Can love overcome the distance between us?

Chris Hatzis
Eavesdrop on Experts, a podcast about stories of inspiration and insights. It’s where expert types obsess, confess and profess. I’m Chris Hatzis, let’s eavesdrop on experts changing the world - one lecture, one experiment, one interview at a time.

Every day is made up of hundreds of interactions with others. When those others are strangers, we probably don’t spare much thought on what they might be thinking or feeling. But every once in a while, we are reminded that every person we come across is unique, with an individual perception of themselves and of others. The sensation can be quite overwhelming.

It’s at this point that Nigel Rapport’s work begins. Nigel is the Professor of Anthropological and Philosophical Studies at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. Nigel was recently in Melbourne where he was awarded the 2018 Miegunyah Distinguished Visiting Fellowship, and delivered the lecture titled “Can ‘Love’ Help Overcome The Distance Between Us?” Steve Grimwade caught up with him for a chat about human behaviour.

Steve Grimwade
Love is a term often used, perhaps not fully thought through. Lust, romance, camaraderie, care, admiration, tolerance, benevolence. The number of ways that we love are as numerous as there are people to love, but perhaps that’s the point. Today we’re talking to Nigel Rapport, Professor of Anthropological and Philosophical Studies at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. G’day, Nigel.

Nigel Rapport
Hello, Steve.

Steve Grimwade
One of my great pleasures is meeting people like you whose interests are as diverse as possible, really. For you, these include social theory, identity, individuality, consciousness, community studies, conversation analysis – which may prove badly for myself, representation, aesthetics, globalisation, violence and anthropology as a moral pursuit, amongst others. Given this very broad range, are you able to point to the heart of your studies? When asked at a barbecue what do you do, what do you say?

Nigel Rapport
It’s an awful question and I try and avoid it. It’s hard to put your finger on one thing. One easy answer is to say well, I’ve done this sort of research and that sort of research, I've done fieldwork here and there and then that leads the conversation off in another direction. But if was to try and answer you honestly, it would be that I am really interested in the relationship between the individual on the one hand and the social or the cultural on the other.

My discipline, social anthropology or cultural anthropology, I feel has tended historically to privilege the social and the cultural over the individual and to say that the individual is a version of the social structure or a version of the cultural tradition or a version of the community organisation, the community identity into which that individual has been born. I think that birth is more superficial or accidental or contingent than the orthodoxies of my discipline might sometimes claim.

In other words, I’m interested in individual identity, consciousness, awareness as a sort of thing in itself, a thing that stands apart from the social and the cultural and historical and the communitarian. I think we have the capacity, I think we have the necessity, to make sense for ourselves as individual human beings, to make meaning for ourselves, to work out for ourselves what it is to be us and how it is that we relate to what is around us or beyond us, other people in the wider world.

We have the capacity to do that because we’re human beings and all human beings have the same set of universal capacities, I believe. How we substantiate those capacities, how we operationalise them, how we bring them to life, how we animate or inhabit those capacities is something absolutely individual that pertains to your embodiment and my embodiment, which is discrete. I am bone-bound, as the poet Dylan Thomas put it, and so are you and so is every human being.

To be human is to be individual, and that means that we operate according to a certain consciousness, perception, awareness, set of interpretations that are special and unique to each of us. That is a truth. It’s what I call an ontological truth, a universal truth. It’s part of the nature of a human being and it operates irrespective of the society or the culture or the historical epoch or the community in which you are operating or manifesting or inhabiting your individuality.

For me, in answer to your question, and I’m sorry this is a long-winded one, individuality is the key thing in which I have been interested since my first period of anthropological fieldwork in the early 1980s, and the different projects and the different books that I’ve written since then have been exploring different versions of individuality, including the rights, I think, to live out our precious and finite individual existence in ways that fulfil our capacities to make an identity for ourselves and gratify ourselves in ways that will be particular to us.

Because what pleases you will not please me necessarily and no one can say to you what should please you, I think, and no one can determine from the outside what will please you. So, the rights to self-expression also have become an aspect of a focus on individuality.

Steve Grimwade
Nigel Rapport, thank you very much for joining us on Eavesdrop on Experts. I feel like my three pages of questions have now become slightly redundant. However, we will slowly unwind all of these concepts, or not. We’ll see how it goes.

