philosophy essay about love

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This essay focuses on personal love, or the love of particular persons as such. Part of the philosophical task in understanding personal love is to distinguish the various kinds of personal love. For example, the way in which I love my wife is seemingly very different from the way I love my mother, my child, and my friend. This task has typically proceeded hand-in-hand with philosophical analyses of these kinds of personal love, analyses that in part respond to various puzzles about love. Can love be justified? If so, how? What is the value of personal love? What impact does love have on the autonomy of both the lover and the beloved?

1. Preliminary Distinctions

2. love as union, 3. love as robust concern, 4.1 love as appraisal of value, 4.2 love as bestowal of value, 4.3 an intermediate position, 5.1 love as emotion proper, 5.2 love as emotion complex, 6. the value and justification of love, other internet resources, related entries.

In ordinary conversations, we often say things like the following:

• I love chocolate (or skiing).
• I love doing philosophy (or being a father).
• I love my dog (or cat).
• I love my wife (or mother or child or friend).

However, what is meant by ‘love’ differs from case to case. (1) may be understood as meaning merely that I like this thing or activity very much. In (2) the implication is typically that I find engaging in a certain activity or being a certain kind of person to be a part of my identity and so what makes my life worth living; I might just as well say that I value these. By contrast, (3) and (4) seem to indicate a mode of concern that cannot be neatly assimilated to anything else. Thus, we might understand the sort of love at issue in (4) to be, roughly, a matter of caring about another person as the person she is, for her own sake. (Accordingly, (3) may be understood as a kind of deficient mode of the sort of love we typically reserve for persons.) Philosophical accounts of love have focused primarily on the sort of personal love at issue in (4); such personal love will be the focus here (though see Frankfurt (1999) and Jaworska & Wonderly (2017) for attempts to provide a more general account that applies to non-persons as well).

Even within personal love, philosophers from the ancient Greeks on have traditionally distinguished three notions that can properly be called “love”: eros , agape , and philia . It will be useful to distinguish these three and say something about how contemporary discussions typically blur these distinctions (sometimes intentionally so) or use them for other purposes.

‘ Eros ’ originally meant love in the sense of a kind of passionate desire for an object, typically sexual passion (Liddell et al., 1940). Nygren (1953a,b) describes eros as the “‘love of desire,’ or acquisitive love” and therefore as egocentric (1953b, p. 89). Soble (1989b, 1990) similarly describes eros as “selfish” and as a response to the merits of the beloved—especially the beloved’s goodness or beauty. What is evident in Soble’s description of eros is a shift away from the sexual: to love something in the “erosic” sense (to use the term Soble coins) is to love it in a way that, by being responsive to its merits, is dependent on reasons. Such an understanding of eros is encouraged by Plato’s discussion in the Symposium , in which Socrates understands sexual desire to be a deficient response to physical beauty in particular, a response which ought to be developed into a response to the beauty of a person’s soul and, ultimately, into a response to the form, Beauty.

Soble’s intent in understanding eros to be a reason-dependent sort of love is to articulate a sharp contrast with agape , a sort of love that does not respond to the value of its object. ‘ Agape ’ has come, primarily through the Christian tradition, to mean the sort of love God has for us persons, as well as our love for God and, by extension, of our love for each other—a kind of brotherly love. In the paradigm case of God’s love for us, agape is “spontaneous and unmotivated,” revealing not that we merit that love but that God’s nature is love (Nygren 1953b, p. 85). Rather than responding to antecedent value in its object, agape instead is supposed to create value in its object and therefore to initiate our fellowship with God (pp. 87–88). Consequently, Badhwar (2003, p. 58) characterizes agape as “independent of the loved individual’s fundamental characteristics as the particular person she is”; and Soble (1990, p. 5) infers that agape , in contrast to eros , is therefore not reason dependent but is rationally “incomprehensible,” admitting at best of causal or historical explanations. [ 1 ]

Finally, ‘ philia ’ originally meant a kind of affectionate regard or friendly feeling towards not just one’s friends but also possibly towards family members, business partners, and one’s country at large (Liddell et al., 1940; Cooper, 1977). Like eros , philia is generally (but not universally) understood to be responsive to (good) qualities in one’s beloved. This similarity between eros and philia has led Thomas (1987) to wonder whether the only difference between romantic love and friendship is the sexual involvement of the former—and whether that is adequate to account for the real differences we experience. The distinction between eros and philia becomes harder to draw with Soble’s attempt to diminish the importance of the sexual in eros (1990).

Maintaining the distinctions among eros , agape , and philia becomes even more difficult when faced with contemporary theories of love (including romantic love) and friendship. For, as discussed below, some theories of romantic love understand it along the lines of the agape tradition as creating value in the beloved (cf. Section 4.2 ), and other accounts of romantic love treat sexual activity as merely the expression of what otherwise looks very much like friendship.

Given the focus here on personal love, Christian conceptions of God’s love for persons (and vice versa ) will be omitted, and the distinction between eros and philia will be blurred—as it typically is in contemporary accounts. Instead, the focus here will be on these contemporary understandings of love, including romantic love, understood as an attitude we take towards other persons. [ 2 ]

In providing an account of love, philosophical analyses must be careful to distinguish love from other positive attitudes we take towards persons, such as liking. Intuitively, love differs from such attitudes as liking in terms of its “depth,” and the problem is to elucidate the kind of “depth” we intuitively find love to have. Some analyses do this in part by providing thin conceptions of what liking amounts to. Thus, Singer (1991) and Brown (1987) understand liking to be a matter of desiring, an attitude that at best involves its object having only instrumental (and not intrinsic) value. Yet this seems inadequate: surely there are attitudes towards persons intermediate between having a desire with a person as its object and loving the person. I can care about a person for her own sake and not merely instrumentally, and yet such caring does not on its own amount to (non-deficiently) loving her, for it seems I can care about my dog in exactly the same way, a kind of caring which is insufficiently personal for love.

It is more common to distinguish loving from liking via the intuition that the “depth” of love is to be explained in terms of a notion of identification: to love someone is somehow to identify yourself with him, whereas no such notion of identification is involved in liking. As Nussbaum puts it, “The choice between one potential love and another can feel, and be, like a choice of a way of life, a decision to dedicate oneself to these values rather than these” (1990, p. 328); liking clearly does not have this sort of “depth” (see also Helm 2010; Bagley 2015). Whether love involves some kind of identification, and if so exactly how to understand such identification, is a central bone of contention among the various analyses of love. In particular, Whiting (2013) argues that the appeal to a notion of identification distorts our understanding of the sort of motivation love can provide, for taken literally it implies that love motivates through self -interest rather than through the beloved’s interests. Thus, Whiting argues, central to love is the possibility that love takes the lover “outside herself”, potentially forgetting herself in being moved directly by the interests of the beloved. (Of course, we need not take the notion of identification literally in this way: in identifying with one’s beloved, one might have a concern for one’s beloved that is analogous to one’s concern for oneself; see Helm 2010.)

Another common way to distinguish love from other personal attitudes is in terms of a distinctive kind of evaluation, which itself can account for love’s “depth.” Again, whether love essentially involves a distinctive kind of evaluation, and if so how to make sense of that evaluation, is hotly disputed. Closely related to questions of evaluation are questions of justification: can we justify loving or continuing to love a particular person, and if so, how? For those who think the justification of love is possible, it is common to understand such justification in terms of evaluation, and the answers here affect various accounts’ attempts to make sense of the kind of constancy or commitment love seems to involve, as well as the sense in which love is directed at particular individuals.

In what follows, theories of love are tentatively and hesitantly classified into four types: love as union, love as robust concern, love as valuing, and love as an emotion. It should be clear, however, that particular theories classified under one type sometimes also include, without contradiction, ideas central to other types. The types identified here overlap to some extent, and in some cases classifying particular theories may involve excessive pigeonholing. (Such cases are noted below.) Part of the classificatory problem is that many accounts of love are quasi-reductionistic, understanding love in terms of notions like affection, evaluation, attachment, etc., which themselves never get analyzed. Even when these accounts eschew explicitly reductionistic language, very often little attempt is made to show how one such “aspect” of love is conceptually connected to others. As a result, there is no clear and obvious way to classify particular theories, let alone identify what the relevant classes should be.

The union view claims that love consists in the formation of (or the desire to form) some significant kind of union, a “we.” A central task for union theorists, therefore, is to spell out just what such a “we” comes to—whether it is literally a new entity in the world somehow composed of the lover and the beloved, or whether it is merely metaphorical. Variants of this view perhaps go back to Aristotle (cf. Sherman 1993) and can also be found in Montaigne ([E]) and Hegel (1997); contemporary proponents include Solomon (1981, 1988), Scruton (1986), Nozick (1989), Fisher (1990), and Delaney (1996).

Scruton, writing in particular about romantic love, claims that love exists “just so soon as reciprocity becomes community: that is, just so soon as all distinction between my interests and your interests is overcome” (1986, p. 230). The idea is that the union is a union of concern, so that when I act out of that concern it is not for my sake alone or for your sake alone but for our sake. Fisher (1990) holds a similar, but somewhat more moderate view, claiming that love is a partial fusion of the lovers’ cares, concerns, emotional responses, and actions. What is striking about both Scruton and Fisher is the claim that love requires the actual union of the lovers’ concerns, for it thus becomes clear that they conceive of love not so much as an attitude we take towards another but as a relationship: the distinction between your interests and mine genuinely disappears only when we together come to have shared cares, concerns, etc., and my merely having a certain attitude towards you is not enough for love. This provides content to the notion of a “we” as the (metaphorical?) subject of these shared cares and concerns, and as that for whose sake we act.

Solomon (1988) offers a union view as well, though one that tries “to make new sense out of ‘love’ through a literal rather than metaphoric sense of the ‘fusion’ of two souls” (p. 24, cf. Solomon 1981; however, it is unclear exactly what he means by a “soul” here and so how love can be a “literal” fusion of two souls). What Solomon has in mind is the way in which, through love, the lovers redefine their identities as persons in terms of the relationship: “Love is the concentration and the intensive focus of mutual definition on a single individual, subjecting virtually every personal aspect of one’s self to this process” (1988, p. 197). The result is that lovers come to share the interests, roles, virtues, and so on that constitute what formerly was two individual identities but now has become a shared identity, and they do so in part by each allowing the other to play an important role in defining his own identity.

Nozick (1989) offers a union view that differs from those of Scruton, Fisher, and Solomon in that Nozick thinks that what is necessary for love is merely the desire to form a “we,” together with the desire that your beloved reciprocates. Nonetheless, he claims that this “we” is “a new entity in the world…created by a new web of relationships between [the lovers] which makes them no longer separate” (p. 70). In spelling out this web of relationships, Nozick appeals to the lovers “pooling” not only their well-beings, in the sense that the well-being of each is tied up with that of the other, but also their autonomy, in that “each transfers some previous rights to make certain decisions unilaterally into a joint pool” (p. 71). In addition, Nozick claims, the lovers each acquire a new identity as a part of the “we,” a new identity constituted by their (a) wanting to be perceived publicly as a couple, (b) their attending to their pooled well-being, and (c) their accepting a “certain kind of division of labor” (p. 72):

A person in a we might find himself coming across something interesting to read yet leaving it for the other person, not because he himself would not be interested in it but because the other would be more interested, and one of them reading it is sufficient for it to be registered by the wider identity now shared, the we . [ 3 ]

Opponents of the union view have seized on claims like this as excessive: union theorists, they claim, take too literally the ontological commitments of this notion of a “we.” This leads to two specific criticisms of the union view. The first is that union views do away with individual autonomy. Autonomy, it seems, involves a kind of independence on the part of the autonomous agent, such that she is in control over not only what she does but also who she is, as this is constituted by her interests, values, concerns, etc. However, union views, by doing away with a clear distinction between your interests and mine, thereby undermine this sort of independence and so undermine the autonomy of the lovers. If autonomy is a part of the individual’s good, then, on the union view, love is to this extent bad; so much the worse for the union view (Singer 1994; Soble 1997). Moreover, Singer (1994) argues that a necessary part of having your beloved be the object of your love is respect for your beloved as the particular person she is, and this requires respecting her autonomy.

Union theorists have responded to this objection in several ways. Nozick (1989) seems to think of a loss of autonomy in love as a desirable feature of the sort of union lovers can achieve. Fisher (1990), somewhat more reluctantly, claims that the loss of autonomy in love is an acceptable consequence of love. Yet without further argument these claims seem like mere bullet biting. Solomon (1988, pp. 64ff) describes this “tension” between union and autonomy as “the paradox of love.” However, this a view that Soble (1997) derides: merely to call it a paradox, as Solomon does, is not to face up to the problem.

The second criticism involves a substantive view concerning love. Part of what it is to love someone, these opponents say, is to have concern for him for his sake. However, union views make such concern unintelligible and eliminate the possibility of both selfishness and self-sacrifice, for by doing away with the distinction between my interests and your interests they have in effect turned your interests into mine and vice versa (Soble 1997; see also Blum 1980, 1993). Some advocates of union views see this as a point in their favor: we need to explain how it is I can have concern for people other than myself, and the union view apparently does this by understanding your interests to be part of my own. And Delaney, responding to an apparent tension between our desire to be loved unselfishly (for fear of otherwise being exploited) and our desire to be loved for reasons (which presumably are attractive to our lover and hence have a kind of selfish basis), says (1996, p. 346):

Given my view that the romantic ideal is primarily characterized by a desire to achieve a profound consolidation of needs and interests through the formation of a we , I do not think a little selfishness of the sort described should pose a worry to either party.

The objection, however, lies precisely in this attempt to explain my concern for my beloved egoistically. As Whiting (1991, p. 10) puts it, such an attempt “strikes me as unnecessary and potentially objectionable colonization”: in love, I ought to be concerned with my beloved for her sake, and not because I somehow get something out of it. (This can be true whether my concern with my beloved is merely instrumental to my good or whether it is partly constitutive of my good.)

