Who Am I and If So How Many? (27 page)

Another potential argument against Luhmann’s concept is this: if love were truly only a social code, it would make no sense to apply the term to the animal kingdom. I will return to this point momentarily. By the same token, it would be absurd to use this sense of the term with respect to a human’s love for a pet animal. The love of a parent for his or her offspring (in both the animal kingdom and in humans), sexual love, and love of family and friends have only one thing in common: the one experiencing love is deeply devoted to another living being. Furthermore, there are sensual and intellectual feelings of love, highly complex emotions, and even a moral imperative, such as the Judeo-Christian ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself.’ This commandment, which is found in other religions in similar form, is easier said than done; feelings of love cannot usually be conjured up on command, which makes requirements of this sort a questionable means of fostering
morality. ‘Respect thy neighbor even if you don’t love him’ would surely be a less overwhelming alternative.

It is hard to say whether animals experience feelings of love. We have already established that we don’t know what it is like to be a bat (see ‘Beyond Sausage and Cheese,’ p. 162), and we surely have no way of telling whether animals feel love. Behaviorism continues to skirt the term ‘love’ altogether and restricts discussions of this issue to sexuality and bonding. Many behaviorists harp on man’s long-lasting monogamous relationships as the sole means of defining the unique form of love experienced by humans, which presents at least three problems. First, parental love is absent from the discussion, and the deep connection between mothers and their children in some highly developed mammals is brushed aside as mere ‘bonding.’ Second, there is the question of why lasting monogamous relationships in the animal kingdom are not characterized as love relationships. If they were, gibbons and birds of prey would be regarded as capable of love, and chimpanzees and ducks would not. And finally, humans also have nonmonogamous love relationships – a practice that likely goes back to the beginnings of mankind. Nonmonogamous relationships can make it next to impossible to identify the biological father. It would appear that monogamy in humans is a far more recent
phenomenon
than feelings of love, not the other way around! The popular biological theory that evolution invented ‘love’ as a ‘social bond’ to safeguard the long period of parenting humans require has been called into question. Biologists are right to shrug their shoulders or knit their brows when asked to address the issue of love, because the term ‘love’ is not defined in biology. Here again,
neuroscientists
have more to say on the subject, because they can identify the areas that govern our sexual desire – primarily the hypothalamus. But it is important to note that the nuclei in question differ by gender. In women, the ventromedial nucleus governs sexual arousal, but in men it is the medial preoptic nucleus. (Some neurobiologists consider this the reason that men typically react more strongly to optical stimuli than do women.) Recent imaging
studies show that both have some connection to the feeling of love, so there is a biochemical tie between sexual desire and love – although a somewhat tenuous one, because in real life, they often appear separately. Even if love often goes hand in hand with sexual arousal, the reverse is certainly not always true. If it were, anyone who enjoyed pornography would be ceaselessly in love.

The hormone oxytocin plays a key role in love. During sexual arousal, oxytocin is released in both women and men. It acts like an opiate: invigorating and intoxicating, yet soothing. It was dubbed the ‘fidelity hormone’ or ‘bonding hormone’ in studies of prairie voles. In contrast to mountain voles, which have fewer oxytocin receptors, the closely related prairie voles live
monogamously
. Researchers working with Thomas Insel, the director of the notorious Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center at Emory University in Atlanta (see ‘Great Apes in the Cultural Arena,’ p. 171), undid a whole series of happy prairie vole relationships by injecting them with oxytocin blockers. Their fidelity was over in a flash, and they became as promiscuous as mountain voles, displaying random copulative behavior. The wanton mountain voles, in turn, happily settled into life as faithful couples when given vasopressin.

Researchers today consider it highly likely that oxytocin receptors have a significant effect on human desire and the ability to bond. Seth Pollack, a psychologist at California State University at Monterey Bay, has found lower levels of oxytocin in orphans than in children who have a close relationship with their parents. Oxytocin is thus a glue that binds. In mothers, it brings on contractions, initiates the milk supply, and enhances bonding with the baby. In couples it enables a relationship to progress from initial sexual encounters to a long-term relationship.

Altogether different centers and biochemical agents are also at work in the brain when we are in love, most likely in the cingular cortex, an area that has to do with attentiveness, and the mesolimbic system, which works like a reward center. Phenethylamines generate feelings of elation. And let us not forget
the usual suspects (see ‘Mr Spock in Love,’ p. 49): noradrenaline for rushes of excitement and dopamine for euphoria. Their level rises while soothing serotonin falls, thus triggering some degree of mental incapacity. And the body produces intoxicants such as endorphins and cortisol. After a while, this whole business ebbs away naturally. Three years is considered the maximum period that we experience feelings of love for a partner, and the average is closer to three to twelve months. International statistics indicate that the average divorce occurs after four years of marriage. The crooked teeth that went unnoticed at first now stick out. From a biochemical point of view, only oxytocin has any relevance for whether the romantic relationship lasts.

