Love, a draft
((At our wedding reception on Saturday Sally will say thank you to everyone so my job in our shared speech is to be a philosopher… This is a first draft.))
To follow on from Sally, thank you so very much for joining us today to celebrate this moment. We both feel, however, that it would be amiss to not say something of love itself.
All of the poetry and other words you heard during the ceremony today were fueled by a most poetic cause. The cause or fidelity that love brings evokes a middle ground between our selves and the wider world. We are both lovers and beloveds, but that which we love in the beloved is not merely some part of them; it is them in their wholeness. Not as the sum of their parts, but as the extra little bit of something, the mysterious and enigmatic je ne sais quoi, that elevates the beloved and draws them to the fore.
We can love many things and not just people. But the love of another person is a strangely paradoxical thing. As a whole, the beloved person cannot give up the je ne sais quoi that presents them to the lover. Rather, the beloved gives what they are not free to give: themselves in their being-there, in the openness of history. In accepting and receiving this being of the beloved, the lover all too unwillingly commits themselves to the je ne sais quoi of the beloved. The lover doesn’t choose love; love chooses the lover.
This is love in its objectivity, or at least what a certain European philosopher might call objectivity: love is neither within the lover or the beloved but in between them as a cause for fascination, trust, fidelity, and the numerous other social goods we attach to the idea of love.
Is love itself a good thing? I would like to think so. But in our epoch of instrumental technocratic rationality, something as deceptively simple as a love-bond between two people does go against the grain of liberal self-determination. The point here is not to trash liberalism-tempting as this is-but instead to highlight the necessity of love.
Love is fragile in its precarious position between two wholes, the lover and the beloved. But this contingency of love is why we humans cling so tightly to it. The law of love is the transition from the narrowness of survival to the blossoming of thoughts, emotions, and subjectivities. The necessity of love’s law connects our seemingly private and subjective interior to the wider world. When we love another person a connection is forged between our subjectivity and theirs. This connection isn’t grounded in a practical how, a descriptive what, or even a psychological who. Instead, dear friends and family, it is the philosophical and poetic “why”. Why is there anything? Why something rather than nothing? Because you love, because you lack and desire even at the height of wholeness, because love is objective and not merely intersubjective.
Sally and I love each other because we must, because we had no real say in the matter. Because love happens with necessity. And this love brings with it all the joyful conversations as to why and our commitment to each other. So please join me in raising your glasses to the je ne sais quoi and the rich amor it brings.
~niveau