Chapter I. Love: essence and manifestation
The law of love: increasing mankind’s life delta
The above-described reasoning about love by great and not-so-great philosophers made a certain sense for the concrete historical time period in which one or another aspect of the “elusive” phenomenon was singled out. Each generation of philosophers, not satisfied with the previous definitions of love, attempted to formulate their own, more comprehensive definitions, yet to this day “the mystery of love” is preserved as untouched as ever. Certain contemporary philosophers have decided that “it is this mystery that is the main thing in love.” I won’t argue, yet I will take the risk and rip this mystical cover off love, taking into consideration everything said about love above.
Love as a philosophical concept
I remind you: the entire world around us is being; its attributes are force, motion, space and time. Being realizes its essence through phenomena. At a certain stage of mankind’s development the phenomenon of love emerged, reflecting the social segment of the reality of human being. For starters it makes sense to sort out love as a concept on the philosophical level, i.e. to show it as an abstraction, primarily from the perspective of the universal, without considering social and historical factors.
So, love as a concept is a certain integrity. Therefore it consists of parts. Moreover, love is the relationship between the parts, which in this case exist thanks to each other while possessing independent essences.
Why do these parts seek unity? They are pushed toward it by a certain force that turns the relations between the parts into an integrity. This integrity itself as an internal active form is a force with respect to other integrities. The correlation between the parts and the whole is defined as follows: “The Parts, as existing on their own account outside of the Relation, are mere Matter and, in so far, not Parts. As Parts they have their determination only in the Whole and, in order to be Parts, they must also be capable on their own account of entering into this Relation to the Whole; only then do the Parts constitute the Whole.”[1]
If Fromm had only assimilated this thought by Hegel, he wouldn’t have been bewildered by the puzzle of “two and one” in love. The idea expressed in this quote should be mastered in order to understand the subsequent reasoning. From the purely conceptual abstraction, we step one rung down.
Let us examine the version of love between a subject and a subject, or an I and an I, leaving aside the version subject-object, or I and IT.
I and I, or two independent selves, are two integrities. In joining together they create WE, losing in the process their integrities and becoming two parts in WE. In other words, the system WE consists of two element-parts. I stress: outside the system they are integrities, within the system they are parts. Actually, they are already such parts that are different from themselves as integrities outside the system, since they function following the laws of the integrity WE. That is, I1 + I2 = WE (*). This transformation’s result is that the force of subject exceeds the force of subject I1, and likewise the force of subject exceeds the force of subject I2 (F >F and F >F ). This happened because each of the forces of the subjects of WE is mutually enhanced not only at each other’s expense, but also at the expense of the common force of the whole system WE. (WE, I remind you, is a force of itself). The paradox here is not that two I became one WE, but that as part of the integrity of the system WE proves to be stronger than the integrity I1 outside the system WE).[2]
On the subjective level this means that although the subjects in WE retain their physical qualities, their mental essences change in the direction of broader and deeper knowledge and understanding of the world around them.
This version of relations is defined by the word “interaction” (in Fromm’s parlance, “mutual gifting”) between the subjects, which is characteristic of relations between people and also between the individual and the state (or its equivalents: clan, tribe, folk, fatherland).
A somewhat different version of relations takes place between the subject and the object. I understand the latter to mean a class of phenomena that do not possess consciousness (things, nature, ideas, etc.). I also relegate the animal world to this class, since in my interpretation it does not belong to the category of life. (Life begins with man – I proved this assertion in my book Dialectics of Force.) In principle, this subject-object version of relations is almost no different from the preceding one, except that in the system WE the object remains the same as it was outside the system (it is indifferent with relation to the subject), while the subject’s force in WE increases at the expense of the object’s passive force. Love is in this case unilateral, although no less objective. Another specificity of this type of love is its lack of structure, i.e. it is manifested in the form of non-structured relations.
The result of love, embodied in the integrity WE, is the increase in force of the subjects of love, which may take on different forms, as described in the corresponding section. This formulation can be designated as the first law of love: love increases the force of the subjects of love.
The objective consequence of love is the increase of the life delta of man and of mankind. This is the second law of love. (An analogy with the second law of thermodynamics is appropriate here, except that this law of love works in the opposite direction [in essence, that is – not in time]).
