Chapter I. Love: essence and manifestation
Сontemporary American approaches to the theory of love
Contrary to Russians’ notions of the West as a world devoid of spirituality, it is precisely the West that boasts a very vast literature about love; thousands of philosophers, psychologists and sociologists became involved in this topic. Moreover, love is a subject taught in university courses in many philosophy and psychology departments under different names, for the most part “Philosophy of Love” or “Psychology of Love.” The program of one such course indicates that its purpose is to teach the students to a) distinguish different kinds of love, b) develop their own philosophy of love, c) develop their own position with respect to works by Western and Eastern philosophers.
It is hard to appraise the effect of such courses on Western society as a whole; nonetheless they do apparently affect a certain part of the population, which happens to be the avant-garde of scientific, technical and humanitarian progress that influences the whole world.
Back in my time I would sometimes read some work or other about love out of pure curiosity. But I had no idea then that someday I would have to write on this topic myself, so I made no summaries of what I read. Since at present I have no time to read those works all over again, I will have to limit myself to several works of summarizing character, in which the authors systemized the contemporary schools and views of love. We’re speaking here of American philosophers and psychologists for the most part.
A brief review of their views will allow us, firstly, to get an idea of the different schools; secondly, to appraise how deeply they penetrated the essence of the problem. Moreover, speaking of Russian readers, such information may be of some use to them, since in contemporary Russian philosophical literature I did not come across any analysis of contemporary Western philosophers’ views on the topic.
I use as the basis for my presentation the large article by the young American philosopher Bennett W. Helm, published in the Stanford Philosophical Encyclopedia.[1]
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In Helm’s classification, scholars are distributed into different groups according to which dominant is decisive in the definition of the concept of love.
Love as Union. This group is formed by those scholars who believe that love is the forming of a certain union, i.e. WE. These philosophers have the task to prove that WE is literally a new integrity in the world of the loving and the beloved. Some contemporary philosophers included in this group are Robert S. Solomon, Roger Scruton, Robert Nozick, Mark Fisher, and Neil Delaney.
The general idea of the conception of union is that it is a union of interests, in which each person acts not in his own or the other’s interests, but in the interests of WE. Solomon believes that such a union is only possible when “two souls” merge, when two individualities regard themselves as a single WE.
In the opinion of some other philosophers (Irving Singer, Alan Soble), this approach has a vulnerability, namely: in this ontological union the individual autonomies are lost, a certain independence of the lovers is lost. As a result, the union based on such a foundation depersonalizes the personalities.
Nozick, however, believes the loss of autonomy in love to be precisely that desirable result, or union, which the lovers aspired to. Fisher believes that the loss of autonomy in love is a perfectly acceptable consequence of love. Solomon defines the “frictions” between union and autonomy as “the paradox of love.”
In order to resolve this paradox, Marilyn A. Friedman suggests defining the union as a federation of individuals (I). In this model a third united integrity is created, in which the lovers act within the framework of certain conditions and goals. In such a federation-type union love, on the contrary, enhances each partner’s autonomy; it facilitates realistic and critical self-evaluation to a greater degree, which is beneficial to the autonomy.
To the Russian reader, such reasoning may seem light-minded, too abstracted from the very essence of love. In actual fact, to the Western person the issues of autonomy, independence of personality are central, even in issues of love, since versions or methods of their resolution, including those used on the “love front,” can be applied in a wider context, for example on the level of society and even the level of international relations. This is precisely why every participant in this debate pays such scrupulous attention to each other’s every word.
Love as Robust Concern. The main idea of this group (which includes William Newton-Smith, Alan Soble, Hugh LaFollette, Harry Frankfurt, Richard J. White) was expressed by Gabrielle Taylor as follows: “To summarize: if x loves y then x wants to benefit and be with y etc., and he has these wants (or at least some of them) because he believes y has some determinate characteristics ψ in virtue of which he thinks it worth while to benefit and be with y. He regards satisfaction of these wants as an end and not as a means towards some other end.” Simply speaking, this approach asserts clearly, contrary to the preceding view of love as union, that love which represents a robust concern to you is in fact fundamentally my interest, even if it is formally for your sake and outwardly is not egoistic. Thus love is neither an emotional nor a conscious act; it is an act of will. This means that all those benefits that I deliver to my beloved ultimately prove to be a benefit to me, and therein is the essence of robust concern in love.
What is disturbing in this approach to its opponents is not so much the egoistical principle of love as the “teleological view” it takes, for example the view on acquisition of well-being for the beloved. How is it then, exclaims Neera K. Badhwar, that “we can continue to love someone long after death has taken him beyond harm or benefit.” She disagrees with this approach, for if love is the desire for acquisition of good, then something essential is missing in it. The other objection is this: the robust concern approach is incapable of appraising the “depth” of love, incapable of explaining the difference between “loving” and “liking.”
