“What if consciousness, like love, is the work of making relationships?” Alva Noë, chair of the philosophy department at the University of California, Berkeley, proposed at Stanford’s annual Presidential Lecture in the Humanities and Arts on Wednesday.
“Love names the work of opening up the world, the very labor of consciousness,” Noë said.
His talk at the Stanford Humanities Center went on to challenge philosophy’s traditional distinction between value and fact where it delimits questions about love and human perception, respectively.
“If I’m right,” he said, “this way of organizing curriculum should be a source of embarrassment. Love and value are at the very heart of the problems of perception, consciousness and indeed, life.”
The Presidential Lecture in the Humanities and Arts has brought prominent scholars, artists and writers to Stanford since the 1990s. Recent speakers have included historian Timothy Snyder, writer Zadie Smith and scholar Sadiya Hartman.
Noë received his Ph.D. from Harvard and has been a philosophy professor at Berkeley since 2003, where he also belongs to the Center for New Media, the Program in Critical Theory and the Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences. A Guggenheim Fellow, much of his past scholarship has focused on problems of consciousness, aesthetics and the philosophy of mind.
He employed each of these problems throughout his lecture, at one point encouraging his audience to embrace the provocation that “all perceiving is somehow loving.” Love’s opposite, he said, is not contempt but indifference, which he called “the basic condition of blindness.”
Director of the Stanford Humanities Center Roland Greene, an English and comparative literature professor, told The Daily that love is a new philosophical frontier for Noë. “My goal is always to bring people who are in the process of working out a new idea,” he said. “So I wanted to get [Noë] at exactly this moment, before his ideas about love have hardened.”
The lecture drew on numerous thinkers and writers who have engaged themes of love and perception, including bell hooks ’73, Iris Murdoch, Sappho and Gillian Rose, whose 1995 memoir “Love’s Work” served as a touchstone for Noë’s ideas.
He argued against the conception that love is an unconditional good “because it is natural and normal.” According to this traditional view, Noë said, the “capacity for love belongs to normal human life,” akin to “strong teeth and healthy bones” or “having good genes.”
For Noë, however, love is not a passive emotion, but rather the effortful task of bringing another person “into focus and accomplishing their presence and our own.”
“We don’t love because the ones we love are so impressive or so charming or so beautiful or good,” he said. “There isn’t really any fully formed person there for you prior to the unfolding of your relationship with them…You enact them in the work of coming to know them. Love is the commitment to this work.”
To illuminate his claims, Noë turned to the theory of art. The aim of aesthetics, he observed, is not to “judge works of art with respect to whether they are, for example, beautiful or original.” Instead, aesthetic engagement is “the work of achieving the [art] object and oneself. It’s the work of making a relationship with it.”
Returning to love, Noë defined the word as “precisely a dedication to the aesthetic work of finding ways to see what is there, to engage a person or a situation honestly and with concern.”
Chloe Allen, a student at UC Santa Cruz who attended the lecture, told The Daily that Noë’s lecture left her thinking about the critical role of attention in relationships.
“I think it’s important to try and bring out what already exists in other people by paying enough attention to them,” she said. “The first step is just paying them enough respect to notice what is actually in front of you, and not take for granted the fact that they are there.”