The force of love itself is defined by its stability, and therefore longevity, i.e. by the time of its duration. However, once time made its appearance, space must exist as well. The latter should not be treated literally. Nonetheless, the closer the subjects of love are to each other, the stronger their love is. Love “across a distance” is fiction. Love is preserved and reproduced only through constant interaction. Where there is no interaction, there is no love. Aristotle said once: the friendship was sundered by lack of conversation, and it is known that under friendship he understood love. In other words, love/friendship requires intense interrelations, and intensity is a category not only of time, but of space as well. This is precisely why the strongest love is structured love, love in time and in space, which is, of course, in accord with the general laws of nature.
A remark: it should be stressed that while the force of love exists, the love of force does not, since force is a category or attribute of being, and it does not depend on our attitude toward it. It’s the same as saying: love of matter, or love of motion, or love of time and space. However, there does exist love for force, since force manifests itself to us in different guises, for example, as force of knowledge or force of love. This difference must always be kept in mind.
The criterion of love, as I mentioned above already, is one’s readiness to sacrifice oneself, up to giving one’s life. This is, I repeat, no exaggeration: world practice is full of countless examples of sacrifices people made for their beloved, their friends, motherland, or ideas.
On the philosophical level there remains the problem that is emphasized mostly by American philosophers: what about autonomy, or the independence of the individual, when he joins WE?
These philosophers failed to understand that love is not the highest instance; its objective essence is not love for love’s sake or WE for the sake of WE. (Art for art’s sake is another such silliness.) WE is an intermediate link, or, in Hegel’s terminology, the intermediate member in the chain I-WE-I. WE-love is an abstraction that reflects the metamorphosis of two integrities I into one integrity WE while preserving relative autonomy. What transpires at this stage is enrichment, enhancement of the parts that realize themselves in a new quality, in two new integrities outside the boundaries of WE. I-before-WE, I-WE and I-after-WE – those are all different I. Subjects that passed through the systemic stage WE are different from the subjects within WE itself (as integrities) and different to an even greater degree from the subjects prior to the integral WE. They differ in that they have greater strength (power), greater capacity for life and creativity. However, any increase in the power of I (which in fact is increase in knowledge) makes the subject more autonomous, more independent. By strengthening the subject, love strengthens all degrees of its independence.
There is, however, a version of interrelations in which autonomy and independence really do practically disappear. This happens when the subject and subject are stuck in WE, dissolved in each other; when two integrities have become one integrity WE without parts. Instead of I + I = 2I we get I + I = (I=I). This is an empty identity without development. It is the formula of mad love, i.e. mindless love, that is, love without consciousness, i.e. already without man. In this case the subjects of love have disappeared; what is left is two objects that merely exist side by side. Love loses meaning, for relations have disappeared. The subject/object is in a coma. This version of “love,” inherent ordinarily to uncultured people, leads to tragedy. Only in such cases does it make sense to speak of loss of independence or autonomy. But then it is practically no longer love, but rather a form of psychic deviation, a pathology of sorts; therefore, this phenomenon has nothing to do with thinking human beings.
The main conclusion is this: love is the force in which man’s ability to increase mankind’s life delta manifests itself.
Love as a social-historical concept
Let us now move on from the sphere of abstractions to social and historical ground. I remind you that Hegel had a reason for placing love in the division of will, which was preceded by intellect, i.e. knowledge. The matter is, should we examine the evolution of human thinking from the very beginning, it is indeed easy to ascertain that its development started with sensations and feelings, with the subsequent forming of consciousness and thought. However, by the time the word love emerged mankind had most of its historical existence behind it already, and its feelings were by then sufficiently conscious, i.e. they possessed certain intelligence, i.e. they were intelligent feelings. These intelligent feelings suggested that a certain type of action with respect to this or that object brings certain benefits in the form of emotional states or a feeling of physical security, while a different type of action, reverse in character to the previous one, brings opposite results. Thus the benefits acquired the character of a certain value to which it is necessary to aspire. The first type of action, the one delivering benefits or values, was consolidated in a word that evoked the positive, the joyful, the good. The word was love. The second type of relations gave birth to the words enmity or hatred.
