Chapter I. Love: essence and manifestation
Love in the epoch of Renaissance and Enlightenment
In the Renaissance epoch love was redirected, naturally, back to man, and it became closely tied to cognition. Many of the leading thinkers of the Renaissance wrote of love from this perspective, including, naturally, Leonardo da Vinci. Most of the time they concentrated their attention not on the universality of love, but rather on its selectivity, i.e. love for a concrete subject who is worthy of love. The worthiness itself is revealed through cognition by the subject of love. Leonardo da Vinci writes: “A thing, once cognized, stays with our intellect.”[1] However, such a state is only achieved when the cognizing one and the cognized are equal to each other. “This is why many come to love and marry women who are like them; and often children born of them are like their parents” (p.285). This topic of compatibility, “commensurateness” of the lovers, raised way back when by the ancient Greeks, and later by Thomas Aquinas and Leonardo, is decisive in the forming of a family; more about this later.
Giordano Bruno, rejecting the principle of “the irrational gust,” viewed love as a fiery passion that inspires man to cognize nature. To him, love is a cosmic force that makes man invincible. The German thinker Jakob Boehme reasoned about love in the same cosmic key; connecting it to reason, he praised reasonable love.
Rene Descartes viewed love from the rationalist perspective. In his treatise “The Passions of the Soul” (1649) he claimed: “Love is an emotion of the soul caused by a movement of the spirits, which impels the soul to join itself willingly to objects that appear to be agreeable to it.”[2] There is a “spirit” figuring in this definition; however, Descartes himself clarifies that this “spirit” is a state of one’s body and one’s opinions, i.e. it is a purely human phenomenon. There is something more interesting in Descartes reasoning: he makes a distinction between simple attachment, friendship and veneration. He writes: “We may, I think, more reasonably distinguish kinds of love according to the esteem in which we have for the object we love, as compared with ourselves. For when we have less esteem for it than for ourselves, we have only a simple affection for it; when we esteem it equally with ourselves, that is called ‘friendship’; and when we have more esteem for it our passion may be called ‘devotion’.” (357)
This passage makes it possible to define the boundary between love and other forms of affection, i.e. it is in fact a criterion of love. If the goal of love is ultimately life, then its criterion is a man’s readiness to give his life for the object of his love. This is precisely what Descartes had in mind, as evidenced by this other passage of his: “We have often seen examples of such devotion in those who have exposed themselves to certain death in defense of their sovereign, or their city, or sometimes even for particular persons to whom they devoted.” (358) It follows from this that the object of love can be the Motherland, or a person, or an idea. This readiness to give one’s life serves to test the truth of the statement: I love this person or that thing. When someone says that he loves a dog or cat or something like that, to determine the true worth of his phrase it suffices to ask him if he’s prepared to die for that creature. Thus the criterion of love is the readiness to sacrifice one’s life!
Benedict Spinoza in his “Short Treatise on God, Man, and His Well-Being” stresses that love emerges from the cognizance of a certain thing, and the more beautiful this thing is, the greater our love is. In other words: “Love is a union with the object which our understanding judges to be good and glorious; and by this we mean such a union whereby both the loved and what is loved become one and the same thing, or together constitute one whole.”[3] There are, however, three types of objects one can join oneself to: transient objects; modi; and God, or truth. Joining to transient things, such as honor, riches, pleasures, etc. (which have no reality whatever), makes the lovers unhappy. Joining to modi likewise avails to little, since the latter are dependent on God, i.e. truth. It is only through union with God/truth that man acquires true love, since “true love results always from the knowledge that the thing is glorious and good.” (81)
Thus, Spinoza did in fact express the idea (albeit in different words) that truth and beauty are one and the same, and this is precisely why this is the unified whole that is love.
In his other work, Ethics, he draws attention to affectations of love which are nothing else than pleasure and joy “accompanied by the idea of an external cause.” [4] That is, they don’t emerge in the soul of man by themselves; an external source, or cause, is necessary. This position diverges from the ideas of certain philosophers who believe that the feeling of love is inherent to man by nature. Spinoza expressed one more important idea: “He who imagines that which he loves to be affected by pleasure or pain, will also be affected by pleasure or pain: and these will be greater or less in the lover according as they are greater or less in the thing loved.” (99) This “theorem” conjugates with my principle of Mutual Assured Love (MAL) – a principle that is at odds with the conception of the possibility of “one-way love” (in the system subject-subject). Finally, in another “theorem” Spinoza proves love’s power to triumph over hatred. He writes: “Hatred which is entirely conquered by love passes into love, and love on that account is greater than if it had not been preceded by hatred.” (114) Though the idea itself is close to the Biblical version (love thy enemy), Spinoza exposes it through the dynamics of the struggle between hatred and love, in which the latter triumphs.
