Two in One: from accident to destiny
The risk and uncertainty of love. It’s idiosyncrasy and serendipity. Only in retrospect do we feel that our love was meant to be. My meeting with Bernadette was an accidental encounter when I, without any foresight, happened to take a summer off from studies to play at community organizing in an area of Chicago which I had never heard of. Love is first a fluke. It is our commitment that makes it fate.
It is maddening to think that this was not the plan of the Universe or the Creator; that it was coincidence, unwritten in the stars. Perhaps like the Universe itself. A random emergence, a quantum fluctuation. But then in the process we change our love from chance to destiny. We take responsibility. We choose to respond to one another.
Alain Badiou, a moral and political philosopher, in his In Praise of Love dismisses love as merely the ecstasy of the encounter or as a contract or as an illusion — a sort of cover for sexual desire. He rediscovers love as a quest for truth. Not the intellectual, academic, disinterested truth-quest of philosophy and science. Love is discovering and making a world from the perspective of two, not one. “What is the world like when it is experienced, developed, and lived from the point of view of difference and not identity?”
Two unique individuals, with their own special identities, do not become or intend One whether in themselves or in some transcendent place or person. They are and remain different but together make their one world. They see things from the other’s point of view; they listen; they accommodate; they join in a common adventure, contribute to and share a common language. Yet they create their own persons, follow their own dreams, and grow their own souls. With each other’s help, critique, accountability.
In Badiou’s understanding of human being, there are four aspects: 1) There is the bodily behavior, the organism interacting with its environment through expressions. 2) There is bodily awareness, a sense of identity, personhood, self-consciousness. 3) There is the expression that defines things in the world, words, models, realities. And 4) there is the world being framed, shaped, carved, discovered in the environment.
Love is two persons sharing the adventure of making and discovering the world. Yes, indeed they are part of a wider community and draw on many other expressions and even enjoy other activities and awareness as they go along. But in love there is a declaration, a commitment, an effort of two persons to share the adventure and discover their one world.
In the process of love as a quest for truth, Badiou identifies 1) the event which is the encounter and its ecstasy. 2) the declaration, the kiss, the “I love you,” as a commitment to one another, the risk of joining in an adventure which may go wrong. 3) The baring to one another, being naked and vulnerable, much more than sexual intercourse. 4) Points along the way like having a child, like a struggle of misunderstanding, like a success or failure, even of separation and death — all points that recall the initial event, the declaration, and the commitment.
For Badiou love is corporeal. Two bodies entwined in the dance of life exploring and shaping the universe. Sexual, yes, but not necessarily a satiation of desire, an orgasm, where the twoness is lost and each becomes preoccupied with his or her own pleasure. They do not become one flesh. And while they are responsible for the growing of each other’s soul, they remain two growing souls, but growing into One.
Some commentators say that Badiou forgoes transcendence for immanence in love and politics. Love is not religion. And religion is not love. We act collectively and we love as two not for some transcendental state or person. I would rather say that Badiou brings the transcendence of love into immanence. In other words, our very corporeal existence is in process, intentional, intending the growth of the whole person. Love (and politics) is in and for this world, not just for some other one; but yes for some other one who is the whole world.
Love is a long-term project. Most love stories describe the initial encounter, the struggles that got the lovers together, and the ecstasy of the joining and then “they live happily ever after” even when that living becomes more commonplace, even boring, and without the initial passion as in War and Peace with Natasha and Pierre. But love is eternal, beyond separation even that of death. Even if, like the ending of the movie “LA LA Land”, each of the lovers, Seb and Mia, go their own way. They have one last encounter, another accidental one. As Mia is leaving with her new husband, she looks back at Seb. He nods and we know that their love will never end.
Two persons, two souls, now undertaking the growing of other souls and perhaps the Soul of all that there is.