What does this tell us about love? What have we learned from all this information about oxytocin receptors and ‘self-portrayal in the eyes of the other’? Where along the spectrum of brain research and Luhmann does the truth lie? Everything new excites, everything surprising stimulates – both negatively and positively. The
improbable
arouses more excitement than the probable. Uncertainty throws us off balance whether the occasion is good or bad. On these points, neuroscience and systems theory are in agreement. Love is ‘a quite normal improbability’ in both the biochemical and the sociological sense, an improbable experience that functions according to biochemically and socially identifiable patterns. Our brains fear boredom, and for this reason alone, it would seem, they love love. Nothing is more suspect than the seemingly innocuous Christian motto once formulated by the remarkable Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer: ‘Love wants nothing
from
the other; it wants everything
for
the other.’ We might well ask: for what purpose? Love is supposedly selfless, yet if it is true that love is self-portrayal in the eyes of the other, it really just reflects back to us the most exciting image we know – that of ourselves.

Of course we still do not know who or what this ‘self’ is, but it clearly has a profound impact on the decisions we make. As Luhmann tells us, decisions are the differences that transform our lives. But how free are we to make them?

In the harbor of the old town on the island of Naxos, which, like many towns in Greece, stretches from the sea up a hill of yellowish brown rock formations, there is a small square with a taverna about halfway up. The russet tops of eucalyptus trees tilt toward the light between the narrow houses. The food is not bad, and it is relatively inexpensive, so every evening the taverna fills up with backpackers and young families. People hold forth on all kinds of causes, girls giggle, and a chorus of children’s voices fills the place. At least that’s how it was in the summer of 1985, during that vacation in the Cyclades that awakened my interest in philosophy. I had fallen in love with biology as a small child, when I wondered why cherry trees don’t grow in our bellies if we swallow a cherry pit. But my journey into philosophy began with an adage. The very first evening at the taverna I noticed a stone tablet inserted into the wall like a tombstone, which carried this inscription: 

I later found out that the taverna was not the birthplace of this well-known saying, but it was new to me, so it held my attention far longer than the little joke merited. As I mentioned earlier, it was during this vacation that I got to know Socrates. I didn’t know whether he had literally said that being means doing something, but I didn’t really care, because the idea that being signifies doing made sense to me. I spent far more time pondering the second statement,
To do is to be
, which I thought was truly puzzling. I had heard of Sartre, and I knew that he was deeply devoted to politics and that he had visited Fidel Castro in Cuba and the terrorist Andreas Baader in his prison cell, but none of that told me why doing means being. Didn’t you have to be, that is, exist, in order to be able to do something? I had a hard time understanding that saying, probably because I sensed what I now know, namely, they were probably both wrong: Sartre
and
Socrates. The only one to get it right was Sinatra. And that is what this chapter is about.

After my vacation in Greece, I began studying philosophy in Cologne. I met a girl my own age who had dark curly hair, big eyes, and a remarkably deep voice. I don’t know whether she would want me to use her name, so let’s just call her Rosalie. The first time I went to her apartment – which had the standard IKEA shelves, hanging plants in macramé holders, and a futon – I noticed that she kept Simone de Beauvoir’s
The Mandarins
at her bedside. In this novel, Beauvoir, the prominent French
philosopher
, feminist, and companion of Sartre, recounts the wonderfully pessimistic years in postwar Paris. The major figures of the French intelligentsia, including characters modeled on Sartre and Beauvoir themselves, spend long nights discussing the meaninglessness of existence and the lack of understanding between people, and they dream up a way out that would entail a great deed. The book was a bestseller, and Rosalie was quite taken with it. She was of course fascinated by Paris. In the 1980s, Paris was still the most exciting city in Europe – at least in the imagination of us students. That changed in 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down and drew our attention there instead. Rosalie was also captivated by the notion
of the absolute freedom of the individual in Sartre’s philosophy. Sartre wrote that people are not predestined by society and psychological disposition but rather are free to do as they wish and are fully and boundlessly responsible for themselves. Individuals ‘invent’ who they are. The claim that you can keep reinventing yourself (now trumpeted relentlessly by the consumerism industry) originated with Sartre: ‘In life, a man commits himself and draws his own portrait.’
To do is to be
.

