Religion, Philosophy, Time

In Rejoicing, Bruno Latour differentiates between two different modes of universal: “the inalterable standard and retrospective universal” (49). The inalterable standard is our default position. When we witness two lovers confessing their love for one another — usually in response to one asking the other, “Do you love me?” — we assume that they share love as an inalterable standard: that the love they confess is the same entity across time and space. But this is not the right way to think about the universality of love:

But, naturally, this ‘same’ is in no way of the nature of a substance preserved intact over time, such as a gold coin forgotten under a mattress that you might come across happily years later. Focusing on such a form of the ‘same’, on such stability over time and space, is exactly the temptation the man needed to avoid in order to wisely utter the sentence that renewed their relationship. (46-7)

Renewal is the operative term that marks a different kind of sameness of the universality of love shared between the lovers. In responding to the question, “Do you love me?” the respondent cannot fake the response. The words don’t matter as much as the non-verbal communication transmitted in the moment of response. Latour refers to the temptation of thinking that the question was actually, “Do you love me in the same exact way that you did when we first fell in love?” This is reified love. This is, to use the knee-jerk adjective, Platonic love in the sense of an unchanging virtue over time and space.

Latour is making a different claim for universality — one that is authentically religious. Religious speech requires a conversion and thus a transformation of the interlocutors. This transformation must be renewed, but not a renewal that assumes a re-engagement with the “same” love that was there at the beginning. I see this renewal as Bergsonian duration. It is memory holding together the past, present, and future but not in a sameness of a stable entity that could never survive the passage of time. We are mistaken if we think that the “unalterable standard” is the only form of universality that holds us together.

This unalterable standard, when applied to our relationships and to our religion and our philosophy, makes us overly concerned with belief. “Do you believe in God?” has become the common litmus test for whether one is or is not “religious.” This is Latour’s main target in Rejoicing. Why must we reduce religious speech to statements of belief? We get ourselves into a host of problems when we do so. Because these beliefs cannot stand up to the universal unalterable standards of truth as measurement, demonstration, and proof, our religious speech must make tenuous recourse to faith as the embracing of “the dizzying mass of false mysteries” (39). These mysteries drive us toward a Gnostic desire to exit this fallen world. This is the opposite of transformation and renewal. This is not, for Latour, authentic religious speech. We lose the ability to look at this world with any kind of curious attention or discernment that transforms our modes of existence. “There is no other world, but there are several ways of living in this one and several ways, too, of knowing it” (34). Eventually, Latour would formulate these new ways of knowing as, Modes of Existence, Facing Gaia and bringing our religious and ethical discernment back Down to Earth.

The other universality is not the unalterable standard. It is a universality that respects duration through the continual need to renew commitments. It exists only in duration, memory, time. When the lover asks, “Do you love me?” the answer need not hinge upon the question “What is love?” just as it need not be a moment to answer the assumed question, “Do you love me in the same way you loved me in the beginning?” The answer is the opportunity to renew a love that brings them close again by looking back to find “the ‘same love’, everlasting over time, even though they know perfectly well that everything has changed, themselves and the times with them”

This particular universal is so unlike the other kind that, far from coming down, stable, from the past to the present, it takes off from the present and goes back to the past, changing and deepening the past’s foundation. So much so that, the more time passes, the more the point of departure swells with the future. (47)

We are in the realm of Bergson and Serres, both of whom were so important to Latour’s thinking, especially on the notion of time. “What happens after that allows the beginning to be the beginning of something. The start depends on the sequel” (47). Love is not a stable, unchanging universal, but a commitment we make to a universality that lives within duration. As such, the present commitment — a renewal — becomes the retrospective strengthening of a bond that “swells into the future.”

Renewal as a Practice of Time

For Latour, this is religious speech, or at least an example of it if not the whole of it. What he has described is a practice of time that bonds two people together over a lifetime of a shared life. This bond is not reducible to a universal that is an essence. Such an essence wouldn’t work because it could never be personal and powerful enough to do the work. If love is an essence, then it is the same for everyone everywhere at all times. It is the absence of time. We get ourselves into a notion of stability as stasis rather than renewal. We seek to go back to the past to find what we once had in order to renew it in its sameness.

We have to untether renewal from stasis, but not from stability. When Latour says, “the start depends on the sequel,” he is telling us that religious speech is self-conscious about unfolding time, which can feel like a reversal. How the lover responds to the question will change the past in one of two ways. Either it was the beginning of a lifelong commitment that has provided stability that is not stasis — the lovers have adjusted to each other’s needs in the passage of time; or it will change the past into wasted time and further drive a wedge between them as time continues to pass. Time cannot be only understood as passing from the present to the past, and from present into the future. At the moment of the answer to the question, the past is different because the past lingers into the present. It seems silly to stand above this dialog trying to judge whether or not the past that emerges in the dialog is correctly interpreted or not. Such a view point depends upon seeing the past as ossified and the present as somehow a transparent reflection of it, as determined by it. Such a viewpoint also determines the future as the effect of the past.