Love as Valuing. This type of love is divided into two sub-types: 1) Love as Appraisal of Value – the lover values the subject of his love as such, while love is understood as evaluation of the quality of the subject’s love with respect to the lover; 2) Love as Bestowal of Value – the subject becomes valuable to the lover on the strength of his love for him, i.e. in this case love is understood as a quality that the subject gives away (gifts) to the lover.
The first of these versions is championed by J. David Velleman, who justifies it through the logic of Kant who made a clear distinction between merit and price (in actual fact, Kant was drawing attention to the difference between ends and means in love). To use an economics metaphor, one may suppose that to have a price means to have a value, which can be compared through price to the values of other things. This means that the beloved can be exchanged without loss of value. By contrast, having dignity means having a value such that it makes no sense to compare it to other values. In other words, goods have prices, while people have dignity which cannot be compared. According to Kant, our dignity as personalities is rooted in our rational nature, in our ability to be motivated by causes which we include automatically in the definitions of our goals as we respond to the values absorbed by us in the world. Accordingly, one of the manifestations of our rational nature is the reaction of respect for the dignity of other personalities.
So what is it that compels us to respect a personality? Velleman thinks it is that which “reins in self-love” and thus prevents us from treating the subject of love as a means to our goals. He believes that love reminds the response to personal dignity, i.e. it is precisely dignity that is the object of our love, as well as its source. However, love and respect are different types of response to one and the same value. Love does not rein in our self-love. Rather, it reins in our emotions, i.e. it strips us of emotional self-defense before others and thus weakens us. This means that interest, attraction, sympathy, etc. which are usually associated with love do not comprise love; rather, they are the normal consequence, while love can stay without them. Velleman did not bother to provide answers to the questions: the reactions he listed (interest, etc.) – they are the consequence of what? And what is love left with? (For some reason one feels like saying: with diddly squat!) Velleman’s main point is something different: love is after all a response to dignity, but not to just any person’s dignity. (“Love… is the optional maximal response to others’ dignity.”) So why is it that not everyone merits such a response? Where is the boundary of choice? Velleman believes that choice takes place when certain people exhibit the ability to express their dignity as personalities, while others are capable of appraising this dignity, which results, though, for some reason in emotional vulnerability. Thus does conformity take place between the conduct of the “subject of love” and the “evaluation” of this subject by the lover. To put it simply: if I value highly the person’s dignity, I fall in love with him, i.e. he becomes “lovable” to me.
Naturally, this approach produces lots of objections; among other things, it fails to answer these questions: how to explain love in terms of “conformity” between expression and my feelings, especially since the latter become “vulnerable” (defenseless)? Most importantly: if love is evaluation, how does one distinguish this evaluation from other forms of evaluation, including the evaluation of my judgment regarding evaluations of love?
The second approach, as mentioned already, is designated love as bestowal of value. In the opinion of the philosopher Singer, this approach enables one to distinguish love from liking. “Love is an attitude with no clear objective,” whereas liking is inherently teleological. This is why it’s impossible to correctly evaluate love, and in this it is different from other personality relations such as nobility, magnanimity, indulgence. “Love…confers importance no matter what the object is worth,” i.e. whatever its price.
So what type of value is returned to the loving one? According to Singer, it is devotion and obligations to the beloved, where someone (the subject) treats the other (the object) as a goal for himself and thus responds to the object’s goals, interests, concerns, etc. as to matters that have value to himself. “I” give to him, for I know that in actual fact I am giving to myself. Such is the subtext of this approach.
According to Singer, this approach reminds the conception of love as robust concern, with the difference being that “love as robust concern” is a consequence of “love as bestowal of value.” In other words, in the first version it is the loving one who exhibits robust concern; in the second version, it is the subject of love.
Having tied the two approaches into one whole, Singer falls in the trap of those same questions: how, for example, do you evaluate someone from whom you expect some “return”? and anyway, what does this “return” mean, and how does one appraise its value? In Bennett Helm’s opinion, the sole merit of this approach is that it expresses the idea of love as a creative principle, not just a response to a preceding value.
Love as Emotion. Grouped around this conception are a large number of scholars (they are for the most part philosopher-psychologists, naturally), who are again divided into two subgroups.
