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Conjugal Faithfulness
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 January 2010
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‘Faithfulness’ is defined in The Oxford English Dictionary of 1901 in a way that leaves out what one might take as a central paradigm. The OED entry reads, in part
Faithfulness … the quality of being faithful.
A. Fidelity, loyalty (to a superior or friend) …
B. Strict adherence to one's pledged word; honesty, sincerity. …
The feudal system, the army, and the rest of such things are provided for in (A) ‘loyalty to a superior …’, and so are friends – after superiors. In (B), commercial interests are satisfactorily covered: ‘strict adherence to one's pledged word, honesty. …’ It is a nice piece of social history: from William the Conqueror to the latter phases of the Industrial Revolution, in two definitions. But a very odd piece of social history, in that conjugal faithfulness, the most existential one that there is, does not rate a mention.
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- Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1977
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NOTES
1 Either/Or, there are two readily available editions of this work: (i) translated by Lowrie, Walter, London, O.U.P. 1946Google Scholar (Princeton, Princeton U.P. 1946); (ii) translated by Walter Lowrie with revision and a foreword by Howard A. Johnson, N.Y., Doubleday, Anchor Books, 1959. The latter edition has been used in the preparation of this paper: page references are given to (i) O.U.P./Princeton first, and to (ii) Doubleday second, as E/O, p. 18/p. 21.Google Scholar
2 ‘Love and faithfulness’: the note to Psalm 89 in The Jerusalem Bible reads, in part, ‘The pairing of “love” with “faithfulness” is a feature of this Psalm’. The Jerusalem Bible, London, Darton Longman, Todd, 1966.Google Scholar
3 Though Søren Kierkegaard's Judge William would seem, in making a case for love, to make such a unique case for so unique a thing, he nevertheless wants to take conjugal faithfulness as a paradigm for faithfulness in other contexts too. The Judge William letter discussed in the body of this paper, mentions three kinds of faithfulness: (1) conjugal (romantic), ‘historic fidelity’; (2) knightly fidelity, and; (3) faithfulness to a vocation or profession. On this last Judge William writes that impressa vestigia of love are what ‘I have … before me, even in the universal sphere which is duty’. E/O, p. 128/p. 155Google Scholar. Having defined the love relationship in the erotic context as one of uniqueness and exclusivity, Judge William will have to explain how impressa vestigia of something so unique relate to the ‘universally valid sphere’ or to the Principle of Universalisability. We get hints, in the letter, of Judge William's solution, but it is not worked out in detail. He writes ‘the defect of earthly love is the same thing as its advantageous quality, i.e., its partiality’: ‘spiritual love’ however, ‘is constantly opening itself’ more and more, ever extending its circle of love … &c. p. 52/p. 63. How the earthlyerotic and the spiritual are to be reconciled, even by impressa vestigia is not at once clear to Judge William's/SK's reader.
4 In the Danish Marriage Service, revised version 1912, the phrase ‘until death do you part’ occurs [indtil døden skiller jer ad], but there is no phrase equivalent to the Anglican ‘forsaking all other’. [I am indebted to Mr. Peter Holsig for a copy and a translation of the Service.]
5 ‘Wilt thou love her … ?’; it has sometimes been remarked that a promise to love, i.e. to go on loving, is absurd, since love is not to be commanded by will. Judge William would see this promise to love as merely an affirmation of a present ‘eternity’; an eternity capable of itself, with certain care and certain ‘determinations’ hedging it, going on into future time. Love is now, so its future can be safeguarded, though not commanded, because, if it is now, its future ‘eternally is’ and need not be commanded.
6 Love is the substance of marriage: virtually the only syllogistic argument in Judge William's otherwise highly dialectical letter is the one:
Love is the substance of marriage,
Love is eternal
Marriage is eternal
Judge William allows himself to equate first and Romantic love with conjugal, or temporarily to distinguish them from conjugal love, as the exigencies of his complex dialetic require. His central principle, however is that ‘marriage is the transfiguration of first love’, E/O, p. 28/p. 33.Google Scholar
7 The senses in which love/marriage are said by Judge William to be AESTHETIC seem to be:
(1) marriage has an immanent teleology (and an apriority), and so is analogous in structure to Kant's beautiful which is ‘purposiveness of an object, so far as this is perceived in it without any representation of a purpose’ (Bernard, J. H.'s trans. Critique of Judgment, N.Y., Haffner Publishing Co., 1966, p. 73)Google Scholar. Reference to ‘representation of a purpose’ may be dropped in Judge William's context, since he distinguishes explicitly between an aesthetic as representation and an aesthetic as lived [Consider also, in its context, the phrase ‘it must bear the stamp of the accidental, and yet one must remotely sense an art’, E/O, p. 90/p. 103Google Scholar, cross refer Kant's remark in C.J.: ‘A product of fine art … must appear just as free from the restraint of arbitrary rules as if it were a product of mere nature’, 45Google Scholar, Bk II, Meredith's trans, pp. 166–7.]