It sounds as though you almost came to this study as an individual with an idea of how you are situated in life and indeed in your research studies. Have you changed and has your idea of yourself as an individual changed over the time, or is there a core belief that you’ve held throughout?

Nigel Rapport
What’s particular to an anthropological methodology? What makes it distinctive as a discipline? Is the way that the anthropologist is meant to go out and live the life of those persons or that person on whom they wish now to focus? It’s a matter of living with and living as.

That might mean – because of the diversity of the people in the world, individuals in the world, ways of life in the world, that might mean – and ideally, it will mean – that one becomes a different person each time one engages in fieldwork.

The identities that I’ve assumed or had given to me in my various periods of fieldwork have been things like farm labourer, builder’s mate, hospital orderly or porter, new immigrant, someone helping in a halfway house for ex-offenders, and someone with a love of the artist Stanley Spencer. Each of these in theory necessitate me becoming someone else, becoming someone other, certainly other than myself.

For the period of the fieldwork, I leave my – as far as I’m able, I leave my identity behind, my values behind, my sense of self behind and I allow myself to be formed by those or that other with whom I’m working, into whose shoes I hope to step, into whose worldview and life projects I hope to get a glimpse. This is an imaginative and an intuitive exercise because I’m never fully able to prove that I have understood the other, but in theory I live the life of the other as a material form insofar as I am able. What is it like physically, as I see it, to be that other or to be with that other or near that other?

So, each fieldwork should entail a new identity that I adopt for myself, but as a scientist, coming back from that identity into the person that will then write that up, I reserve the right as it were to say well, the truth that I’ve discovered in interacting with this person is actually commensurate with the truth that I understood through an earlier fieldwork.

While my identities as a fieldworker will vary, I would like to think that the scientific knowledge, the anthropological knowledge that I have been able to discern since that first fieldwork in 1980 about humanity and individuality, amounts to a corpus of knowledge that has a consistency and an intellectual integrity to it, so that – in brief, to answer your question – I’ve learnt different details about the nature of how individuals live a human life, but I would like to think that I have grown into a deeper knowledge that has a sameness to it.

Steve Grimwade
Is that sameness you?

Nigel Rapport
[Laughs]

Steve Grimwade
Sorry. I mean, I don't…

Nigel Rapport
No, no, no. That’s really nice. Anthropology is a personal pursuit. Fieldwork is a personal and individual pursuit. By which I mean if you were in the field, Steve, not me talking with Doris and Fred and Sid who are farmers and builders in the Yorkshire Dales, your experience of them and with them would have been different to mine.

I would have hoped that it would have been compatible, that you would come back and write a version of Sid, Doris and Fred that would be commensurate with what I wrote, but certainly you would do a different fieldwork and you would form a different relationship with them.

So yes, there is a personality and a personal-ness to what and how the anthropologist operates. Nevertheless, I think – I would like to hope that anthropology is a science, which means that there are certain ontological – again this word pertaining to the universal nature of being – there’s an ontological reality to our humanity and our individuality that is the core of the science that I want to write, by way of the examples that Sid, Doris, Fred, porters that I’ve known since, and Alistair, Angus, Gerard. These are individual exemplars of something that I think is more universal.

So yes, you would do field work differently to me if you were knowing the same – the same, inverted commas – people that I knew, but by virtue of our being social scientists, I would hope that if you and I went into it with an equally open mind that we would emerge from it with a kind of knowledge that I would want to call human science.

Steve Grimwade
And that we would both share in the outcome.

Nigel Rapport
Mm.

Steve Grimwade
I would love to talk about labour, because all the fieldwork you spoke about was very labour-intensive fieldwork. Listeners won’t know this but I’m looking at you and I see a pretty strong man underneath the shirt, so I feel like there’s a bond potentially between you and this kind of work. Is that true to say, or a leap?

Nigel Rapport
Mm.

Steve Grimwade
And you can choose to not answer any of my questions.

