I want to use literal human warmth, which is what happens when a person sits near a fire or wears a quilted coat, as a way to understand metaphorical human warmth, which is associated with friendship and community, so as to be more precise about the metaphorical and other meanings.
Everyone knows what it is like to get warm or feel deprived of warmth even if you have not experienced the lack of warmth in a bombed out building in winter in Ukraine or the shambles of earthquake damage in Turkey and Syria in wintertime. You know what it is to get under the covers and warm up, quickly enough and deliciously, mostly by capturing your own heat.There is something delicious in that experiencing the warmth overcoming the cold until you reach a point when you feel fully warm and languorous as a result of it, what seem to be the waves of warmth invigorating the person within that enclosure, knowing that intellectually just inches away the temperature is still cold, a person reassuring himself that there are no gaps in the cocoon whereby warmth might lek out. This is an experience as old as the cavemen or older, to primates who shivered and knew they shivered before fire had been controlled and so became a metaphor for wellbeing.
It therefore makes sense to broaden warmth to include the customs and usual interactions between people, particularly with regard to friends, spouses, families and communities. All of these accomplish a degree of comfort and reliable sustenance as is also achieved with actual warmth. Moreover, there is a sense of wellbeing that pervades these entities, people feeling they are enveloped in these social entities and so separated from the strangeness and possible hostility of the outside. The most important component, however, is a feeling of positive emotion that is called warmth when you find a person to be charming or even endearing or when you act in a generous or even munificent manner as when you give your last apple to someone who seems more needy or give a compliment to someone who needs one. You feel warm for being ethical rather than having fulfilled an obligation, relieved of a burden rather than, as Kant would have it, relieved at having accomplished and so ended a burden. It pleases people that someone else becomes happy and the reward is that warm feeling that accompanies it. And so it makes sense to speak of spouses as being warm with one another even when not under the covers when thy pass the time with small talk or even have no need to converse when sharing a meal in that they aren’t enclosed in their relationship and so invisibly separated from what goes around then, just feeling the cocoon of the relationship.
But it would be an easy mistake to overreach human warmth and think it accomplishes things or consequences far beyond the literal meaning of warmth. Go back to basics. Think of spouses getting into bed that night under the covers. Yes, they literally cuddle and share their warmth. What else they do together is breathe and snore and pass gas and rest, a safe harbor from the world, which recognizes, and this is central, that their individual spirits are contained within their bodies, doing the ordinary things that bodies do. How is it, what a wonder it is, that a beloved, that immaterial spirit, is also there in that time and place and managing for at least a time, to endure? Quizzical and paradoxical as it is, and therefore qualified, whether actual or as a metaphor, a miracle. But not so far as to get to an idea, for example, of individualism, which is a distinctive organization of the psyche, much prized as essential to the Western Mind, but rather, this self in the body, only the marvel of that which, again, went back to the cavemen and the higher primates.
Community, to use another example, provides human warmth in that it constructs fellow feeling, a sense of its members being tied together in a common enterprise, weather it is a small town or a neighborhood in a large city where, some claim, the women look after all the children collectively by looking out the windows to the children sitting on the stoop. There is human warmth from feeling people rely on one another. This perception warms the cockles of their hearts and social life is desolate when, as happens in ghetto communities, people cannot rely on one another.
The basis of a community is supposed to be deep in its social structure. Durkheim thinks it is the result of the similarity of pertsons, everything unusual thought taboo. Simmel thought community came from the complex ways in which members of the community were entwined with one another in complicated ways, as when a church congregant is also your son’s third grade teacher. Or else a community is the association of institutions that are both the landmarks and substance of the community: the museums and ballparks and orchestras and the city hall and the supermarkets whereby civilization is transacted. But there is another way, more akin to human warmth, which can serve as the basis of community. It consists of the fellow feeling, the sense of pride and self satisfaction, that comes from a community announcing itself as such, whether through a local sports team or a local tv station or a local car dealership mounting a local used clothing drive. We are a community because we say we are and that warmth is superficial because it covers up divisiveness, just as happens in Sinclair Lewis’ “Main Street”. The covers may unfold us, but these are very thin and so can let in a lot of cold. Moreover, a smug community can also restrict its participants and lead to fear rather than freedom, which is chilling rather than warming both actually and metaphorically.
