Caring: Our Emotional Bonds

Caring societies need truth and authenticity. Is it possible that love is the connective tissue? Alain Badiou  argues that love is one of four truths: love, art, science, and politics. We believe that meaningful attachments, in a caring society, are preconditions for all modes of caring. If I need you because I must transact with you, to get something from you, how do I care for you, beyond what is transacted?  Erik Fromm wrote about this in The Art of Loving: “Immature love says: ‘I love you because I need you.’ Mature love says: ‘I need you because I love you’.” Love is the connective tissue binding us to others. It motivates us to care for others.  How do we bind ourselves through emotional connections in ways that supersede the transactional? We've been influenced by the contemporary German philosopher, Axel Honneth and his work on recognition:

“Just as, in the case of love, children acquire, via the continuous experience of 'maternal' care, the basic self-confidence to assert their needs in an unforced manner, adult subjects acquire, via the experience of legal recognition, the possibility of seeing their actions as the universally respected expression of their own autonomy. The idea that self-respect is for legal relations what basic self-confidence was for the love relationship is already suggested by the conceptual appropriateness of viewing rights as depersonalized symbols of social respect in just the way that love can be conceived as the affectional expression of care retained over distance. [...] What is required are conditions in which individual rights are no longer granted disparately to members of social status groups but are granted equally to all people as free beings; only then will the individual legal person be able to see in them an objectivated point of reference for the idea that he or she is recognized for having the capacity for autonomously forming judgments.”
― Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts

On the Blog - Modes of Caring - Love