Nigel Rapport
No, no, these are nice, probing questions. The particular fieldworks that I’ve chosen have been physically challenging. For example, the hospital porters or orderlies that I worked with in Scotland, they figure at the very bottom of a hospital hierarchy that is based on medical expertise or administrative capacity. The porters are people that depend on their stamina and their physical strength above everything else, which means that in the hierarchy of skills, together with the domestics, that is, the cleaners, they’re at the base.

Part of the study that I undertook of the porters and with the porters was how, symbolically, do they deal with the stigma of being regarded as people that, if not being without skill, do not have a skill that is particular to the hospital as a medical environment. This wasn’t what you asked, but to cut a long story short, to be a hospital porter in the hospital that I worked at in Scotland is to invert – to reverse the stigma or invert the hierarchy such that they see themselves as the most important people in the hospital, but also the most human or natural people in the hospital. By which they mean that they are manifesting their true identity, their masculinity. They feel that the other people in the hospital have sold themselves to a job of work that restricts their ability to express themselves as naturally or fully as they would like.

So, the doctor is moved here and there around the hospital or between hospitals. They are, as the porters see it, selling themselves to their profession in such a way that they are repressing – alone in this workforce, the porters are men. To be a man is to inhabit a certain masculine body that gratifies itself through drinking, fighting, playing football, and having women, and having fun. This is how the porters gratify and manifest their masculinity.

I found it very challenging initially to enter the porters’ lodge, which was two small rooms a bit like this, below the surface, hidden away from much view, and they enact their masculinity in this space vis-à-vis one another and vis-à-vis those that they talk about who aren’t porters.

For me to enter into this space was – I was frightened at first, but I felt that I could hold my own as it were if I could show them that I could (a) do the physical work and (b) share in their recreational pursuits – maybe not the drinking or the fighting or the chasing women so much, but football and weights and that kind of thing, I could show them that I was, at least to an extent, a whole person, that I was – they knew that I was from the university.

Mostly in my fieldworks it’s a matter of going in incognito so that people as far possible are natural in their everyday worlds and I’m not disturbing any more than I have to, and they place me in a category that they have already determined is appropriate in their world. In other words, I’m not inventing a category in which they have to place me. But it was a bit different working in a hospital because of the sick people around, so they knew I was a university person, so I worked to show them that even though I was this odd outsider, I could hold my own and help them through the physicalities of the job.

I’m not sure why I got onto this exactly, but to bring it to a close, I have felt it easier in the field, in my different fieldworks, to meet the strange others that I hope to get to know on a physical level rather than a verbal or intellectual level. In other words, I find it easier to get to know people through physical activity. I find it harder to explain myself, I suppose, verbally than to show myself physically.

So, who are you, Nigel? Who is this stranger? Well, I’ll show you who I am; I’ll work with you or for you or alongside you. Don’t ask me to explain myself because (a) I wouldn’t really know where to start, (b) what I have to say about myself might not really accord with your values or your worldview, and I don’t really want to get into a discussion about the distances or the differences between your worldview and your values and mine because that’s not why I’m here. I’m not here about me, I’m here about you.

Verbally, intellectually, I’d find that a bit hard and embarrassing, but if I can just reach you physically then I’d like to use my fitness or my physical aptitude to do that, to show you I can be useful to you and you can relate to me as just another body beside yours.

Steve Grimwade
The way you spoke about your fieldwork, it made me leap to that idea of your thoughts on love, because it was that recognition of the other which seems to be at the heart of the way you present love.

Nigel Rapport
Yep, okay. So, love; a brief history of my relation to the concept. I’ve done four distinct periods of fieldwork, so a farm labourer and builder’s mate in England, a hospital orderly or porter in Scotland, a new immigrant in Israel, and in Canada, in Newfoundland, a member of a provincial city, a newcomer to the city that had to find his or her way through the pubs and streets and hospitals and halfway houses and law courts. How do you integrate into a city as a stranger? That was that field work. How do you learn the phrases that will enable you to pass yourself off as someone that can be met in the street or met in the pub and someone that you can start a conversation with?

After those four fieldworks, I did a kind of historical anthropology, which was to look at the English painter Stanley Spencer, whose dates are 1891-1959. Not as well known as Bacon or Freud or Hockney, but in certain circles regarded as one of the greatest British painters of the last century. Spencer painted in a number of genres: landscapes, portraits, but what he felt was most him were what he called visionary depictions of human beings who were knowing each other in ways that were more honest and deep and less superficial than was conventionally the case.

