Love as Passion (eBook)

The Codification of Intimacy

Niklas Luhmann (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2014
John Wiley & Sons (Verlag)
9780745694450 (ISBN)

Infos

In this important book Niklas Luhmann - one of the leading social thinkers of the late 20th century - analyses the emergence of love' as the basis of personal relationships in modern societies. He argues that, while family systems remained intact in the transition from traditional to modern societies, a semantics for love developed to accommodate extra-marital relationships; this semantics was then transferred back into marriage and eventually transformed marriage itself. Drawing on a diverse range of historical and literary sources, Luhmann retraces the emergence and evolution of the special semantics of passionate love that has come to form the basis of modern forms of intimacy and personal relationships. This classic book by Luhmann has been widely recognized as a work of major importance. It is an outstanding contribution to social theory and it provides an original and illuminating perspective on the nature of modern marriage and sexuality.

Autor

Niklas Luhmann was Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Bielefeld University.

Inhalt

Preface to the English Edition 1

Introduction 8

1 Society and Individual 12
Personal and Impersonal Relationships

2 Love as a Generalized Symbolic Medium of Communication 18

3 The Evolution of Communicative Capacities 34

4 The Evolution of the Semantics of Love 41

5 Freedom to Love 48
From the Ideal to the Paradox

6 The Rhetoric of Excess and the Experience of Instability 58

7 From Galantry to Friendship 76

8 Plaisir and Amour 84
The Primary Difference

9 Love versus Reason 94

10 En Route to Individualization 97
A State of Ferment in the Eighteenth Century

11 The Incorporation of Sexuality 109

12 The Discovery of Incommunicability 121

13 Romantic Love 129

14 Love and Marriage 145
The Ideology of Reproduction

15 What Now? 155
Problems and Alternatives

16 Love as a System of Interpenetration 172

Notes 179

Index 240

Textauszug

1

Society and Individual

Personal and Impersonal Relationships

It is most assuredly incorrect to characterize modern society as an impersonal mass society and leave it at that. Such a view arises partly owing to an overly narrow conception of society and partly because of a set of optical illusions. If society is conceived of primarily in terms of economic categories, that is, its economic system, then it necessarily follows that impersonal relationships are the rule, for this is indeed the case within the economic system. But the economy is only one of the various factors determining social life. It is true even for individuals, of course, that only impersonal relationships can be established with most other people. If society is therefore taken to be the sum-total of possible relationships, it will appear, for the most part, to be impersonal. At the same time, however, it is also possible for individuals in some cases to intensify personal relationships and to communicate to others much of what they believe to be most intimately theirs and find this affirmed by others. Bearing in mind that everyone can enter into such relationships, and indeed many do, these too must be judged to exist on a massive scale.1 Moreover, in modern society to avail oneself of this option is typically neither subject to any restrictions nor encumbered by the need to make allowances for other relationships.

We shall accordingly assume in the following that modern society is to be distinguished from older social formations by the fact that it has become more elaborate in two ways: it affords more opportunities both for impersonal and for more intensive personal relationships. This double adaptive capacity can be further expanded because present society is, as a whole, more complex, can more effectively regulate interdependencies between different forms of social relations and is better able to filter out potential disturbances.

It is possible to speak in terms of an enhanced capacity for impersonal relationships, in that one can communicate in numerous areas with no risk of misunderstanding, even if one has no personal knowledge whatsoever of the people with whom one is talking, and can only ‘size them up’ by means of a few hurriedly noted role characteristics (policeman, salesman, switchboard operator). This is the case, moreover, because every individual action depends on innumerable others, the functions of which are not guaranteed by certain personality characteristics that can be known to the person who has to rely on them. Never before has a society exhibited such improbable, contingent dependencies, which can neither be held to be natural, nor interpreted solely on the basis of one’s knowledge of other people.

Equally, an enhanced capacity for personal relationships cannot be seen as a simple extension or increase in the number and diversity of effective acts of communication, for such an extension would soon reach a point where it would overwhelm anyone.

The personal element in’ social relationships cannot therefore become more extensive, only more intensive. In other words, it is a question of laying the basis for social relations in which more of the individual, unique attributes of each person, or ultimately all their characteristics, become significant. We shall term such relationships interpersonal interpenetration. By the same token, one can speak of intimate relationships.

