In Cohen’s deliberately exaggerated expression, God’s being becomes actual in and through His correlation with man. “God is conditioned by the correlation with man. And man is conditioned by the correlation with God.” God cannot be thought properly as being beyond His relation to man, and it is equally necessary to understand man, the creature constituted by reason or spirit, as essentially related to the unique God Who is spirit. Reason is the link between God and man. Reason is common to God and man. But it would contradict reason if man were only the passive partner in his correlation with God. Correlation means therefore also and especially that God and man are equally, if in different ways, active toward one another. (Leo Strauss, “Introduction to Hermann Cohen: Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism” 238)

It takes a lot of Scriptural twisting to identify rationality as the central link between God and man. A sharp distinction between reason and revelation is much more sound for the study of philosophy or Scripture. And yet Cohen uses this strange set of thoughts to get here:

Our fellowmen we do not know through experience pure and simple but only by virtue of the command that we love them. Only on the basis of this intrahuman correlation can the correlation of God and man become actual: in man’s behavior toward men, not in his behavior toward God, the distinction between good and evil arises. It is in the light of “the social love” of our fellowmen that we must understand the love that proceeds from God and the love that is directed toward him. (239)

It’s beautiful. We understand fully there is nothing particularly rational, erotic or even friendly about this. This is a moral vision and it seems to indicate that concerns about the beautiful are moral concerns. It places a higher love as prior to justice, knowledge and even divinely inspired order. One does not argue with such a vision. There is too much in its generality and universality at stake to lodge petty complaints. What one does is sketch the more complicated pictures elsewhere. We recognize fully the power of the declaration that started this reflection. Sight, memory and thought create another world from the emergence of reason from darkness. Cohen, in his original vision, may not be attuned to the whole as tragic (although, given Providence and the fate of peoples, he certainly is aware of tragedy).

References

Strauss, Leo. “Introduction to Hermann Cohen: Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism” in Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, ed. Pangle. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983. 238-9.

Then I’ll talk to the boyfriend and I’ll wonder how this guy remembers to breathe. We’re not just talking “not so bright” here – we’re talking “wow, this guy has an amoeba for a brain. And you want kids with this guy?”

I’m writing this because when I think through it, there isn’t a misogynistic explanation. At first I thought any comment on this topic was going to sound really sexist. I was going to have to address how maybe women are controlling or a desire for nostalgia dominates relationships especially nowadays (“he reminds me of the kid eating paint chips in class!”). But then I remembered my own rule: there are different kinds of women, just like there are different kinds of men. And I think the real problem we’re running into is this:

We value success and control, but we don’t value intelligence. Intelligence and the desire for it are increasingly threatening to a subset of people.

When put this bluntly, it explains 99% of the behavior of the Internet. My sex, of course, has taken the lead in creating places where idiocy thrives and is probably ruining entire generations: see /b/. Also see the rituals of “The New Dating Game,” which force the opposite sex to find a way through elaborate constructs and poses of male stupidity. It seems people more than ever want a result or want to feel comfortable, and have no patience figuring out “why” or even “how.”

Look, I’m not saying “go find smart guys.” I’m just saying be a bit more open to them and call out your friends when they’re dating people you wouldn’t trust with your car keys even though you know they couldn’t open the door. This isn’t just incompetence I’m witnessing. I’m watching women purposely date people who are really, really stupid. That’s going to end badly for all involved. If the world needs anything right now, it needs people who are brave enough to deal with complexity and call it on its self-delusion.

The Weakerthans, “Reconstruction Site”

Trouble with wandering away is we don’t know when we’re being taken for a ride. Try rejecting the bandwagon tendencies of peers: going to homecoming and reunions, watching beauty pageants, voting (or not-voting, depending on the peers). That rejection does not necessarily place us at something true or beautiful. We don’t even know we can ask the right questions.

What’s left is a muddle. If there’s going to be healing – we usually don’t turn our back unless we’re hurt – then we’re tempted to flooding ourselves with images. Maybe we can picture what we really want. TV comes with the images and the feeling the world isn’t passing us by. That puts us in a strange place: a bitter – perhaps miserable – rejection of misery.

