.
Sub-aside A - All futures are contained as possibilities within the present.
Aside 12 - Only the attending attributes produce content variables; which are quantitative, not qualitative - once we have chosen to love, everything else is just details that may very well have been otherwise.
Aside 13 - The outcomes of any relationship which may or may not result from the choice here is an important issue, but one for a later time, lest it distract us. Simply put, later events do not undo the having-been of the primal choice.
Aside 14 - Which would be our first manifestation or contingent affection. It’s certainly more gratifying to the beloved’s ego to feel that they are the irresistible cause of their lover’s choice, rather than the object of it.
Whew.
Notes follow the text.
-Preface-
A person once said to me that they had no interest in justice - only in love. My own thought has always been that love, as everything else, must be predicated by that primal value of freedom. It is through this fundamental freedom that a love can be just, which I think love must be. A love which loves without reference to what is right is, at best, a potentially detrimental love, and at worst, not love at all.(1)
I once pointed out how an action will be ultimately assigned importance one way or another, and that for it to have the importance we wish, we must be conscious in choosing and defining why that action has been taken and what we hope to achieve by it. (2) So it is that I now set out in an attempt to determine this concept of love in its import with a mind towards the factors of the good (the just), freedom, and the defining choice.
Let us return to be beginning of this, following the path of the development of the idea of non-contingent affection which I began some years ago.
-Part 1-
First, the presumption of freedom as a necessity for just action. Incense the judge not to anger, nor sway the jury by emotion. A decision made under influencing factors which sway said decision unduly(0) is a corrupted decision, made with a less than clear mind. In the case of affection, let us take examples of contingencies which create unfree and thus false affections.
First, affection based on appearance. One of the most common and most easily noted and defeated. If we have affection for the beautiful only, does our affection cease when time renders its effects on that beauty? What shall we do then? We would have no choice but to move on to another object of affection whose beauty yet remained. But this is an unfair practice (ignoring the adage that all is fair in love and war). As time cannot be avoided, we are punishing our objects for their being ephemeral and subject to that time. In other words, we are holding them culpable, and basing our affection contingently on something over which our object can have no final control. Small measures can be made, but ultimately, time will overcome, should accidental circumstance not intervene beforehand. Thus, affection contingent on beauty is dismissed.
Next, let us assume an affection contingent upon the wealth of the object. They may have accrued said wealth solely by their own devices, but that remains unimportant to our contingent affection. The circumstances of the wealth’s becoming (and coming into the possession of this particular individual) are irrelevant, only its presence (or absence) matter. This materialist perspective could be easily countered by an assertion of non-materialistic value assumptions. However, let’s not dismiss the wealth but accept it as is - after all, wealth is capable of a great deal. Even so, it means nothing to affection in relation to the person of our affection, because that person is not the true object of our affection. The true object is the wealth the person has. If the wealth is our true object, then the person to whom the wealth is attached is meaningless and we may exchange one wealthy object of affection for another at whim (a whim most likely motivated by the amount of wealth or the freedom of its expenditure). Beyond the blatantly mercenary aspect of this contingent affection is the fact that its contingency lies not with its ostensible object-person. In other words, we do not hold the person in affection because of something they *are*, but because of something they *have*. (3)
This is of course the crucial point, that these contingent affections are based upon things that are incidental, not inherent, to the person-object of affection. It is incidental that a person is beautiful, rich, intelligent, male or female, or known to us. To love on these bases is to love contingently, to love the thing incidental to the person rather than to love the person themselves. But now, another example.
Say our affection is contingent upon our object returning or initiating affection for us. Again, our objection does not lie with the mercenary aspect of this situation (though such an objection could be lodged). Rather, it lies with making the affection contingent upon an incidental factor. If it is on the returned declaration of love or the firstly given affection that our own affection is based, then we are contingent upon a situation, rather than a person. Were one person to create the same situation with respect to us that had first been created by another, we would find ourselves in a bind. (4) It is not the person doing, but the thing being done, which predicates our affection in this case. So long as that action can be performed by another, our affection has no special bond with its object-person. This same argument can again be applied to other things with the same effect.