Although Whiting’s and Soble’s criticisms here succeed against the more radical advocates of the union view, they in part fail to acknowledge the kernel of truth to be gleaned from the idea of union. Whiting’s way of formulating the second objection in terms of an unnecessary egoism in part points to a way out: we persons are in part social creatures, and love is one profound mode of that sociality. Indeed, part of the point of union accounts is to make sense of this social dimension: to make sense of a way in which we can sometimes identify ourselves with others not merely in becoming interdependent with them (as Singer 1994, p. 165, suggests, understanding ‘interdependence’ to be a kind of reciprocal benevolence and respect) but rather in making who we are as persons be constituted in part by those we love (cf., e.g., Rorty 1986/1993; Nussbaum 1990).

Along these lines, Friedman (1998), taking her inspiration in part from Delaney (1996), argues that we should understand the sort of union at issue in love to be a kind of federation of selves:

On the federation model, a third unified entity is constituted by the interaction of the lovers, one which involves the lovers acting in concert across a range of conditions and for a range of purposes. This concerted action, however, does not erase the existence of the two lovers as separable and separate agents with continuing possibilities for the exercise of their own respective agencies. [p. 165]

Given that on this view the lovers do not give up their individual identities, there is no principled reason why the union view cannot make sense of the lover’s concern for her beloved for his sake. [ 4 ] Moreover, Friedman argues, once we construe union as federation, we can see that autonomy is not a zero-sum game; rather, love can both directly enhance the autonomy of each and promote the growth of various skills, like realistic and critical self-evaluation, that foster autonomy.

Nonetheless, this federation model is not without its problems—problems that affect other versions of the union view as well. For if the federation (or the “we”, as on Nozick’s view) is understood as a third entity, we need a clearer account than has been given of its ontological status and how it comes to be. Relevant here is the literature on shared intention and plural subjects. Gilbert (1989, 1996, 2000) has argued that we should take quite seriously the existence of a plural subject as an entity over and above its constituent members. Others, such as Tuomela (1984, 1995), Searle (1990), and Bratman (1999) are more cautious, treating such talk of “us” having an intention as metaphorical.

As this criticism of the union view indicates, many find caring about your beloved for her sake to be a part of what it is to love her. The robust concern view of love takes this to be the central and defining feature of love (cf. Taylor 1976; Newton-Smith 1989; Soble 1990, 1997; LaFollette 1996; Frankfurt 1999; White 2001). As Taylor puts it:

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. [p. 157]

In conceiving of my love for you as constituted by my concern for you for your sake, the robust concern view rejects the idea, central to the union view, that love is to be understood in terms of the (literal or metaphorical) creation of a “we”: I am the one who has this concern for you, though it is nonetheless disinterested and so not egoistic insofar as it is for your sake rather than for my own. [ 5 ]

At the heart of the robust concern view is the idea that love “is neither affective nor cognitive. It is volitional” (Frankfurt 1999, p. 129; see also Martin 2015). Frankfurt continues:

That a person cares about or that he loves something has less to do with how things make him feel, or with his opinions about them, than with the more or less stable motivational structures that shape his preferences and that guide and limit his conduct.

This account analyzes caring about someone for her sake as a matter of being motivated in certain ways, in part as a response to what happens to one’s beloved. Of course, to understand love in terms of desires is not to leave other emotional responses out in the cold, for these emotions should be understood as consequences of desires. Thus, just as I can be emotionally crushed when one of my strong desires is disappointed, so too I can be emotionally crushed when things similarly go badly for my beloved. In this way Frankfurt (1999) tacitly, and White (2001) more explicitly, acknowledge the way in which my caring for my beloved for her sake results in my identity being transformed through her influence insofar as I become vulnerable to things that happen to her.

Not all robust concern theorists seem to accept this line, however; in particular, Taylor (1976) and Soble (1990) seem to have a strongly individualistic conception of persons that prevents my identity being bound up with my beloved in this sort of way, a kind of view that may seem to undermine the intuitive “depth” that love seems to have. (For more on this point, see Rorty 1986/1993.) In the middle is Stump (2006), who follows Aquinas in understanding love to involve not only the desire for your beloved’s well-being but also a desire for a certain kind of relationship with your beloved—as a parent or spouse or sibling or priest or friend, for example—a relationship within which you share yourself with and connect yourself to your beloved. [ 6 ]

One source of worry about the robust concern view is that it involves too passive an understanding of one’s beloved (Ebels-Duggan 2008). The thought is that on the robust concern view the lover merely tries to discover what the beloved’s well-being consists in and then acts to promote that, potentially by thwarting the beloved’s own efforts when the lover thinks those efforts would harm her well-being. This, however, would be disrespectful and demeaning, not the sort of attitude that love is. What robust concern views seem to miss, Ebels-Duggan suggests, is the way love involves interacting agents, each with a capacity for autonomy the recognition and engagement with which is an essential part of love. In response, advocates of the robust concern view might point out that promoting someone’s well-being normally requires promoting her autonomy (though they may maintain that this need not always be true: that paternalism towards a beloved can sometimes be justified and appropriate as an expression of one’s love). Moreover, we might plausibly think, it is only through the exercise of one’s autonomy that one can define one’s own well-being as a person, so that a lover’s failure to respect the beloved’s autonomy would be a failure to promote her well-being and therefore not an expression of love, contrary to what Ebels-Duggan suggests. Consequently, it might seem, robust concern views can counter this objection by offering an enriched conception of what it is to be a person and so of the well-being of persons.

Another source of worry is that the robust concern view offers too thin a conception of love. By emphasizing robust concern, this view understands other features we think characteristic of love, such as one’s emotional responsiveness to one’s beloved, to be the effects of that concern rather than constituents of it. Thus Velleman (1999) argues that robust concern views, by understanding love merely as a matter of aiming at a particular end (viz., the welfare of one’s beloved), understand love to be merely conative. However, he claims, love can have nothing to do with desires, offering as a counterexample the possibility of loving a troublemaking relation whom you do not want to be with, whose well being you do not want to promote, etc. Similarly, Badhwar (2003) argues that such a “teleological” view of love makes it mysterious how “we can continue to love someone long after death has taken him beyond harm or benefit” (p. 46). Moreover Badhwar argues, if love is essentially a desire, then it implies that we lack something; yet love does not imply this and, indeed, can be felt most strongly at times when we feel our lives most complete and lacking in nothing. Consequently, Velleman and Badhwar conclude, love need not involve any desire or concern for the well-being of one’s beloved.

This conclusion, however, seems too hasty, for such examples can be accommodated within the robust concern view. Thus, the concern for your relative in Velleman’s example can be understood to be present but swamped by other, more powerful desires to avoid him. Indeed, keeping the idea that you want to some degree to benefit him, an idea Velleman rejects, seems to be essential to understanding the conceptual tension between loving someone and not wanting to help him, a tension Velleman does not fully acknowledge. Similarly, continued love for someone who has died can be understood on the robust concern view as parasitic on the former love you had for him when he was still alive: your desires to benefit him get transformed, through your subsequent understanding of the impossibility of doing so, into wishes. [ 7 ] Finally, the idea of concern for your beloved’s well-being need not imply the idea that you lack something, for such concern can be understood in terms of the disposition to be vigilant for occasions when you can come to his aid and consequently to have the relevant occurrent desires. All of this seems fully compatible with the robust concern view.

One might also question whether Velleman and Badhwar make proper use of their examples of loving your meddlesome relation or someone who has died. For although we can understand these as genuine cases of love, they are nonetheless deficient cases and ought therefore be understood as parasitic on the standard cases. Readily to accommodate such deficient cases of love into a philosophical analysis as being on a par with paradigm cases, and to do so without some special justification, is dubious.

Nonetheless, the robust concern view as it stands does not seem properly able to account for the intuitive “depth” of love and so does not seem properly to distinguish loving from liking. Although, as noted above, the robust concern view can begin to make some sense of the way in which the lover’s identity is altered by the beloved, it understands this only an effect of love, and not as a central part of what love consists in.

This vague thought is nicely developed by Wonderly (2017), who emphasizes that in addition to the sort of disinterested concern for another that is central to robust-concern accounts of love, an essential part of at least romantic love is the idea that in loving someone I must find them to be not merely important for their own sake but also important to me . Wonderly (2017) fleshes out what this “importance to me” involves in terms of the idea of attachment (developed in Wonderly 2016) that she argues can make sense of the intimacy and depth of love from within what remains fundamentally a robust-concern account. [ 8 ]

4. Love as Valuing

A third kind of view of love understands love to be a distinctive mode of valuing a person. As the distinction between eros and agape in Section 1 indicates, there are at least two ways to construe this in terms of whether the lover values the beloved because she is valuable, or whether the beloved comes to be valuable to the lover as a result of her loving him. The former view, which understands the lover as appraising the value of the beloved in loving him, is the topic of Section 4.1 , whereas the latter view, which understands her as bestowing value on him, will be discussed in Section 4.2 .

Velleman (1999, 2008) offers an appraisal view of love, understanding love to be fundamentally a matter of acknowledging and responding in a distinctive way to the value of the beloved. (For a very different appraisal view of love, see Kolodny 2003.) Understanding this more fully requires understanding both the kind of value of the beloved to which one responds and the distinctive kind of response to such value that love is. Nonetheless, it should be clear that what makes an account be an appraisal view of love is not the mere fact that love is understood to involve appraisal; many other accounts do so, and it is typical of robust concern accounts, for example (cf. the quote from Taylor above , Section 3 ). Rather, appraisal views are distinctive in understanding love to consist in that appraisal.

In articulating the kind of value love involves, Velleman, following Kant, distinguishes dignity from price. To have a price , as the economic metaphor suggests, is to have a value that can be compared to the value of other things with prices, such that it is intelligible to exchange without loss items of the same value. By contrast, to have dignity is to have a value such that comparisons of relative value become meaningless. Material goods are normally understood to have prices, but we persons have dignity: no substitution of one person for another can preserve exactly the same value, for something of incomparable worth would be lost (and gained) in such a substitution.

On this Kantian view, our dignity as persons consists in our rational nature: our capacity both to be actuated by reasons that we autonomously provide ourselves in setting our own ends and to respond appropriately to the intrinsic values we discover in the world. Consequently, one important way in which we exercise our rational natures is to respond with respect to the dignity of other persons (a dignity that consists in part in their capacity for respect): respect just is the required minimal response to the dignity of persons. What makes a response to a person be that of respect, Velleman claims, still following Kant, is that it “arrests our self-love” and thereby prevents us from treating him as a means to our ends (p. 360).

Given this, Velleman claims that love is similarly a response to the dignity of persons, and as such it is the dignity of the object of our love that justifies that love. However, love and respect are different kinds of responses to the same value. For love arrests not our self-love but rather

our tendencies toward emotional self-protection from another person, tendencies to draw ourselves in and close ourselves off from being affected by him. Love disarms our emotional defenses; it makes us vulnerable to the other. [1999, p. 361]

This means that the concern, attraction, sympathy, etc. that we normally associate with love are not constituents of love but are rather its normal effects, and love can remain without them (as in the case of the love for a meddlesome relative one cannot stand being around). Moreover, this provides Velleman with a clear account of the intuitive “depth” of love: it is essentially a response to persons as such, and to say that you love your dog is therefore to be confused.

Of course, we do not respond with love to the dignity of every person we meet, nor are we somehow required to: love, as the disarming of our emotional defenses in a way that makes us especially vulnerable to another, is the optional maximal response to others’ dignity. What, then, explains the selectivity of love—why I love some people and not others? The answer lies in the contingent fit between the way some people behaviorally express their dignity as persons and the way I happen to respond to those expressions by becoming emotionally vulnerable to them. The right sort of fit makes someone “lovable” by me (1999, p. 372), and my responding with love in these cases is a matter of my “really seeing” this person in a way that I fail to do with others who do not fit with me in this way. By ‘lovable’ here Velleman seems to mean able to be loved, not worthy of being loved, for nothing Velleman says here speaks to a question about the justification of my loving this person rather than that. Rather, what he offers is an explanation of the selectivity of my love, an explanation that as a matter of fact makes my response be that of love rather than mere respect.

This understanding of the selectivity of love as something that can be explained but not justified is potentially troubling. For we ordinarily think we can justify not only my loving you rather than someone else but also and more importantly the constancy of my love: my continuing to love you even as you change in certain fundamental ways (but not others). As Delaney (1996, p. 347) puts the worry about constancy:

while you seem to want it to be true that, were you to become a schmuck, your lover would continue to love you,…you also want it to be the case that your lover would never love a schmuck.

The issue here is not merely that we can offer explanations of the selectivity of my love, of why I do not love schmucks; rather, at issue is the discernment of love, of loving and continuing to love for good reasons as well as of ceasing to love for good reasons. To have these good reasons seems to involve attributing different values to you now rather than formerly or rather than to someone else, yet this is precisely what Velleman denies is the case in making the distinction between love and respect the way he does.

It is also questionable whether Velleman can even explain the selectivity of love in terms of the “fit” between your expressions and my sensitivities. For the relevant sensitivities on my part are emotional sensitivities: the lowering of my emotional defenses and so becoming emotionally vulnerable to you. Thus, I become vulnerable to the harms (or goods) that befall you and so sympathetically feel your pain (or joy). Such emotions are themselves assessable for warrant, and now we can ask why my disappointment that you lost the race is warranted, but my being disappointed that a mere stranger lost would not be warranted. The intuitive answer is that I love you but not him. However, this answer is unavailable to Velleman, because he thinks that what makes my response to your dignity that of love rather than respect is precisely that I feel such emotions, and to appeal to my love in explaining the emotions therefore seems viciously circular.

Although these problems are specific to Velleman’s account, the difficulty can be generalized to any appraisal account of love (such as that offered in Kolodny 2003). For if love is an appraisal, it needs to be distinguished from other forms of appraisal, including our evaluative judgments. On the one hand, to try to distinguish love as an appraisal from other appraisals in terms of love’s having certain effects on our emotional and motivational life (as on Velleman’s account) is unsatisfying because it ignores part of what needs to be explained: why the appraisal of love has these effects and yet judgments with the same evaluative content do not. Indeed, this question is crucial if we are to understand the intuitive “depth” of love, for without an answer to this question we do not understand why love should have the kind of centrality in our lives it manifestly does. [ 9 ] On the other hand, to bundle this emotional component into the appraisal itself would be to turn the view into either the robust concern view ( Section 3 ) or a variant of the emotion view ( Section 5.1 ).