This concept describes a process. It is based on the supposition that the sum total of everything which goes to form an individual, his memories and attitudes, can never be accessible to someone else, if for no other reason than that the individual himself has no access to them (as can be seen from Tristram Shandy’s attempt to write his own biography). Of course, one can to a ‘greater or lesser’ degree know something about the other person and heed this. Above all, at the communicative level, there are rules or codes which prescribe that in certain social situations one must be receptive in principle to everything about another person, must refrain from displaying indifference towards what the other finds of great personal relevance and in turn must leave no question unanswered, even if and especially when this centres on matters of a personal nature. While interpersonal interpenetration can be enhanced continuously in factual terms – given sufficient room for manoeuvre in society and disregarding possible disturbances – the capacity for such enhancement must be fixed discontinuously at the level of communicative regulations.

A type of system is thus created for intimate relationships which ensures that the personal level has to be included in the communication.

Judging from what we know or assume about the social genesis of individuality,2 the need for personal individuality and the capacity for stylizing oneself and others as unique can presumably not be adequately explained simply in terms of anthropological constants. Rather, such a need and its possible expression and affirmation in communicative relationships correspond to a specific socio-structural framework, especially to the complexity and particular form of differentiation adopted by that social system.3 We shall not treat the sociogenesis of individuality and its attendant semantics in extenso, but shall instead confine ourselves to a subordinate question which is nevertheless important to our considerations: namely, the question of the genesis of a generalized symbolic communicative medium assigned specifically to facilitating, cultivating and promoting the communicative treatment of individuality.

It goes without saying that one must assume that individuality in the sense of a self-propelling, psycho-physical unity, and above all in terms of each person’s individual death, is something accepted by all societies.

The Christian credo of the indestructability of the soul and the notion that the salvation of the soul is an individual fate irrespective of stratification, family or even the circumstances surrounding each death, do not essentially add anything to this anthropological fact, nor, for that matter, do the Renaissance view of a pronounced individualism, the individualization of affect-management and natural rationality (e.g. Vives) or the Baroque concept of self-assertive individualism. Such notions serve only to strengthen their social legitimacy in the face of increasing difficulties in anchoring the individual person in the respective social structures. People are still defined according to their social status, i.e. by their positions within a stratified social system. At the same time, however, less claim is made to a specific position within the functional areas of politics, economics, religion and the academic world. This did not, at least not initially, lead to the abandonment of the old concept of the individual, i.e. its definition in terms of indivisibility and separateness, or to its being modified when applied to actual living persons.4

The development which leads up to the modern world and which cancelled out the traditional concept of the individual and invested the word with new meaning had a number of different aspects to it. These must be carefully distinguished from one another because they not only refer to substantially different things, but also to some extent conflict with each other. First of all, the transition from stratified to functional differentiation within society leads to greater differentiation of personal and social systems (or, to be exact, of system/environment distinctions within personal or social systems). This is the case because with the adoption of functional differentiation individual persons can no longer be firmly located in one single subsystem of society, but rather must be regarded a priori as socially displaced.5 As a consequence, not only do individuals now consider themselves unique owing to the supposed greater diversity of individual attributes (which may not at all be true), but also a greater differentiation occurs of system/environment relations, necessary for personal systems to refer to specific systems. Accordingly, if persons now nonetheless share common characteristics, this must be attributed to coincidence (and no longer to a characteristic of the species).

This trend towards differentiation, easily comprehensible from the point of view of systems theory, means that individuals are all the more provoked into interpreting the difference between themselves and the environment (and in the temporal dimension, the history and future of this difference) in terms of their own person, whereby the ego becomes the focal point of all their inner experiences and the environment loses most of its contours. Possessing a name and a place within the social framework in the form of general categories such as age, gender, social status and profession no longer suffices as a means both of knowing that one’s organism exists and of self-identification – the basis of one’s own life experience and action. Rather, individual persons have to find affirmation at the level of their respective personality systems, i.e. in the difference between themselves and their environment and in the manner in which they deal with this difference – as opposed to the way others do. At the same time, society and the possible worlds it can constitute become much more complex and impenetrable. The need for a world that is still understandable, intimate and close (which, incidentally, means approximately the same thing as does the ancient Greek ‘philos’) stems from this, a world which one can,...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 8.12.2014
• Übersetzer: Jeremy Gaines, Doris L. Jones
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Sonstiges ► Geschenkbücher
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Psychologie ► Sozialpsychologie
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Politik / Verwaltung
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie ► Allgemeine Soziologie
• Schlagworte: accommodate • Alternatives • Book • developed • Edition • English • Family • Generalized • Gesellschaftstheorie • important • Index • INTACT • interpenetration notes • Introduction • Love • Luhmann • Medium • Modern • Social Theory • Societies • Society • Sociology • Soziologie • Symbolic • System • Systems • Traditional • Transition
• ISBN-13: 9780745694450 / 9780745694450