In response, one could say that we would therefore have to have affection for a person for who they are - in other words, for their personal history. Let’s allow this for a moment long enough to refute it. Assume we have affection for a person via their past. We have the same problem we saw above with returned affection, should elements of our object-person’s past be similar/shared/same as that of another person. If the elements are the same, then what decides between the two potentials? If we say the decision is made by other elements, we still have the same problem, just with a different and now more complex set of variables. If A and B share X in their personal history and we decide to distinguish between them on the basis of their possession (or not) of Y, then we will have another problem with A and C, who share X and Y, as we would with A and D, who share X, Y, and Z, should we seek to distinguish more and more.
What if we specifically state every variable so that the entire myriad constellation is satisfied by A and only A, what then? Well, that depends. If we are saying that we have affection for A, who has a specific constellation of history, we could be saying one of two things.
The first is that the person we hold affection for, we do so specifically because of that person’s history (which amounts to a list of demands, in other words contingencies, such as having been born to white parents, raised Protestant, attended a business school, worked a job with good income, etc). This will bring us back to the objection we have been putting off from above - that the affection is contingent (in this case, on history) and thus discounted once more on the same basis as the other contingent affections were - namely, directing affection away from the individual to one of their incidental qualities.(5) However, the second possible meaning is different. We could say that we have affection (non-contingent at that) for “this person”, where we distinguish “this person” by means of referring to their unique constellation of personal history. The difference between the two is that the object of the latter affection is distinguished by, but not dependent on, said unique history. (6)
Let us make one final, and admittedly extreme, example in this current vein. Our affection must additionally not be based on our knowledge of the object-person of our affection. Phrased as a question - is it any less possible for a person we do not know to be loved by us when compared to one we do know? Or, is our love dependent on that knowing? If we say yes, we remain in the realm of contingency. (7) And it is contingency, of course, that we are truing to avoid in this consideration.
The question now begs of itself, “why?” Why avoid contingency? Why not accept it as an element, perhaps inevitable, of human affection? The answer is simple enough: because we do not wish to love that person of our affection with a lesser love, which is what we have assumed a contingent affection to be. The reason why a contingent affection is a lesser one has been addressed in the examples given above. A contingent affection’s basis is the thing which it is predicated on and not the person to whom that basis may be incidentally attached. Contingency is therefore a lie.
To say “I love so-and-sp because of such-and-such” is a lie - or, at least, a deceptive and misdirecting wording. This statement’s true meaning is rather “I love such-and-such, which so-and-so has” or even more accurately “I love such-and-such, which so-and-so happens to have.” The difference of the wording between the two is important as it makes apparent to us the implicit meaning happenstance, of circumstance, of incidence, that contingent affection bears. Again, we see the division between a person and an incidental attribute upon which the person is given our contingent affection. Should the attribute happen to be possessed by another, that person would be as equally a valid object of our affection as our current one is - in so much as our affection is contingent upon this attribute.
An important factor underlying this problem of person and attribute is that of the individual versus the role that they play. With any person against whom we stand in relation, we are faced with both the unique of that individual and the universal of the role they are fulfilling. The universal’s contents are comprised of value assumptions and our own personal logic. The nature of the universal’s contents have the potential to determine the persons which may fulfill that relational role as a normalizing effect born of our value assumptions. What is being argued here is the case for a universal which is as inclusive (as free and as equitable) as possible. If the universal is qualified by various attribute (the object’s appearance, wealth, sex, lineage, personal history, etc)… this is the problem. This act of qualifying leads us into the realm of contingent affection, and that same problem of not loving the person for themselves but for an incidental attribute (or set of attributes) they may possess. (8) What we are seeking, then, is an unqualified universal, which any may fulfill. Having thus settled the matter of the who or what of our non-contingent affection, the how and why still remain.
-Interlude-
If I do not love you for your beauty,
For what do I love you?
If I do not love you for your frailty,
For what do I love you?