It should be stressed here in particular that love and enmity are two opposite phenomena that exist simultaneously, “for everything is what it is itself only in contraposition to some other.”[3] Empedocles, as noted above, accorded even an ontological meaning to this pair. Therefore all talk and writing about universal love, appeals like “love thy enemy,” etc. stem either from failure to understand the problem or, more likely, from political provocation. For as long as good and evil exist in the world, there will be love and hatred.
It has been said in this connection that it is often difficult to tell good from evil, and vice versa. That is indeed true, since these words express not only the moral aspect of social relations, but also politics. To some people, for example, wealth is evil, to others it is good; to some private property is theft, to others it is a value. In actual fact the criterion is very simple, and it is always tied to a certain fundamental criterion: the relation to the law of entropy growth. The life delta (LΔ) is the criterion of success in the struggle against entropy. Evil is an ally of this law in the sphere of social relations; good is its opponent. This is why that same private property was good during a certain era (for example, the period of formation of capitalism); back then it served progress, it required in those times the attitudes of love, reverence, etc. In our time it has become evil, it started working toward destruction of society, state and man himself; it requires the attitude of hatred, and therefore it should be fought against. In other words, one and the same phenomenon can cause in different geographical and temporal (historical) spaces perfectly opposite feelings: love or hatred. Therefore, when certain philosophers of Fromm’s type or servants of religion speak of the necessity to eradicate in oneself the feeling of hatred, they are calling in fact for killing in oneself the feeling of love as well. I repeat and stress: one does not exist without the other. From the philosophical perspective, this pair must always be examined together; however, here I will have to leave “enmity” alone, otherwise I will stray too far from the topic of this work.
So, love emerged initially as a reaction to good and non-good (that same force that connected the “parts” in WE). Since in the initial stage of mankind’s development the security of each member of the clan was a much more important component of its existence than the purely emotional state of the individual, evidently it was since that time that the feeling of love started developing first and foremost for the tribe, the clan and for members of the clan. Doubtlessly, the word love was not used back then, but the foundations of the pithy aspect of the word were laid even then. In later stages of development, this feeling took on the form of love for the fatherland, the motherland, the nation.
Already in this early stage both sides receive the benefits of love: the singular is preserved thanks to the universal, i.e. the human being ensures his security through protection from the clan (state), while the universal is preserved thanks to the singular, i.e. the clan (state) exists thanks to each of its members. This mutual love, whatever you want to call it, ultimately fulfills its main function: it preserves and lengthens life - for both the state and the individual. For this type of love, the most appropriate word is philia, or, more precisely, philopatria, i.e. love for one’s fatherland. Doubtlessly, there exist contradictions between the individual and the clan, analogous to the contradictions between philogenesis and ontogenesis. However, in order to be preserved, this contradiction is resolved in the middle point (in Hegel’s parlance, the middle term) – love. This philopatria is the basis, the foundation of all other forms of love. However, its distinctive specificity is that both extremes (extreme terms) have no choice; they are obliged to love each other in order to be preserved and to endure. Ordinarily it isn’t every person that realizes this obligation, yet instinctively or by law (Leibniz and Condillac wrote of this) they are forced to love their motherland. When an individual resorts to actions with respect to his motherland that are based on enmity or hatred, his motherland is obliged to destroy this individual for the sake of preserving the entire state and most of its members. This topic is widely represented in world literature and in history.
There is, however, another aspect to this phenomenon. An individual may discover that the state conducts an anti-popular policy, that its acts lead to the destruction of the people, etc. Such a state is worthy of hatred, not love; it is necessary to fight against it for the sake of love for one’s people, i.e. one’s clan. Love transforms into hatred for the state while preserving itself in love for the people. This is precisely what was done by revolutionaries of thought and deed of all ages and nations. Revolutions and revolutionaries always worked to preserve the entire clan, increasing its life delta. Here in the correlation between philopatria and philodemos priority must always be given to the latter.
