TZVETAN TODOROV
381
When we love, we do not question ourselves, but only let ourselves be
drawn towards happiness. Still, to take this road is nonetheless to make a
philosophical choice, albeit unconsciously. As we have seen, love, more than
any other human relationship, implies the irreplaceable and non-fungible
nature of the loved one, who becomes an individual in the strongest sense
of the word, a unique being. In reserving our most powerful feelings for an
individual in her uniqueness, one elevates her to a pedestal of exception,
making of her an absolute value; the loved one becomes "the measure of
all things." Viewed through the lens of love, terms like "humanism," "indi–
vidualism," or "personalism" acquire new meanings, outlining a value
system whose summit is occupied by the individual-the very celebration
that we know from love: a means to no end beyond herself, irreducible to
any other person or idea, inexhaustible in her uniqueness.
Humans feel a need for transcendence, aiming at values beyond their
immediate selves, beyond the animal need
to
assure their own survival.
Through their material nature, they are living organisms like all the rest;
but their consciousness, enabling them to embrace the totality of the uni–
verse and of time, leads them to know the infinite. For millennia,
gods-beings that stand above us, incarnations of all values-have satisfied
this need for transcendence. Beginning only a few centuries ago, in
Europe, people began to doubt the existence of gods, then ultimately pro–
nounced them dead. To escape the anguish of a life devoid of
transcendence, other divini ties were proposed, ones which had previously
played only a secondary role: Nation, the People, the Proletariat, the Tribe,
Race, or Community. Twentieth-century totalitarianisms rendered even
these less substantial, replacing them with the demand for the worship of
a Party and its Leader. Today, we are too familiar with the impasses to
which these promises lead to retain our faith in them; does this mean that,
at millennium's end, we are without any means of transcendence?
No: we still have the transcendence of love--a strange one, we must
confess, if not downright paradoxical, since it dwells in a being similar to
ourselves in all respects, rather than superior to us in quality (God) or in
quantity (the group). Similar, that is, in all respects except one: this person
must stand outside us.
It
is, as it were, a "lateral" transcendence rather than
a "vertical" one. The absolute value takes the form of another being, a face
that
r
see, a You that I adore. This "humanism of the other,"
to
use
Levinas's words, this notion of the "defense of one other than oneself"
allows us to surmount the sterile antinomies of dogmatism and nihilism,
theism and egoism or, on another level, of immanence and transcendence.
Transcendental values do indeed exist, but there is nothing supernatural
about them; they are simply the individual beings to whom we direct our
love, celebrating their existence. Far from living in an age of decadence and