In contrast to Velleman, Singer (1991, 1994, 2009) understands love to be fundamentally a matter of bestowing value on the beloved. To bestow value on another is to project a kind of intrinsic value onto him. Indeed, this fact about love is supposed to distinguish love from liking: “Love is an attitude with no clear objective,” whereas liking is inherently teleological (1991, p. 272). As such, there are no standards of correctness for bestowing such value, and this is how love differs from other personal attitudes like gratitude, generosity, and condescension: “love…confers importance no matter what the object is worth” (p. 273). Consequently, Singer thinks, love is not an attitude that can be justified in any way.

What is it, exactly, to bestow this kind of value on someone? It is, Singer says, a kind of attachment and commitment to the beloved, in which one comes to treat him as an end in himself and so to respond to his ends, interests, concerns, etc. as having value for their own sake. This means in part that the bestowal of value reveals itself “by caring about the needs and interests of the beloved, by wishing to benefit or protect her, by delighting in her achievements,” etc. (p. 270). This sounds very much like the robust concern view, yet the bestowal view differs in understanding such robust concern to be the effect of the bestowal of value that is love rather than itself what constitutes love: in bestowing value on my beloved, I make him be valuable in such a way that I ought to respond with robust concern.

For it to be intelligible that I have bestowed value on someone, I must therefore respond appropriately to him as valuable, and this requires having some sense of what his well-being is and of what affects that well-being positively or negatively. Yet having this sense requires in turn knowing what his strengths and deficiencies are, and this is a matter of appraising him in various ways. Bestowal thus presupposes a kind of appraisal, as a way of “really seeing” the beloved and attending to him. Nonetheless, Singer claims, it is the bestowal that is primary for understanding what love consists in: the appraisal is required only so that the commitment to one’s beloved and his value as thus bestowed has practical import and is not “a blind submission to some unknown being” (1991, p. 272; see also Singer 1994, pp. 139ff).

Singer is walking a tightrope in trying to make room for appraisal in his account of love. Insofar as the account is fundamentally a bestowal account, Singer claims that love cannot be justified, that we bestow the relevant kind of value “gratuitously.” This suggests that love is blind, that it does not matter what our beloved is like, which seems patently false. Singer tries to avoid this conclusion by appealing to the role of appraisal: it is only because we appraise another as having certain virtues and vices that we come to bestow value on him. Yet the “because” here, since it cannot justify the bestowal, is at best a kind of contingent causal explanation. [ 10 ] In this respect, Singer’s account of the selectivity of love is much the same as Velleman’s, and it is liable to the same criticism: it makes unintelligible the way in which our love can be discerning for better or worse reasons. Indeed, this failure to make sense of the idea that love can be justified is a problem for any bestowal view. For either (a) a bestowal itself cannot be justified (as on Singer’s account), in which case the justification of love is impossible, or (b) a bestowal can be justified, in which case it is hard to make sense of value as being bestowed rather than there antecedently in the object as the grounds of that “bestowal.”

More generally, a proponent of the bestowal view needs to be much clearer than Singer is in articulating precisely what a bestowal is. What is the value that I create in a bestowal, and how can my bestowal create it? On a crude Humean view, the answer might be that the value is something projected onto the world through my pro-attitudes, like desire. Yet such a view would be inadequate, since the projected value, being relative to a particular individual, would do no theoretical work, and the account would essentially be a variant of the robust concern view. Moreover, in providing a bestowal account of love, care is needed to distinguish love from other personal attitudes such as admiration and respect: do these other attitudes involve bestowal? If so, how does the bestowal in these cases differ from the bestowal of love? If not, why not, and what is so special about love that requires a fundamentally different evaluative attitude than admiration and respect?

Nonetheless, there is a kernel of truth in the bestowal view: there is surely something right about the idea that love is creative and not merely a response to antecedent value, and accounts of love that understand the kind of evaluation implicit in love merely in terms of appraisal seem to be missing something. Precisely what may be missed will be discussed below in Section 6 .

Perhaps there is room for an understanding of love and its relation to value that is intermediate between appraisal and bestowal accounts. After all, if we think of appraisal as something like perception, a matter of responding to what is out there in the world, and of bestowal as something like action, a matter of doing something and creating something, we should recognize that the responsiveness central to appraisal may itself depend on our active, creative choices. Thus, just as we must recognize that ordinary perception depends on our actively directing our attention and deploying concepts, interpretations, and even arguments in order to perceive things accurately, so too we might think our vision of our beloved’s valuable properties that is love also depends on our actively attending to and interpreting him. Something like this is Jollimore’s view (2011). According to Jollimore, in loving someone we actively attend to his valuable properties in a way that we take to provide us with reasons to treat him preferentially. Although we may acknowledge that others might have such properties even to a greater degree than our beloved does, we do not attend to and appreciate such properties in others in the same way we do those in our beloveds; indeed, we find our appreciation of our beloved’s valuable properties to “silence” our similar appreciation of those in others. (In this way, Jollimore thinks, we can solve the problem of fungibility, discussed below in Section 6 .) Likewise, in perceiving our beloved’s actions and character, we do so through the lens of such an appreciation, which will tend as to “silence” interpretations inconsistent with that appreciation. In this way, love involves finding one’s beloved to be valuable in a way that involves elements of both appraisal (insofar as one must thereby be responsive to valuable properties one’s beloved really has) and bestowal (insofar as through one’s attention and committed appreciation of these properties they come to have special significance for one).

One might object that this conception of love as silencing the special value of others or to negative interpretations of our beloveds is irrational in a way that love is not. For, it might seem, such “silencing” is merely a matter of our blinding ourselves to how things really are. Yet Jollimore claims that this sense in which love is blind is not objectionable, for (a) we can still intellectually recognize the things that love’s vision silences, and (b) there really is no impartial perspective we can take on the values things have, and love is one appropriate sort of partial perspective from which the value of persons can be manifest. Nonetheless, one might wonder about whether that perspective of love itself can be distorted and what the norms are in terms of which such distortions are intelligible. Furthermore, it may seem that Jollimore’s attempt to reconcile appraisal and bestowal fails to appreciate the underlying metaphysical difficulty: appraisal is a response to value that is antecedently there, whereas bestowal is the creation of value that was not antecedently there. Consequently, it might seem, appraisal and bestowal are mutually exclusive and cannot be reconciled in the way Jollimore hopes.

Whereas Jollimore tries to combine separate elements of appraisal and of bestowal in a single account, Helm (2010) and Bagley (2015) offer accounts that reject the metaphysical presupposition that values must be either prior to love (as with appraisal) or posterior to love (as with bestowal), instead understanding the love and the values to emerge simultaneously. Thus, Helm presents a detailed account of valuing in terms of the emotions, arguing that while we can understand individual emotions as appraisals , responding to values already their in their objects, these values are bestowed on those objects via broad, holistic patterns of emotions. How this amounts to an account of love will be discussed in Section 5.2 , below. Bagley (2015) instead appeals to a metaphor of improvisation, arguing that just as jazz musicians jointly make determinate the content of their musical ideas through on-going processes of their expression, so too lovers jointly engage in “deep improvisation”, thereby working out of their values and identities through the on-going process of living their lives together. These values are thus something the lovers jointly construct through the process of recognizing and responding to those very values. To love someone is thus to engage with them as partners in such “deep improvisation”. (This account is similar to Helm (2008, 2010)’s account of plural agency, which he uses to provide an account of friendship and other loving relationships; see the discussion of shared activity in the entry on friendship .)

5. Emotion Views

Given these problems with the accounts of love as valuing, perhaps we should turn to the emotions. For emotions just are responses to objects that combine evaluation, motivation, and a kind of phenomenology, all central features of the attitude of love.

Many accounts of love claim that it is an emotion; these include: Wollheim 1984, Rorty 1986/1993, Brown 1987, Hamlyn 1989, Baier 1991, and Badhwar 2003. [ 11 ] Thus, Hamlyn (1989, p. 219) says:

It would not be a plausible move to defend any theory of the emotions to which love and hate seemed exceptions by saying that love and hate are after all not emotions. I have heard this said, but it does seem to me a desperate move to make. If love and hate are not emotions what is?

The difficulty with this claim, as Rorty (1980) argues, is that the word, ‘emotion,’ does not seem to pick out a homogeneous collection of mental states, and so various theories claiming that love is an emotion mean very different things. Consequently, what are here labeled “emotion views” are divided into those that understand love to be a particular kind of evaluative-cum-motivational response to an object, whether that response is merely occurrent or dispositional (‘emotions proper,’ see Section 5.1 , below), and those that understand love to involve a collection of related and interconnected emotions proper (‘emotion complexes,’ see Section 5.2 , below).

An emotion proper is a kind of “evaluative-cum-motivational response to an object”; what does this mean? Emotions are generally understood to have several objects. The target of an emotion is that at which the emotion is directed: if I am afraid or angry at you, then you are the target. In responding to you with fear or anger, I am implicitly evaluating you in a particular way, and this evaluation—called the formal object —is the kind of evaluation of the target that is distinctive of a particular emotion type. Thus, in fearing you, I implicitly evaluate you as somehow dangerous, whereas in being angry at you I implicitly evaluate you as somehow offensive. Yet emotions are not merely evaluations of their targets; they in part motivate us to behave in certain ways, both rationally (by motivating action to avoid the danger) and arationally (via certain characteristic expressions, such as slamming a door out of anger). Moreover, emotions are generally understood to involve a phenomenological component, though just how to understand the characteristic “feel” of an emotion and its relation to the evaluation and motivation is hotly disputed. Finally, emotions are typically understood to be passions: responses that we feel imposed on us as if from the outside, rather than anything we actively do. (For more on the philosophy of emotions, see entry on emotion .)

What then are we saying when we say that love is an emotion proper? According to Brown (1987, p. 14), 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.” He spells this out by saying 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 (pp. 106–7). These qualities, which include historical and relational qualities, are evaluated in love as worthwhile. [ 12 ] All of this seems aimed at spelling out what love’s formal object is, a task that is fundamental to understanding love as an emotion proper. Thus, Brown seems to say that love’s formal object is just being worthwhile (or, given his examples, perhaps: worthwhile as a person), and he resists being any more specific than this in order to preserve the open-endedness of love. Hamlyn (1989) offers a similar account, saying (p. 228):

With love the difficulty is to find anything of this kind [i.e., a formal object] which is uniquely appropriate to love. My thesis is that there is nothing of this kind that must be so, and that this differentiates it and hate from the other emotions.

Hamlyn goes on to suggest that love and hate might be primordial emotions, a kind of positive or negative “feeling towards,” presupposed by all other emotions. [ 13 ]

The trouble with these accounts of love as an emotion proper is that they provide too thin a conception of love. In Hamlyn’s case, love is conceived as a fairly generic pro-attitude, rather than as the specific kind of distinctively personal attitude discussed here. In Brown’s case, spelling out the formal object of love as simply being worthwhile (as a person) fails to distinguish love from other evaluative responses like admiration and respect. Part of the problem seems to be the rather simple account of what an emotion is that Brown and Hamlyn use as their starting point: if love is an emotion, then the understanding of what an emotion is must be enriched considerably to accommodate love. Yet it is not at all clear whether the idea of an “emotion proper” can be adequately enriched so as to do so. As Pismenny & Prinz (2017) point out, love seems to be too varied both in its ground and in the sort of experience it involves to be capturable by a single emotion.

The emotion complex view, which understands love to be a complex emotional attitude towards another person, may initially seem to hold out great promise to overcome the problems of alternative types of views. By articulating the emotional interconnections between persons, it could offer a satisfying account of the “depth” of love without the excesses of the union view and without the overly narrow teleological focus of the robust concern view; and because these emotional interconnections are themselves evaluations, it could offer an understanding of love as simultaneously evaluative, without needing to specify a single formal object of love. However, the devil is in the details.

Rorty (1986/1993) does not try to present a complete account of love; rather, she focuses on the idea that “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” (p. 73). In part this means that what makes an attitude be one of love is not the presence of a state that we can point to at a particular time within the lover; rather, love is to be “identified by a characteristic narrative history” (p. 75). Moreover, Rorty argues, the historicity of love involves the lover’s being permanently transformed by loving who he does.

Baier (1991), seeming to pick up on this understanding of love as exhibiting historicity, says (p. 444):

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.

To a certain extent, such emotional interdependence involves feeling sympathetic emotions, so that, for example, I feel disappointed and frustrated on behalf of my beloved when she fails, and joyful when she succeeds. However, Baier insists, love is “more than just the duplication of the emotion of each in a sympathetic echo in the other” (p. 442); the emotional interdependence of the lovers involves also appropriate follow-up responses to the emotional predicaments of your beloved. Two examples Baier gives (pp. 443–44) are a feeling of “mischievous delight” at your beloved’s temporary bafflement, and amusement at her embarrassment. The idea is that in a loving relationship your beloved gives you permission to feel such emotions when no one else is permitted to do so, and a condition of her granting you that permission is that you feel these emotions “tenderly.” Moreover, you ought to respond emotionally to your beloved’s emotional responses to you: by feeling hurt when she is indifferent to you, for example. All of these foster the sort of emotional interdependence Baier is after—a kind of intimacy you have with your beloved.

Badhwar (2003, p. 46) similarly understands love to be a matter of “one’s overall emotional orientation towards a person—the complex of perceptions, thoughts, and feelings”; as such, love is a matter of having a certain “character structure.” Central to this complex emotional orientation, Badhwar thinks, is what she calls the “look of love”: “an ongoing [emotional] affirmation of the loved object as worthy of existence…for her own sake” (p. 44), an affirmation that involves taking pleasure in your beloved’s well-being. Moreover, Badhwar claims, the look of love also provides to the beloved reliable testimony concerning the quality of the beloved’s character and actions (p. 57).