Is the way out making “misery loves company” literally, positively true? Can’t we just find someone from our past who’s had crap luck and build from there? There’s no guarantee in life one can find passion, much less love. The only way out is to wander better, away from the hurt itself. That might mean a few lies: can’t reject everything involved in hurting us. Love and truth may not be terribly compatible, especially if we want to spell beauty ourselves someday.

• Religious fundamentalism does not necessarily create sensible couples. What you need is for people to know what they want and who they can work with. What I’m seeing happen is a number of young people – and even some older than me – use “church” and “churchy things” as a meeting ground even as they have no other shared values. “Church” is too generic a concept to know whether someone is moral or trustworthy enough – sorry Mom and Dad. It can be a starting point, but if you’re looking for someone righteous, someone once said you shall know them by what they actually do. Now I’m not talking about having things in common, although that’s not unimportant. I am talking whether people are getting the minimum habits in order to make a relationship work. Not, for example, skipping work to hang with one’s significant other. No amount of prayer is going to fix that sort of dysfunction.
• Isn’t a relationship about betterment? If it were, we’d all get married and no one would go to school. I’m not saying it isn’t about betterment; that’s definitely part of it. A good couple supports each other and achieves together and individually. Sometimes, though, that means they don’t have kids. I think what drives most couples is that being alone is really, really scary. This is not the worst fear to have: the worst is probably being scared of the world and other people. So we take something of which we’re really frightened and actually turn it into a positive. Couplehood can be about improving each other. But it’s truly about being there for each other in a more fundamental way. A family results from that sort of love, which can’t be thought merely biological because it is fulfilling for many.
• What about finding someone? Please start with your friends. I’m not saying that will definitely work, or that you can’t try elsewhere. But you’re crazy to think that whoever you decide to be with isn’t going to be your best friend. They have to be. There’s no other option. There are scenes you can try, but you’re looking for people who are willing to make the effort a certain way. I wish I could tell you “desperation” – which has brought together many a couple – works. In a way it does. People do just get together and life goes on. It isn’t totally unpleasant. But if you want to be happy and not wasting your time even in a committed relationship (think about how many mindless fights you’ll be having and chores you’ll be doing), that’s another story.

I’m not in agreement with the absolutism of the assumption that makes this article work. The author says at one point: “Given that nice guys get bedded and/or wedded all the time, you must have a more specific problem than that.” And like all dating advice, I do feel that the less gender-specific the advice, the better: Why not talk about nice girls that may get passed over? Ultimately, my disagreements with the article stem from my holding that success in life  – whether we’re talking about finding love, security, fame, etc. – does not necessarily tie in with moral behavior. A lot of people, esp. when it comes to dating, want to get moralistic in a hurry.

That having been said – there are a lot of guys who call themselves “nice guys” but are really whiners and losers. The list of “specific behaviors” provided at the end of the article is dead-on in my opinion. I’ve definitely witnessed guys treat the women they like substantially differently from everyone else around them to the degree that it is nauseating (and I can’t say I’m blameless here. I can say I try my best to make people I’m with feel comfortable, no matter what). And it is true that guys do have to find ways of just talking with more women on a more casual level, perhaps aiming for genuine friendship first before going “aaaaaaaaaaaaa I need to be married aaaaaaaaaaaaaa.” There doesn’t seem to be any concept that two people’s lives are involved; the level of self-absorption in most “I’m nice, why don’t I have someone” laments is just stunning.

Still. Are there nice guys being treated badly? Of course. Is it a problem? Definitely, and our attitudes as a whole about finding the right person could use some tweaking. If you don’t believe me, think about all the nice girls you know getting passed over. Many of them are exempt from the above critique – they have healthy attitudes and are genuinely giving. And there are guys like that too, tons of them. Part of the reason why they get passed over is because we can’t tell the difference between those who say they’re “nice” and those who really work to be of value to others.

I’ve ranted enough, those are just my thoughts. I want to hear yours.

