Love, fairness and the problem of value

Introduction

Since life is multi-dimensional, and consideration of every factor in any moment is cumbersome to the point of death or anxiety, we often defer kindnesses, apologies and passions to a law: we often defer love to fairness. However, whenever we consider fairness, we run into a deep question about being, namely, in what sense are things equivalent. For if there is a univocity of being (being is the same) then to aspire for fairness is incoherent, for identity is always equivalent; if being is monadological—rhizomatic or “of difference”—then it also makes no sense to speak of fairness, since all things participate in being differently; if being is equivocal, then we must again ask ourselves for what end. Consider the trade of carrot for potato. Is it fair one item for one, or weight for weight, or kilojoule for kilojoule. When we preference equality in one domain, we create inequality in another. We may overcome this issue of course by implementation of value. When value formulas are provided for number, weight and energy (or whatever combination of factors are available) then by means of differential equations an equilibrium/ point of fairness becomes possible, or at least as a teleology. My contention is that love does not participate in the generation of value formulations. Since fairness’ existence as a coherent concept is contingent upon value, it cannot have a part in love.

An Inequality of Being

Competencies between people vary substantially, and efforts made by less competent people toward certain tasks can have an adverse affect upon its completion, thus, to speak of mere equivalency of actions, remuneration, or time expense can be a generation of unfairness rather than fairness, let alone its failure to participate in love. There should be no debts between friends—love does not count—yet it is the perpetual habit of people to attempt to “pay back” a friend. But given different pools of assets, a remuneration of an equivalent volume may be unfair, for the capacity to be generous with large sums frivolously is available to the wealthier, but not the poorer. This in turn encourages the poorer to shy away from generosity, that is to turn away from love, not for love’s sake, but for fairness’s (although this too may be gratuitous and why they turn away is pride, or a fear of accumulating debts, but these do not partake in love). It is appropriate instead for the recipient to be generous in their reception, that is, to be gracious and thankful and to be affected by their friend. Consider how lovingly a child adores the things given them, and that is a far greater gift to the parent then the return of a gift. Since people vary in capacity, it is self-contradictory to talk of fairness as an equivalency in pure act (“I scratch your back, you scratch mine”), for variance in skill, or expense (“dollar for dollar”), for variance in wealth, yet we may be misled if we are tempted to see fairness’s role in love as “bringing what you have to the table.”

The primary issue with the interplay of lawfulness with love is that it is antithetical to it: where necessity exists, love cannot be. For political philosophy, the question of fairness, and in what sense, has been long considered. Whether that is equality under the law (which creates inequality in the outcomes of people), equality of pay for labour hour (which creates inequality in pay per product), or equality of outcomes (which creates inequality in the opportunities for people), a determination of what type of fairness is fairness has been in deep dispute. It is tempting to adopt the Marxist conceptualisation “from each according to their ability, to each according to need,” when we formulate what fairness should look like in love. We may see that the wealthier is able to provide experiences for their poorer friend, which they are able to enjoy in a way that the wealthier cannot, since they are not acclimatised, and in their enjoyment provide something for the wealthier to enjoy. This might be described as each providing what they can, for the other. Yet where it succeeds in description, it fails in prescription, for what brings the enjoyment of the poorer friend, is the gifting freely (done out of the love the wealthier has); and what brings about the enjoyment of the wealthier friend is the love the poorer has for them and the gift. Were the gift to be a necessary act and the thanks and playing with the gift a pretence, done for the sake of fairness, there would be no love. By constraining the subject to be a vicar to a law or principle (this is called the depraved^[1]) we remove their capacity to subjectively affect and be affected, which is the very nature of love.