There is surely something very right about the idea that love, as an attitude central to deeply personal relationships, should not be understood as a state that can simply come and go. Rather, as the emotion complex view insists, the complexity of love is to be found in the historical patterns of one’s emotional responsiveness to one’s beloved—a pattern that also projects into the future. Indeed, as suggested above, the kind of emotional interdependence that results from this complex pattern can seem to account for the intuitive “depth” of love as fully interwoven into one’s emotional sense of oneself. And it seems to make some headway in understanding the complex phenomenology of love: love can at times be a matter of intense pleasure in the presence of one’s beloved, yet it can at other times involve frustration, exasperation, anger, and hurt as a manifestation of the complexities and depth of the relationships it fosters.

This understanding of love as constituted by a history of emotional interdependence enables emotion complex views to say something interesting about the impact love has on the lover’s identity. This is partly Rorty’s point (1986/1993) in her discussion of the historicity of love ( above ). Thus, she argues, one important feature of such historicity is that love is “ dynamically permeable ” in that the lover is continually “changed by loving” such that these changes “tend to ramify through a person’s character” (p. 77). Through such dynamic permeability, love transforms the identity of the lover in a way that can sometimes foster the continuity of the love, as each lover continually changes in response to the changes in the other. [ 14 ] Indeed, Rorty concludes, love should be understood in terms of “a characteristic narrative history” (p. 75) that results from such dynamic permeability. It should be clear, however, that the mere fact of dynamic permeability need not result in the love’s continuing: nothing about the dynamics of a relationship requires that the characteristic narrative history project into the future, and such permeability can therefore lead to the dissolution of the love. Love is therefore risky—indeed, all the more risky because of the way the identity of the lover is defined in part through the love. The loss of a love can therefore make one feel no longer oneself in ways poignantly described by Nussbaum (1990).

By focusing on such emotionally complex histories, emotion complex views differ from most alternative accounts of love. For alternative accounts tend to view love as a kind of attitude we take toward our beloveds, something we can analyze simply in terms of our mental state at the moment. [ 15 ] By ignoring this historical dimension of love in providing an account of what love is, alternative accounts have a hard time providing either satisfying accounts of the sense in which our identities as person are at stake in loving another or satisfactory solutions to problems concerning how love is to be justified (cf. Section 6 , especially the discussion of fungibility ).

Nonetheless, some questions remain. If love is to be understood as an emotion complex, we need a much more explicit account of the pattern at issue here: what ties all of these emotional responses together into a single thing, namely love? Baier and Badhwar seem content to provide interesting and insightful examples of this pattern, but that does not seem to be enough. For example, what connects my amusement at my beloved’s embarrassment to other emotions like my joy on his behalf when he succeeds? Why shouldn’t my amusement at his embarrassment be understood instead as a somewhat cruel case of schadenfreude and so as antithetical to, and disconnected from, love? Moreover, as Naar (2013) notes, we need a principled account of when such historical patterns are disrupted in such a way as to end the love and when they are not. Do I stop loving when, in the midst of clinical depression, I lose my normal pattern of emotional concern?

Presumably the answer requires returning to the historicity of love: it all depends on the historical details of the relationship my beloved and I have forged. Some loves develop so that the intimacy within the relationship is such as to allow for tender, teasing responses to each other, whereas other loves may not. The historical details, together with the lovers’ understanding of their relationship, presumably determine which emotional responses belong to the pattern constitutive of love and which do not. However, this answer so far is inadequate: not just any historical relationship involving emotional interdependence is a loving relationship, and we need a principled way of distinguishing loving relationships from other relational evaluative attitudes: precisely what is the characteristic narrative history that is characteristic of love?

Helm (2009, 2010) tries to answer some of these questions in presenting an account of love as intimate identification. To love another, Helm claims, is to care about him as the particular person he is and so, other things being equal, to value the things he values. Insofar as a person’s (structured) set of values—his sense of the kind of life worth his living—constitutes his identity as a person, such sharing of values amounts to sharing his identity, which sounds very much like union accounts of love. However, Helm is careful to understand such sharing of values as for the sake of the beloved (as robust concern accounts insist), and he spells this all out in terms of patterns of emotions. Thus, Helm claims, all emotions have not only a target and a formal object (as indicated above), but also a focus : a background object the subject cares about in terms of which the implicit evaluation of the target is made intelligible. (For example, if I am afraid of the approaching hailstorm, I thereby evaluate it as dangerous, and what explains this evaluation is the way that hailstorm bears on my vegetable garden, which I care about; my garden, therefore, is the focus of my fear.) Moreover, emotions normally come in patterns with a common focus: fearing the hailstorm is normally connected to other emotions as being relieved when it passes by harmlessly (or disappointed or sad when it does not), being angry at the rabbits for killing the spinach, delighted at the productivity of the tomato plants, etc. Helm argues that a projectible pattern of such emotions with a common focus constitute caring about that focus. Consequently, we might say along the lines of Section 4.3 , while particular emotions appraise events in the world as having certain evaluative properties, their having these properties is partly bestowed on them by the overall patterns of emotions.

Helm identifies some emotions as person-focused emotions : emotions like pride and shame that essentially take persons as their focuses, for these emotions implicitly evaluate in terms of the target’s bearing on the quality of life of the person that is their focus. To exhibit a pattern of such emotions focused on oneself and subfocused on being a mother, for example, is to care about the place being a mother has in the kind of life you find worth living—in your identity as a person; to care in this way is to value being a mother as a part of your concern for your own identity. Likewise, to exhibit a projectible pattern of such emotions focused on someone else and subfocused on his being a father is to value this as a part of your concern for his identity—to value it for his sake. Such sharing of another’s values for his sake, which, Helm argues, essentially involves trust, respect, and affection, amounts to intimate identification with him, and such intimate identification just is love. Thus, Helm tries to provide an account of love that is grounded in an explicit account of caring (and caring about something for the sake of someone else) that makes room for the intuitive “depth” of love through intimate identification.

Jaworska & Wonderly (2017) argue that Helm’s construal of intimacy as intimate identification is too demanding. Rather, they argue, the sort of intimacy that distinguishes love from mere caring is one that involves a kind of emotional vulnerability in which things going well or poorly for one’s beloved are directly connected not merely to one’s well-being, but to one’s ability to flourish. This connection, they argue, runs through the lover’s self-understanding and the place the beloved has in the lover’s sense of a meaningful life.

Why do we love? It has been suggested above that any account of love needs to be able to answer some such justificatory question. Although the issue of the justification of love is important on its own, it is also important for the implications it has for understanding more clearly the precise object of love: how can we make sense of the intuitions not only that we love the individuals themselves rather than their properties, but also that my beloved is not fungible—that no one could simply take her place without loss. Different theories approach these questions in different ways, but, as will become clear below, the question of justification is primary.

One way to understand the question of why we love is as asking for what the value of love is: what do we get out of it? One kind of answer, which has its roots in Aristotle, is that having loving relationships promotes self-knowledge insofar as your beloved acts as a kind of mirror, reflecting your character back to you (Badhwar, 2003, p. 58). Of course, this answer presupposes that we cannot accurately know ourselves in other ways: that left alone, our sense of ourselves will be too imperfect, too biased, to help us grow and mature as persons. The metaphor of a mirror also suggests that our beloveds will be in the relevant respects similar to us, so that merely by observing them, we can come to know ourselves better in a way that is, if not free from bias, at least more objective than otherwise.

Brink (1999, pp. 264–65) argues that there are serious limits to the value of such mirroring of one’s self in a beloved. For if the aim is not just to know yourself better but to improve yourself, you ought also to interact with others who are not just like yourself: interacting with such diverse others can help you recognize alternative possibilities for how to live and so better assess the relative merits of these possibilities. Whiting (2013) also emphasizes the importance of our beloveds’ having an independent voice capable of reflecting not who one now is but an ideal for who one is to be. Nonetheless, we need not take the metaphor of the mirror quite so literally; rather, our beloveds can reflect our selves not through their inherent similarity to us but rather through the interpretations they offer of us, both explicitly and implicitly in their responses to us. This is what Badhwar calls the “epistemic significance” of love. [ 16 ]

In addition to this epistemic significance of love, LaFollette (1996, Chapter 5) offers several other reasons why it is good to love, reasons derived in part from the psychological literature on love: 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. Friedman (1993) argues that the kind of partiality towards our beloveds that love involves is itself morally valuable because it supports relationships—loving relationships—that contribute “to human well-being, integrity, and fulfillment in life” (p. 61). And Solomon (1988, p. 155) claims:

Ultimately, there is only one reason for love. That one grand reason…is “because we bring out the best in each other.” What counts as “the best,” of course, is subject to much individual variation.

This is because, Solomon suggests, in loving someone, I want myself to be better so as to be worthy of his love for me.

Each of these answers to the question of why we love understands it to be asking about love quite generally, abstracted away from details of particular relationships. It is also possible to understand the question as asking about particular loves. Here, there are several questions that are relevant:

• What, if anything, justifies my loving rather than not loving this particular person?
• What, if anything, justifies my coming to love this particular person rather than someone else?
• What, if anything, justifies my continuing to love this particular person given the changes—both in him and me and in the overall circumstances—that have occurred since I began loving him?

These are importantly different questions. Velleman (1999), for example, thinks we can answer (1) by appealing to the fact that my beloved is a person and so has a rational nature, yet he thinks (2) and (3) have no answers: the best we can do is offer causal explanations for our loving particular people, a position echoed by Han (2021). Setiya (2014) similarly thinks (1) has an answer, but points not to the rational nature of persons but rather to the other’s humanity , where such humanity differs from personhood in that not all humans need have the requisite rational nature for personhood, and not all persons need be humans. And, as will become clear below , the distinction between (2) and (3) will become important in resolving puzzles concerning whether our beloveds are fungible, though it should be clear that (3) potentially raises questions concerning personal identity (which will not be addressed here).

It is important not to misconstrue these justificatory questions. Thomas (1991) , for example, rejects the idea that love can be justified: “there are no rational considerations whereby anyone can lay claim to another’s love or insist that an individual’s love for another is irrational” (p. 474). This is because, Thomas claims (p. 471):

no matter how wonderful and lovely an individual might be, on any and all accounts, it is simply false that a romantically unencumbered person must love that individual on pain of being irrational. Or, there is no irrationality involved in ceasing to love a person whom one once loved immensely, although the person has not changed.

However, as LaFollette (1996, p. 63) correctly points out,

reason is not some external power which dictates how we should behave, but an internal power, integral to who we are.… Reason does not command that we love anyone. Nonetheless, reason is vital in determining whom we love and why we love them.

That is, reasons for love are pro tanto : they are a part of the overall reasons we have for acting, and it is up to us in exercising our capacity for agency to decide what on balance we have reason to do or even whether we shall act contrary to our reasons. To construe the notion of a reason for love as compelling us to love, as Thomas does, is to misconstrue the place such reasons have within our agency. [ 17 ]

Most philosophical discussions of the justification of love focus on question (1) , thinking that answering this question will also, to the extent that we can, answer question (2) , which is typically not distinguished from (3) . The answers given to these questions vary in a way that turns on how the kind of evaluation implicit in love is construed. On the one hand, those who understand the evaluation implicit in love to be a matter of the bestowal of value (such as Telfer 1970–71; Friedman 1993; Singer 1994) typically claim that no justification can be given (cf. Section 4.2 ). As indicated above, this seems problematic, especially given the importance love can have both in our lives and, especially, in shaping our identities as persons. To reject the idea that we can love for reasons may reduce the impact our agency can have in defining who we are.

On the other hand, those who understand the evaluation implicit in love to be a matter of appraisal tend to answer the justificatory question by appeal to these valuable properties of the beloved. This acceptance of the idea that love can be justified leads to two further, related worries about the object of love.

The first worry is raised by Vlastos (1981) in a discussion Plato’s and Aristotle’s accounts of love. Vlastos notes that these accounts focus on the properties of our beloveds: we are to love people, they say, only because and insofar as they are objectifications of the excellences. Consequently, he argues, in doing so they fail to distinguish “ disinterested affection for the person we love” from “ appreciation of the excellences instantiated by that person ” (p. 33). That is, 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. This worry about Plato and Aristotle might seem to apply just as well to other accounts that justify love in terms of the properties of the person: insofar as we love the person for the sake of her properties, it might seem that what we love is those properties and not the person. Here it is surely insufficient to say, as Solomon (1988, p. 154) does, “if love has its reasons, then it is not the whole person that one loves but certain aspects of that person—though the rest of the person comes along too, of course”: that final tagline fails to address the central difficulty about what the object of love is and so about love as a distinctly personal attitude. (Clausen 2019 might seem to address this worry by arguing that we love people not as having certain properties but rather as having “ organic unities ”: a holistic set of properties the value of each of which must be understood in essential part in terms of its place within that whole. Nonetheless, while this is an interesting and plausible way to think about the value of the properties of persons, that organic unity itself will be a (holistic) property held by the person, and it seems that the fundamental problem reemerges at the level of this holistic property: do we love the holistic unity rather than the person?)

The second worry concerns the fungibility of the object of love. To be fungible is to be replaceable by another relevantly similar object without any loss of value. Thus, money is fungible: I can give you two $5 bills in exchange for a $10 bill, and neither of us has lost anything. Is the object of love fungible? That is, can I simply switch from loving one person to loving another relevantly similar person without any loss? The worry about fungibility is commonly put this way: if we accept that love can be justified by appealing to properties of the beloved, then it may seem that in loving someone for certain reasons, I love him not simply as the individual he is, but as instantiating those properties. And this may imply that any other person instantiating those same properties would do just as well: my beloved would be fungible. Indeed, it may be that another person exhibits the properties that ground my love to a greater degree than my current beloved does, and so it may seem that in such a case I have reason to “trade up”—to switch my love to the new, better person. However, it seems clear that the objects of our loves are not fungible: love seems to involve a deeply personal commitment to a particular person, a commitment that is antithetical to the idea that our beloveds are fungible or to the idea that we ought to be willing to trade up when possible. [ 18 ]

In responding to these worries, Nozick (1989) appeals to the union view of love he endorses (see the section on Love as Union ):

The intention in love is to form a we and to identify with it as an extended self, to identify one’s fortunes in large part with its fortunes. A willingness to trade up, to destroy the very we you largely identify with, would then be a willingness to destroy your self in the form of your own extended self. [p. 78]

So it is because love involves forming a “we” that we must understand other persons and not properties to be the objects of love, and it is because my very identity as a person depends essentially on that “we” that it is not possible to substitute without loss one object of my love for another. However, Badhwar (2003) criticizes Nozick, saying that his response implies that once I love someone, I cannot abandon that love no matter who that person becomes; this, she says, “cannot be understood as love at all rather than addiction” (p. 61). [ 19 ]

Instead, Badhwar (1987) turns to her robust-concern account of love as a concern for the beloved for his sake rather than one’s own. Insofar as my love is disinterested — not a means to antecedent ends of my own—it would be senseless to think that my beloved could be replaced by someone who is able to satisfy my ends equally well or better. Consequently, my beloved is in this way irreplaceable. However, this is only a partial response to the worry about fungibility, as Badhwar herself seems to acknowledge. For the concern over fungibility arises not merely for those cases in which we think of love as justified instrumentally, but also for those cases in which the love is justified by the intrinsic value of the properties of my beloved. Confronted with cases like this, Badhwar (2003) concludes that the object of love is fungible after all (though she insists that it is very unlikely in practice). (Soble (1990, Chapter 13) draws similar conclusions.)