Contrary to community as the basis of social structure, which was de Tocqueville’s view, there is, aside from community, a whole set of roles, of occupations and familial statuses, that are part of life and for which warmth is tangential, people doing what they do because it seems obvious, like protecting a child or being civil to a woman, rather than because there is a god given edict or a complex philosophy of ethics much less a warm feeling that guides us on our path, no need for a magnetic compass to guide us on a true path. The marvel of warmth is on its own rather than an innate or established or derived tendency.
The idea of human warmth is not only a description of the everyday and an explanation for the social. It is also a way to engage the cosmological. Remember that on the very first day God created the separation between the darkness and the light, which is the separation between day and night. The association with light is with clarity, but that might be a later addition, it's more primitive meaning that the sun made us warm. After all, it was the sun that allowed the crops to grow when in spring and summer it lasted more in the sky and comforted the human frame. No wonder that Aton, the Egyptian sky god, is considered the first monotheistic religion, even though it just meant that there was a single god rather than many and so didn’t have the attributes of a modern monotheism, developed by Abraham, who thought of God as invisible and so expressed only in words and in ethics.
A second connection between warmth and cosmology is offered in the big bang theory, as that is offered to me in popular presentations, where the origin of the universe arises out of a great explosion that expands space and raises temperature and the remnants of that original explosion still measurable as part of its background radiation. Gradually. The temperature of the universe decreases until the point, billions of years from now, when the remaining disbursed heat will be close everywhere to absolute zero. This is a bleak and irreversible prospect that results from thinking of heat as generative but ever dissipating, though very different from its Biblical story where the present theory is aimless, just a process discovered by science while the Biblical story is decided by God and based only on faith. The important thing is that heat in both these stories is essential.
A third connection between heat and what should be considered cosmology in that it considers basic and unique origins is the question of when a life begins, people much e when hearts developed. perturbed not about the start of the life of most primates but of individual human life so as to ascertain whether a fetus has rights akin to those of human beings who have emerged from the womb. Anti-abortionists point out the anatomical features of fetuses. They have fingers and hearts, which is what Darwin pointed out were the features that became modified over the eons because these become fossilized and so could be compared for one another while the metabolic modifications over time could not yet, at least, be recovered. But that is to beg the question of when a fetus becomes a human being. It surely isn’t when it forms fingers, It must have to do when it develops consciousness. Anti-abortionists say that fetuses feel pain at some early part of their lives, but chimps can even anticipate pain but they are not recognized as having rights unless you follow Peter Singer in thinking so.
The best I can imagine of a fetus consciousness is that he or she is enclosed in a warm bath that provides comfort and sustenance for as far back as it is aware of them and also includes sound effects from the time when the ear developed and would bear a mother’s heartbeat or her intestines gurgling. The key question is when consciousness arose and that seems gradual rather than punctuated so that we can say when the person had become a person rather than attributes associated with personhood. The image of the warm bath captures the most early appreciation of the experience of life, just as being warm under the covers is an elemental and universal experience of human existence.
It is hard to appreciate that human warmth (and human cold) is part of the human senses. That is because it seems so primordial, so much about being alive itself, throughout one’s core rather than a particular antennae, as is the case with sight, a special organ that allows the art of art, while the ear allows the art of music, and smell and taste offer the minor arts of perfumery and the culinary arts. Warmth, on the contrary, is a holistic experience, a way of being, even if it also signals that the body shakes when it is cold and sweats when it gets hot. What it is to the body is the opposite of what happens in consciousness, which also pervades our being and does allow the art of language and literature however much that apparatus depends on the singular organ of the brain as warmth is also measured and experienced by its internal thermostat.
I can push the matter even farther. We speak of sexual excitement as a time when “the blood gets warm” or “his passion turns hot”. John Updike says somewhere that God assures us of an afterlife while sex makes the present life worthwhile. These are existential matters where heat is both the indicator and the substance of life, people forever contesting whether to stay under the covers or else throw them off and engage in our various adventures.