If I do not love you for your health,
For what do I love you?
If I do not love you for your wit,
For what do I love you?
If I do not love you for your wealth,
For what do I love you?
If I do not love you for your strength,
For what do I love you?
If I do not love you for your vulnerability,
For what do I love you?
If I do not love you for my needs,
For what are you loved?
If I do not love you for my wants,
For what are you loved?
If I do not love you for my plans,
For what are you loved?
If you are not loved for the past,
For when is this love?
If you are not loved for the future,
For when is this love?
If this love is for nothing,
How can this love be for you?
If this love is for you,
Why is it so?
If this love is for me,
It cannot be otherwise
Than that I have decided.
-Part 2-
To continue, if the affection is non-contingent, then it is, in one sense of the word, baseless. Being dependent upon no attributes of the object-person, it exists merely on the fact that it exists. It does not serve a mercenary purpose, which would imply a dependency of the action on possible returns or higher causes. Further, existing as it does, non-contingent affection predates its object in the course of an individual’s linear perception of their life. If affection did not precede its object, it would be dependent upon that object, and thus contingent.
The picture of non-contingent affection thus far is this; that it precedes that which it takes as its object, and that the object so taken is the bare subject without reference to its attributes or image. Universally extant and universally applicable, we thus come to the question of how this non-distinguishing entity comes to distinguish a particular object as its own. There are a couple of possibilities.
The first would seem initially to be antithetical to all that has been said to this point. Here, the non-contingent affection is attracted to a particular individual by specific attributes they possess. However, we must take note, and this is the important hair to be split, of the fact that the affection is not founded or predicated by these attributes, but rather first drawn in their direction (the direction of their embodiment in the unique constellation of a particular individual) by said attributes. Thus, when the lover says to the beloved in this case “You’re beautiful, I love you” or “You’re wonderful, I love you” or “You’re brilliant, I love you”, the lover is not indicating that their love is based upon these aspects of beauty, benevolence, or brilliance. Rather, they are indicating a particular specific attribute of the beloved that stands out in their (the lover’s) image of them (the beloved). This is not to indicate that the affection itself was drawn by the particular aspects, but that rather the attention - the consciousness by which the affection is manifested - was drawn toward the object by virtue of said attribute.
To prevent misunderstanding, let us reiterate that the attribute is an attracting, not deciding, factor in the affection’s turning towards the object. Think of this example. The specific attribute or attributes (whatever they may be) could be present in any number of individuals, and thus any individual possessing them is an equally likely candidate to receive the affection on this basis.(9)
What then is to decide between the candidates of equal likelihood or between them and the candidates of lesser likelihood? (10) It cannot be the attributes. If it were, no candidate of lesser likelihood would ever be the object of our affection. If it were, we would be at an impasse for choosing between the candidates of equal likelihood - not without adding further attributes until only one candidates remains (which would be conditions). If the attributes decided, we would be contingent once more. (11)
Thus, an external to the attributes must decide the matter. And that is raw choice itself.
This raw choice is one of the most fundamental existential elements and is frequently overlooked or has its credit given to other factors. A person may say that it was inevitable that they should come to love A as opposed to B, when in truth loving one is functionally equivalent to loving the other.(12) Perhaps, as some say, people will prefer the sense of inevitability, fate, karma, Providence, God’s will, psychological predispositions, or sheer blind chance to facing their own responsibility for their choices and the shape of their life. But whether conscious of it or not, those people have made their choices of who to love.
This is the most common of manifestations. It is also the closest to a contingent affection in nature, which can make it the most potentially hazardous manifestation. It does not share the same quality as contingency, only to differ in the quantity of that contingency. It is, in fact, non-contingent. But the delicate subtlety of its distinction from a contingent affection makes it difficult to tell the two apart.