Nonetheless, Badhwar thinks that the object of love is “phenomenologically non-fungible” (2003, p. 63; see also 1987, p. 14). By this she means that we experience our beloveds to be irreplaceable: “loving and delighting in [one person] are not completely commensurate with loving and delighting in another” (1987, p. 14). Love can be such that we sometimes desire to be with this particular person whom we love, not another whom we also love, for our loves are qualitatively different. But why is this? It seems as though the typical reason I now want to spend time with Amy rather than Bob is, for example, that Amy is funny but Bob is not. I love Amy in part for her humor, and I love Bob for other reasons, and these qualitative differences between them is what makes them not fungible. However, this reply does not address the worry about the possibility of trading up: if Bob were to be at least as funny (charming, kind, etc.) as Amy, why shouldn’t I dump her and spend all my time with him?

A somewhat different approach is taken by Whiting (1991). In response to the first worry concerning the object of love, Whiting argues that Vlastos offers a false dichotomy: having affection for someone that is disinterested —for her sake rather than my own—essentially involves an appreciation of her excellences as such. Indeed, Whiting says, my appreciation of these as excellences, and so the underlying commitment I have to their value, just is a disinterested commitment to her because these excellences constitute her identity as the person she is. The person, therefore, really is the object of love. Delaney (1996) takes the complementary tack of distinguishing between the object of one’s love, which of course is the person, and the grounds of the love, which are her properties: to say, as Solomon does, that we love someone for reasons is not at all to say that we only love certain aspects of the person. In these terms, we might say that Whiting’s rejection of Vlastos’ dichotomy can be read as saying that what makes my attitude be one of disinterested affection—one of love—for the person is precisely that I am thereby responding to her excellences as the reasons for that affection. [ 20 ]

Of course, more needs to be said about what it is that makes a particular person be the object of love. Implicit in Whiting’s account is an understanding of the way in which the object of my love is determined in part by the history of interactions I have with her: it is she, and not merely her properties (which might be instantiated in many different people), that I want to be with; it is she, and not merely her properties, on whose behalf I am concerned when she suffers and whom I seek to comfort; etc. This addresses the first worry, but not the second worry about fungibility, for the question still remains whether she is the object of my love only as instantiating certain properties, and so whether or not I have reason to “trade up.”

To respond to the fungibility worry, Whiting and Delaney appeal explicitly to the historical relationship. [ 21 ] Thus, Whiting claims, although there may be a relatively large pool of people who have the kind of excellences of character that would justify my loving them, and so although there can be no answer to question (2) about why I come to love this rather than that person within this pool, once I have come to love this person and so have developed a historical relation with her, this history of concern justifies my continuing to love this person rather than someone else (1991, p. 7). Similarly, Delaney claims that love is grounded in “historical-relational properties” (1996, p. 346), so that I have reasons for continuing to love this person rather than switching allegiances and loving someone else. In each case, the appeal to both such historical relations and the excellences of character of my beloved is intended to provide an answer to question (3) , and this explains why the objects of love are not fungible.

There seems to be something very much right with this response. Relationships grounded in love are essentially personal, and it would be odd to think of what justifies that love to be merely non-relational properties of the beloved. Nonetheless, it is still unclear how the historical-relational propreties can provide any additional justification for subsequent concern beyond that which is already provided (as an answer to question (1) ) by appeal to the excellences of the beloved’s character (cf. Brink 1999). The mere fact that I have loved someone in the past does not seem to justify my continuing to love him in the future. When we imagine that he is going through a rough time and begins to lose the virtues justifying my initial love for him, why shouldn’t I dump him and instead come to love someone new having all of those virtues more fully? Intuitively (unless the change she undergoes makes her in some important sense no longer the same person he was), we think I should not dump him, but the appeal to the mere fact that I loved him in the past is surely not enough. Yet what historical-relational properties could do the trick? (For an interesting attempt at an answer, see Kolodny 2003 and also Howard 2019.)

If we think that love can be justified, then it may seem that the appeal to particular historical facts about a loving relationship to justify that love is inadequate, for such idiosyncratic and subjective properties might explain but cannot justify love. Rather, it may seem, justification in general requires appealing to universal, objective properties. But such properties are ones that others might share, which leads to the problem of fungibility. Consequently it may seem that love cannot be justified. In the face of this predicament, accounts of love that understand love to be an attitude towards value that is intermediate between appraisal and bestowal, between recognizing already existing value and creating that value (see Section 4.3 ) might seem to offer a way out. For once we reject the thought that the value of our beloveds must be either the precondition or the consequence of our love, we have room to acknowledge that the deeply personal, historically grounded, creative nature of love (central to bestowal accounts) and the understanding of love as responsive to valuable properties of the beloved that can justify that love (central to appraisal accounts) are not mutually exclusive (Helm 2010; Bagley 2015).

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Thinking about Love: Essays in Contemporary Continental Philosophy

Diane Enns and Antonio Calcagno (eds.), Thinking about Love: Essays in Contemporary Continental Philosophy,  Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015, 262pp., $84.95 (hbk), ISBN 9780271070964.

Reviewed by Helen A. Fielding, The University of Western Ontario

This collection addresses a lacuna in contemporary continental philosophy: thinking about love. As the editors explain, Western philosophers tend to avoid addressing love since it is associated more closely with the body and emotion, instead attending to what is deemed to be the business of philosophy, delimiting reason. The matter of love has been left to poets and musicians. But as they further point out, "love is not beyond thinking." Love both motivates and transforms us, and is thus part of the human condition (1). While a few philosophers in the Anglo-American philosophical tradition have explicitly addressed love, within the continental tradition, philosophical meditation on love has generally been linked to theology. This means there is a need for attention from continental philosophers on this theme since they raise different kinds of questions concerning love, questions about subjectivity, identity and the ways we relate to one another. As such, this collection provides a much-needed intervention on the intertwinings of thinking and love. To this end, the book is thematically organized: divided into five parts it addresses the limits of love, love's intersection with the divine, with politics and with phenomenological experience as well as the stories love allows us to tell.

In the first section, "Human Vulnerability and the Limits of Love," three philosophers explore what defines love as love, and their conclusions vary widely, provoking the question of whether it's even possible to find agreement about what constitutes love. Perhaps it is precisely the varied possibilities for defining love's limits -- possibilities that cannot be discovered through reason -- that make it so difficult to thematize and yet provide the other side to reason that makes it human. For Todd May, the limit of love is our mortality. That we will die is what guarantees its intensity. Exploring the ways in which love has been taken up in the analytic tradition, he concludes that the one common element is that romantic love entails an intensity of engagement (23). Because romantic love between two people "occurs not only for but also with the other," it requires that the relationship be between equals who also "consider each other to be equals" (24). In his reading of the film Ground Hog Day (1993), where one day is repeated over and over again, he further concludes that a relationship between equals not governed by the limit of death would lose its intensity, and similarly, watching our lover age reminds us of the limit of the time we will be together, of its ephemerality.

Diane Enns' lyrical essay, "Love's Limit", takes a completely different turn. Countering the liberal perspective that champions love between equal and sovereign selves who enjoy a love that endures and "is not supposed to fail" (33), she defends love between imperfect individuals, where there is jealously, obsessiveness, and abandonment of the self. It is love that is more often referred to as "masochism, repetition compulsion, fantasy, an unhealthy attachment" (34). In dialogue with Beauvoir she suggests we consider the limit of love from the "perspective of the loving self". This shift in focus from autonomy to vulnerability entails openness and risk: "For there is no love without abandoning one's position and 'crossing' over an abyss like an acrobat" (36-37). To love imperfectly is human, and "failed relationships do not necessitate failed love" (41). Thus to love is to open ourselves to the other's vulnerabilities and weaknesses, to open our selves to being transformed by love. Accordingly, the limit of love for Enns is when the lover's "capacity for love is harmed." For "lovers cannot endure all things." What must be preserved are the conditions of love that allow for a spacing and "movement of love between two" (43). It is the question of whether it's even possible to love in our contemporary world that John Caruana explores. Drawing on the work of Julia Kristeva, he explores the symbolic and semiotic aspects of love, arguing that contemporary phenomena of self-harm ranging from cutting to the ISIS terrorist "prepared to maim and kill innocents" point towards "an unparalleled crisis in subjectivity, an inability to love" (47). What are required are narratives and images to support psychic renewal, and the ability to believe again in the world, "a secular symbolic discourse that would promote flourishing subjects" (59).

The four essays in part two, "Love, Desire, and the Divine," focus on love as transcendence. In this section, we see consistency amongst the authors who all seem to conclude in some way that transcendence can be found in the particularity of love, in its erotic articulations rather than the universality of love as general and passionless. Christina M. Gschwandtner turns critically to the work of contemporary continental philosophers of religion who are inspired by theological affirmations of Christ's "kenotic" love, which she describes as one of devotion and self-sacrifice. It is the exclusivity of kenotic love that is problematic for Gschwandtner, in that applied to our everyday lives it can provide justification for the kind of self-sacrificing love often demanded of women, or that provides justifications for all kinds of abuse (75). Kenotic love does have place in philosophy, but only as a religious phenomenon rather than a "general phenomenological account of all loving relations". Mélanie Walton, drawing on Lyotard, privileges eros over caritas or charity. The problem with caritas , the Christian narrative of love, is that it ultimately produces a closed system, "a universal, circular, and conditional logic" with a "meaning that has been given in advance," and that "necessitates one's free commitment". As a universal love it does not recognize the particularities of love: "the subject marching under this banner does not actually have the freedom to choose and enact love toward another subject." (103) Erotic desire on the other hand, because it is unpredictable, provides for an open system from which change, and justice can be effected.

Felix Ó Murchadha also comes out on the side of erotic love, arguing against the duality of self that separates the responsible self from passion in the philosophical tradition. Ó Murchadha observes that though there is always the danger of losing oneself in love, ultimately we become fully ourselves only through being in love; thus privileging the autonomous thinking subject is to forget that the self emerges from "the between space of being in love" (96). While Ó Murchadha, focusing on the emergence of the self, concludes that "to be a person is to be in love," Antonio Calcagno turns his attention to the way that desire motivates the mind in its engagement with the world (90). Focusing critically on the work of Hannah Arendt, Calcagno argues her account of the life of the mind requires a "more robust understanding of desire." As he points out, the object of desire, which lies outside the self, is precisely that which moves us to "to desire to think, judge, and will" (114). Indeed, thinking, judging and willing as described by Arendt entail a "kind of passivity or receptivity," which opens the mind to that which is other than the self. The mind's activity is accordingly "solicited by desire" for that which lies beyond the self, and this desire needs to be taken into account in our theorizing about the life of the mind.

While the thematic arrangement of the essays does work, any such arrangement sets up particular conversations. The two essays on love and politics, for example, consider how change can emerge when love is considered as a social phenomenon. Sophie Bourgault considers the role of love in politics by turning to the seemingly disparate perspectives of Arendt and Simone Weil. There is no place for love and compassion in politics according to Arendt, while for Weil, compassion is precisely what is called for. For Arendt, politics is characterized by speech and action, but Weil's concern is that those who are most disadvantaged have no voice. But as Bourgault points out, the two thinkers do come together in their agreement that what is needed in our modern world is "more thoughtfulness and (empathetic) attention" (165). Rethought as attention, love has a place in the social and political world. This is not insignificant, as Christian Lotz reminds us. For, within the context of recent left political philosophy developed by thinkers such as Hardt, Negri, and Badiou, love seems to be granted a metaphysical status. Lotz reminds us, however, of the Marxist critique of essentialist conceptions of love which "tend to overlook the material, historical, and social form that love takes on in real individuals" shaped by class (131). Also connecting the particular to the general, Lotz points out that "What we can see, feel hear is not sensual in an abstract sense; rather, it is the result of concrete historical forms of how we are related to one another, and of how the sensual world is itself reproduced through labor" (133). In other words, love allows us to engage in particular and concrete relations in a world that is shaped through material relations. Lotz concludes that rather than thinking about love "in terms of a truth procedure (Badiou) or an ontological event (Negri)," it is the social aspect of love, and the ways in which it is produced to which we should turn our attention (147).

Dorothea Olkowski, whose essay completes the fourth part on the phenomenological experience of love, is also concerned with forms of love, in particular in light of recent neurophysiological explanations of love that cannot account for intentionality. In working through her ontology of love, she draws on Merleau-Ponty, in particular his early work "on the interplay of the organism and the phenomenal field" (202). Like Lotz, Olkowski thinks through sensory perception drawing on form. In this case the "sensory value of each element is determined by its function in the whole and varies with it. Every action undertaken modifies the field where it occurs and establishes lines of force within which action unfolds and alters the phenomenal field" (207). This means that sensory input alone is not sufficient for explaining why we respond in certain ways. Instead, what is needed is an account of intentionality, of consciousness of certain objects and the ways we take them up, consciousness of the actions we take, of the words we speak, and the ways in which these "consciously constitute the intention(s) in which they are involved" (207). Consciousness and the world are intertwined. Relations are motivated and not causal in one direction, and "there is a 'network of significative intentions,' more or less clear, lived rather than known" (208). So desire cannot be mere instinct or drive. Instincts are part of an entire organism or structure, which means that they cannot be separated out from perception, intelligence and emotions. Physical events do not equate with situations, which are the lived interpretation of what takes place.

