I want to suggest that all of these alleged advantages are at odds with genuine intimacy. True intimacy requires embodied and exposed human beings, who are grounded and synchronously together in real space and lived time, and who use tacit and tactful rather than explicit and unvarnished modes of communication, including modes of expression that are deeper than speech itself. True intimacies are translucent rather than transparent to one another; self-surrendering rather than controlling; embedded in networks of ties and obligations to families and communities, rather than isolated atoms utterly free to create themselves ex nihilo; adventurous rather than playing-it-safe; guided by hope and trust rather than by calculation and information; face to face or side by side, hand in hand or arm in arm, as much as mind to mind; and driven less by the self-centered desire to find what you were missing than by an eagerness to become all you might become by being fully present to, and concerned for, the well-being of the other, who will also be fully present to, and concerned for, you and your well-being.
To defend these intuitions, we need an account of the anthropology of intimacy – an account of the engagement of embodied souls becoming near and dear to one another. I offer here some elements of such an account, relying heavily on a short essay by the late neurologist-psychologist Erwin Straus entitled “Shame as a Historiological Problem.”10
Toward an Anthropology of Intimacy
I start with a fundamental distinction, learnable from Aristotle. Liking (or the analogous erotic feeling) is an emotion, but friendship and love properly so called are settled dispositions or “holdings” (hexeis or haltungs, habits) of soul, where not only warm feelings but also good will and mindful concern are directed steadily at the beloved or, to coin a term, the “befriended.” Moreover, this settled disposition to love or “to friend” – not in its cyber-meaning – is, though central, merely the capacity or capability; the real thing, loving or befriending, is found fully only in activity, in the manifest being-at-work (energeia), here and now, of these settled dispositions. Friends who rarely or never see or speak with one another enjoy but a sleeping friendship. Wakeful and energetic friending and loving require active being together, sharing and enjoying one another’s company as well as common interests and activities.11 Effort, attention, and care are of the essence, and good will must become beneficence in times of need and trouble. Sharing thoughts and speech is silver, but deeds of love are golden. This should settle the question of whether the worldwide but millimeter-deep friendships à la Facebook and Friendster deserve the name, and whether the Internet’s emotion-generating powers despite physical separation are an asset for true love. While absence makes the heart grow fonder and familiarity often breeds complacency if not contempt, love and friendship thrive in physical closeness, not in separation. We crave that our dear be ever near. We long for and rejoice in the presence – the real and bodily, not merely virtual or verbal, presence – of the other.†
There is, of course, a complication regarding distance in the case of lovers, a complication not present among friends. For potential lovers, as we noted with the fig leaf, sexual attraction is suffused with a concern for approbation and a fear of rejection; each seeks to win not just the body but especially the heart of the other. Each seeks approval, praise, respect, and esteem; correlatively, each seeks to gaze admiringly at the beautiful beloved. A new dialectic is introduced into the dance of sexual desire: approval, admiration, and regard keep lovers at the beholding distance, even as their desire for one another drives them toward fusion at no distance whatever. The special and mirthful intimacy known only to lovers emerges partly out of the delicate need to preserve and negotiate this distance and its closure. The wordless embrace, the deep drink of meeting eyes, and the caressing or playful words of purely private import are among the intimacy-making and intimacy-expressing fruits of this dialectic of the erotic face-to-face – near, nearer, but also not too near.
Notice, please, that the gazing distance requires and permits mutual beholding: by gazing or beholding I mean something other than “looking at”: it does not objectify the beloved, but is a form of communion. The exchanged look, which today goes by the wretched name “eye contact” – as if eyeballs were billiard balls – is always an invitation to or the expression of a mutual meeting of souls. Voyeurs, incapable of giving themselves to love, keep their distance, as do users of pornography. Theirs is a one-way viewing, incommunicado, with the object of their attention treated not as a unique woman to be loved but as a generic woman to possess and to satisfy one’s own lusts and fantasies. Says Erwin Straus, “The looking of the voyeur” – and, I add in my own name, the face-browsing of the Internet date seeker – “is as different from the looks exchanged by lovers as medical palpation from a gentle caress of the hand. In viewing, there is a transition from the immediate I-thou encounter, i.e., mutual participation, to a unilateral intention – a transition from the I-thou relationship to the subject-object relationship proper. All looking and being looked at is a lapse from immediate communication.”12
To be sure, all of us lovers are at risk of lapsing into the psychic mode of the voyeur, seeing the beloved solely from the outside, objectively, as an object to be possessed and enjoyed, not as the living being who graces you with the opportunity to take a lovers’ journey into mutual self-revelation and self-discovery. But where love is present, you do not love her for her long dark hair but for herself alone. “There’s beggary in the love that can be reckon’d.”
The crucial anthropological and psychic fact about intimacy is what Straus called immediate experience and the sphere of immediate becoming: the important distinction is not between what is public and what is private (in truth, a special case of the public), but between the public and immediate modes of being.
We belong to the public in the ways we are described – e.g., by our name, title, position, status, profession, etc. . . . If we meet a stranger in public, we usually ask two questions: “Who is he?” and “What is he?” The name identifies someone in the social space of the family, of the birthplace, of the chronicles. To the question of the What of his being, we answer by stating his profession, his position, etc. The specification points to something general and repeatable. (Le roi est mort. Vive le roi.)‡ These are general and repeatable functions that the individual assumes in public. The intimate person is always initially concealed by his public figure. It is possible to participate in a public figure with a non-committal, one-way kind of general interest; but the intimate person opens and reveals himself to understanding only in mutual and immediate participation. . . .
Public being is characterized, as we have seen, by objectification, reflection, generality, repetition; the outcome is non-committal, one-way participation. Immediate being, on the other hand, is not objectified, it is singular, unique becoming and calls for reciprocal sharing.13
When we live immediately, we live on the way, in process, in medias res, unfinished yet seeking, tentatively yet honestly and organically yet responsively disclosing to another – and, a crucial point, also to ourselves – not some prefabricated finished “self” but the unfolding mysteries of what we really think and feel, and the translucent truths of who we are aspiring and striving to become – God willing, with your help. As Kurt Riezler remarks, thanks to love, “the relations between human beings can be such that the I and the You build up a We as the whole of an intimate world in which they are obliged to be to themselves what they are to each other and are permitted to be to each other what they are to themselves.”14
A crucial but silent psychic force, what Erwin Straus calls “protective shame,” stands guard over intimacy and the sphere of immediate becoming, keeping out the necessarily objectifying looks both of the outsider and of our own corrosive reflective consciousness.
The secret that shame protects is not, . . . as prudery makes the mistake of believing, one that is already in existence and only needs to be hidden from