Spencer had a kind of metaphysical personal philosophy of life which focused on love. He said “if one looks lovingly at the world around, you will know that world in ways that are not superficial and not conventional and not necessarily tied to the physicality that you see before you.”

This sounds a bit bizarre but it actually has a venerable philosophical history that goes back to people like Plato who say that the love is a form of desire and that desire is to know otherness, to know what is not you in order to complement the gaps in your own life and to know how you fit into the wider world around you. So, you are led by a kind of desire or attraction to what is not you, what is other, and by virtue of your desire, you will know that otherness in a true way.

Steve Grimwade
However, you must know it through your own body.

Nigel Rapport
You know it through your own embodiment, but for Plato and for Spencer, the desire of love was also a means not to become another body, that was not possible, but to reach as far as was possible from the limits of your embodiment to what lay beyond your bodily limits. There was no absolute knowledge beyond the body, but desire led you to a place where you could, at the very least, identify what you didn’t know, as it were, identify the mystery of the other. So, love was key to Spencer and love was moral for Spencer. Love was a way to overcome the supposed morality, the narrow conventionalism in his case, of English society. I became interested in the relationship between love and truth.

So, love as a thesis, or love that I am trying to espouse, is a form of public or civil behaviour, a means that people can interact with one another in a way that I hope is more honest or true to the individuality of each of the human beings that will be interacting than is conventionally the case in the way that culturally and conventionally and socially people will interact with each other.

This is starting to sound a bit bizarre, but what I mean is that by love I want to describe a kind of form of human interaction that sees beyond the conventional ways that you might ordinarily react to individuals around you by virtue of certain classes or categories. There’s a woman, there’s an Australian, there’s a Christian, there’s a Muslim, there’s a Jew, there’s someone who is rich, there’s someone who is poor, there’s someone who is good, there’s someone who is bad. These I think are often accidental and contingent categories that don’t do proper justice to the individuality of the person actually in front of you that you should be interacting with.

Steve Grimwade
Love like this already exists, the ability or capability to look at an individual and accept them for who they are and allow them to be who they are.

Nigel Rapport
Yeah.

Steve Grimwade
That already exists.

Nigel Rapport
Yeah.

Steve Grimwade
But you’re hoping that this will be enhanced?

Nigel Rapport
Yeah, exactly. I’m pleased you said the word ‘look’, because the look of love is a key phrasing for me. The thesis is yes, it’s a natural capacity. It’s something that we do ordinarily but it’s also something that conventionally we cover up, as it were, or we don’t allow to have its full expression because we then fall back into the ease of dealing with the complexity of the world by virtue of these habits of classification. Rather than say okay, Steve, you’re sitting in front of me and I must try and accommodate the particularity that is Steve rather than say okay, Steve’s a man, Steve’s Australian, Steve’s wearing headphones, Steve’s wearing glasses.

Rather than conventionalise who Steve is, I must allow myself to say well, honestly, looking at Steve, there’s something particular to him, there’s something unique to him that I can apprehend. I don’t know what it’s like to be on the other side of the eyes that are looking at me; that is and will always be an absolute mystery, but there is a human other. That’s really all I should claim to know or need to know.

Steve Grimwade
Sorry to ask you this question. Is it actually about apprehending the other or allowing the other just to impart themselves and as they are?

Nigel Rapport
Yeah. By apprehend, I don’t mean comprehend. I don’t mean understand. I don’t mean know. That’s a no-no. I can’t claim to know, I can’t claim to comprehend because the minute I claim to know who Steve is, I am enculturating him in my habitual world. Okay, this is the kind of person that Steve probably is because.…

Steve Grimwade
Okay, let’s stop it now. We don’t need to talk about me [laughs].

Nigel Rapport
But that kind of move is what I am wanting love to subvert, to obviate, and it’s not necessarily just a one-to-one. Love is a civic virtue, as I describe it. It’s a matter of using that look to see the strangers that will mostly populate our social lives and say there is a stranger that I can recognise as a human individual other and I can’t claim and I needn’t claim and I shouldn’t claim to know anything else about them than their human individual otherness. But looking at them, I have a kind of desirous attraction towards them in that I can say yeah, there’s a smile, I like that smile, I like how they’re using their body, I like how they’re being themselves.