Also drawing on Merleau-Ponty and our intertwinement with the world, Fiona Utley explores the ways in which the loving bonds we create in the world not only anchor us there but also provide us with "another self who shares and knows the intimate structures of our world" (169). This means for Utley that to love we must trust. Thus, the trust that sustains this love must be central to human existence. Utley picks up here on a theme others in this volume have explored, namely that loving makes us vulnerable. It opens us to the risk of heartbreak, of "violence, cruelty and death" (175). Marguerite La Caze explores this close relation between love and hate through the work of Beauvoir. Supporting Utley's findings, she concludes that love allows for both reciprocal and ambiguous relations that belong to being human. Hate, however, is not relational as such. It stresses the "material, object status of the hated offender."

The final two essays are thematized as love stories. Dawne McCance writes eloquently about Derrida as a philosopher who did not practice "philosophical detachment" when he wrote about love. Coming back to the opening theme that any binary of reason and emotion is doomed from the start, she explains how Derrida's "deconstruction is not only about acknowledging difference", but "is also about being open to being altered in one's encounter" with it (222). It is about changing how we think as well as what we think about. Alphonso Lingis puts this into practice, dwelling on practices of loving and living that shape the ways we think about ourselves and our relations to nature.

This collection opens up an overdue discussion of the intersections of love and thinking within the continental tradition. Some of the observations were ones I anticipated; others were surprising. My only real criticism is that there is no mention of the work of Luce Irigaray, a contemporary continental philosopher for whom love is at the center of her work. Nonetheless, it is easy to fault a work for what it has not done. In the end it must be judged by what it has accomplished, and that by all measures is much.

Thinking About Love

Essays in Contemporary Continental Philosophy

Edited by Diane Enns and Antonio Calcagno

$90.95 | Hardcover Edition ISBN: 978-0-271-07096-4

$32.95 | Paperback Edition ISBN: 978-0-271-07097-1

Available as an e-book

272 pages 6" × 9" 3 b&w illustrations 2015

“The contributors—scholars from Canada, Australia, the UK, and the US—offer insightful examinations of love, in its romantic/erotic, kenotic, friendship, and agapic forms. . . . A worthy foray into a topic of universal human experience, this collection will awaken readers to the value of what philosophy today says about love.” —S. Young, Choice

• Description
• Table of Contents
• Sample Chapters

Thinking About Love considers the nature and experience of love through the writing of well-known Continental philosophers such as Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques Derrida, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

Evolving forms of social organization, rapid developments in the field of psychology, and novel variations on relationships demand new approaches to and ways of talking about love. Rather than offering prescriptive claims, this volume explores how one might think about the concept philosophically, without attempting to resolve or alleviate its ambiguities, paradoxes, and limitations. The essays focus on the contradictions and limits of love, manifested in such phenomena as trust, abuse, grief, death, violence, politics, and desire.

An erudite examination of the many facets of love, this book fills a lacuna in the philosophy of this richly complicated topic.

“This collection opens up an overdue discussion of the intersections of love and thinking within the continental tradition.” —Helen A. Fielding, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

“The editors of this inspiring new collection rightly contend that the question of love is woefully under-treated in contemporary Continental philosophy. This failure has impoverished both philosophy and contemporary life, making this volume a timely and much-needed intervention as well as a cause for gratitude.” —Jason M. Wirth, author of Commiserating with Devastated Things: Milan Kundera and the Entitlements of Thinking

Diane Enns is Associate Professor of Philosophy at McMaster University and the author of Speaking of Freedom and The Violence of Victimhood , the last also published by Penn State.

Antonio Calcagno is Professor of Philosophy at King’s University College at Western University. His most recent book is Contemporary Italian Political Philosophy .

Acknowledgments

Thinking About Love: An Introduction

Diane Enns and Antonio Calcagno

Part I Human Vulnerability and the Limits of Love

1 Love and Death

2 Love’s Limit

3 The Subject in Crisis: Kristeva on Love, Faith, and Nihilism

John Caruana

Part II Love, Desire, and the Divine

4 The Phenomenon of Kenotic Love in Continental Philosophy of Religion

Christina M. Gschwandtner

5 Love’s Conditions: Passion and the Practice of Philosophy

Felix Ó Murchadha

6 What Can Love Say? Lyotard on Caritas and Eros

Mélanie Walton

7 Finding a Place for Desire in the Life of the Mind: Arendt and Augustine

Antonio Calcagno

Part III Love and Politics

8 Against Essentialist Conceptions of Love: Toward a Social-Material Theory

Christian Lotz

9 Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil on the Significance of Love for Politics

Sophie Bourgault

Part IV The Phenomenological Experience of Love

10 Trust and the Experience of Love

Fiona Utley

11 The Time of Possible and Impossible Reciprocity: Love and Hate in Simone de Beauvoir

Marguerite La Caze

12 Intentionality and the Neuroscience of Love

Dorothea Olkowski

V Love Stories

13 Love Is Blind: Jacques Derrida

Dawne McCance

14 The Babies in Trees

Alphonso Lingis

List of Contributors

Thinking About Love:

An Introduction

Philosophers have been accused, and rightly so, of not giving love enough consideration. Treatments of love by philosophers throughout history pale in number when considered against all the works of literature, poetry, painting, or film devoted to love in its plethora of forms. How does one write of love philosophically, given the age-old prejudices of Western philosophers against the body, emotions, and the mutability that is their only constant? Reason falters in matters of the heart; for reflections on love we flock to the poets and musicians. Their melodies, the lyricism of their self-contained lines, act like watery conduits, easing the awkwardness of expressing what is deeply felt in words that never seem adequate. But beyond descriptions of the beauty and joy or pain of human attachment, we need understanding. Love is not beyond thinking. We approach the thinking of love through analyses of our own and others’ experiences; in this way reflection on love can transform us.

But there is another reason why philosophers should care about love. Plato rightly saw eros as a motivator: it pushes us, inciting our desire for pleasure, wisdom, knowledge, and virtue, and even for the good. If we accept this insight, thinking about love in all its manifestations—desire, appetite, sexual longing, intimacy, care, and friendship, as well as love’s failure and death—can enrich our understanding of human existence. Love is a fundamental aspect of our being, and its presence or absence in our lives has profound effects. That philosophers on the whole have greater confidence in the power of reason than in the power of love means they have neglected a fertile terrain for exploring and understanding the human condition. In order to address a number of our most vexing philosophical problems, including the relationships between emotion and reason, the self and the other, love and hate, ethics and politics, and our preoccupations with death, trust, intimacy, and sex, we need to think about love.

This book considers these problems from perspectives arising out of the Continental tradition. While there exists a growing philosophical interest in the question of love, mostly on the part of Anglo-American Analytic scholars, Continental approaches to the question of love have not been fully explored. Philosophers in the Analytic tradition, foremost among them Irving Singer, Harry Frankfurt, and Alan Soble, have written extensively on the nature of love and its history, but they do not write in the context of the persistent themes we find in recent Continental philosophy, including critical accounts of subjectivity and selfhood, social relations of production and reproduction, alterity, desire, abjection, ineffability, reversibility, and ambiguity. While several works have recently appeared that are rooted in this latter tradition, notably Jonna Bornemark and Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback’s edited collection Phenomenology of Eros and M. C. Dillon’s Beyond Romance , these texts are exclusively phenomenological treatments of erotic love and therefore more limited in scope. Jean-Luc Marion and Michel Henry, also phenomenologists, and a cohort of contemporary French thinkers have done much to rectify the lack of philosophical interest in love, but their perspectives are informed and constrained by the Catholic tradition. New or relatively recent works by Alain Badiou and Jean-Luc Nancy can be added to the roster, but these are either too prescriptive, as in the former, or obscure, as in the latter. We seek a wider approach to considering love, one that is informed by recent philosophical work but also moves beyond it.

With this in mind, we have brought together scholars and philosophers from a variety of critical perspectives to reflect on a number of contemporary European Continental thinkers, all of whom have much to say on the nature of love. Our contributors consider the writings of Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques Derrida, Michel Henry, Jean-François Lyotard, Julia Kristeva, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Simone Weil, among others, and several draw on fiction and film for their analyses. Each of the fourteen essays focuses on a specific question or theme and draws on leading philosophers to help develop the problem or provide a critical response to the questions raised. Our contributors explore various aspects of love, from its paradoxical nature and its connection to hate or the event of death, to the role it plays in ethical comportment and the limit it demands when it encounters violence. With few exceptions we have restricted our texts to principal figures in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Continental philosophy, as it is this body of work that needs more scholarly attention.

The purpose of this collection is to widen the scope of philosophical reflection on love in terms of method and to raise new questions on the nature of love that challenge established views. Literature, film, memoir, social analysis, and personal meditations on love can lead to valuable philosophical insights that provoke further thinking and help us to understand the complexity of human relationships. This complexity is constantly evolving. We believe it is time for fresh perspectives on the nature of love, given new forms of social organization, changes in political and social conventions, and the development of a more robust psychology and new types of love relationships—all of which have been shaped by technology and the collapse of old social norms.

Not merely exegetical, the following essays grapple with the realities of human experience; the materiality and vicissitudes of contemporary love figure prominently. Central to such an endeavor is the self-reflexive question of how to think about love philosophically: is there an ineffability, or conversely, a materiality to love that remains inaccessible to the philosopher? Our contributors are not making prescriptive claims about authentic love, as many philosophers have done; they are thinking about how to think philosophically about love without attempting to resolve or alleviate love’s ambiguities, paradoxes, or limits. This highlighting of some of our best European thinkers and attentiveness to both the thought and experience of love fills a lacuna in the philosophy of love. We trust that the essays gathered here will appeal to a broad audience of readers searching for new insights on timeless questions regarding love.

We have organized the chapters into five parts, grouping essays according to the themes rather than the authors they address. Some are expository while others are more reflective, even personal. We could never pretend to be systematic or comprehensive in our discussions of love; this collection reflects the disparate, perhaps even haphazard, ways in which we move between experience and analysis in our consideration of love, between the body and mind, and between another’s experience of love and our own. Such thinking demands versatility not only in the writer, but in the reader as well. When it comes to thinking about love, philosophy must open its doors to creativity.

<1>I. Human Vulnerability and the Limits of Love

We begin with mortality. In “Love and Death,” Todd May rejects the traditional depiction of love as enduring and even eternal. This view of love stems from Plato and is refined by the Neoplatonists and other religiously oriented thinkers. May risks a wager: what if our mortality, although it makes love temporally finite, lends to love an intensity, a power and affective valence that distinguishes it from other emotions? Through an exploration of diverse phenomena, including aging, friendship, and romantic love, May argues that a reflection on the significance of death to love does not tell us how to conduct a successful long-term romantic relationship but makes us aware of the impact of the limits of our time together. In this way death lends to love an intensity that varies in different kinds of relationships, and it is this intensity that constitutes the nature of love. Our mortality, in fact, is “a cosmic gift to love” even if it is an ambivalent one, since “it takes our loved ones from us but gives them to us all the more while we and they are here.”

Our mortality provides the ultimate limit to love, gifting us with meaning and fulfillment, but in loving, our own limits are revealed. In “Love’s Limit,” Diane Enns reflects on the limits of love with reference to twentieth-century philosophers like Arendt, de Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre and to writers such as Lorna Crozier and David Grossman. Enns begins by taking a position against the liberal and Christian paradigms that continue to inform our assumptions about romantic love. In the former, the self is presumed autonomous and sovereign, requiring equality and reciprocity to love properly; in the latter, the self is a mere vessel for God’s perfect love, requiring self-sacrifice and denial. Enns argues that there is a limit not to love itself—for love can be experienced as an expansive swell of emotion without limit—but to an individual’s capacity for love. The limit arises when the self permits another to erode or destroy this capacity. This is not a sovereign self with fortified borders that is threatened by the love and need of another, but a self always already in relation to another, affirmed in her existence by the act of loving rather than by being lovable. Loving, Enns suggests, is a gift to both lover and beloved, an unsurpassed affirmation expressed in Augustine’s phrase volo ut sis —I will you to be. Enns interprets this as a passive acceptance of the other’s freedom to be, to act, and to take responsibility for one’s life. But to be capable of love we need to be vulnerable to the other, Enns argues, and this means being open to the risk of suffering and loss, to the vicissitudes of love. Thus the capacity for love is destroyed when vulnerability is crippled.

John Caruana reflects similarly on love’s wounds and limits in chapter 3, “The Subject in Crisis: Kristeva on Love, Faith, and Nihilism.” He writes of a current crisis in subjectivity: an inability to love. To assess this crisis he turns to Julia Kristeva, for whom the subject is given in love. When love is not present or deficient, the incipient psyche falls back on itself, into an autism that inhibits, even forecloses, relations with others. Kristeva is unequivocal in her criticisms of the vacuous and exploitative discourses of love and romance proffered by our present age, which fail to address what she calls “the incredible need to believe,” to have faith in the world and in others. Given this failure, Caruana argues, it should not surprise us that young people are increasingly attempting to heal their tormented psyches through self-harm, in particular self-cutting, a paradigmatic symptom of our age. In the absence of effective and meaningful images and representations, these youth are abandoned to themselves, enacting a desperate ritual in response to abject feelings. Through self-inflicted incisions they struggle to revive their stillborn psyches without recourse to metaphor and idealization. But it is an act as futile as it is tragic, for if they cannot love themselves they are unlikely to establish loving relations with others. Kristeva challenges our contemporary secular age to conceive of alternative narratives and images of love that can foster ongoing psychic renewal and belief in the world again.

