Chapter I. Love: essence and manifestation
German philosophers on love
Unlike 18th-century France, in Germany in that same period love was glorified not only by representatives of the “Sturm und Drang” movement (Goethe, Schiller), but even by such a “dry” philosopher as Immanuel Kant. In his treatise The Metaphysics of Morals he wrote: “Love is an act of sensation, not of will”; love is pleasure, passion. Sexual attraction, too, is love, the greatest of sensual pleasures. However, this is just one aspect of love. Kant would not be Kant if he limited himself to just this. He naturally goes on to transfer love into the domain of ethics: “However, we understand love here not as a feeling (not esthetically), i.e. not as pleasure from the perfection of other people, and not as love-sympathy (for one cannot impose on others the duty to have certain feelings); love must be thought as a maxim of goodwill (practical), having as its consequence a boon…”[1] His understanding of boon is this: the goals of my fellow man must be made my goals, instead of me turning him into a tool for achieving my goals. This idea of love as a goal, or love as a means, will be subsequently (in the 20th and 21st centuries) widely discussed in Anglo-American philosophy.
Those authors would be affected to an even greater degree by another of Kant’s ideas. In his reasoning about love, Kant expressed apprehension about too-tight merging between lovers, when selfless giving of self takes place in love. This type of love (same as friendship), in Kant’s opinion, threatens the independence of the lovers as individuals. It is as if they become dissolved in the universal. Here emerges the problem of the degree of unity - or the degree of the lovers’ autonomy, to use the expression favored by contemporary Anglo-American philosophers. It is precisely this kind of apprehensions on Kant’s part that causes them to value the German agnostic highly, while keeping silent about his attitude toward marriage.
The matter is, Kant was highly suspicious of sexual relations between man and woman, believing that they lead man to a dangerous line, beyond which lies the animal. However, since sexual love is unavoidable, there is only one method to ennoble this phenomenon: a social contract, embodied in marriage. He writes: “Marriage is an agreement between two persons about according each other equal rights… Thence are reasons revealed why a sexual agreement is possible without degradation of the personality or violation of the moral law. Marriage is the sole condition on which sexuality may be realized.”[2] Thus, to Kant marriage was not so much a natural stage in the history of human development (as a social-political phenomenon), as it was a method for culturing, humanizing people’s sexual needs. Since Kant himself was never married, remaining a bachelor throughout his long life, one can suppose, based on his conception, that he never did experience that “animal feeling” called “sexual love.”
This same idea, albeit in a more categorical form, was championed by Johann Gottlieb Fichte. Fichte proceeded, first of all, from the premise that nature’s goal is the continuation of mankind. Before they knew of this natural goal, the two sexes in their union merely satisfied their natural sexual urges. Once they acquired consciousness and reason, love became involved in the process of continuation of species. “Love is the closest point of union of nature and reason; it is the only link wherein nature connects with reason, and hence it is the most excellent of all that is natural.”[3] Thus love is human nature cognized by reason.
To a woman, love is a natural inclination embodied in sacrificing herself to the other. Man originally feels not love, but rather sexual impulse. Love for him is “a communicated, derived impulse, namely, an impulse developed through connection with a loving woman.” (Ibid.) That is, to a woman love is an innate principle; to a man, it is an acquired one.
Fichte further claims: “Contained in the simple concept of love is the concept of marriage.” Hence “if a woman gives herself to a man out of love, from this marriage emerges with a moral necessity.”[4] It is equally moral that the man accepts the woman’s gift of herself to him only on those conditions that she can give herself on, i.e. on conditions of love. This close tying of marriage to love leads Fichte to the even more decisive claim that “satisfaction of the sexual urge is permissible only in marriage; outside of wedlock, it would mean to the woman a complete destruction of her morals, and to the man – complicity in this crime and use of his animal urge” (ibid.) – a claim rejected with hatred by the practice of paramours and mistresses, prostitutes and pimps of all ages and nations.