In other words, I have a kind of human attraction to that other. I can appreciate their individual being and I would wish that individual being to have the right and the space to come into its own without saying what that might be, allowing that person to define for themselves what coming into their own might be. But my moral behaviour towards them, my ethical interaction with them should be to say I recognise their humanity and their individuality, full stop.

I would like that individuality and humanity to be respected by others and to be allowed the space, the time, the opportunity to fulfil itself, to manifest itself, and not go down the habitual road, the cultural road of using the conventions of conceptualisation that I’ve been socialised into as if that did justice to the uniqueness of each life form, which it does not and cannot. A respect for the individuality of life is what I’m trying to translate into a form of social interaction.

Steve Grimwade
How do you as an anthropologist measure love’s impact?

Nigel Rapport
This is an idealistic picture that I’ve been painting, and it’s a moralistic one. Often anthropologies fight shy of having a point of view, but because anthropology I think is a form of science, and because the reality of human individuality I think is so precious, I don’t want to restrict myself to just saying this is how the people that I’ve met make sense of the world. I want to go beyond that.

I want to say this is the nature of humanity and individuality and as an anthropologist this is my duty also to suggest how optimally individuality might live, how optimally human beings might organise their societies and their cultures so that the truth of identity and the truth of individuality might manifest itself, might express itself.

What is the best version of moral society that we can imagine, by which individual human beings might do justice to one another, might provide space for one another? I want to go down that route, even if it is idealistic. How might I measure it?

Again, through my fieldworks the data that you gather in the field is often rich enough if you are focusing sufficiently on the individual details of people’s lives, such that the questions that you initially asked of it, or the reason that you thought you were in the field, do not limit the data that can be extracted from those materials in the years to come.

I’ve been looking back on different fieldworks, in the Yorkshire Dales, in the Scottish hospital, in Israel, in Stanley Spencer’s life and afterlife, and saying well, what evidence if any can I find for the thesis that love might be a form of knowledge, that love might be a human capacity, that love might give onto a moral way of interacting with one another. What evidence can I find, if any, in these fieldworks that’s there’s anything here but a series of pipedreams? And how can build on what I find in the field?

In other words, if the way that people interacted in the Yorkshire Dales is not perfect, if the porters in the Scottish hospital were not loving, if Stanley Spencer despite his protestations that he was living a metaphysic of love, if he wasn’t nice to his wives and children, then how can I also critique my informants as it were and say well, I learn this from them and I also learn what not to do? My fieldworks are my laboratories, I suppose. Also, what I can learn from novels, what I can learn from philosophical treatises.

My duty as an anthropologist is to gain access to the complexity of the human by whichever route I can, which is why I like to also say that anthropology intrinsically interdisciplinary and if I can use the novels of E.M. Forster or Woolf, Virginia Woolf, or the philosophy of Iris Murdoch or Nietzsche or John Stuart Mill or the artist Stanley Spencer, if I can use any of these other resources in order to be a better anthropologist, then I will, however seemingly amateurish the attempt, because of my duty to try and understand the complexity of human being.

Steve Grimwade
What advice has served you well over the years in the field and at St Andrews?

Nigel Rapport
Mm, I’m a sucker for aphorisms, and I like to have a commonplace book that’s always current in which I will note down sections and sentences and words from what I’m reading in novels and whatever to reflect on later and use those to build into my own texts.

Advice that I’ve found – well, I’ll give you one quote. Friedrich Nietzsche, another person like Stanley Spencer that completely was his own man, his own person, a real outsider and outlier during his life.

One of the aphorisms from him that I always bear in mind is "the will to a system is a lack of integrity". In other words, there’s always likely to be a complexity, a complicatedness that will outwit your ability to systematise it, to know it, so don’t presume that you will be able to make the human into a system or easily to make the world into a system. The will or the desire to always see something neat and structured out there is likely to reflect badly on your own character rather than enable you to know better so it’s a lack of personal integrity to, at least too quickly, to want to systematise.

Steve Grimwade
That almost sounds like that’s your Occam’s Razor.