The first subgroup believes that love as an emotion proper is a kind of “evaluative-cum-motivational response to an object.” What does this mean? I leave out here their debates about the term emotion and move on straight to their conclusions. According to Robert Brown, emotions as occurrent mental states are “abnormal bodily changes caused by the agent's evaluation or appraisal of some object or situation that the agent believes to be of concern to him or her.” This “abstruse” phrase means only that in the process of evaluating someone or something the brain receives additional information capable of changing the subject’s psychological state, which is quite normal. Nonetheless, this banality is tied in some miraculous fashion to love. Brown’s conception of emotions leads him to such reasoning: it turns out that in love, we “cherish” the person for having “a particular complex of instantiated qualities” that is “open-ended” so that we can continue to love the person even as she changes over time. The aggregate of these qualities forms the merits that are evaluated in love. Apparently, the sole problem with this approach is the problem of evaluating the merits themselves, including the merits of the approach.
D. W. Hamlyn writes of love in this same key, with some minor variations and with the addition that love and hatred are primary emotions. It is not clear, though, what such reasoning has to do with the essence of love.
The second subgroup champions a broader thesis: Love as Emotion Complex. Its adherents, however, over-emphasize first one, then another “emotion.” Amelie O’Rorty first offers this “thought”: “relational psychological attitudes” which, like love, essentially involve emotional and desiderative responses, exhibit historicity: “they arise from, and are shaped by, dynamic interactions between a subject and an object.” This banal phrase led the author to the equally trivial thought that love is not a momentarily state of infatuation. Rather, O’Rorty believes that love is to be “identified by a characteristic narrative history.” Well, when a philosopher, especially a woman, thinks historically, this can only be welcomed.
Annette C. Baier also speaks of historicity of love, delivering a maxim every bit as deep: “Love is not just an emotion people feel toward other people, but also a complex tying together of the emotions that two or a few more people have; it is a special form of emotional interdependence.”
Helm thinks highly of the emphasis the authors in this subgroup put on the “historicity” of love, since this accords “duration” to love, in the process of which the lover and the beloved change for the better, naturally. He appears to understand himself that all these groups and schools he designated have contributed little to the theory of love. It remains unclear why do people love, and why they love precisely this or that person and not others? And what is the value of love? The philosophers of antiquity did supply answers to these questions; here are some answers from American philosophers.
David O. Brink believes that is not sufficient for a man to simply evaluate himself through the beloved. He is in need of improving himself; to that end he must interact with others who are not like him. Interaction presupposes the realization of alternative opportunities for deriving rationally the best aspects of the established couple’s merits. Therein lies, in Brink’s words, the “epistemological meaning” of love.
Another philosopher, LaFollette, stresses that love increases our sense of well-being, it elevates our sense of self-worth, and it serves to develop our character. It also, we might add, tends to lower stress and blood pressure and to increase health and longevity. This is all true, sure enough. However, all these health benefits can be derived from keeping a cat or a dog, as animal welfare activists often remind us from television screens.
Friedman puts the emphasis on moral values, for love delivers to man “well-being, wholeness and fullness with life.” Solomon summarizes: “Ultimately, there is only one reason for love. That one grand reason…is ‘because we bring out the best in each other.’” Solomon does not specify what “the best” means, evidently believing that it’s evident to all.
An endless debate continues among philosophers over the question of what is ultimately loved: the personality itself, or the personality’s qualities. For example, Gregory Vlastos thinks that Plato and Aristotle provide an account of love that is really a love of properties rather than a love of persons - love of a type of person, rather than love of a particular person - thereby losing what is distinctive about love as an essentially personal attitude. In this case, the person seemingly has no meaning, since many people possess similar qualities. True love, however, is not fungible.
These philosophers failed to understand that Plato and Aristotle spoke of love on the ontological level; their interest was love in general as a phenomenon of human being. They failed to notice that Plato’s supreme criterion of love for beauty was love for philosophy as expression of maximum beauty. The ancients had no idea that twenty-four hundred years later philosophers would appear who can’t tell ontology from epistemology, phenomenon from essence, to whom dialectics is just as alien as it was to many wayward pupils of Socrates.
The many fruitless efforts to sort out the essence of love as a phenomenon compelled another American philosopher, Alex Moseley, to pose the general question: is this phenomenon cognizable at all? For example, some phenomenologists believe that love is a non-cognitive phenomenon. And even if love does possess a nature that manifests itself through personal expressions, a special type of behavior and actions – all the same, is it possible to correctly understand this nature with the human mind? Perhaps its true nature lies beyond the cognitive abilities of man? Perhaps love is some epiphenomenal integrity embedded in the human actions of the lovers, which are impossible to understand and to describe with language.[2]
Moseley provides no definite answer to such questions-doubts. The course of his reasoning, though, resembles very strongly the views of the nihilistic philosophers of the University of New Jersey, especially Colin McGinn, albeit that philosopher was attempting to solve a different problem: mind/body. Within the framework of that problem, it was necessary to answer the questions: what is thought, and how is it different from consciousness? Having failed to solve the problem, the nihilists arrived at the conclusion that consciousness is beyond the “cognitive abilities” of man.[3] Same thing with love: ignorabimus (we won’t cognize)!