One more important conclusion by Fichte: “The absolute predestination of every individual of either sex is to get married. The physical man, same as the moral man, is not man or woman, but their unity (beides)” (ibid.). This maxim follows from Fichte’s ontological understanding of “I” and “Not-I” – the two opposites into which the universal spiritual force is initially divided in order to subsequently reunite with itself. By the way, Friedrich Schelling likewise wrote of love from the perspective of ontologization. Myself, I’m most interested in Hegel.
Georg Wilhelm Hegel already in his very earliest works or, more exactly, fragments (Love and Religion, Love) saw in the contradictions of the object’s and the subject’s love the potential for immortality. Same as the category of force, love possesses the similar property of expansion, domination. This domination is achieved through the resolution of the contradiction between desires and reality, which leads to the merging of the subject and the object in a certain unity that is called love. As Hegel proceeded to develop the conceptual apparatus, love in his conception started following the laws of dialectics, and it is in this quality that we encounter it in the lecture series read by Hegel in Jena. In his practically never-quoted work The Jena Real Philosophy, in its second part, Hegel analyzes the concepts of intellect and will. The latter (will) through several stages of development – inducement, knowledge – approaches cognition of the “object,” which heretofore found itself in the split state of “extreme objects” (or “terms”), i.e. as something passive, beings-for-themselves. However, their rapprochement due to the inducement transforms these somethings into being-for-the-other, in other words, the other “knows himself in me.” Such cognition is what Hegel calls love.
That’s when “each extreme <term> is filled with I, and so directly is in the other.”[5] That is, a merging of two “I” took place. Hegel writes: “This is the element of morals, but not yet morals itself” (ibid.) The inducement only joins together the two “I”, but this is not yet sufficient for objective, or satisfied love. Movement is necessary in order to give birth to a third, and this motion enters into its own (it cannot fail to do so, due to the contradictions between each Me-for-the-other). Now I want to offer a quote that will give true delight to the philosophically inclined reader. Hegel reasons:
Satisfied love first becomes objective for itself in such a way that this third is different from the extremes (terms) themselves, or love is other-being, an immediate thingness, in which love cognizes itself not directly, but exists for the other (same as a tool contains no activity within itself); or both cognize their mutual love through mutual service, through the third which is a thing. This is a means, namely the means of love; like as a tool is preserved labor, this third is also something universal; it is the lasting, preserving possibility of its existence (203).
For the non-philosophically inclined reader, I clarify. Hegel analyzes the motion of the concept of love through other concepts (other, other-being, object, thing), i.e. reflections, rather than their essences. Here he needed to show that love, in order to preserve itself as a whole, must first split into “extreme terms”, i.e. two “I”, with the being in between them necessarily filled by a third, by an other, by a thing. It is precisely this thing that embodies in itself the universal, i.e. it offers the possibility of preserving the two “I” through the third. If we replace the word third with the word child, right away the being-ness aspect of love becomes clear as well. That is, coming out of abstraction, love becomes objective, of thing quality. Hegel goes on to write:
“Love itself is not yet an object. However, the “I” of love exits from it, pushes itself away and becomes an object-for-itself. The unity of both characters is only love, but it does not yet know itself as love. As such it knows itself in the child. In the child the lovers behold love; [this] is their self-conscious unity as such.” (203-204)
However, this is not yet all; there is a continuation. Love as the universal becomes through objectified love unitary in the child. Its completeness as the universal is stated in the death of the parents. The unitary has prevailed over the universal. Thus love has gone through the cycle of development, through the beginning (the inducement that joined together the two “I”), the middle (the third); and the end – the removal of love (death of the two “I”). However, this cycle is endless, since the two “I” became embodied in the third, which starts a new motion - in new “I”s, in new selves, which Hegel regards as self-moving concepts.