<1>II. Love, Desire, and the Divine

In part II we shift our focus to discussions of love and transcendence, whether we speak of a love beyond human capacities, that gestures toward the unsayable, or of the desire that propels us beyond ourselves. We commence with Christina M. Gschwandtner’s discussion of what she calls an unprecedented and surprising emphasis on love in a particular current of French thought. In “The Phenomenon of Kenotic Love in Continental Philosophy of Religion,” she argues that in this body of work we find a fairly monolithic and extreme picture of love as kenotic abandon, entailing intense self-sacrifice, total abnegation, and complete devotion to the other. This approach is particularly evident in Jean-Luc Marion, who has written most extensively on the question of love, and whose assumptions and analyses are reiterated by other writers even on the rare occasions when they criticize him or diverge from his account. Kenotic love is grounded in claims about the relation between God and the human soul (as agape ), limiting love to the traditional image of a male initiator of love and a female respondent coming together in a heterosexual coupling. Gschwandtner argues that this kenotic version of love is too extreme and does not ultimately depict how love is actually experienced in concrete situations. For example, while heterosexual eros is the most common pattern for love in the Western Christian tradition, it is not clear that this is an adequate pattern for all loves, like parental love, homosexual love, friendship, or love for an animal, a home, or a garden. Love is not only sexual and it is not always kenotic in this intense degree. This does not mean we should entirely reject accounts of kenotic love, Gschwandtner concludes. If it is described more narrowly as a particular religious phenomenon of agape , kenotic love provides a meaningful account of religious experience and of religious identity in phenomenological terms, and in that sense provides important insights into the meaning and patterns of religious experiences of love.

To be in love is to be a self and to be a self is to be overtaken with passion, that is, ruled by an alterity that is both within and transcends the self. In chapter 5 of this volume, “Love’s Conditions: Passion and the Practice of Philosophy,” Felix Ó Murchadha understands love as the self giving itself to this alterity, trusting in a passionate feeling that always remains partly opaque but also conscious of possible destruction. The will to love and to be loved does not then begin with itself, but is a response to that which entices and allures it. There is a tension, however, between this alterity and the philosophical project of self-understanding. Self-knowledge, responsible selfhood, and self-legislating reason—informed by Stoic reflections on the self—all cluster around the formation of a self capable of philosophical reflection and are rooted in an ascetic discipline of control, perhaps even the elimination, of the passions. The philosophical impulse to sovereignty and autonomy forgets the source of self-responsibility, which is not in the self but in the place from which the self emerges, the between space of being in love. But such an autonomous, sovereign, and apathetic being cannot love, Ó Murchadha points out. And while Christianity’s account of love as agape critiques this philosophical position, it ultimately fares no better. To think love philosophically, Ó Murchadha concludes, is to begin in and with passion, to begin as already in love. It is to practice philosophy otherwise, beyond the Stoic-Skeptic inheritance that continues to inform the ascetics of philosophical reflection.

In chapter 6, “What Can Love Say? Lyotard on Caritas and Eros, ” Mélanie Walton’s point of departure is Jean-Luc Marion’s claim that philosophers no longer have the words to speak of love. Referring to Jean-François Lyotard’s concept of the differend, she argues that it is in the face of the impossibility of full and complete capture of knowledge that we are called most urgently to try anyway. When it comes to the experience of human love, we must keep in mind that while narratives are the clearest indicators of the truths we live by, these narratives do not capture the meaning of the event itself; their identification as narratives does not then give us the power to break the veils of construction and access some true wisdom beneath them.

With the help of Lyotard’s The Confession of Augustine , Walton elaborates two notions of love, eros and caritas , and argues that the former succeeds better than the latter in speaking of that which we cannot, of that surplus of meaning that is just out of our grasp of the event. The failure of caritas rests in its becoming an overly constrictive, circular, and universalizing narrative that prohibits the indeterminacy of the occurrence. Caritas possesses its object; it avoids any exception by its creation of the narrative whose form authorizes every past, present, and future possibility as already denominated as an instance of God’s love. Eros is markedly different, Walton suggests. In eros , the having is only as a not-having; eros has only longing, it is a lack but paradoxically not a lack, because it is pure materiality. Walton concludes that it is eros that succeeds best to speak of that inaccessible excess because it fails to do so, yet it tries, again and again.

In “Finding a Place for Desire in the Life of the Mind: Arendt and Augustine,” Antonio Calcagno argues that a more robust understanding of desire must play a role in the life of the mind as Hannah Arendt describes it, and it must do so primarily as a motivator, an experience that is not of our own generation, but which moves us to desire to think, judge, and will. Arendt’s most sustained treatment of desire or appetite ( appetitus ), what is often translated as “craving,” can be found in her doctoral dissertation, now published as Love and Saint Augustine . Like Augustine, Arendt associates desire with the appetites of the body; it is understood as an inferior kind of love that largely confines oneself to one’s own ego interests. Ultimately, desire, craving, or appetite is redeemed, indeed transformed, through social interactions or an encounter with God, or so, at least, this is the way Arendt reads Augustine: appetite yields to agape .

If we read Augustine closely, with some distance from Arendt’s fruitful reading, he never fully makes the Neoplatonic distinction between matter and spirit ( nous ). The human person is a unity of body and soul. Whereas Arendt separates bodily desire from the traditional faculties of the soul, Augustine, through an encounter with God, allows desire itself to be transformed: it can move us to the good, which is God, away from our own self-interest. This does not mean, however, that one ceases to struggle with bodily and spiritual desires, the struggle between the earthly and heavenly cities; rather, the encounter with God and the gift of grace need not reduce desire simply to one’s own needs, one’s own bodily needs. The encounter opens up desire to a larger possibility of objects. Love, then, is a desire for not only our own selves, but also others, the world, and God. If Augustine is right, and we extend the dialogue between Arendt and Augustine, one that continued throughout all of Arendt’s own life, then perhaps we can find a place for desire as a love that can motivate the faculties of the mind, which Arendt found crucial for the promise of a new politics founded on exceptional words and deeds.

<1>III. Love and Politics

From discussions of kenosis, differends, and the motivating push of desire, we turn in part III to the social and political context of human love, its profound materiality. In chapter 8, “Against Essentialist Conceptions of Love: Toward a Social-Material Theory,” Christian Lotz provides a critique of the religious, romantic, anthropological, or legal conceptions of love that reduce love to an ontological or ethical base from which all other elements of society emerge. He develops instead an understanding of love as the sensual form of being social; that is, love is tied to a social form, dependent on the categorial system of reproduction within which love concretely exists under existing relations of production. From this vantage point, sensual life is as complex as the social world and cannot be abstracted from it. Love must remain tied to real individuals and grasped in its specific, categorial form. As Marx states in The Holy Family , love “cannot be construed a priori, because its development is a real one which takes place in the world of the senses and between real individuals.” To outline this conception of love, Lotz first reflects on love in pre-Marxian terms, as Marx’s break with essentialist conceptions of love depends on his critique of Feuerbach. He then reconstructs Marx’s early philosophy of love as a philosophy of sensuality, expanding this position by taking the “standpoint of reproduction” (Althusser) into account. Lotz concludes with a discussion of Antonio Negri’s and Alain Badiou’s philosophies of love, which he argues provide a regressive position in recent political philosophy and a relevant contrast with the social-material theory of love Lotz provides in this chapter.

Considering further the practical implications of theories of love is Sophie Bourgault’s chapter, “Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil on the Significance of Love for Politics.” In recent decades much scholarly attention has been paid to the role of love in politics. Martha Nussbaum, among others, has made a powerful case for the importance of empathy and compassion in politics. But compassion is certainly not without its critics. Many feminists have objected to a celebration of political compassion and of “caring,” and numerous political theorists have raised red flags about compassion’s excessive sentimentality and its possible perversion into a politics of pity. Bourgault sheds new light on this debate by turning to two twentieth-century political philosophers whose work appears to capture the two most extreme positions that could be taken in this debate, Arendt and Weil. In The Human Condition Arendt suggests that love was a great antipolitical force, and in On Revolution she blames compassion for the failure of almost all revolutionary projects. The contrast with Weil could not be starker. Weil wrote several essays that argue that social justice and good citizenship are impossible without love.

Bourgault considers these dissimilar positions, paying particular attention to the ties between political compassion, speechlessness, and bodily needs. She suggests that Weil’s and Arendt’s distinct positions on compassion are highly dependent on the former’s Platonist and the latter’s phenomenological standpoints on things political. Despite their divergent views, Bourgault concludes that both philosophers agree that solutions to modern ills should include “sober” kinds of love (e.g., philia ). Nevertheless, a positive outlook on love need not entail a progressive politics. In fact, Bourgault argues, Arendt and Weil were both wary of efforts aimed at translating love into generous welfare state measures and both worried about the large bureaucratic apparatus that accompanies such measures.

<1>IV. The Phenomenological Experience of Love

Part IV brings us to the rich terrain of phenomenology and back to the body’s individual experience of love. We begin this section with Fiona Utley’s essay “Trust and the Experience of Love,” which mines the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty to show that love must not be understood as a purely spiritual phenomenon; rather, essential to love is a fundamental comportment that is grounded in trust. She explores how trust unfolds as a lived experience, from the body and habituation, to the psyche and ultimately extending through to the spirit, where one encounters acts of willing and motivation, which are fundamental for love. The unique observation of this chapter is Utley’s cogent point that although Merleau-Ponty does not have a sustained view of love, his disparate writings on the subject demonstrate some consistency. She concludes that we do not remain in the heightened phase of falling in love; rather, our lives settle as new sedimentations occur, building new worlds of shared intimacy from our affective opening onto depth. A metamorphosis occurs out of depth and its reversibility of dimensions through entanglement, and I am altered, you are altered. We become, as Merleau-Ponty suggests, “two in one Being ,” and this one being creates a new world.

The human experience of love in its most concrete manifestations is further highlighted in Marguerite La Caze’s essay “The Time of Possible and Impossible Reciprocity: Love and Hate in Simone de Beauvoir.” This chapter explores how interpreters of Simone de Beauvoir look at her intriguing readings of love and desire in The Second Sex . La Caze brings Beauvoir’s view of love from that text into relation with her descriptions of hate and vengefulness in her early essay “An Eye for an Eye.” She demonstrates how Beauvoir’s position differs in The Second Sex and in other texts from that of the essay and argues that we must distinguish these emotional reactions of outrage from reciprocal loving relations.

La Caze writes that “An Eye for an Eye,” written amid the postwar purge, clarifies for us why vengefulness is “almost bound to be disappointed.” For Beauvoir the extremes of the crimes of the Nazis and the collaborators taught anger and hate to people in a way they had not before experienced. Although this experience was thought to promise a corresponding joy when the worst criminals were punished, disappointment resulted instead. Ultimately, while these particular negative affects are both ethical and understandable, according to Beauvoir they cannot be satisfied or resolved. She sets out to comprehend why this need for a restored reciprocity in the light of such crimes usually cannot be fulfilled. Both private revenge and state punishment fail to bring about the perpetrator’s recognition of what they have done, of their own ambiguous existence or an acknowledgment of the victim’s perspective. Here, writes La Caze, Beauvoir parallels this impossible reciprocity with that of love. In other texts, however, Beauvoir suggests that reciprocity in love may be possible. Indeed, it would be if women were not oppressed, she argues in The Second Sex . In exploring the two accounts of love and hate, La Caze not only offers readers a challenging view of reciprocity and its connection to time, but also a reading of the relationship between love and hate.

Dorothea Olkowski’s point of departure in “Intentionality and the Neuroscience of Love” is the failure of Irving Singer to provide a workable ontology to serve as the framework for the modern ideas of love that he puts forth. She takes on the leading philosophical view of love espoused by Singer but also frames the question of love in terms of neuroscience. Olkowski’s task is to address this failure and take up the challenge of developing an ontological framework for love, one that correlates the ontology with scientific accounts of the physiology and neurophysiology of love. To this end she asks whether love is an emotion, and if it is, how shall we define emotion? Is an emotion a product of sensation or something correlated with intentions? For if emotions are sensations and not intentional, then any notion of lasting love is an illusion. Love may be romantic or familial, passionate or convivial, sexual or Platonic, sadistic or generous; whatever form it takes, we will have to go back to the same questions Singer asked: Is love something learned, is it an instinct, is it a creative act, or is it something else altogether that we have not yet examined and may not even understand?

To respond to this line of questioning Olkowski walks us through the ideas of David Hume on the passions, then turns to the accounts of intentionality found in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s work on perception and in Walter J. Freeman’s on neuroscience. Finally, Olkowski takes up the fictional account of love between the protagonists of Haruki Murakami’s novel 1Q84 to show us how such intentionality might function.

<1>V. Love Stories

Continental philosophy often appeals to literature and stories to make certain points about an experience or an event. We close our collection with two meditative essays that discuss the nature of love within the framework of stories. Both draw from the work of philosophers, but they also show how philosophical reflection and analysis can be carried out in different forms of expression.

In chapter 13, “Love Is Blind: Jacques Derrida,” Dawne McCance provides a Derridean-inspired meditation on her own views of love. She invokes memory to show how her experience of love, in particular the love of her father, is transformed in time and by looking back at it through the lens of the present. This chapter, however, is not only a timely meditation on “filial love”; McCance also acts as a sage who guides us through Derrida’s own writings on love. She exposes and ponders different Derridean claims about the nature of love, including its power to individuate but also obscure and hide, mindful of the fact that Derrida himself was always reluctant to speak about the nature of love, or his own experience of love. A dynamic parallel is established between the author’s own reflections on love and how it is treated and discussed by Derrida.

In our final chapter we return to the themes of death, life, and love. Alphonso Lingis meditates on the experience of love in nature and the love of nature. “The Babies in Trees” begins with a description of these experiences while traveling. He finds in nature a powerful experience of life, a life that is not uniquely his own but to which he feels intimately linked. He expresses the feelings of awe and amazement at belonging to the greater experience of life that he uncovers in nature. But nature not only displays the magnitude and power of life, it also bespeaks a kind of unique intimacy and love, which Lingis says lies within the very structure of nature itself. Our bodies, fundamental expressions and parts of nature, experience the intimacy between love and life as it is witnessed in nature as a whole, but also love and death. “Love comes over us,” Lingis writes; “it is a force of nature in us” that elicits a demand to care and nurture. He uses the example of the relations between mothers and children, turning at the end of his essay to the Toraja people’s custom of burying in the trunks of trees their stillborn or infants who die before cutting their first tooth. In this way, the trees continue the love and nourishment of the parents. “In love we are attached to a singular life,” Lingis states, but also “to a vast beyond and future that opens before that life.”