The crucial difference can be said to be a matter of fetishism, in which the individual, rather than making a raw choice, invests the awesome power and terrible burden of responsibility for decisions into a particular object (the attributes of the contingency). This object becomes both salvation and damnation for the fetishistic individual. They are saved from facing the crushing reality of their own humanity-godhood by believing in an irresistible force, a necessity, an undeniable inevitability and fate that they may fall into, diverting responsibility away from themselves into the festishized thing. But they are simultaneously damned to an unfreedom to remain in this state, and they are damned to their freedom, which they must face and accept in some way (no matter how small), should they wish to break the hold of the fetish that they have placed over themselves and choose freely once again (if only to establish yet another fetish). The individual with a contingent affection is a fetishist and therefore a slave (if to nothing else but a part of themselves or a previous choice), and no slave may love freely and fully. The individual with a non-contingent affection is free from these fetters and can love fully, having freely chosen that beloved.
This manifestation is a love which has found its object and lies satisfied. Is may be called common love.
Another manifestation is similar to this first one, but is distinguished by a greater degree of self-awareness. This affection is always conscious of its having been a chosen affair. Whereas the first may make a choice without having realized it, this affection manifests (it had already existed, recall) solely on a conscious basis. The chooser is aware of their choice, aware that it is a choice, aware that no matter how much it may feel like it was meant to be, the fate was formed through our own having accepted it.
A possible side effect of this awareness is that the choice may either be undermined or propped-up by our awareness of it being choice. Faced with the situation of absurd, empty choice, one may feel themselves justified in dismissing the choice once made in favor of a new and contravening choice which undoes the former. And one would be justified in this feeling, as it is nothing other than our choice that makes it so. Being such, we are entitled not only to our whim, but also to acting upon it. Thus, the situation has a sense of permanent instability, as it may be unchosen at any time. And yet, this self-same absurdity gives the choice an unassailability. Having been based upon sheer choice (and self-aware of this), it is subject to no efficacious assault, as nothing can undermine its baselessness, nothing can subvert its non-causality - not even death, separation, or failure.(13)
Given this double-nature, a person who comprehends the fact of their choice but not both aspects of it could be either capricious or dogmatic as a result of the unbalanced recognition. Meanwhile, a beloved which apprehends this fact in her lover could see him as coldly unpredictable (he may change at any time) or frighteningly obsessive (he will never change, ever). The concept of absurd, empty, raw choice is more difficult to understand (and perhaps accept) than that of certain attributes of the self having attracted the lover to the beloved.(14) Make no mistake though, this affection is none the lesser of our first manifestation for its rarefaction.
This second manifestation is a love that has found an object and lies content so long as it continues to accept itself. It may be called absurd love.
There is the possibility of a third possible manifestation which involves the omission of a particular object, but will not be dealt with here.
So ends our consideration of non-contingent affection, its premises, and its manifestations for toady.
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Asides
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Aside 0 - Problem: what is undue influence?
Aside 1 - Of course, it is arrogance to declare another’s love to not be love. Unfortunately, there is no other alternative to the condemnation of others via the affirmation of myself. In deciding for myself, I decide for the world what is good and what is bad. A thing which is bad for me, I declare as bad for others as well, in accordance with the fact that I declare as bad for myself those things that are a priori bad - that are bad universally by an application of my personal logic with is basis in my value assumptions. My rejection of this excluded thing is the natural outgrowth of my having formed an opinion on the matter. (A) It is however, balanced by the idea of “to each his own” in general, and that idea of “Each must love in their own way and be loved in their own way” in particular. So while it feels bad to reject as love what another thinks love is, I find it to be an unavoidable conclusion.
Sub-aside A - Is this why I avoid forming opinions, as to be as inclusive as possible? Inclusiveness is an essential element of freedom, which must first assume as many potentialities as possible. Or is it of a desire to avoid “being wrong”? (For whatever sense wrong may have in the case of an opinion - which is a real sense if the opinion runs counter to an objective fact or a system of thought and value assumptions we take as an objective fact.) Is it part of or a side effect of the project to be unassailable?