The Problem of Value

However, even if fairness operates as an affect, rather than as a law, upon love, it operates to the destruction of it. Where fairness is an affect upon love, love is predicated upon a consideration of the commensurability of actions: it must assign value. How else might one thing be equal to another, if there is no notion of value? Yet if we are to consider the subjective nature of being—that is the unpredictable nature of things—we must take upon Leibniz’ perspective of infinite substances, finitely realising the infinite^[2]. That is to say, since nature is volitional, and volitional entities are identified by their unique privation of the infinite, it is essentially incommensurable. When we consider what we love about a person, what we point to are instantiations of modes of being, of which we do not, in themselves, love, but love as a consequence of their relation to the mode of being itself. When we consider a mode of being, we are not exclusively concerned about extents as positive, but also their absences as positive instantiations of the mode of being: I love you for what you are and for what you are not. Since love’s affect is the mode of being, as resolved by the intellect, its attachments cannot be commensurable, such that someone who has “all that and more” is not of greater value, but entirely incomparable, since negative and positive attributes are varied. Love, whose subjects are unlimited—including topics, clothing, animals and people—, is moved by the modes of being of non-human volitions, that is their presences and absences. Therefore, to treat actions, items and time expenditures as commensurable is to act not out of love, but out of depravity, and to implement fairness to the calculus of action, whether by principle or consideration, is to fall into the error of commensurability.

Love as the Volitional Act

What we conceive of as the failures of love (that must be subsidised by lawfulness and fairness) are always failures to love, and once we have become aware of its true nature, its necessary relationship to subjectivity (volition) becomes clear. Spinoza understood love to mean positive affect. While this definition is sufficient for a complete understanding of the movements of love, it does not make Love’s nature distinct. Where affect moves the peak, or signal, of a distribution of determinations, it cannot determine the determination, or else it would be a cause and not an affect; that is, it would be depraved. Yet, when love is oriented toward a person love is not oriented toward the instantiations, for then it would be more appropriate to say I love when ‘x’ occurred rather than to say I love you, but instead it is oriented toward their mode of being and is thus oriented toward the good of the mode and not the instance. When we speak of love being determinative, or that love caused someone to act against the interest of the loved, we have confused a failure to love with a failure of love. For if we speak of the irreciprocity of love, we indicate that the putative lover has given of themselves with an expectation, that is, the love was in reference to an absence, rather than to a mode of being, which, in being volitionally, is self-sufficient. Consider one that changes themselves for compromise “out of love” and finds their beloved unchanged. Yet if there is something to be perfected in the subject which affects the lover, is the subject which affects a subject, or have they been turned into an object, whose attributes are commensurable? On the other hand, if we speak of a suppression of the self “derived of love,” we have resolved the subject, of whose force a lover is subject, to an object, that the lover denies the opportunity for change within. For if love is positive affect, it must have the possibility to move against the instantiations of the mode of being which is its affect, such that a lover can leave a beloved who hurts them, since they subjectively determine it to be an ill for the beloved to continue; but the subject must not be constrained. Therefore, to understand affect we must have the context of force between two subjects; that is two volitions.

Love’s interplay with fairness.

The possibility to conceive of commensurability, or of fairness, or to some extent lawfulness, while in implementation to particulars is the depraved, does not fail as a conceptual model (or a normative model) at sufficiently coarse grain analysis. Emergent properties do not need to reflect possible states of volitional agents below measurement: the angular momentum of a rock sitting on a table is zero, yet we know that the spins of the particles comprising the rock are of non-zero magnitude and randomly orienting,^[3] such that a vector sum, over a large enough sample set (for example the number of molecules comprising a rock) averages out to zero, with a very sharp distribution of probability densities. The signal, that is the peak of the distribution, may be sufficiently fixed such that causal analysis may be applied to the rock with near lawful efficacy, however, merely because a peak has a sharp distribution, does not preclude the possibility of volitional behaviour: consider that absolute uncertainty increases with number of measurements, but relative uncertainty diminishes, such that the total possible states increases, but the likelihood to move away from the peak becomes increasingly unlikely. Commensurability, that is value assignments, function in a similar way.^[4] Fairness is thus an emergent phenomenon of love.

Fairness, as it describes Love’s progression, refers to the reciprocal and integrative movement of affect, of which two separate movements are identified. The first of which has already been discussed, that is where two love each other, love is sufficient, yet the behaviours—one giving out of love and one appreciating out of love—has affect move such that fairness suffices as descriptive. Fairness here participates in the universal; love as the particular. Where fairness is aspired for, we observe an Impotence of Ambition,^[5] such that in aspiring for fairness, one no longer loves (as above), and it is thus no longer coherent to speak of the fairness of love, for what is needed in reciprocation is affect, not necessity. The second movement of love called fairness, is understood as The Moral. The height of love, of affection, is unity, that is integrative reciprocal affect: You affect Me affect You affect Me… The integrative movement of affect is such that only through love are we able to affect ourselves, only in the movement of love called fairness. Yet, since in the movement of love called fairness, the mode of being which is the affect is itself affected, the scope of our affections must broaden.