(2) love/marriage is ‘eternal’, and in this is like, isomorphic with, an aesthetic idea, as: §(2.1) given, all, all in one, and; (2.2) needing to be, in time, exfoliated.
(3) love/marriage achieve a unity of opposites, see pages p. 51/pp. 61–2; p. 81/p. 98; perhaps the most striking unity which the aesthetic of love achieves is that of ‘freedom and necessity’, see pp. 37ff/pp. 44ff.
(4) ‘love is a unity of the universal and the particular’, pp. 75–6/pp. 91–2Google Scholar; it is the role, classically, in post Hegelian thought, for the aesthetic to achieve this union, though the notion is, of course, older then Hegel. [See also: Conclusion to this paper: and in relation to the ‘conclusion’ note, ‘one would not treat the particular individual merely as a moment in a process, but as the definitive reality’, p. 58/p. 70.]Google Scholar
8 ‘Eternal’ and ‘infinite’ used of love:
Eternal, eternity (approx. 60 occurrences): p. 18/p. 21Google Scholar; the ‘little eternity’ of p. 19/p. 22Google Scholar would be Marvell, 's; p. 20/p. 23Google Scholar; p. 23/p. 27; p. 24/p. 28; p. 26/p. 30; p. 28/p. 33; p. 32/p. 38; ‘the constantly unfolding …’; p. 34/p. 40; p. 34/p. 41; p. 35/p. 42; p. 36/p. 43; p. 49/pp. 58–9; Marvell, 's too ‘the seductive eternity of the instant’, p. 49/p. 59Google Scholar; p. 50/p. 60; p. 51/p. 61 [‘a moment out of time’, p. 81/p. 97]; p. 94/p. 114; p. 99/p. 120: (p. 106/p. 128); ‘naive eternity’, p. 106/p. 129Google Scholar; pp. 115–16/p. 140; p. 116/p. 141; p. 117/ p. 142; p. 118/p. 143; ‘the hope of eternity which fills the moment to the brim’, p. 120/p. 145Google Scholar; p. 122/p. 148; p. 125/p. 152.
Infinite, infinity (approx. 10 occurrences): ‘bad infinity’, p. 23/p. 27Google Scholar; p. 26/p. 31; p. 49/p. 59; ‘infinity of energy’, p. 54/p. 65Google Scholar [finite, p. 60/p. 73]: ‘that infinity which is your element’, p. 70/p. 85Google Scholar: ‘first love is discovered as an immediate infinity’, p. 79/p. 95Google Scholar: ‘the infinity which has finiteness in itself’, p. 79/p. 96Google Scholar; ‘the infinite moment of love’, p. 94/p. 113Google Scholar; (‘the most of infinite significance’, p. 112/p. 135)Google Scholar; ‘an infinite reality in eternity’, p. 118/p. 143Google Scholar. For the relationship between ‘infinite’ and the universal-particular nexus, see p. 76/p. 92.
9 Judge William presents himself as one of those ‘fortunate individuals’ who found, was found by, ‘eternal’ love: Søren Kierkegaard who wrote the whole book, in which Judge William is a mere persona it would seem did not find love; his treatment of Regina Olsen suggests this. By putting in this, unobtrusive, reference to ‘fortunate individuals’, ‘A’, who otherwise cuts a rather poor figure in Judge William's letter, has his revenge. For if it is not the case that all cases of love are the same as they are to the fortunate, the large claims of Judge William's analysis of love as eternal, are much weakened. Again the phrase ‘whether he has truly been in love’, p. 37/p. 44Google Scholar, inserts another tiny, but possibly deadly, qualification.
10 ‘Time-Transcendence and Some Related Phenomena in the Arts’, by Hepburn, R. W., in Contemporary British Philosophy, fourth series, edited by Lewis, H. D., London, George Allen & Unwin, 1976, p. 158Google Scholar.
11 There is a subtle argument behind the redefinition of the aesthetic which turns upon Judge William's distinction between ‘what is aesthetically beautiful’ and ‘the representation of aesthetic beauty’, EjO, p. 111/p. 135Google Scholar. This is too complex to go into here.
12 Ut pictura poesis; see, for an interesting historical account of this notion, Lee, Rensselaer W.'s Ut Pictura Poesis: The Humanistic Theory of Painting, N.Y., W. W. Norton Go. Inc., 1967.Google Scholar
13 ‘Ramassé non encore déroulé’, Professor Hepburn is quoting from the essay on Maurice Scève's poetry in vol. IV of Études sur le temps humain (pp. 9–15)Google Scholar.
