ALS Diary (part 52): Life and Schopenhauer’s Will; Love Versus Solidarity

What is the measure of life? Voltaire philosophizes about the response of a fine young man who in consequence of falling off a horse became quadriplegic—reduced to a life without activity, physical love, or initiative of any sort. Voltaire expresses wonderment that the young man nonetheless loves life. I have heard from my neurologist friend Herman a similar story of a young man who fell out of his hunting stand and became a quadriplegic. One of our dearest old friends in Austria was a retired physician, still entirely healthy and active. He fell from a ladder while pruning a fruit tree in his garden and became quadriplegic. Once he described to us in clinical detail how he was fed and evacuated. He told us how at first he had only wanted to die; but he, too, grew accustomed to his reduced condition and began to take pleasure in sunshine and fresh air and the friendship of his loved ones and visitors.

I would say that in their own way these reduced individuals were taking the measure of the essence of life, life itself, life devoid of most of the activities that make it a specific life or distinguish one day from the next. Life is even then always a choice. Certainly, in the physician’s case, he could have ended his if he hadn’t wanted to go on living. All suicides do just that. No one has to go on living. If human beings in their most reduced condition not only shun death but experience life as something good, isn’t this a judgment that life is essentially good? We normally think that some of us have a good life and others a bad life. Life gives to some its blessings, while to others it is a curse. The response of the disabled suggests that life is intrinsically good, not because it gives us anything, but because it is good in itself.

For Schopenhauer, esthetic pleasure is a similar measure of intrinsic value. The pleasure we take in a glorious sunset or the starry sky or a painting or a poem is beyond the satisfaction we get from owning, consuming, or accomplishing anything. For the esthete or for the quadriplegic, the viewing of a sunset, or the experiencing of life itself, is stripped of all striving or achieving by the will. Its goodness is similar to the goodness of pure friendship. In certain ways, friendship or comradeship is or can often be purer than the ties of love and family which are sentimentalized but tainted by the quid pro quo of relations of exchange. Parents “invest” in their children in order to assert certain benefits. The notions of owing and earning overshadow and infiltrate a love mendaciously extolled in kitsch. Pure love transmutes itself to the absolute entitlement of children or the proud ownership of parents. Pure selfless love is more characteristic of deep friendship than of most child-parent relationships.

The same can be said of comradeship in struggle. Recently, I read about the scandal of hiring underage immigrant children for dangerous jobs. The children are sent north by their desperate families as a last resort for survival. A liberal’s reaction is to express outrage at this vicious exploitation. We would prefer that the children and their families starve out of sight without burdening our consciences. What no one notices is the remarkable courage and fierce family loyalty of those exploited and endangered children. Once they set off on their own and cross the border, nothing prevents them from fending for themselves and neglecting the interests of those they leave behind. Few American children would possess the courage and loyalty to undergo such ordeals for the sake of their families. It’s an article of faith reconfirmed in popular culture that American children and adolescents have a right or even an obligation to escape the oppressive reign of their families. It’s impossible to imagine a fourteen-year-old American kid doing what those immigrant kids often do.

I suspect that those immigrant families are consolidated by something more like the solidarity of the soldier or team member. Military units in combat are consolidated to the point of self-sacrifice by a sense of comradeship which is altogether distinct from the tenuous family affection typical for middle-class families in wealthier countries. Comradeship does not depend on the entitlement and equitable exchange relationships that define so-called family bonds here. When I flew to Hawaii to rescue my stricken son, I told myself that a family must be like a military unit in never abandoning a wounded member. I was saddened when my family snapped back into their former aggrieved entitlement as soon as I made it home. There was no residual effect when I faced my own health crisis. What I had done was simply in fulfillment of my family’s entitlement. There was no “deal” requiring reciprocation. I agree that family love should not be understood as an exchange deal. But I also insist that what we give one another is given freely, not in fulfillment of any sort of entitlement. If it isn’t given freely, it’s worthless as an expression of love.

Life or love only attain purity in freedom: the freedom of the quadriplegic to take or leave life; the freedom of the immigrant child to support or abandon his family. Obligatory love isn’t love at all.

Signed,

Andrew (Weeks)