Gillian Rose, "Love’s Work"

Dispatch 006

The title itself exemplifies my theme: love-and-reason-in-tension as a cultural trope. In this case, that trope extends to philosophy in the writing of Gillian Rose, a tremendous, impassioned sociologist and philosopher before cancer took her at the age of forty-eight.

Work serves as a proxy for reason. The former implies the presence of the latter. Work presumes an objective, as well as a strategy and an agenda for reaching it. One expects work to produce a useful outcome. All this draws on our reasoning powers. These must combine with the exercise of will, to be sure; nonetheless, work connotes rational endeavour.

Whatever love is, it sits uneasily with the idea of work. Sure, there are the sex manuals, and there’s the ponderous advice that if you want a good relationship, you’re going to have to work at it. Rose, though, does not intend anything so prosaic.

The phrase “love’s work” produces a paradox. Love’s work transforms our understanding of needs and of what makes sense. Love transforms our understanding of work. That love has work to do also stimulates reflection on what we mean by love. Its agency elevates it above a mere sentiment or passion. Rose also tacitly invites us to participate in the work that love does.

In all, she challenges the caricature of philosophy as detachment. Like a rose, the title invites the reader into layers of meaning, hidden joys, and action.

Three Petals

Rose displays the duality of love and reason in her autobiography, one of the petals of Love’s Work. She describes her devotion to the discipline of philosophy as a developing passion: “My passion for philosophy began when I was seventeen.” Recounting her first exposure to philosophical writings in school through the works of Plato and Pascal, she writes: “With rapt but sober elation, I devoured the Republic and the Pensées ….” She moves from rapture to sobriety to bodily appetite. Reading philosophy at Oxford disgusted her, but a tutor rescued her by expressing contempt for bad teaching. “I bloomed in this degradation,” she confesses. “I resumed passionate, holistic, critical reading and thinking, which revived my earlier commitment to justice and to speculation.”

Rose’s experience also instructs her in love’s transcendence: “In personal life, people have absolute power over each other …. There is no democracy in any love relation: only mercy.” If “democracy” represents the triumph of sensible interactions between two people, love reveals a deeper experience of vulnerability and dependency on mercy. This affirmation, however, does not render love irrational (love as reason’s opposite). Rather, the experience of love revises our perception of reason. This is love’s work. Love transforms reason (or fulfils the law), it doesn’t abolish it.

The experience of love helps us to see that “reason’s claim [to absolute authority] remains unrealized from that transcendent ground on which we all wager, suspended in the air.” Rose would have us see that trust in reason involves an appeal to a “transcendent ground,” the making of a “wager,” and that we live in a “suspended” condition. Reason, she reports, “is forever without ground.”

Groundlessness, though, is not the same thing as relativism or postmodern skepticism: “Relativism of authority does not establish the authority of relativism: it opens reason to new claimants.” Its groundlessness tells us that reasoning is truly difficult. Our situation rightly saddens us. However, to acknowledge reason’s dependency also encourages hope in us. Reason has an “anagogical” dimension: it savours of heaven.

An appreciation of reason in relation to love produces political engagement. Like love, reason is “risk,” while politics remains “the art of the possible.” In our condition as rational creatures, we affirm that in some world beyond our experience, good intentions produce good results and politics really is the “easy way.” In the meantime, we acknowledge conflict and stake ourselves within it: we “remain in the fray.”

Love’s Work is a slender but challenging volume. The difficulty of its form embodies the understanding of reason in relation to love that Rose affirms. The book does not suffer fools but it repays loving attention. I trace three of its petals here – a lived passion for philosophy, love’s absolute rule, and reason’s groundlessness (but reasonableness nonetheless) – by way of invitation to potential readers who might otherwise put the book down impatiently and by way of reminder to myself of a florescent manifestation of my theme.

In a mere 135 large-print pages, Rose also reflects on the Jewishness of her name, postmodern skepticism as Protestant interpretation of freedom from the law, and living with cancer as symbiosis (to say nothing of symbol). As part of her conviction that both sadness and hope attend reason, she ponders the political meaning of Camelot. A fragment written even closer to her death begins with an appended letter from brave friends who challenged her to read that image more Christianly. On her deathbed, Rose converted to Anglicanism. The fragment was published posthumously as Paradiso.