Aside 2 - In other words, a reflective life must carry on its act of reflection before the chosen act, so that the choice may be made more consciously of the values which may inform it (the psychoanalytical project - to expose our own controlling impulses to light so as to better understand our own actions). Of course, at the same time, being human, our choice does not equal reality (though, at the same time, in another sense, it does). Thus, this reflection is also an a posteriori. Only after viewing the effects can we see the fruition of our choice.
Aside 3 - Of course, this will lead us into a discussion of what is an element of a person’s having versus a person’s being.
Aside 4 - This bind is often called up in stories, which only speaks to the disheartening presence and proclivity towards this sort of thought among people - that a love returned is the only love.
Aside 5 - A person is not (merely) their history (objective, external, history) and that history is not a necessary history, besides.
Aside 6 - More on this will become clear in the discussion of the first manifestation of non-contingent affection later on.
Aside 7 - Yet another phrasing could be, is the affection based upon the knowing of information about the individual? This formulation is more directly applicable to our everyday situations. Example: we know an individual and know a specific quantity of information about that individual (by direct communication, observation, reliable testimony, it does not matter how). Do we love a person based upon knowing that person? Do we love more, the more we know? If so, affection is here being reduced to a quantitative matter of information exchange. More on this will be addressed in the discussion of the person-themselves versus the image of the person and our formulation of that image in Aside 8, sub-aside A.
Aside 8 - This formulation begs a metaphysical question as to what an individual is. Is the person merely a sum of their attributes? If so, then a person is no other than what they have been, which would excuse us to a contingent affection, as there is nothing else to love a person for than what they have been, for they are nothing other than that. The future is excluded in the formulation, as it does not yet exist and therefore cannot be taken into consideration. The result of this is that we are sunk into time and our affection is necessarily contingent upon time past. This means that, in time to come, our love may end as its historical bases are removed if those bases were, at the time of the affection’s beginning, currently continuing aspects. If the affection is based on a permanently passed fact, it is less contingent in the sense that it will not change with time, but nonetheless remains contingent due to its basic dependency upon the past.
Given these facts, we must assume a distinction between an individual and their attributes (thus, an isolatable self) as a base premise for a non-contingent affection. Not only for the case of the object-person, but also for ourselves the giver of affection. There must be an element which is free of attributes (and thus the consideration of attributes which is the basis of contingency - beyond, perhaps, the attributes existing (A)) if there is to be the possibility of non-contingency.
Sub-aside A - Even this attribute (existing) is questionable and results in a gray area. By the definition of non-contingency we are working towards, it is possible to love a non-existing “person”. Imagine loving a fictional literary character. One could object there is no body. In a sense, the text is their body - those words by which they are made known to us (as an existent body makes the person known to us by its actions, including speech). If we held correspondence with another (real) person and felt ourselves to love them, though there has never been a body presented to us as such, would we feel it right that this affection be dismissed on account of non-corporeality? (This begs the question of what a “body” is, which will not be dealt with further here.)
But now a second objection comes. A fictional character has only as much history as is directly written, no more; whereas the correspondent has history other than what they have told us.
Perhaps. However, we the reader do not know what this other history of our fellow correspondent is, as our only means of knowing is what the text-body has borne out to us in its information-acts. Thus, whether this correspondent has any other history or not, it will have no bearing on our affection anyway (whether the affection is contingent on information received to date, or non-contingent), as the possibility of its existence is not taken into account - only what is known is considered (in the case of contingency, non-contingency will not take account at all).
Very well, says the objector, the remaining element is that you can’t interact with the fictional character, whereas you can with the correspondent.
But what if the correspondence where one-way only? What then? Would it be possible to have affection for someone to whom we could not communicate in return? Or, more accurately, is it possible to have affection for a being we may be able to make a communicative act towards, but cannot expect a reply in any certain terms? (God, anyone?) Is it possible to care for someone in an irrecoverable coma? Is it possible for us to love someone who is dead？Is it, for someone who was never born? Yes, because we don’t specifically love the person themselves, but our idea of the person, which is dependent upon their existence (one way or another, “real” or not).
But, our objector intones, is this not contingency again, to love the idea of the person?