So it is precisely the tackiness of Valentine’s Day that’s at issue. Being alone on Valentine’s Day used to affect me, years ago – all those public displays of affection on campus were overdone, sure, but it looked like people had each other. Hah. Anyone who knows anything about relationships in college knows what all the smooching and big red hearts really meant. I feel now that for some (obviously, not all, not even many) Valentine’s Day is a bit of a game: “I have someone so I’m normal and my life is together.” For even fewer “haha I have someone you don’t” is the underlying sentiment. None of the very public forum posts and facebook announcements and IM away messages saying (before today) “give me date ideas” or  (today) “valentine’s day I’m so lucky!” are dissuading me from this opinion.

And again, my complaint with Valentine’s Day is fairly straightforward: it’s empowering this minority, the one that can’t see what love and crafting a life together mean independent of swooning a lot. It’s emphasizing only everything outward as love, and is screaming that something is wrong with being alone.

I think being alone is a problem for me, I’ll be the first to admit that. But I also think there are times in one’s life when one isn’t ready for a relationship, or one has to get other issues in order, and it isn’t like someone is “behind the curve.” The more maturity you can bring to a relationship, the better, no? Valentine’s Day as currently constituted seems to emphasize the absolute worst in how we approach things, and again, one really tacky day wouldn’t be a problem if it weren’t for the fact that this seems to be representative of a larger trend.

To all the couples out there who are having a good time: please continue, nobody wishes you badly here. I don’t mind the tackiness one day out of the year. The more serious issue is still on the table, and we can address it later.

This article is from a while ago, and I’m not sure whether I agree with it fully or not. I obviously think the lessons hold for women and men, but that the author telling us about her personal experience can’t be generalized too much. Still, I don’t pay much heed to the “as you get older, the market favors men” argument. Being lonely sucks, and getting older and staying lonely sucks worse, regardless of gender. I’d rather not make this a he said/she said game and instead get to the question of whether we have the right attitudes or not. It seems like something we should definitely discuss in the comments, to wit:

What I didn’t realize when I decided, in my 30s, to break up with boyfriends I might otherwise have ended up marrying, is that while settling seems like an enormous act of resignation when you’re looking at it from the vantage point of a single person, once you take the plunge and do it, you’ll probably be relatively content. It sounds obvious now, but I didn’t fully appreciate back then that what makes for a good marriage isn’t necessarily what makes for a good romantic relationship. Once you’re married, it’s not about whom you want to go on vacation with; it’s about whom you want to run a household with. Marriage isn’t a passion-fest; it’s more like a partnership formed to run a very small, mundane, and often boring nonprofit business. And I mean this in a good way.

I don’t see many articles – including ones that are more realistic – stress the self-evident boring parts of living together. But I think what’s really interesting is how complicated our mindsets regarding relationships are:

I thought that the person I married would have to have a sense of wonderment about the world, would be both spontaneous and grounded, and would acknowledge that life is hard but also be able to navigate its ups and downs with humor. Many of the guys I dated possessed these qualities, but if one of them lacked a certain degree of kindness, another didn’t seem emotionally stable enough, and another’s values clashed with mine. Others were sweet but so boring that I preferred reading during dinner to sitting through another tedious conversation. I also dated someone who appeared to be highly compatible with me—we had much in common, and strong physical chemistry—but while our sensibilities were similar, they proved to be a half-note off, so we never quite felt in harmony, or never viewed the world through quite the same lens.

It’s easy to condemn the author and forget just how articulate and self-reflective she is. Most of us are probably being really picky about relationships and not even knowing it. At the same time, I do wonder if some of us are being picky enough. I know some women and men who’ve gotten into bad situations because of making their criteria too lax to begin with. Still, “settling” itself is pretty hard, all things considered:

And no matter what women decide—settle or don’t settle—there’s a price to be paid, because there’s always going to be regret. Unless you meet the man of your dreams (who, by the way, doesn’t exist, precisely because you dreamed him up), there’s going to be a downside to getting married, but a possibly more profound downside to holding out for someone better.

So I do encourage you to read the article and comment here, because I’m interested in the truth of these reflections and other questions we can raise.