Adjacent to this type of love, albeit in a specific form, is love for that which surrounds you (things, work, animals, nature, sciences, etc.). This type of love is unilateral, there is no mutuality in it (not even when a favorite dog or cat is involved), but there is the thing’s impact on the brain that is captured in the brain as a signal that causes joy, pleasure, a certain goodness, causes positive emotions. Such love gives comfort, and to some it even gives happiness.
Another type of love is the interrelations between members of society in general. Since the problem of security of the whole society’s life is not present here, freedom of choice emerges: you are not required to love everyone and everything, you may love only those and only that toward whom/what your soul is disposed. Ordinarily it is disposed toward him/that from whom/what you derive the greatest comfort - those same benefits and values.
These relations are described with various words: like – dislike, abhorrent – non-abhorrent, love – non-love, etc. The concept liking crosses over into love when there is someone in relations with whom you receive the greatest comfort. Naturally, the greatest comfort is derived by you from someone who corresponds to your ideas of comfort. People ordinarily love those who are like them. This type of love is customarily called philia (friendship). It is not tied to differences between sexes, Eros as sexual attraction is not present in it; spiritual closeness dominates, having to do mostly with identical understanding of human values. Such love cannot be not-mutual, since the one whom you love is the same as you, and his attitude toward you is naturally the same. One cannot say in this case: I love him, but he loves me not. In that case there would be no interaction, meaning: no relations. Unlike the previous type, this type is built on interaction, on mutuality; only then does unity take place, spiritual in this case. This is precisely the difference between liking and loving. I may like someone, but I don’t care what he feels toward me. Liking is a unilateral feeling, love is bilateral: he is in you, you are in him. This is the essence of unity when you and he/she aspire to constantly maintain this unity through constant offering of benefits to each other that can take on the most diverse forms. This is precisely that version of love of which Aristotle wrote.
It should be noted that the last two types of love possess two qualities in common. Firstly, they both exclude Eros; secondly, they ensure the social environment necessary for the individual’s life. When a man loves no one and no thing, and no one loves him, he is no longer a man. He is doomed to perish.
Love as a psycho-physiological concept
The third type of love is relations between man and woman. The first two forms – philopatria and philia – create the necessary environment for the realization of the third form of love: love between man and woman. It should be kept in mind right away that at a certain historical stage all forms and types are intertwined in the sense that not one exists separately from others.
Prior to speaking of love between man and woman, it is necessary to specify first the terms that often produce confusion in reasoning, namely: sexual instinct, sex and sexual love.
Sexual instinct is the innate biological property of opposite sexes that encompasses by far the greater part of the organic world, which also includes man on the biological level. It has its own laws, primarily the law of continuation of species. In the early stages of mankind’s development (note that this “stage” is estimated to have lasted between two and three million years), when love did not yet exist as a phenomenon, it was precisely the sexual instinct that joined men and women for the purpose of realizing the natural task: continuation of species. That was the case in polygamous families, in group marriages and in many other versions of families that are described in relevant literature. In those times the feeling of love for a separate individual did not exist; what existed was the natural attraction of woman and man in general to each other, i.e. the relations between males and females, as in the animal world.
Sex. Formally, the word “sex” also means gender (from the Latin word sexus). In principle the expression “sexual love” could be used a synonym for “gender love.” I don’t know when exactly the word sex became established in European languages, but already in the second half of the 19th century and especially in the 20th century even English-writing philosophers sought to avoid using this word when analyzing love. For example, E. Fromm preferred to speak of “erotic love,” while others wrote of “romantic love.”
This choice of words is not accidental, for the word “sex” has become burdened with negative connotations: lewdness, fornication, debauchery, sodomy. It is precisely in this quality that sex flourishes in today’s world.[4] This is why sex has nothing to do with love.
Neither does it have anything to do with the sexual instinct, which, I repeat, is realized in reproduction. In sex, on the contrary, the partners take care to avoid such a result. Its principal and sole purpose is satisfaction for lust. In sexual acts even the gender of the partner has no importance; hence the roots of homosexuality in the form of gays and lesbians. Certain scientists seek to justify “love” between men or between women by arguing that homosexuals have an innate anomaly, one that is perhaps even embedded in the genes.