What is it that distinguishes Hegel from all preceding philosophers? First of all, it is his lack of interest in manifestations of love. What mattered to him was the essence of love, which emerges as one of the links in the exposition of the concept of will. At the same time, love itself transforms into a developing concept; its inner content leads through the “extreme terms” (each of them being contradictive in itself: Me-for-myself and Me-being-in-the-other) to unity in the form of the universal. The development of love itself is progressive in character (“it is the lasting, preserving possibility of its existence”), completing itself in the “object” (child), i.e. love must inevitably give birth to life. The most important thing is this: the emergence of love is due to cognition. This follows already from the fact that although love exposes itself within the framework of the concept of will, will itself is preceded by the concept of intellect, i.e. knowledge. This means that will is a product of knowledge, therefore each manifestation of it, including the form of love, is also knowledge. It follows from this that those who are not capable of cognition are not capable of love. This conclusion deals away with all fables about animal love, to say nothing of lower creatures in the hierarchy of the organic world – and the inorganic world, it goes without saying. Finally, in Hegel’s reasoning about love we find no references to any gods, miracles and other such devilry.
One of Hegel’s most important differences from the majority of philosophers (both before him and after him) is his tying of love to family (Fichte, as we recall, tied love to marriage, rather than family, and the two are not the same). He writes: “Family consists in these moments: α) love as natural love, childbirth, β) self-conscious love, conscious feeling and frame of mind, and their language, γ) joint labors and acquisition, mutual services and cares, δ) upbringing. No separate part can be made the whole (exclusive) goal.” (204) The location of love’s action is the family. This will be discussed in the next chapter.
What is missing in Hegel’s reasoning? One could say: historicity. However, Hegel posed no such task for himself: he analyzed the concept of love from a purely philosophical perspective. His most important omission is this: he did not point out the moving forces of love. Why does the “inducement” join together the two “I”? Should we look at Hegel’s philosophy as a whole, it does, of course, contain an answer: this force is the absolute spirit that transforms itself, among other things, through the subjective spirit that manifests itself in intellect and will, and arrives eventually at the stage where love is born. At the end of this chapter I will attempt to prove that there is no need here for any spirits.
Arthur Schopenhauer presented his views on love in the chapter titled “The Metaphysics of Sexual Love” of his magnum opus “The World as Will and Representation”. Having evaluated very lowly all his predecessors in the research of the topic of love (including Plato, Spinoza and Kant), he builds a conception that proceeds from his own general theory – the World Will; according to this conception, this Will at a certain stage becomes embodied in “the will-to-live” of man, ultimately directed toward the continuation of mankind. Let us examine how this works.
First of all, “All amorousness is rooted in the sexual impulse alone,” which brings “physical pleasure.” In Schopenhauer’s opinion, “in affairs of love” it doesn’t matter through which means this pleasure is achieved: mutual affection, purchase with gifts, brute force (rape), etc. What matters is that there is “possession.” The goal is important: “the composition of the next generation.”[6]
Thus does the sexual instinct, directed toward the good of the species, move man, whereas “man himself imagines he is seeking merely a heightening of his own pleasure.” (P. 539) In this manner “the will-to-live” is manifested. It objectifies itself in that child whom the two partners can bring into the world.
Schopenhauer grounds sexual love in just the instinct, i.e. unconscious attraction, or “the will to live,” through the following set of factors (motives). The main one: man is inclined to inconstancy in love, woman - to constancy. The reason: “The man can easily beget over a hundred children in a year, if there are that number of women available; on the other hand, no matter with how many men, the women could bring into the world only one child in a year (apart from twin births).” (542)
Schopenhauer goes on to list the conditions presented by men to women in order to have healthy progeny: age, health, body build (he didn’t even forget about the teeth), a certain fullness of flesh. He puts beauty of the face in last place, having specified the importance of “the bone parts” of the face: there must be a beautiful nose (“a short, turned up nose mars everything”), a small mouth, formed with small jaws (small maxillae). A receding chin, cut away as it were, is particularly repugnant, because mentum prominulum (‘prominent chin’) is an exclusive characteristic of our species. (543-4)