I was also intrigued by the idea that all my decisions were determined solely by my free will, although neither I nor Rosalie had made much use of our free will up to that point. Compared with the Mandarins of Paris, our life in Cologne was pretty boring. Was I merely afraid to take my fate into my hands? The idea did not sit well with me. Was it really just my lack of courage, or was there more to it? Rosalie did in fact change her life. She left the university and went to acting school in Stuttgart. She also signed up for self-discovery groups, on the quest for the elusive ‘I.’ When we got together, I took her to task, quoting Niklas Luhmann, who was quite popular at the University of Cologne back then. My future dissertation adviser had brought Luhmann’s theory to the philosophy department when he came from Bielefeld. The question ‘Who am I?’ I insisted, echoing Luhmann, ‘leaves you groping in the dark, and the only way out is by resorting to devious tricks.’ Rosalie was not impressed. Then she went into therapy. I had a response right out of Luhmann for that as well: ‘The influence of therapists on morals … is difficult to estimate, but it is surely to be feared.’ Back then I thought that therapy was essentially the opposite of Sartre’s
To do is to be
, a hunt for a straw man that supposedly set the stage for everything else.

Today I think that I judged Rosalie too harshly. Without realizing it, I had applied a precept to her that I myself had nagging doubts about, namely, that we are free of internal and external constraints if we are strong enough to liberate ourselves from them, and that deeds are the only thing that matter when judging a person: ‘In life, a man commits himself and draws his own portrait.’
Wasn’t that asking too much of man? How had Sartre come up with this?

Sartre wrote that man is ‘condemned to be free’ in
Being and
Nothingness
, which analyzes the philosophies of Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, and Martin Heidegger, who set the stage for Sartre’s own philosophical inquiry. Husserl’s innovation was to move away from explaining man and the world from an ‘inner essence’ with rules and laws, as Kant had. He went the opposite route and, like a modern neuroscientist, probed the conditions of our experience. Kant had explored the conditions of cognition but not of experience, which he simply presupposed without much elucidation. Husserl, by contrast, focused squarely on experience: how do my senses communicate the world to me? Since he was not a biologist, he used many vivid images and concepts for sense perception, especially when describing the connection between seeing and knowing. His contentious student Martin Heidegger developed Husserl’s idea into a philosophy of life, an attitude toward the world. In contrast to Husserl’s pithy terms, Heidegger’s words were mystical and obscure – which is exactly what made them fascinating for many readers, including Sartre.

When Sartre published
Being
and
Nothingness
in 1943, he was thirty-eight years old. France was occupied by the German Wehrmacht. The Nazis with whom Heidegger sympathized were Sartre’s adversaries when he joined the French Resistance. An analysis and critique of Heidegger, who continued to impress him, is one of the subtexts of
Being and Nothingness
. The contrast between the leading intellectual of the Third Reich and the rising star of the French cultural scene was stark. On the one side was Heidegger, who was bourgeois through and through and deeply rooted in his homeland, with the political double standard of the opportunist and the sexual double standard of the petit bourgeoisie, and on the other was Sartre, who stood at five feet one inch and found the bourgeois milieu deeply repugnant, and who liberated himself from all political and sexual double standards, directing all his efforts at an uncompromising morality.

Sartre, the son of a French navy officer who died at a young age and an Alsatian mother, spent his childhood in his grandfather’s bourgeois household. Educated by private tutors and at elitist schools, he acquired an impressive range of knowledge in a self-prescribed strict work regimen. He read widely and held to an unvarying daily work schedule (9 a.m. to 1 p.m. and 3 p.m. to 7 p.m.) for the rest of his life. In the realm of philosophy, he was persuaded that there was no reliable higher power or moral law within man. As a child, he had felt out of place living with his grandfather’s family, and now he asserted that mankind as a whole was out of place and lost. Heidegger had regarded human existence as ‘thrown into the world,’ an outlook that Sartre confirmed from his own experience. While working as a high-school teacher, Sartre traveled through a series of French cities, sometimes joined by his companion Simone de Beauvoir, with whom he had an on-again, off-again love affair. In 1933, the year of Hitler’s accession to power, Sartre and Beauvoir were enjoying their ‘free’ life as an unmarried couple in two rooms of a small hotel in Paris. At the beginning of World War II, Sartre, who was briefly serving in the military, found time to work on a book about the Age of Enlightenment. He also fared quite well during his captivity as a prisoner of war in Trier. In 1941, after his early discharge because of problems with his eyes, he and Beauvoir organized a resistance group against the Vichy regime, the French military dictatorship allied with the Germans. Sartre wrote plays and novels and began work on his major philosophical treatise. After the defeat of the German Wehrmacht in Stalingrad, he renewed his contacts to the Resistance and stepped up his political activities. When
Being and
Nothingness
was published in the spring of 1943 during a severe paper shortage, Sartre was already a famous man, a well-connected key figure in French intellectual life.