Theoretically, this is not impossible: the organic world’s development forces its way through a multitude of anomalies and deviations from the laws of species’ survival. I remind you that of two billion species of organisms that existed on Earth over the ages, today only about two million exist, i.e. only just 0.1% of all species “survived.” All the rest were destroyed through natural means. The anomalous species found themselves on the wrong branches of the evolutionary tree. Even though singular anomalies do exist among the surviving species, from the evolutionary perspective they are doomed.
Homosexual pairs are just such anomalies. What is to be done about them? The issue appears to be very complicated if we consider the knot of ethical, political, democratic and other norms involved. In the West they chose the “democratic way,” giving the homosexuals full freedom to practice fornication. The results are obvious: in all those countries where gays and lesbians received “full license,” growth of the Caucasian population ceased. Of course, this process is also influenced by other social factors, and these factors may even be much stronger than the factor of homosexuality. However, in the historical perspective it is precisely this factor that will prove the single most important one on the strength of its end result: an end to reproduction. If this process is not stopped, mankind will simply die out as a species, same as 99% of the preceding organic world. Nature does not tolerate anomalies; everything in it is regular. Those who stray from this regularity are guaranteed to perish. If mankind still has the instinct of self-preservation, it must develop the optimal mechanism for combating this anomalous, anti-natural deviation. Especially since sex is already forcing its way to new “partners,” namely animals; this type of perversion is winning over increasing numbers of debauchees (it suffices to check out their websites). In normal countries such “sex” is banned by law; in abnormal ones society turns a blind eye to it.
Sex in any form is not just a disease; it is an indicator of the society’s state of morals. Those countries where sex prevails over love are historically doomed; their degradation is inevitable, which, by the way, is already pretty obvious.
Individual sexual love (erotic love, romantic love), as stated already, has nothing to do with sex. However, it differs from both the sexual instinct and even the Eros of ancient Greeks[5] - primarily in its selectivity. In principle, selectivity is already present in the animal world, but there it is unconscious, instinctive. To some degree, selectivity is realized in similar fashion in the early stages of human development. However, in its later stage, in the era of monogamy, it acquires a conscious character – for the reason that will be discussed in the chapter on Family. Here we should simply accept as a fact that sexual instinct turns into sexual love only when the human being starts consciously selecting a concrete partner for himself, and unification with that one person necessarily implies reciprocity. The consequence of this love does not necessarily have to be reproduction, but unlike the sexual instinct, in sexual love the most important thing is not the physical act itself – it is the spiritual kinship of two loving creatures. It is so strong that every separation is experienced as tragedy. The most important thing in sexual love is the conscious choice of partners.
Let us recall that Schopenhauer spelled out the optimal parameters of men and women that work as if under the surface - on the intuitive level - to govern the choice of partners for the creation of “the next generation.” Generalizing, I could say that ultimately man chooses beauty, i.e. form, while woman chooses intelligence, i.e. content, so no matter how long a list one makes of characteristics and merits of the two genders, they will ultimately all become merged in these two categories: intelligence and beauty. However, both Schopenhauer’s parameters and my categories are too general; they are inherent to a very large part of the population, yet a human being only chooses one person. To use Berdyayev’s fortunate expression, it is the promised one who gets chosen, i.e. the one intended by destiny. So how does a human being recognize his destiny?
My answer is rooted in simple logic. From the earliest childhood, ideas about our future loved ones are formed within us. Everything plays a role: the general culture of the nation and the person himself, the family relations between the parents, the concrete environment. At the early stage, the child’s parents are to it the best and handsomest people. As he grows up, he starts comparing his parents to others. If the family is troubled, the child in the future will pretty certainly look for a loved one among people who are not like his parents. That is, the image of the ideal is formed prior to puberty. Subsequently, throughout his life the man will unconsciously be choosing the one person who corresponds to this image.
The ideal is the “model of the loved one.” It has been noted that, speaking especially of appearances, man is inclined to choose one and the same morphological type. Ultimately, we chose one who is like us.[6] We are that whom we choose, not that who chooses us. There is a popular Russian saying: “Love is cruel, you may come to love a goat.” Based on the logic presented above, this phrase will sound very differently: “to love a goat means to be a goat,” or “when your chosen one is a goat, it means a goat you always were and always will be.” This is precisely why already in early youth it is easy to tell who will choose whom.