There is an interesting footnote to E. Vinaver's ‘Action and Poetry in Racine's Tragedies’ in which he refers to ‘the presence of each moment at every other’: M. Vinaver expresses his indebtedness, for this notion, to Merleau-Ponty, M.'s La Structure du comportement, nouvelle edition, Paris 1949, p. 153, & 147ff.Google Scholar: the notion represents a rather condensed precis of the ideas of these pages of La structure du comportement, and the phrase is M. Vinaver's, not M. Merleau-Ponty's. See Racine, ed. Knight, R. K., Macmillan (Modern Judgments series), 1969, p. 160CrossRefGoogle Scholar. ‘The presence of each moment at every other’ would match nicely Judge William's talk of ‘the first’ as ‘simply the present, but the present is … the constantly unfolding and rejuvenating “first”’, E/O, p. 33/p. 40Google Scholar and talk of ‘the continuity with which the whole is posited by the first’, p. 35/p. 41Google Scholar; ‘the eternal which has the temporal in itself’, p. 79/p. 96, &c.Google Scholar
14 ‘has the idea in itself’. This is the closest, perhaps, that Judge William comes to acknowledging quite explicitly an indebtedness to Kant's notion of the aesthetic idea: E/O, p. 15/p. 140Google Scholar. Perhaps Judge William's ‘remark’ to ‘A’: ‘at such moments you are transfigured … your whole soul is concentrated upon [a] sole point…’, E/O, p. 10/p. 11Google Scholar and the whole context of it, represents ‘A’ as subject to an aestheticon-the-pattern-of-an-aesthetic-idea. Again, of ‘A’s ‘polemic’ Judge William writes: ‘when I think of the multifarious expressions of it which I possess in their dispersion, and imagine them gathered into a unity, your polemic is so talented and inventive that it is a good guide for one who would defend the other side’, E/O, p. 25/p. 29.Google Scholar
15 Unfaithfulness of course in the marital-sexual context is classically defined in terms of not forsaking all other, and not going on ‘as long as ye both shall live’. To fail to comfort, to honour, to cherish, to ‘keep her in sickness and in health’ does not, in common parlance, amount to ‘unfaithfulness’. So much for ‘what we ordinarily say’.
16 The belovèd ‘alone has existence’, E/O, p. 36/p. 43Google Scholar. This phenomenology has of course been, in its general form criticised: see: ‘Freud's reference (Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, IXX)Google Scholar to “Bernard Shaw's malicious aphorism to the effect that being in love means greatly exaggerating the difference between one woman and another”.’ Freud perhaps had in mind Undershaft's remark to Cusins (Major Barbara, Act III), ‘like all young men, you greatly exaggerate the difference between one young woman and another’. This quotation is from a footnote on p. 194 of Brophy, Brigid's The Adventures of God in His Search for the Black Girl, London, Macmillan, 1973, q.v.Google Scholar
17 ‘A power compelling you to remain in love’, does smack a little of J-J. Rousseau's notion of the citizen who is ‘forced to be free’. SK occasionally resorts, as does J-J. Rousseau so often and so notoriously, to a two-will model, see the remarks on Duty. But his real move is ontological: the will can and must, in love, remain steadfast because love is, as eternal, itself steadfast. (See The Social Contract, Book I, Ch. VII.)
18 George Santayana writes, somewhere, of love: ‘Love is very penetrating, it penetrates to possibilities rather than facts.’ Faithfulness as to the promise of a matter seems to be rather like Santayana's ‘love’. (Quoted in Keats, by Bate, Walter Jackson, Harvard U.P./Oxford U.P., 1963, p. 123.)Google Scholar
19 Søren Kierkegaard would have found Sanseverina admirable in her freedom from the bane of The Present Age, reflection. Mosca, while still courting her, as yet only the widowed Countess Pietranera, says of her (to himself), ‘… where else can you find a soul like hers, a soul that is always sincere, that never acts “with prudence”, that abandons itself entirely to the impression of the moment, that asks only to be carried away by some new object?’ (Ed. cit., p. 85; chapter six.) Søren Kierkegaard's book begins: ‘Our age is essentially one of understanding and reflection, without passion, momentarily bursting into enthusiasm, and shrewdly lapsing into repose,’ The Present Age, trans. Dru, Alexander, Collins, 1962, p. 33.Google Scholar
20 ‘Formalistic’ here is a mild enough expression. It would be too coolly arrogant, in some interpersonal relations — and in the case of love or marriage it would be offensive to the other person – to be faithful just to one's pledged word: or, it would be offensive to let it be felt that it was only to one's pledged word that one would be being faithful.
Faithfulness in love involves, in extreme cases, an idealisation of the bad ‘now’ on the matrix of the good ‘then’/ ‘once-upon-a-time’, whatever that idealisation may come to. Love which ‘penetrates to possibilities’ must go on looking for them, even when everything has turned out badly. This is what the heuristic, and its idealisations, perhaps comes to.
21 If faithfulness becomes faith, then perhaps for Judge William it has to become not ‘ethical’ but full religious faith: see his remark, that ‘marriage belongs essentially to Christianity’, p. 24/p. 29. The substance may be love, when love does not fail; when it does, a kind of ‘faith’ takes over. But might this faith not be in some sense ethical without being religious? or Christian? Judge William's constant identification of the aesthetic, the moral, and the religious, as well as seeming premature, can, too, at the end of our argument, seem dangerous to his case. Or has he foreseen the dangers?