Moseley has a reserve exit, though: love is perhaps not cognizable to the ordinary people, the mundane ones (who are hardly interested in this problem in the first place, I think), but it is accessible to philosophers, musicians, poets – to the chosen. In Moseley’s opinion, they examined the nature of love as romantic love, which was first sung by the troubadours in France in the 11th century. Such love hails back to Plato’s traditions, according to which love is aspiration for beauty, for value - which is embodied, in particular, in the beauty of the body. The culmination of this approach is love for philosophy – the subject that personifies the highest stage of human reason. Contemporary romantic love, in Moseley’s opinion, is closer to Aristotle’s version of love between two people, expressed in the phrase: unity of two bodies and one soul.
Not only Moseley, but quite a few other scholars reason in this fashion, failing to notice for some reason that Aristotle speaks mostly of love as philia (friendship), which is more general in character than the relationship between man and woman. Poets don’t analyze love as a concept; they describe lovers’ experiences. Not one poet or writer has ever said anything worthwhile about love as a concept.[4]
For curiosity’s sake, I also want to mention here the approach used by the physicalists – those who call love a physical reaction to the other, whom the subject considers physically attractive. Accordingly, the lovers’ actions are manifested in various behaviors, with such characteristic traits as courting, caring, the desire to show the object in public, etc. This is the behaviorist approach (love is defined through a certain type of behavior). Physicalists and geneticists analyze it primarily through lovers’ sexual relations. Some geneticists advance theories saying that certain criteria for choosing this or that sexual partner are inherent in the genes. In this version, the quote from Teilhard de Chardin about love built into molecules, presented in the beginning of this chapter, no longer looks perfectly insane. The reductionists appear to have penetrated all sciences.[5]
One could go on enumerating the various schools, trends, directions, but this would add little to what has been said already. Let us draw a preliminary total.
Despite the large number of scholars who tackled the topic of love in the West and their innumerable works (a Google search produced 12,600,000 hits for the word “love” and 262,000 hits for the Russian word “lyubov’”), all of them together failed to reveal the nature of love, failed to grasp in this concept the universal, i.e. the universal essence of love which stretches over such a broad range of phenomena in social life. One gets at times the impression that this is done on purpose in order to leave the topic “open” for further study, which enables several thousand people to specialize in this field. This reminds me again of the problem of the search for consciousness, which has been pursued for over 200 years by philosophers of a different specialization without arriving at any “consensus.”
In actual fact, the answer probably lies in a different dimension. None of the philosophers of the Anglo-American sphere ever had mastery of the dialectical method. Hardly any of them (there are very few exceptions) ever studied Hegel, especially his Science of Logic. These people studied Kant, Nietzsche, Marcuse – anyone but Hegel. It is a property of American thinking to avoid dialectics, i.e. to avoid development and contradictions. They examine all phenomena in the space of the current moment. This is true not only of the philosophy of love, but of practically all social sciences. They will never understand Hegel’s saying: “Contradiction is the criterion of truth, absence of contradictions is the criterion of error.”
These scholars have the term “love” out of touch with other concepts and categories. Same as the term “democracy,” in their works it doesn’t live, doesn’t develop, it doesn’t even get born. Therefore they are doomed to circle endlessly around this incomprehensible thing called love, preserving jobs for a new generation of philosophers.
At the same time, having failed to uncover the essence of the phenomenon, they describe professionally its manifestations in the form of all sorts of positive qualities, which can have a beneficial effect on society. The very discussion of this topic in mass media, in books, in conversations is already a rather important factor that is most welcome. Another positive aspect of most Americans’ work can be seen in the fact that their analysis of love is rarely tied to God, to mysticism or other such nonsense. Love issues from human being to human being. There is little science here, but the social effect is noticeable. We may consider that the American army of “love-sages” earned their paychecks after all.
[1] Helm. Love.
[2] Moseley. Philosophy of Love.
[3] For more detail see: The Dialectics of Force, 247-51.
[4] One can be convinced of this by reading the book by Chertkov (On Love), who tried to formulate the conceptual definition of love based precisely on pronouncements by poets and writers. He failed utterly.
[5] For more detail on the reductionists see: The Dialectics of Force, 264-7.
On Love, Family, and the State
(Philosophical-sociological Essay)