In dreams begin responsibilities. – William Butler Yeats, Responsibilities

Note: Not even I am satisfied with all of the moves made in this conceptual schema. It will develop further but I think this is worth writing about. There are also many forms of commitment and scenarios outside the ones described that ultimately need to be analyzed.

To be a subject is not solely to be conscious, to be animated, but for one’s en-minded activity to be the subject of some orientation to the world. This subjectivity is what gives content to that activity, which makes it both the agent and object of meaning. Without subjectivity, one’s activity remains contentless, an object of external interpretation but without reference to the intention and attention of the anima that performs the activity. One becomes a subject through orienting their activity towards the world, and there are multiple (and overlapping) ways that one may be a subject. Most living beings orient their activity towards growth, generation, and reproduction – through sustaining the species-life that they inhabit, whether or not they themselves conceptualize their activity as part of a species. But many living beings also orient their activity towards the world in ways not reducible to reproduction or generation, which matters the world in distinct ways. One of the central forms of subjectivity for the human species-life is ethical subjectivity, or activity that is oriented towards the good, or which aims at the good.

Ethical subjectivity emerges from commitment. In committing ourselves to another, our activity is woven with their mattering, orienting our intending towards their good. Prior to commitment, the subject already matters, but this mattering is not ethical – the activity of the Unique is not bound to the good of another. In pre-ethical subjectivity, the Unique enjoys and fears, they feel pleasure and pain, and the world matters and un-matters to them. Their subjectivity aims at growth, generation, and corruption, and may take other pre-ethical or non-ethical matterings into account. However, there is no ethical center that holds this mattering together, which orients and directs it towards the good. Mattering becomes ethical whenever the Unique orbits their activity around the good of the object of their commitment. The subject-object relation of the Unique’s mattering thus becomes a subject-subject relation, matterings dwelling in matterings molding the geography of self-and-other.

Commitment is always to a particular, a Unique or Unique together. This is the case with any subjectivity – one aims at growth and reproduction not in the abstract, but in the context of one’s Uniquing and the togethering of their species-life. In terms of the ethical, one may be loyal to the good, to justice, to freedom, to equality, but these commitments only have content through being the good of someone, justice for someone, the freedom and equality of a given together. We universalize these commitments by moving outward, by inviting the mattering of the many into the heart of our activity, rather than abstracting it. Abstracting away from the good of the particular subverts its ethical core, returning the mattering of the Unique to its imaginary interior, which is no longer an ethical subjectivity but a self-subjectivity. The ethical atmospheres the world of the Unique, the space-between, condensing into meaning in our action and sweat, never emerging from the interior alone. There is no such thing as a private ethic. The good is always public.

The ethical intertwines with love by orienting our attending towards another in a loving-way, marking our subjectivity as loving. However, the nature of this attending differs by the object of commitment, with some meeting the standard of love and others not. My commitment to my partner Katie is also a love for Katie: I commit myself to her good and unfold this commitment in my activity by attending to her own unfolding. Her matterings merge with my own by intimately coloring the space-between of my activity, gifting significance to my intention and attention. But what of my commitment to my students? That is not love, at least not in any robust sense. I do not attend to the unfolding of each student, except in the limited sense of attending to their good within the context of teaching. However, it is still an ethical commitment in that my activity, in the proper context in which I act as a teacher, is oriented towards their good and integrates their matterings into my own. I know to attend to students in different ways by preliminarily orienting my intending as a teacher towards them. They do not matter to me because I find them pleasant, as in the pre-ethical, nor because I love them. Instead, they matter because I have committed myself to their good as their teacher. Likewise, I attend to the good of my community as a neighbor, to the land I inhabit as one who dwells, and to God as the imago Dei. In some cases we may speak of love for our community, love for the land, and love for God, but this dimension is not required for my commitment to their good, so long as I am still properly oriented towards their unfolding.

There are therefore forms of commitment that diverge from love, or which do not necessitate love. These are not corrupted commitments, but ones in which our intention and attention to the object of loyalty is distinct from the attending found in love. Loving-commitment, such as romantic commitment, which I will focus on here (along with parental commitment later in the post), is its own kind, a special form of loyalty and ethical subjectivity that we should give closer attention to. To say “I love you” is to proclaim one’s loving-commitment to another, to say “I want to attend to you,” to express one’s intending to attend. In the initial “I love you,” this intention is excited but tentative, proleptically revealing the possibility of an intertwined future, an unveiling of one’s hope in the togethering of beloveds. Every subsequent “I love you” is then an echo of this initial commitment, declaring one’s intention again-and-again through the unfolding of a relationship. We say “I love you” every day to re-affirm our intending and attending, to say “I am committed to you” as an act of both duty and care. The loving-relationship then becomes patterned by this continual re-affirmation of love, by the dance of mutual attending that marks the emerging of the doma.

