Love Letter

Nigel Rapport steps towards a cosmopolitan love.

- Nigel Rapport

We are all human and should treat each other decently and with respect”, Ernest Gellner counselled: “Don’t take more specific classifications [eg ethnicity, nationality, religiosity, class, caste] seriously” (Times Literary Supplement, 1993). Or again, from Bertrand Russell: “Remember your humanity and forget the rest” (The Russell-Einstein Manifesto, 1955). Sadly, more usually we assess others by virtue of a group or class to which they happen to belong. This is a situation that Primo Levi, in the light of his experience of the Holocaust, deemed unconscionable. It is not to be tolerated, Levi insisted, that any human being should find themselves in a situation where definition and evaluation are being made on the basis not of an essential humanity and intrinsic individuality, but due to being assigned to a collective type — possibly with fatal consequences (The Drowned and The Saved, 1996).

Such classifications I would define as fictions. Here, by ‘fiction’, I mean a symbolic construction that may have cultural validity, but which is not true ontologically: it does not pertain to that person’s identity as a living human being. Rather, the categorisations are impositions on the person — extraneous, and dependant on their cultural construction and recognition. The individuality of a life, on the other hand, is true independent of any cultural constructions.

Love has been mooted as a practice whose essence is the perception of the individual, in opposition to any such ‘category-thinking’. To fall in love, Iris Murdoch urged, is to be stunned by the realization of an absolute particularity beyond the self: to become conscious of another for what they uniquely are, beyond any cultural practice. In the face of irreducible individual dissimilarity, “love is the imaginative recognition of, that is respect for, this otherness” (