Love as Morality

The Moral must be understood in the Kantian conception as that which is correct regardless of circumstance: a categorical imperative. We must understand that given an inability to access noumena, that is things in themselves, the universalizable moral imperative is to love, that is to be positively affected, in all circumstances; to love unconditionally.^[6] It is therefore the immoral to act out of apathy, out of commensurability: it is immoral to act in Depravity. One apathetic manifestation of note is to be a vicar to a conception of evil, that is to act in Perversity.^[7] Love must therefore not orient itself toward fairness, but also must not orient itself toward unfairness, in its participation in the Moral.

Love’s movement toward the Moral as the Universal

When we try to realise universals, that is, when we try to realise that which participates in being infinitely, we must be reminded that we are constructed finitely, and as such have finite conceptions, even of infinite things. Love, affect, participate universally in fairness and morality, for everything must be able to affect us, everything is worthy of our love. Yet we render ourselves without love, we make ourselves apathetic, when we do not present ourselves with partiality, such that categorical imperatives, or a morality of universal love, move against love and thus against itself (The Impotence of Ambition). For we do not come from the universal to the particular, but from the particular to the universal. Dialectically, when we love one person, or one thing, since it is subject to change, we learn to expand the scope of our affections, by constraining its scope to one. And in so doing we lose all particulars. Love teaches us to love the mode of being, and not the instantiation. Thus, when we are confronted with questions like "would you still love me if I were a worm" there is a deep meaning here, which is, would you love me save of my instantiations: do you love me unconditionally. And yet, since love moves toward the unconditional, it moves toward universality. But there is no true universality without its dialectic realisation in the particular; in partiality.

The Depraved

Since being is volitional, and thus mutually affected by force,^[8] to speak of apathy, or vicariousness, is incoherent, and as such we may be led to the belief that aspirations toward universals (as they are only realised by finite beings finitely) are aspirations toward particulars and an aspiration of fairness is not conducive to the depraved, as nothing is. To speak of something as Depraved is similar in spirit to calling something Bad Faith: where one is a rejection of existential freedom (by something existentially free), the other is to objectify, that is to reject the subjectivity of anything (by/ to something which is volitional). Depravity, as with Bad Faith, does not therefore describe states as they occur, but as they are intended; for this reason, we understand morality to be deontological, that is about intentions. In intending fairness, as discussed above, we cease to intend according to the intelligibility of affects and cease to participate in love: we act immorally.

The Perverse

Yet considerations of fairness produce a second moral threat, that introduces the structures which incentivise proscriptive moral law: namely, since the rational consequence of the movement of love is called fairness, it is possible to intend against the moral realisation of love; that is to intend evil in intending unfairness. There is an equality in being only in apathy, only in acts of Depravity, such that to be a vicar to a conception of evil is to assent to all evil. Therefore, there is an equality in sin, that in intending ill in lying, that is to lie for the sake of its wickedness, there is an equivalent intention to perform any sin (murder, adultery, rape) since the motive for the act was to intend evil. Yet why should one, lying or spreading rumours with the intention to harm in this instance, then be more common than another, like murder? But it is not because of moral reasons, but because of fear, since punishments are often attached to murder, either legal or social, where lying will rarely attract any punishment since it may be hard to identify the cause. Thus, there is an incentive to construe moral laws proscriptively, i.e. “thou shalt not…,” since it does not offer the threat of Depravity. However, the necessity for proscriptive moral laws only arises when consideration is given to the movements of love, and not love itself. In this way, the consideration of fairness in love, offers a second threat, that is, the temptation for unfairness, which is only human.

Conclusion

When love is observed, we readily identify the movement of affect as fairness and can be tempted to think this is an element of love, rather than an emergent phenomenon. However, this is misleading and attempts to incorporate fairness into love only leads to an absence of love, and moral predicament. We must therefore come to love, willing to be positively affected by others, but not foregoing our volitional nature, nor objectifying the volitional nature of the other. By opening ourselves up to be perceived, we allow for others to love, that is to be positively affected by us, which we should be motivated to do, not out of a principle of openness, but by how we are affected by the other. In this way the reciprocal movement of love, called fairness, may emerge, but we must not operate for this end.