The commitment is then strengthened and structured in long-term relationships and, most of all, in marriage and other types of formal commitment, which generally integrate the doma of beloveds into the life of the community. “I love you” is a declaration and affirmation, but “I do” is a vow, a promise to lovingly-commit oneself to attending to the beloved so long as this loving-commitment remains mutual or un-broken by a violation of the vow. Marriage creates a context for the unfolding togethering of lovers in this vow, the life-long promise of intimate loving-commitment to one another. Though lovers manifest a doma with one another in their togethering even without marriage, marriage creates a social context in which this doma can unfold and flourish, and ideally wherein the good of the doma is supported by the unfolding common-life of the community it dwells in. The doma is no longer a prolepsis of the life-long commitment of lovers, but its realization. Romantic love does not always arrive at this realization, but it is (in most cases) oriented to it, a process of unveiling that manifests the common-life that will be sustained in the doma and which will (ideally) be recognized as part of the common-life of the community.

Importantly, there is nothing about this loving-commitment in marriage that reduces it to heterosexual coupling, nor does it preclude divorce. Commitments may be broken, individually or mutually, and the obligation of one is dependent on the obligation of the other. If this commitment ceases to be mutual, or lovers violate their responsibility of loving-commitment, then the vow that was made is nullified. One is never obligated to remain in an un-loving marriage, as the lack of mutuality degrades commitment into possession. Love requires a type of mutual powerlessness, where the unfolding of each is intertwined in their attending without one possessing or commanding the other. To possess another is a radical violation of not just loving-commitment, but the entire ethical orientation that is required for love. Loving-commitment also makes no reference to gender or to what must be included in the mutual unfolding, except insofar as it remains a loving-commitment. To reduce loving-commitment, including marriage and the doma, to heterosexuality, is to make a mistake as to the nature of love, to idolize a specific gendered-relation and to replace orientation to the good of the beloved with orientation to reproduction and to sustaining a given gender-system. This type of orientation is both not loving and not ethical, being closer to pre-ethical forms of subjectivity that are not concerned with the good of their object.

There are kinds of loving-commitment where it is less clear how the commitment is mutual or how it avoids possession and direction. The most clear example here is a parent’s commitment to their young children. Though ideally the love between parent and child becomes mutual over time, the love of the child at first is not pre-ethical but instead proto-ethical. What I mean by this is that the child does not yet consciously orient themselves toward the good of the parent, but their sentiments and affections and sense of security are bound up in the parent’s loving-commitment to them. They are nurtured into ethical commitment, which is something that must be taught rather than being inherent. In becoming a parent, one lovingly-commits oneself to nurturing the free and homely unfolding of their child, both as the Unique that they are and as a proto-ethical subject. This nurturing may also require a type of loving-direction, whereby the child is oriented towards their unfolding as an ethical subject and which is not aimed at their possession, but their self-determination. The mutuality of the parent-child relationship is found in how the unfolding and ethical subjectivity of the child is nurtured by the parent, but only through accepting the free choice of the child as they enter into their self-determination as an adult. It is this lack of possession, and augmented directing, which allows the shape of the relationship to be mutual, so long as the parent upholds their loving-commitment.

In this context, the doma always-and-already involves an ethical commitment, both between lovers who form the doma in their togethering and to those, such as children and other dependents, whose lives unfold within the doma. The doma is first and foremost a home, and home, rather than one’s house or birthplace, is decided by the type of orientation one has to it as a home. The doma is formed not just through loving-commitment but the process of en-homing that is unveiled in the togethering of Uniques in loving-commitment. The doma is the united togethering of those in loving-commitment, but home is the placetime that this togethering reveals (even as the place- and -time of that placetime might shift, without fundamentally changing the experienced placetime of existing within the doma). This placetime is a mutually-constituted placetime and one is oriented to it as a relationship to a given together rather than a specific place- and -time, even if it overlaps the actual spacetime that we inhabit. It is in this sense that one can consider a place they were not born in, or which is not inhabited by their birth family, as their home – it is the placetime which they are oriented to as their home, where one dwells in the unfolding togethering of loving-commitment. One’s home may not even be a place, in the sense of a location, but a place in the sense of a space-between where the conjoined unfolding activity of the doma takes place. It is in this sense that one’s home may be a family, chosen or not, which are distributed across space, but which still form the placetime of a doma through their activity.

At the heart of the doma beats the ethical foundation of loving-commitment, of attending to the unfolding of those one loves and of orienting one’s intentions and activity towards their good. It is in this sense that home and family are the starting point for an ethical society – not because of the role of heterosexual reproduction and gender hierarchies, but in modeling our commitments to one another. Ideally, one learns to be an ethical subject through being loved and nurtured, and we continue to develop in our virtue as we inhabit the doma. Virtue emerges from love-loving-love within the doma, itself modeled on the perichoretic kenosis, or creating-begetting-proceeding, at the heart of nature, and it is our commitment to those we love that models our commitment to the rest of the world, creating the possibility for mutual care and commitment even outside of the family, extending to neighbors, to one’s community, and to the world. The doma is the hearth of the good.

Home is where the heart is. – Pliny the Elder

Image: Cattleya Orchid and Three Hummingbirds by Martin Johnson Heade (1871)