Book launch celebrates new book by UH Hilo philosophy professor
Professor of Philosophy Chris Lauer’s book, Intimacy: A Dialectical Study, explores the “impossibility of intimacy.”
By Susan Enright/UH Hilo Stories.
Philosophy professor Chris Lauer‘s new book was celebrated last Thursday at a book launch hosted by the Hawaiʻi Island Philosophy Club and the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo Department of Philosophy.
Lauer’s book, Intimacy: A Dialectical Study (2016, Bloomsbury Academic), explores the “impossibility of intimacy.”
- UH Hilo philosophy professor Chris Lauer examines the concept of intimacy in new book (UH Hilo Stories, Oct. 20, 2015)
Intimacy is Lauer’s second published book and at this point, he says, his most important scholarly contribution. It takes the methodological lessons Lauer learned from Hegel and Schelling (as well as Simone de Beavoir, who Lauer says is just as central to his thinking) and applies them to intimate relations.
“The term ʻlove’ has so many meanings in English that I found it more productive to sidestep it and focus on the more determinate term ʻintimacy,’” says Lauer, “but I’m speaking to much of what we mean when we talk of love. The book develops an insight already found in Plato’s Symposium and Phaedrus 2,400 years ago: The most basic reason why we both do good and ought to do good is that everyone wants to be loved.”
An important contribution to the burgeoning field of the ethics of recognition, this book examines the contradictions inherent in the very concept of intimacy. Working with a wide variety of philosophical and literary sources, it warns against measuring our relationships against ideal standards, since there is no consummate form of intimacy.
After analyzing ten major ways that we aim to establish intimacy with one another, including gift-giving, touching, and fetishes, the book concludes that each fails on its own terms, since intimacy wants something that is impossible. The very concept of intimacy is a superlative one; it aims not just for closeness, but for a closeness beyond closeness. Nevertheless, far from a pessimistic diagnosis of the human condition, this is a meditation on how to live intimately in a world in which intimacy is impossible. Rather than contenting itself with a deconstructive approach, it proposes to treat intimacy dialectically. For all its contradictions, it shows intimacy is central to how we understand ourselves and our relations to others.
Story by Susan Enright, public information specialist for the Office of the Chancellor and editor of UH Hilo Stories. She received her bachelor of arts in English and certificate in women’s studies from UH Hilo.