Sartre’s
Being and Nothingness
highlighted his view that man is the only animal that can ponder things that do not exist, as is evident in the book’s title. Other animals’ limited imagination prevents them from picturing something that once was or has yet
to be. Humans, by contrast, can invent things that never exist – they can lie. Imagination is liberating. By the same token, Sartre argues, man has no substance at all as a naked being. Unlike animals that are determined by fixed instincts and behavioral patterns, man has to set his own patterns of behavior: ‘Existence precedes essence.’ Theologians and philosophers had always failed to appreciate this fact while looking for rules and patterns to define man. But in a world without God, these definitions of man based on
philosophical
values and binding moral maxims would no longer make any sense. The only truly existential facet of man is in the realm of feelings: revulsion, fear, worry, boredom, and sense of the absurd. Sartre called his philosophy ‘existentialism.’

The relentlessness with which Sartre eradicated his predecessors’ assumptions about man, and his emphasis on negative feelings, need to be understood against the backdrop of his war experience. Sartre’s spirit of rebellion against inertia and emptiness was similarly adamant. What mattered was to offer resistance (to the Nazis) and to construct something new. This feeling is expressed
philosophically
in Sartre’s countless exhortations to act: ‘Man is what he does,’ or ‘The only reality is in action.’ There is no excuse for people who daydream aimlessly, because they are only fleeing themselves and their responsibility. All this, Sartre claimed, is self-deception.

Sartre went on to outline an ambitious mission in his next book,
Existentialism is a Humanism
, which was published shortly thereafter and defined the philosopher as an agent of enlightenment, exhorting others to embrace their freedom and thus realize themselves as human beings. For Sartre it essentially comes down to the ‘project’ that man makes of himself: ‘Man is nothing other than his own project. He exists only to the extent that he realizes himself, therefore he is nothing more than the sum of his actions, nothing more than his life.’ The will, by contrast, is only a consequence of a preceding project of this kind: first man draws up a design of himself, then he acquires a will that accords with this design. In Sartre’s words: ‘What we usually understand by ‘will’ is
a conscious decision that most of us take after we have made ourselves what we are.’ This idea captivated my friend Rosalie, and it inspired an entire generation of postwar intellectuals to lead life as a ‘project.’ Of course, these supposedly highly individualistic projects were often strikingly similar: clad in black and melancholy, existentialists roamed from jazz clubs to campus to movie theaters to cafés, indistinguishable in their fashionable conformity.

Sartre’s life remained exciting and heady all the way to his death in 1980. He was the preeminent French intellectual of the twentieth century and a well-regarded moral authority. But was his notion of man’s freedom realistic? Is the individual truly so free of internal and external constraints that he can draw himself, the way an artist draws a work of art? If Sartre were right in claiming that the ‘plan’ we draw up of ourselves precedes the will, man would be capable not only of liberating himself from all social expectations but also of rising above his instincts, habits, wishes, behavior patterns, moral precepts, and reactions formed in early childhood. All it would take is the courage to reassess and change one’s life circumstances inside and out. ‘Self-realization’ in Sartre’s sense would begin with an inventory of our psyches, clearing out unwanted merchandise and restocking the shelves with more enticing goods. Is my petit bourgeois education holding me back? Out with it! I’ll go for the exciting, carefree life of an artist and man about town! Kant had also believed that the will was capable of making free and rational decisions, though he insisted that free deeds needed to be good deeds, which is an enormous restriction. Sartre felt much the same way. Although he did not believe in Kant’s ‘moral law’ in our psyche, Sartre’s equation also held that freedom is self-determination, and that self-determination is good.

However, freedom of the will is no easy matter to achieve. As we saw earlier (in ‘The Libet Experiment,’ p. 111), most neuroscientists disagree with Sartre and contend that man is
not
free. First, man is a product of his aptitudes, experiences, and
upbringing, and second, it is not our consciousness in the light of day that tells us what to do, but rather our
sub
consciousness in the dark of night. Even if I liberate myself from many external constraints, my desires, preferences, and longings remain unfree. I am not the one determining my needs – they are determining me! And that is why many neuroscientists claim that people are utterly incapable of ‘reinventing’ themselves.