Nigel Rapport
[Laughs]. Yeah, and I often…

Steve Grimwade
That’s the... on which your work is finely balanced.

Nigel Rapport
I often fail, because I also like writing very much and the beauty in forming sentences and then writing an essay and then structuring something that has an aesthetic shape to it, a crystalline shape, a start, a middle, an end, I really love that. To write in such a way that you write against yourself, as it were, or you write in such a way as to say to yourself and to your reader, I really don’t know, that’s a real challenge.

There are writers also, Fernando Pessoa, Stevie Smith, [Ziebelt] who really like also because of the way that they refuse the norms of aesthetic closure and they allow the texts that they’re writing to be unsystematic. I’ve not succeeded, I don’t think, in allowing sufficient openness into my texts. I want to know and I want to present something that might convince because I feel really strongly about what I’m writing about the beauty of human individuality, the need to respect it, the need to know it. It seems increasingly important in a world of identity politics which is based on collective identities and communitarian closures as I see it rather than the mysteries of individual otherness.

Steve Grimwade
There are any number of other questions I could ask you but finally, when listeners think about love, or perhaps when they’re walking down the street and they look in someone else’s eyes, what would you like them to consider?

Nigel Rapport
I’d like them to see that look as a kind of loving recognition. Another person that we haven’t mentioned is the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas and much of what I’ve been saying relates to his insistence that conscience is born out of a look. He says if you look honestly and straightforwardly into the naked eyes of the human other, you will be struck by what Levinas calls the secrecy of the other’s subjectivity, the secrecy of the other’s being. If you look honestly and straightforwardly, he says, you cannot but feel that your sense that you knew the world by virtue of your cultural expectations was really not true.

If you allow yourself to be brought up short by the mystery of the other, then it should really be what Levinas calls the first intelligible, the first step towards not knowing, the first step towards realising that what you thought you knew through your enculturation really did not comprehend this mystery of the person that is facing you. Really, that mystery should be the beginning of your moral life henceforward, that it should really be a sundering of the person that you felt you were, the self that you thought you knew and the world you thought you knew, because now it contains this mysterious otherness that cannot be brought within the bounds of you or what you thought you knew through your culture.

There’s an enormity there and infinity there in the other human being that is as mysterious, Levinas says, as death. It’s as mysterious as infinity itself, or it’s as mysterious – if you’re religious – as God. It shows that the world is plural; in other words, it’s not just you or your supposed cultural knowledge within it. There’s mystery within it, there’s otherness within it, and you must now begin your life afresh from that position of ignorance. Here is another human being, another life that is facing me and I know nothing of the inside of that life, but I must respect above all else that that life is there, standing in front of me, walking beside me, walking past me.

The world contains an infinitude of mysterious individual life forms of which I will always be ignorant, and vice versa, because I am in this embodiment and those life forms are in their own embodiments. Anthropology, I would like to define, as the science of how these individual life forms affect each other and should morally find a way to be beside one another, to live alongside one another without affecting one another in ways that don’t do justice to the preciousness, infinitude and uniqueness of each of those things in themselves.

Steve Grimwade
And all that in a glance.

Nigel Rapport
Yeah. All that in a glance.

Steve Grimwade
We have not even really gone down the other rabbit holes of political theory, religion, the contention that we’re living in a simulation, but we have gone to infinity and back, so Professor Nigel Rapport, I thank you for joining us today on Eavesdrop on Experts.

Nigel Rapport
Thanks, Steve.

Chris Hatzis
Thanks to Nigel Rapport, Professor of Anthropological and Philosophical Studies at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. And thanks to our reporter Steve Grimwade.

Eavesdrop on Experts - stories of inspiration and insights - was made possible by the University of Melbourne. This episode was recorded on October 18, 2018. You’ll find a full transcript on the Pursuit website.

Audio engineering by me, Chris Hatzis. Co-production - Dr Andi Horvath and Silvi Vann-Wall.

Eavesdrop on Experts is licensed under Creative Commons, copyright 2018, the University of Melbourne.

If you enjoyed this podcast, drop us a review on iTunes, and check out the rest of the Eavesdrop episodes in our archive.

I’m Chris Hatzis, producer and editor. Join us again next time for another Eavesdrop on Experts.