To illustrate, starting with the girl:

Everybody hated her. That month Miss Fritz was reading to them during homeroom about a girl, Emmy, who was badly spoiled and always telling her parents lies about her twin sister Annie; nobody could believe, it was too amazing, how exactly when they were despising Emmy most Joan should come into the school with her show-off clothes and her hair left hanging down the back of her fuzzy sweater instead of being cut or braided and her having the crust to actually argue with teachers. “Well I’m sorry,” she told Miss Fritz, not even rising from her seat, “but I don’t see what the point is of homework. In Baltimore we never had any, and the little kids there knew what’s in these books.”

And now, the boy:

This was the one time Charlie saw Joan cry actual tears. He was as bad as the others: worse, because what the others did because they felt like it, he did out of a plan, to make himself more popular. In the first and second grade he had been liked pretty well, but somewhere since then he had been dropped. There was a gang, boy and girls both, that met Saturdays – you heard them talk about it on Mondays – in Stuart Morrison’s garage, and took hikes and played touch football together, and in winter sledded on Hill Street, and in spring bicycled all over Olinger, and did what else, he couldn’t imagine. Charlie had known the chief members since before kindergarten. But after school there seemed nothing for him to do but go home promptly and do his homework and fiddle with his Central American stamps and go to horror movies alone…. Charlie thought the gang might notice him and take him in if he backed up their policies [i.e. torturing Joan] without being asked.

The plot is deceptively simple; the complications are beginning to show. Charlie’s being a social outcast has something to do with him being a bit geeky, whereas Joan is a primadonna. He likes to do homework; her marks, from what he can tell, aren’t all that good. Moreover, it isn’t clear that Charlie is terribly aware of sexuality yet. He only really sees Joan differently when she starts looking like the other girls. The center of the story – from where the title comes from – has Charlie saving Joan in a dream from a river full of alligators; it is followed by two statements, one which is expected, “He loved Joan Edison,” and another not so expected:

If he carried her off, did rescue her from the others’ cruelty, he would have defied the gang and made a new one, his own. Just Joan and he at first, then others escaping from meanness and dumbness, until his gang was stronger and Stuart Morrison’s garage was empty every Saturday. Charlie would be a king, with his own touch football game. Everyone would come and plead with him for mercy.

The issue for us is whether Charlie really is in love or thinks he’s in love because he wants power. Of course, Joan’s transformation results in this:

In the afternoon [after walking with Joan a bit] the momentum of the dream wore off somewhat. Now that he kept his eyes always on her, he noticed, with a qualm of his stomach, that in passing the afternoon from Miss Brobst’s to Miss Fritz’s room, Joan was not alone, but chattered with others. In class, too, she whispered. So it was with more shame – such shame that he didn’t believe he could ever face even his parents again – than surprise that from behind the dark pane of the variety store he saw her walk by in the company of the gang…. It came to him that what he had taken for cruelty had been love, that far from hating her everybody had loved her from the beginning, and that even the stupidest knew it weeks before he did. That she was queen of the class and might as well not exist, for all the good he would get out of it.

We obviously have to take the narrator’s notions with a grain of salt, given that he’s relaying to us what Charlie thinks, and Charlie, while a bright 5th grader, is still a 5th grader. What’s interesting to us isn’t how Charlie is misreading the situation: the torments this girl went through were real enough, she was forced to fit in. What I’d like to try and get a grip on is Charlie’s boyish pride, that starts from an “everybody hated her” to a realization that he was alone to a love of the girl when it looked like she was trying to fit in to a disappointment when she actually did fit in. The story moves from pride to shame, and what I want to know is how that relates to the development of reason and love. How exactly do we learn – if we learn – from getting things utterly wrong?

There are several narratives underneath the surface. One narrative is the politics of adulthood and childhood. Miss Fritz cried once when a child spilled paint on the floor: Charlie noticed that she was afraid to death of the school board. That same dynamic of fear and torment is used by Miss Fritz to keep order in the classroom when Joan starts up – this school isn’t your old school, fit in now. Getting a response from others is usually perceived to be power, especially if the response isn’t positive. Charlie’s left out as a wannabe: the gang is purposely capricious, and if it weren’t, it wouldn’t be any fun to be a part of.