The demands women make on men are listed in less detail, nonetheless two groups of factors are singled out: firstly, age – 30 to 35 years, i.e. it has to be a mature man, with already-formed physical qualities and moral responsibility for his offspring; secondly, psychic qualities, among which women are most attracted by “firmness of will, resoluteness, and courage, perhaps also by honesty and kindness of heart.” (544) Curiously enough, in Schopenhauer’s opinion, limited intellect (in a man. – A.B.) does not preclude success with women. On the contrary, outstanding abilities and even genius are perceived by women as deviation from the norm. “It is a vain and ridiculous pretence when women assert that they have fallen in love with a man’s mind, or it is the overstraining of degenerate nature.” (545)
This list belongs to the absolute consideration of sexual love, i.e. apparently motives that are not controlled by the consciousness. There are also motives of relative consideration, tied to concrete individuals, founded on the principle of mutual complimentarity. “Therefore, everyone loves what he himself lacks.” (Ibid.) Then again, ultimately for the sake of “a rectification of the type of the species already defectively presented, a correction of the divergences from the type which are already borne in the chooser’s own person, and hence a return to the pure presentation of the type.” (Ibid.) Whenever such goals of the species are not achieved, the lovers who served as its tools perish also, like for example in Romeo and Juliet, Tancred, Don Carlos, Wallenstein, The Bride of Messina, and many others. On the other hand, “the will of the species is so much more mighty than the will of the individual”, that a man, often being an outstanding mind already, joins himself to a monster in the form of his spouse. Cupid is apparently blind. This interpretation explains why “so many Socrateses have found their Xanthippes.”
Thus, in Schopenhauer’s conception the essence of love is the species, concentrated in which is “endless life”; the interests of the species are higher than the interests of the individual. In this connection marriage based on love is less desirable than marriage based on calculation, since in the former case the emphasis is on the “present generation,” while in the latter case the emphasis is on the good of the future generations.
Thus, according to Schopenhauer, the basis for attraction, infatuation between man and woman is the sexual instinct, or sexual love, which is one and the same to him. Its purpose is the continuation of the species.
Strangely enough, Schopenhauer is correct: the essence of the sexual instinct as a biological manifestation of nature in the organic world is the continuation of the species. It is a phenomenon of the interrelations between philogenesis and ontogenesis. However, this has nothing to do with love. Schopenhauer writes himself that a similar “feeling” is experienced by animals. Yet the term “sexual love” is hardly applicable to animals. They, too, have an instinct that is likewise non-conscious, caused by the World Will - if we take the latter to mean nature, laws of the organic world. Even man was subject to these laws for a very long time as he continued his species without burdening himself with love. Schopenhauer, like many before him and after him, reasoned about love without its historical context; therein lies his greatest mistake. Besides, he did not, unlike Hegel, single out the concepts of family and marriage, and, accordingly, the meaning of love within the framework of these concepts. Love is a phenomenon of consciousness – a sufficiently advanced one at that, while the World Will (same as Schelling’s World Spirit) is devoid of consciousness outside of human existence. “The will to live” is a beautiful idea, but only in the case when will is guided by thought, and it is only possible because of thought. Nonetheless the idea that love is the realization of the continuation of the species, leading to immortality of mankind (through the genus, or the species), is quite fruitful, especially when set against the background of its negation in the sexual love of the “individual”, who supposedly cares nothing about the species.
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When writing on love, after Schopenhauer it is customary to analyze Nietzsche and Freud. However, I omit them both on the grounds that the former said nothing interesting about love, except for the banality that love and marriage are incompatible things, while the latter has so much written about him that it is hardly possible to add anything. Besides, Freud’s conception of “the narcissistic libido”, criticized by many, including the neo-Freudians, has ceased to be actual. However, I will have to dwell on Erich Fromm – precisely due to the actuality of his ideas in the present time, if only judging by the attention still paid to this psychoanalyst. Before that, though, it makes sense to look briefly at the approaches to this topic taken by Russian philosophers, whose views on love by definition must diverge from Western ideas.
[1] Kant, vol.6, 494-5.
[2] Kant. Lectures on Ethics, 167.
[3] Fichte. The Science of Rights, 399.
[4] Fichte. The System of Teaching of Morals in Accordance with the Principles of Science Teaching.
[5] Hegel. Jenaer Realphilosophy, 202.
[6] Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Representation, 533-4.
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On Love, Family, and the State
(Philosophical-sociological Essay)