No, I say, it is not. Loving the person or idea of them is functionally the same, as an entire object has been taken for our affection. However, so long as that object has not been adopted on the basis of its constituent attributes (or what we perceive to be their attributes) the affection will remain non-contingent. The person-themselves and the person-as-we-see-them (the image) are functionally the same to us, as these two both serve as the ultimate entity in their respective cases. To have affection for the person based on their attributes is the same as having affection for the image of that person based on the attributes of that image. In both cases, we are taking a part of the Whole and subsuming the importance of that Whole to that selected part.(a)
Sub-sub-aside a - Of course, the recognition of the distinction between person and image inserts and additional difficulty. It could be argued that the image is the attribute of the person upon which we have made our affection contingent. However, this would be inaccurate. First, the epistemological reason for why this is not so. We cannot know everything about the person with perfect precision and certainty. And even if we did, this would be nothing more than a collection of facts, and to stand in relation with facts is nothing else than to know (or not know) them. There can be no true affection for mere facts. Where there is, we have our contingency - where affection is elicited by the binary on-off switch of the facts’ existence or non-existence in relation to the individual. Our images are not merely facts. Images are what is known and what is thought about what is known. However, we will admit here that our objector from above is half right.
If the knowing, the what is known, and the what is thought/felt about what is known decide the affection, we are once again contingent. And yet this is not an inevitable matter. Non-contingency is still possible; the matter is one of direction.
Our affection, if non-contingent, is directed towards the person. But we know the person only as far as we have an image of them. If we learn more of the person, and thus must adjust our image of them, this will not effect the existence of our affection, which remains firmly fixed. This is the essence of non-contingent affection: our affection is for the base subject of the person and is not lessened or strengthened, not begun or ended, not predicated at all, on the basis of the first layer of attributes existing or on the second layer of those attributes we have apprehended (the image).
This leads us back to the starting point of Aside 8, the metaphysical consideration of the object-person. There is a bare subject, and it is to this bare subject that our affection is directed, irrespective of the intervening layers of attributes-real (all those existent in the person-themselves) or attributes-known (the image, which may contain attributes known erroneously). In turn, this tells us that the universal of a non-contingent affection is the bare subject. By this universal, any and all beings (including those of debatable existential status) are eligible objects of our non-contingent affection: male-female, beautiful-ugly, alive-dead, rich-poor, foolish-wise, known-unknown, real-unreal, all are capable of becoming the object of our affection.
This will now call into question the how of non-contingent affection, now that we have settled the who and the what (the why remains unsettled and will be resolved simultaneously with the how).
Aside 9 - This doesn’t mean that those and only those individuals possessing the attracting attributes are candidates; just that they are more likely candidates than those who do no and equal candidates among themselves. The matter is a quantitative and not qualitative one. Lack of the attribute does no exclude the lacking individual wholesale, just makes them unexpected (as the attention may is less liked to be turned towards them). How many couples do we see where one seems to be a very unlikely match for the other?
Aside 10 - Though we must be mindful that, ultimately, all candidates have equal standing due to what the deciding factor of the choice is.
Aside 11 - Additionally, we must be wary of potential temporal comparisons. Two candidates could be perfectly equal, but we entertain an image of their futures wherein they take divergent paths, one of which is more favorable to us. This future is the attribute of potentially manifesting that future and is thus no different from any other attribute at the present(A) and thus bears nothing more on the decision than another attribute would (or rather, should). Were it to do so, we return to contingency.
Sub-aside A - All futures are contained as possibilities within the present.
Aside 12 - Only the attending attributes produce content variables; which are quantitative, not qualitative - once we have chosen to love, everything else is just details that may very well have been otherwise.
Aside 13 - The outcomes of any relationship which may or may not result from the choice here is an important issue, but one for a later time, lest it distract us. Simply put, later events do not undo the having-been of the primal choice.
Aside 14 - Which would be our first manifestation or contingent affection. It’s certainly more gratifying to the beloved’s ego to feel that they are the irresistible cause of their lover’s choice, rather than the object of it.
Whew.