What’s interesting is what Joan initially represents, before she “changes.” Her character doesn’t change, there’s just a threshold of abuse that everyone has to learn to take. She does represent something exotic: flower imagery accompanies her all throughout the narrative. When Charlie walks with her and notices her much more closely, it is raining, and she’s wearing perfume. She is something alien, a sexuality that is not more adult as much as it is pushing others to adulthood.

But the ones last to catch on aren’t always dumb or behind. Sometimes they’re like Charlie: the situation is just too complex for an outside adult observer to read, let alone a 5th grader. For example: Charlie’s lament lends strong credence to the idea that students put on an act for teachers and teachers put on an act for their bosses, etc. And the problem with that narrative, of course, is that putting on an act is hard work. It requires an awareness that many don’t have to do consistently. But is it happening? Sure – I remember grade school. I was relatively innocent and still knew a bunch of things I shouldn’t have known. The kids that were less innocent and less bright knew far, far too much, and it did catch up with them. When you can’t pay attention in class because everything is about sex, getting “blitzed,” and power at 13 or 14, you’re not going to pay attention when you’re 21 or 30 or whenever.

At the same time, innocence is not a prerequisite to learning. Experiences that one can work with – experiences that encourage one to think – are. It is no surprise, then, that the Platonic dialogues encourage us to think of philosophy as an art in the sense that cooking or household management are arts. Charlie has those experiences: he likes to draw, and Joan is someone he looks at carefully:

She had a thin face with something of a grownup’s tired expression and long black eyelashes like a doll’s.

…on his tablet where she could easily see over his shoulder he once in a while drew a picture titled “Joan the Dope:” the profile of a girl with a lean nose and sad mincemouth, the lashes of her lowered eye as black as the pencil could make them and the hair falling, in ridiculous hooks, row after row, down through the sea-blue cross-lines clear off the bottom edge of the tablet.

The haircut had brought out her forehead and exposed her neck and made her chin pointier and her eyes larger.

Another peculiar thing was the tan beneath her skin; he had noticed before, though not as closely, how when she colored it came up a gentle dull brown more than red.

We move, in Charlie’s vision, from the colorless to caricatures to the appropriate color. We could sit here and try to think up alternative readings of what Charlie missed or didn’t miss: perhaps his being in love with Joan, and everyone knowing it, helped earn her the respect of others. Perhaps Charlie isn’t as bright as he thinks he is, and the gang is really a step ahead of him and he’s left out for good reason. But Charlie’s eye for detail really is the key to the puzzle. The other kids have grown up quickly because they have a caricature of what being a grown-up is, and they’re going to stick to the plan. The short story – Charlie’s story – is centered around a river/rain metaphor; he saves her from a river full of alligators, when he walks with her the weather is wet. Alligators grow up in crude, stupid ways too – the trick is to realize when you’re one of them or not.

In the past, Mignon has devoted considerable energy to examining the virtue of hope. Aaron has spoken at length of how our age refuses to believe people can act for a cause, can be motivated by faith more than self-interest. It is our privilege to be in a room filled with the third theological virtue. This has come about because these two were open to finding each other, and that is their greatest gift to us.

As they are colleagues of mine, they are also teachers of mine. Their comments in the core classes have helped me fill notebooks and sometimes papers; they have been open about their experiences, willing to share the good and the bad and think through aloud what they have learned. They honor their communities and strengthen their students merely by being themselves. This leads us, perhaps, to reflect on how exceptional they are.

Only – they wouldn’t permit such praise. They teach not only to build others but so they too can learn. They yearn for the day where we are equal towards each other because we measure up – as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, for God saw that it was good. Our work here is tireless not because we are incomplete, but because what is truly good must perpetuate.

Of course, true love might not be about possession or conquest. It might be about two people being there for each other, providing support, being open, and being willing more than demanding. In which case: love can’t be about being carried away right away. It can’t be a romance which just “is” happiness and all ends happily ever after when it begins. It would have to be friendship, where two people find concord, and then move into romance and those powerful, sweet all-encompassing moments later, the ones not meant to impress in the short term but rather to express what is eternal.