However, the choice means not merely rejection of others; it also means rejection of oneself, that which is often designated by the word “agape” – self-sacrifice or self-renouncement. I discover this same idea in Hegel’s writings: “Love is in general the consciousness of the unity of myself with another. I am not separate and isolated, but win my self-consciousness only by renouncing my independent existence, and by knowing myself as unity of myself with another and of another with me.”[7]
This means that love is renouncement not only of all others, but to a certain degree (only to a certain degree!) of one’s own self as an independent person (integrity). However, in joining together man and woman as parts of the whole (love) qualitatively mean substantially more that when they were integral elements outside of love. This is clearly seen in the following formula:
First of all, this formula demonstrates the forming of love in the non-structured WE. It reflects love in its initial stage: in the form of Eros in the meaning of sexual love.[8] This type of relations is built on love-passion, in which sexual love predominates. However one may feel about it, even the formal unity of two people on the strength of the law of love enhances the lovers’ potentials, i.e. the qualities of their personalities. This modern version of erotic love is the beginning of man’s improvement. A man in love is always richer, more multifaceted, more kind, etc., than a man who is not in love. Love, even as Eros, in any event improves the qualities of individuals.
Nonetheless, this type of love, which can be designated as love-Eros, has two very major shortcomings. One is obvious: continuation of species is not implied. It is not exactly the case of love for the sake of love, or two people for themselves. This type of love is beneficial to society in any case, for it improves people’s qualities. However, it lacks completeness, lacks continuation, lacks development. Its second shortcoming is this: this type of love is not structured; this love is up in the clouds, it lacks a social foundation. It is precisely due to the absence of this foundation that love-Eros often resulted in tragedy, and still does today. In contemporary conditions, some lovers find support in the form of the so-called civil union – something like an ersatz family. Practice shows that such “unions” fairly quickly cross over into the stage of co-habiting, i.e. Eros transforms into elementary sex and no longer has anything to do with love. Doubtlessly some exceptions can be pointed out, but they are extremely rare. Therefore, the only stable structure for the preservation and development of love-Eros is the monogamous family. The reunification with love required a very long period of history.
* * *
At this point I want to halt my reasoning about love between man and woman, even though several important points remain to be clarified. It is just that for obviousness’ sake, it is more convenient to examine these points while using the example of the most stable form of love: love within the framework of family. I will revisit this topic in the chapter about Family.
Moreover, it is necessary first to sort out the essence differences between man and woman. This topic is hazardous, by the way, especially when it is raised by a man.
[1] Hegel. The Philosophical Propaedeutic, 86.
[2] This all takes place in accordance with increased complexity in any sphere of being, whether it is the inorganic or the organic world. The more complex systems are considered more advanced than the less complex ones. All these things are described in detail in the theory of complexity and in many other conceptions of development.
[3] Hegel. Jenaer Realphilosophie, 190.
[4] By the way: during the early period of “perestroika” in the USSR, during a “tele-bridge” between the USA and the Soviet Union, one Russian woman declared angrily that unlike the sexually depraved United States, in Russia there was “no sex”; this was met by uproarious laughter from the Americans. This woman was perfectly correct, however: sex as fornication was indeed nonexistent in the Soviet Union. If ever there were some episodic outbursts of group sex, the participants were subjected to criminal prosecution.
[5] In the Eros of Antiquity, the woman often had no right of choice; more often that not she could only in fact be an object of love, although there were exceptions, of course.
[6] This regularity manifests itself even in the choice of dogs. To become convinced of this, it suffices to go to a dog show and compare the dogs to their owners.
[7] Hegel. Philosophy of Right, 139.
[8] I don’t mean in this case that type of non-marital relations between man and woman, characteristic of the capitalist countries of the West, known under the name of boy/girl-friending. Some try to label this type of relations as family, even though the name itself cries out against such designation: friendship. Of course it isn’t any kind of family, since usually the boyfriend and the girlfriend don’t even have a household in common. In the vast majority of cases this type of relations, best described with the word co-habitation, implies no children.
On Love, Family, and the State
(Philosophical-sociological Essay)