Heidegger and Gay Marriage

Heidegger and Gay Marriage

What attracts me to philosophy and critical theory is that it answers questions. The answer may not be familiar, and indeed the answer may come with another question, but if philosophy can't engage the questions that we debate, then it is not worth much. We need philosophy more than ever now. The kinds of ethical questions we must tackle at the beginning of the 21^st century demand forms of direct and creative thinking. In fact, we find our conventional truths so often undermined today that the need for theoretical thinking is greater now than it has ever been.

All this is in the way of introduction to one of the more controversial issues the United States faces: the legalization of gay marriage. I don't offer an answer to the question of whether it should be legalized or not (for me the question is not that interesting: of course it should. Full stop). The more interesting question is the source of the opposition to gay marriage. Why care? Naturally, there is a "moral" answer to this question. Opposition to gay marriage is rooted in intolerance, ignorance, hatred, etc. True enough, as far as it goes, but, like most moral statements, it doesn't offer much in the way of understanding. We dismiss those who oppose gay marriage without exploring the fertile question of why it is such an issue in the first place.

I want to offer another perspective by borrowing some insights from Martin Heidegger, more specifically his thoughts on worldhood (and of the "worldhood of the world"). I have promised myself that this blog will not go too deeply into the technical language of philosophy and theory, so I want to offer up what is most interesting about Heidegger's notion of  "worldhood." What is so compelling is the idea that, as humans (as what Heidegger calls Dasein), we do not live in a world where we start with bare facts and then build meaning from them. We do not construct our world from the flotsam of objects, whether those objects be rocks and trees, tools and buildings, or even words and ideas. Rather, we live first and foremost in meaning, inside of meaning. A world is not a geographical locale or a collection of people and things. It is rather that within which our actions can have meaning.

If I plant a stick in the ground and refuse to leave it, defending that spot of ground even at the cost of my life, I am, in my early twenty-first century white urban Canadian world, simply insane, and my actions will have no meaning because my world attributes no meaning to them, save for sickness and irrationality. However, if I am a member of the Crow tribe, and it is 1800, the planting of a stick in the ground and the refusal to leave it is not only a meaningful act, it is the most meaningful act I can carry out as a warrior. The act will have meaning for every member of my community. It will make them proud and happy. Indeed, my performance will even have meaning for the enemy who comes to kill me. Even with this enemy, I share a world. Eventually, there comes a time when, for the Crow, this act becomes impossible, no longer has meaning, and that is the moment when one world passes away, never to return. For a more detailed elaboration of this passing-away of a world it is worth taking a look at Jonathan Lear's excellent book Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation.

Closer to home, we may find that people are no longer polite, that what used to be an indispensible part of social engagement -- the extending of public courtesies to one another -- is no longer a meaningful act. Public courtesy loses its meaning and comes to be viewed simply as strange and even slightly awkward. I am perhaps being pessimistic here. Perhaps public courtesy still has a place in the world, but I want to emphasize that in order for public politeness to have a meaning, there must be a world in which that meaning can express itself.

We can now come back, after this tangent, to the question of gay marriage and Heidegger, because we now have at least the beginning of a solution to the problem of why anyone cares about gay marriage in the first place. We can say two things now about Heidegger's notion of worldhood. One is that it is only within a world that anything I do can have a meaning. The other is that a world is never private. It always involves other people. A world is something that binds me together with others, their concerns, their cares, their problems, and, yes, their desires and pleasures as well.

Those who oppose gay marriage do so in the name of marriage itself. The "Protection of Marriage Act," "The Defense of Marriage Act": something is being attacked here. But what? Every comedian worth their salt asks the same question. What is it to you if two gay men want to get married? How does that affect your marriage? As Louis CK says: "They're not being gay at you." Do you need to get divorced because gays are now granted the same rights? It seems utterly irrational. But, then again, no one, including Heidegger, ever claimed that worlds are constructed from rational decisions.

Worlds are the locales of meaning. They are horizons within which certain kinds of meanings can mean. But these meanings are not entirely affirmations. Every world must also begin with a "no." Lacan calls this "Le Nom/Non du Pere," or the "Name/No of the Father" (but the Lacanian angle on this question will be for another post). A world must say "no" to something. For the Crow, it is surrender or cowardice that is ruled out of bounds. In the world of courtesy, it is churlishness or boorishness. In the world of "traditional marriage" (and that term is very specifically defined -- we are not talking about the "traditional marriage" of the polygamous patriarchs of the Old Testament) marriage is defined as "between one man and one woman." The very naming of the basic condition of marriage (i.e. heterosexuality) is the first sign that this condition is already embattled. We do not, for example, stipulate that marriage must be between a living man and a living woman because that qualification is not under question, and no one is demanding rights of necrophiliac marriage (although opponents of gay marriage will assure us that if gay marriage becomes legal, it is only matter of time before the movie "The Corpse Bride" becomes a reality).

So, in the protest against gay marriage, what we are dealing with is the fear that a world is about to disappear. But even though worlds do disappear, and their disappearance is always a matter of tragedy for those who see them slipping away, I want to argue that the opponents of gay marriage have made a category error about marriage itself. They have, in effect, focused on the wrong "no."

If I say no to gay marriage, and if I believe that in proclaiming this "no" I am saving marriage, I am effectively arguing that my marriage holds together through the rejection of homosexuality. While it may be true that many traditional married couples reject homosexuality, it is unlikely that any of them got married in order to reject homosexuality: "Darling, I love you and I want to spend the rest of my life sticking it to the fags with you." So although the rejection of homosexuality may be a characteristic of many traditional marriages, it is not a defining (i.e. world-making) characteristic. What is defining of the world of marriage is a different "no." The "no" is a rejection of irresponsibility, of free-floating individuality, of alienation. Just as the Crow warrior rejects the very possibility of cowardice, the married person rejects the very possibility of alienated living. The rejection is not of the homosexual, but of the unmarried person, and what unmarried person over 30 has not been the target of pity, irritation, fear, confusion from those whose world only makes sense as a world founded on marriage, a world in which singles are only understandable as pre-married.

The fear that gay marriage will destroy traditional marriage is a false one, and not only false, but self-defeating because it rejects allies against what might be a genuine threat to the world of marriage: the increasing likelihood that adults will choose to be single. If there is a world in which we could imagine marriage becoming meaningless, it is a world in which singles dominate, in which they learn new forms of relationship, new rewards for independent living, new structures of responsibility. In such a world, marriage, while it might continue to exist, would no longer exist in the same horizon of meaning. Marriage, in short, would no longer confer upon the married the ethical status it does today. And it is this ethical status that is the foundation of marriage. To grant this ethical status to gay couples not only does not diminish the status of traditional marriage, it proclaims the moral victory and dominance of that world. Marriage, in other words, is so right, that even gay couples want it.

If traditional marriage wants a world in which it maintains its meaning, it needs to embrace gay marriage. A world, remember, always involves other people, and gay people -- the "other people" -- are saying yes to the whole ethical, moral and social value of marriage.

The debate we might have is over which "no" is most definitive of marriage. If the "no" is to disconnection, then traditional marriage can absorb gay marriage without a hiccup. If the "no" is to homosexual desire, then marriage is a far darker pact than we have known, and if the world about to disappear is a world that only holds together through the contempt it feels for homosexual love, then we can all say "good riddance."