Another genius of the 17th century, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, viewed love as man’s aspiration for perfection and emphasized its emotional aspect. In one of his letters to Malbranche he wrote: “Love is the inclination to find pleasure in good, in perfection, in the happiness of another person, or (which is the same thing) the inclination to connect the other’s good to our own good.”[5] This emphasis on pleasure (“whatever gives pleasure is good in itself”) is an oblique condemnation of the Biblical interpretation of love as a severe necessity. It is important to stress that Leibniz took this above-stated definition of love from his own work The Diplomatic Code of International Law. This means that love by then had started making the move from the sphere of morals and ethical norms to the sphere of law, which called for the comprehension of its social significance. In this context love was examined in more detail by philosophers of the 18th and 19th centuries.
Naturally, the English-French philosophers of the Renaissance epoch likewise could not bypass the topic of love. Even though they did not make a direct break from God (often for reasons of personal safety), they did devote their principal attention to relations between people, magnifying the things that theologians usually condemned and still do condemn to this day. Thus, Thomas Hobbes, having repeated the well-known “under love between persons we understand always the aspiration for possession, or goodwill,”[6] goes on to appraise “lust” in a very different fashion. In his opinion, it is not just sensual satisfaction; it also contains within itself “sensual pleasure.” Lust, which, too, is love, is just as natural as hunger. Hobbes also magnifies the concept of Eros; “it must be defined by the word need: for it is conception of the need a man hath of that one person desired.”[7] Here he needed to show to early-capitalist The United Kingdom that Eros is not something base, that it flows from man’s natural needs. The context is understandable, but a need is not yet love. Need as a biological instinct in coupling with the other sex is inherent to animals as well, but animals do not have Eros, which is indeed related to love, and love belongs to the sphere of man.
French philosophers of the 18th century devoted more attention to the social significance of love. Claude Adrien Helvetius, for example, claimed: “A citizen’s foremost passion must be love for the law and for the social good.”[8] His logic, naturally, differs from mine, presented above. He proceeded from the thesis that should there ever be a triumph of excessive love for one’s relatives and intimates, this would create conditions for robbing strangers or even the communal treasury, which as a whole would violate the foundations of the state. Therefore filial love and in general the bonds that tie children to their father and the father to his children must be subordinate in man to “love for the fatherland” (ibid.) This kind of love must be legalized, since it does not, in Helvetius’ opinion, flow from nature itself. If love in general (not just for the fatherland) were natural and possessed something like an “innate source,” there would have been no need for the Biblical commandments and for laws in general. He was equally critical of descriptions of various kinds of love, believing that “their topic is always one and the same: the joining of men and women.” (392) He justified his negativity toward this type of love thusly: “a busy people accords little importance to love… To an idle people, love becomes an occupation, it is more constant.” (393) Obviously, he meant purely sexual relations, not love in the true sense of the word. Fornication was the chief entertainment and occupation of the nobility in the reigns of Louis XV and XVI, it was in fact one of the causes of their utter degradation; Helvetius and his fellow-thinkers spoke out against it. The situation and the reaction to it were very reminiscent of the decline of the Roman Empire, when the ruling class indulged in sex orgies. I want to stress: whenever a society identifies love with sex, one should expect decay and collapse of the state. Putting it even more bluntly: as soon as love turns into sex, sexists come to an end.
[1] Leonardo da Vinci. Selected Works, 73.
[2] Descartes, Rene. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, 356.
[3] Spinoza’s Short Treatise on God, Man, and His Well-Being, 79.
[4] Spinoza's Ethics, 95.
[5] Leibniz. Works in four volumes, vol.3, 335.
[6] Hobbes. Selected Works in two volumes, vol.1, 263.
[7] Hobbes. The Elements of Law, Natural and Politics, 48.
[8] Helvetius, vol.2, 95.
On Love, Family, and the State
(Philosophical-sociological Essay)