This is not the practice of time that Latour is describing. The past must be seen as present but not as a hard determination of the future. This is what happens when we treat our conversations as effects of causes that are purely external to the unfolding of time within the conversation. In other words, if love is assumed to be a stable entity that holds the lover’s relationship together, then the question “Do you love me?” becomes dependent on two further questions: “What is love?” and “Is it present in this relationship in the same way that it was assumed to be at the beginning?” The only possible answer to the original question is whether or not love has remained in place over time in the same way that it did in the beginning. Love is either present or absent.

To see love as the other universal — the one that requires renewal in the unfolding of time because we are committed to it together — gathers the entire conversation into a kairos that makes the past and the future present in such a way that they both can be changed based as much on the tone of the answer as the words used to convey the answer. This gathering of the past and the future is what Walter Benjamin referred to as Jetztzeit, often translated as actuality. It is kairos in the sense that there is a gathering and a summarization of the past into the present that will change the past as the foundation for what happens in the future. If the responding lover fails to deliver a convincing display of renewal, the past is not just reinterpreted but is different than it could have been in its actuality. Actuality here is a practice of time and not the stability of an ossified love that is either actually present or actually absent. Actuality is an activation of the past in the present that changes the past, the present, and the future.

Benjamin equated this practice of time with a “w e a k Messianic power.” “W e a k” because wholesale one-and-done redemption is not possible. Such a “strong” redemption is the redemption that can only see presence or absence of the stable and eternal mode of universals. Either love is present as it always has been — and is the same entity for both lovers and thus the same experience — or it is absent because it is not the same as it always has been for them. The w e a k redemption (Benjamin’s spacing is intentional and should be preserved), demands a practice of time as attention to the past with the deep understanding that the answer to the question “Do you love me?” will change the past and the future based on how the question is answered. The past is actualized in the present and transformative of the past, the present, and the future.

To deeply understand this is to consciously live in time and to get comfortable with the transformative power of these conversations. We need not see that transformative power as founded upon something universal, eternal, and external to the conversation. Love is not the same experience for my partner as it is for me, and it shouldn’t be. What she needs from me is different that what I need from her. Recognizing and renewing this mutual commitment is love, and is not reducible to an eternal Idea that is either present or absent in the time between us.

Galatians

I would like to end this meditation with an example of Jetztzeit and religious speech from Paul’s Galatians. As always, treating time as practice cannot seek to find stable essences even when we are talking about the “in between” of temporality, and this is what I find in this text. The in-between is never the same nor is it absolutely different. The in-between is, in Benjamin’s term, Actuality (Jetztzeit), as the compression and contraction of the past into the present that will be a judgment of the past that changes the future, and therefore changes the past. Something will be remembered, which means something will be forgotten. How we remember and how we forget are more important perhaps that what we remember and what we forget.

The first example: Paul’s final chapter (a later numbering that has become our numbering, of course) of Galatians:

Brothers and sisters, if a person is discovered in some sin, you who are spiritual restore such a person in a spirit of gentleness. Pay close attention to yourselves, so that you are not tempted too. Carry one another’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ. (6:1-2)

Spirit, restoration, gentleness, attention are the operative terms here. There is no purely external universality on which this speech hinges. The “spirit of gentleness” is how a community restores itself by restoring its members when they “sin.” By sin, we need not mean Original Sin or some other ontological condition of humanity. Here it simply means a transgression of some sort. This is going to happen. Let’s not make more of it that it is. Sins are not permanent states of being. We should not treat sin as a universal in the stable and essential sense. Sin is not present or absent in the community or in a person. It is something that happens in time, and atonement for it equally happens in time and is actualized by the community and its members. Sin is balanced by a practice of time that is a fulfillment of the law (as its Spirit): “For the whole law [nomos] can be summed up in a single commandment, namely, ‘You must love your neighbor as yourself” (5:14).

This very statement can be Benjamin’s Jetztzeit if we read it in a particular way. It actualizes the past (Leviticus 19:18) as a summary of the past that defines the present and changes the future. How is Leviticus 19:18 to be actualized? By what Paul says in 6:1-2: practicing time in such a way that sin is not permanent and restoration is done in a “spirit of gentleness.” To read this through the lens of time as practice is to release ourselves from seeing “love your neighbor as yourself” in terms of the presence or absence of an eternal entity called love. Paul never sets out to define this summary as anything other than a practice of time that is simultaneously as “spirit of gentleness.” We never leave the realm of humans interacting with each other; we stay in time.