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Our wish for readers is that this volume of essays not only illuminates provocative insights on love generated by a number of major figures in Continental philosophy but also stimulates further thinking about the nature of love and its implications for the human condition.

Also of Interest

The Violence of Victimhood

Embodiment, Relation, Community

A Continental Philosophy of Communication

Garnet C. Butchart

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The Weeders (1868) by Jules Breton. Courtesy the Met Museum, New York

The enchanted vision

Love is much more than a mere emotion or moral ideal. it imbues the world itself and we should learn to move with its power.

by Mark Vernon   + BIO

Most ancient traditions, not only Christianity, picture the universe as an involution of divine love. It emanates from an origin that precedes frail beings. According to a hymn of creation in the Rig Veda, love is a fundamental presence: ‘In the beginning arose Love’ – or Kāma in Sanskrit: the love that sparks desire and vitalises consciousness through practices of yogic attention. In mystical Islamic traditions, love is similarly comprehended as an external power more than an emotion. For the Sufi, love forces believers, who are called lovers, out of themselves towards the Beloved, who is God. Even Stoicism was originally a discipline for discovering that the world is shaped by the Logos, or active word of creative love.

Today, this appreciation of reality, with its ‘built-in significance’ and ‘admirable design’, to quote C S Lewis, has become a ‘discarded image’. Any curious person enquiring of the universe now, and inspired by science, might feel themselves to be confronted by a reality of unknown or unknowable significance, or of no significance at all. Moreover, such doubt or confusion seems to be the price of rejecting a fanciful worldview for a scientific one. Apprehending the universe no longer consists of an awesome realisation that your mind fits the divine mind to some degree, but becomes one of uncertain, probing wonder: intellectual humility threatened by cognitive humiliation. Nor can anyone who is suffering turn to myths and rituals conveying the purposes of a love that exceeds and might contain their afflictions; they must bear their woe alone or, if they are lucky, in solidarity with similarly isolated others.

As a psychotherapist, I feel sure this feeling of existential seclusion exacerbates distress as well as other symptoms, like excessive consumption or spiritual discontent. Although the prevalence of suffering is given as a prime reason to reject the existence of divine love, paradoxically, I suspect its dismissal has made suffering worse. The healing power of having suffering recognised and understood, even when its causes remain, is a phenomenon that anyone engaged in caring will know. To be with suffering, which is more than just to witness it, is to be vulnerable, which can in turn bring an awareness that love and connection are basic and immovable. This is why people attest to finding God in suffering, regardless of rational objections. That mystery is central to any sure – as opposed to merely asserted – conviction that there is divine love.

Love is the formidable helpmate of our attention. This was something on which the philosopher Simone Weil , who famously took upon herself the sufferings of others , insisted – refusing, for example, to consume more that the miserable rations allowed her compatriots in France, when she was confined to a hospital bed in London in 1943. ‘By loving the order of the world we imitate the divine love which created this universe of which we are a part,’ she wrote.

Put another way, love was considered a universal force and a matter for knowledge, integral to the warp and weft of reality, not just a beneficent feeling or costly duty, practised at a personal level in acts of compassion or charity. When someone received love or gave it, they aligned themselves with the fundamental vitality pulsing through them and everything else. Sun and moon, mountains and seas, plants and birds, beasts of water and land. Everything participated in a common movement of love that would eventually return them to their source and sustainer.

Human beings could intentionally attend to this dynamic and collaborate with it. But, if not, if love is demoted from this role it becomes, at best, a moral ideal or emotion, exapted from evolution and sustained by the brain. Metaphysical agnosticism has replaced ‘ontological rootedness’, to borrow from the philosopher Simon May. Little wonder people feel disorientated or worse. To misquote R D Laing: someone who describes love as an epiphenomenon might be a great scientist, but someone who lives as if love is so will need a good psychiatrist.

But might the older notion of love be returning, as Weil and others have hoped? Might we be moving past the Romantics, who strove to comfort modern minds disturbed by what William Wordsworth called the ‘still, sad music of humanity’ because we are coming to know once more of that ‘holier love’? Might love be not just all you need, but something precisely required to account for who we are and all that is?

P rovocative hints that challenge a reflexive discounting of the enchanted vision, and which might spur a shift by reorientating attention and re-opening avenues of perception, can be drawn from moral philosophy, trends in contemporary biology and by considering the nature of intelligence. Consider first the moral issue. It begins with the observation that uncoupling love from its divine telos, and redescribing it solely in terms of evolved behaviours and all-too-human desires, has had unintended consequences. In particular, the secular turn has inverted the dictum that God is love, and made love a god, encouraging a sentimentalisation of love – a sappy deity for an otherwise godless age. Worse, the reversal excites a demand that is impossible to meet, by tasking humans with offering the unconditional love that, until a couple of centuries ago, would have been taken as coming only from God.

When unconditional love was known as a divine emanation, to claim that capacity for oneself, or to ask it of another, was a form of madness or idolatry. But now everyone is supposed to deliver and receive it, and overlook that we mortals are flawed and floundering. For such reasons, the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan proposed that, in a world without God, love is more honestly defined as a pact. ‘To love is, essentially, to wish to be loved,’ he said: in other words, I’ll give you what we can call love, if you offer me the same. The trouble is, such deals undermine and destroy love, as the philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch realised. Compromise and trade-offs are part of life, yes, but love’s whole point is to draw us beyond the transactional and mediocre. Consider the nature of creativity, Murdoch writes in The Sovereignty of Good (1970): ‘The true artist is obedient to a conception of perfection to which his work is constantly related and re-related in what seems an external manner.’ Love is likewise not fired by injunctions such as ‘Improve a little’ but rather by the call ‘Be perfect!’

The transcendent end to which love leads needn’t be called God, Murdoch felt, though it must be recognised as superhuman and excellent. Following Plato, she called it the Good, ‘the magnetic centre towards which love naturally moves,’ which also reveals the nature of love’s energy. ‘Love is the tension between the imperfect soul and the magnetic perfection which is conceived of as lying beyond it,’ she continued. That ‘beyond’ is the key thought here, with its intuition that what is most longed for is independent of us. Love is active in the psyche that hopes to know more than is currently even conceivable. To foreclose that transformation not only thwarts love, it is dehumanising; since to be human is to yearn for contact with more.

This ‘sovereignty of good’ is impressive, given the way it appears to call us, make demands upon us, and not let us go. But is that the same as affirming love’s transcendent actuality? Some biologists, it seems, are developing a worldview that invites the possibility.

Instead of phrases like ‘the mating season’, Darwin prefers ‘the season of love’

The move is happening in two steps: a first that can be characterised as bottom-up; a second, top-down. The bottom-up element stems from the revised picture of the living world that has been emerging in recent years. This new thinking has left behind the reductive view of life, characterised by Richard Dawkins as driven by selfish genes , to appreciate that cooperative, holistic and interdependent creaturely processes operate at and between all levels of life, from proteins and genes to the organism as a whole – and beyond, including ecological interactions with the so-called external environment.

It’s a fractal picture, driven by the explanatory power derived from considering how wholes matter quite as much as parts. Patterns of interaction that are present at the micro-level are amplified and transformed at the macro-level, with that in turn affecting the granular. Homologous parallels can be detected across species, too. What manifests as attraction and cooperation in simpler organisms becomes altruism and empathy among the more complex, with love capping the pyramid. Building on the foundations laid by biologists like Lynn Margulis, who championed symbiosis in evolution, and developed in books such as Interdependence (2015) by the biologist Kriti Sharma, the new picture changes the status of love from epiphenomenon to an emergent quality, springing from antecedent forms discernible within all sorts of interactions and behaviour; if love in all its fullness is present only in creatures like us, capable of forming intentions and consciously acting sacrificially, then love’s forerunners run all the way down the chain of living entities.

This, incidentally, is akin to the opinion of Charles Darwin. In The Descent of Man (1871), he discusses the ‘love-antics’ of birds, alongside using functional terms such as ‘display’, and instead of phrases like ‘the mating season’, he prefers ‘the season of love’. But he proposes something else, too. While nascent forms of love might evolve alongside the practicalities of survival – caring for offspring, for example – others, such as meeting aggression with kindness or loving enemies, would need ‘the aid of reason, instruction, and the love or fear of God.’ Which brings us to the top-down revision within biology. It shares the vision of an interplay of life processes across levels. But where the bottom-up biologists detect empathy and its precursors in the behaviour of a range of animals, the top-down revisionists are sceptical that complex psychological capacities like empathy exist in any creatures except humans.

In From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds: Six Myths of Evolution (2022), the evolutionary biologist Simon Conway Morris examines the evidence for empathy in creatures from crows to chimps, and finds the data wanting. The matter is subtle and often raises hackles, but the crucial point is that context matters. The environment in which animals live shapes how they behave, as it does with humans, but for nonhuman animals context radically determines what behaviour is possible in the first place. Empathy is a case in point, because being moved by the suffering of a stranger, for instance, is morally significant when it can happen regardless of context, which no other animal appears capable of. ‘It is far from clear that our nearest cousins are anywhere near a moral dimension,’ Conway Morris concludes.

His alternative proposal, in line with Darwin’s conclusion about what it takes to love enemies, is that humans can access and align with moral verities, by virtue of being aware of a transcendent dimension that has not emerged, but been discovered. The human capacity for emotional self-regulation, say, and the ability to have sympathy with radically diverse perspectives, means that we can be open to the revelation of moral features of reality, top-down. The implication is that, while there are certainly analogues to love in other parts of the animal kingdom, these do not form complete pathways for evolutionary development. Rather, our ancestors have readied us for the perception of a love that pre-exists us.

Needless to say, the top-down conclusion is controversial, given the overtone of human exceptionalism, to say nothing of the implication that the creatures we love may not equally love us back. But the enquiry can be nudged along by extending the matter of what we know and turning to the question of how we know anything at all. In this, what we attend to is crucial.

C onsider a delightful anecdote told to me by the astronomer Bernard Carr. A former colleague of Stephen Hawking, Carr joined him at the premiere of the film about Hawking’s life, The Theory of Everything (2014). Carr was paying attention and, as they watched, an irony dawned in his mind. ‘The film was primarily about Stephen’s personal relationship with Jane, his first wife,’ he explained, ‘even though personal relationships and emotions, indeed mind itself, will probably never be covered by any Theory of Everything.’ In short, the film gave the lie to the aspiration to derive a complete account of existence from physics alone, and the reason is obvious: love is real and routinely experienced by human minds; but scientifically speaking, love can be evidenced only indirectly, by measuring the after-effects it leaves in its often-turbulent wake.

That first-hand quality is a feature of many types of knowledge. You can learn a lot about swimming by reading about swimming, but you can never learn how to swim from books. Even knowledge that can be captured in words or equations has a participatory dimension, of which the words and equations are tokens. Humans don’t only calculate but also comprehend, which the philosopher Mary Midgley in Wisdom, Information and Wonder (1989) described as arising from ‘a loving union’. Her point is that knowledge is never merely information amassed, like a digital dataset, but involves an intentional engagement with whatever the information might be about, that latter element being the revelatory issue. Intelligence rests on a dialogue with the world; flow is the feeling of immersion in the exchange. And it is love that invites us in.

Love is an active ingredient of our intelligence in another way. Consider the welter of sense-perceptions that bombard us all day, every day. The cognitive psychologist John Vervaeke argues that we can make sense of the avalanche of what we see, hear, smell, taste and touch through what he calls ‘relevance realisation’; we do not sort through the data, as an AI might, but care for some things above others, and thereby spontaneously spot what matters through the maelstrom. With the exception of the occasional sociopath, people are drawn by what is good, beautiful or true; these qualities organise things for us, even when we are not entirely clear what the good, beautiful or true might be. The ‘transcendentals’, as they were traditionally known, therefore have an objective character, even leading us over current horizons of perception to discover new insights. Weil put it like this: ‘The beauty of the world is the order of the world that is loved.’

When a river enters a larger body of water, the words of Indigenous languages allude to love

Suffering is integral to a searching intelligence, too. Breakthroughs often occur after breakdowns because wisdom tends to arise not with the accumulation of knowledge, but when an old mindset or worldview gives way – a process that is typically troubling and traumatic. But in that transition we are met, which is why a discovery may be greeted with a delighted exclamation: Eureka! Our minds can knowingly resonate with a wider intelligence, in a way that’s seemingly unavailable to other creatures. The pattern of seeds on a sunflower’s head may manifest a Fibonacci sequence, but humans can spot the mathematical and almost musical regularity – and, driven by love, delight in it.

My suspicion is that noticing the felt experience of our connection with the natural world, the associated moments of beauty and revelation, and concluding that the resulting joy is given as a gift, is part of the reason that Indigenous ways of knowing are reviving. ‘Indigenous peoples live in relational worldviews,’ explains Melissa Nelson, a professor at Arizona State University, whose heritage includes Anishinaabe, Cree, Métis and Norwegian. Nelson refers to the notion of ‘original instructions’, which is the array of rituals, myths and patterns around which Indigenous ways of life are organised, together aimed at deepening communion between humans and the more-than-human. She tells me: ‘There is a nurturing quality to the universe that is for us like a natural law, a universal principle that we can tap into: this field of love that is the matrix of the universe.’ The significance for environmental and ecological concerns is obvious.

What’s particularly striking is that analogues of love are perceived in the interactions of the so-called inanimate world, too. For example, when a river enters a larger body of water, the word used in several Indigenous languages alludes to love, Nelson says. Alternatively, viewing the planets or stars can be experienced as a relationship: receiving a quality of light that simultaneously lights up the soul – an insight remembered in words like ‘influence’, which originally meant stellar inflow.

To my mind, there are implications, here, for re-envisioning the place of humans in the world: part of the distinctiveness of our task is to bring this richness to mind. That can make a difference insofar as it increases the attention afforded to love. ‘We live in dire poverty in many places,’ Nelson continues, referring to spiritual as well as material need. ‘But we have this profound understanding of love being a cosmic universal force, that comes to us from the natural world and from the universe as a whole. That really strengthens us in terms of our embodiment and survival, and to thrive and regenerate.’

This kind of awareness might be called a participatory consciousness, and it’s been part and parcel of Western ways of knowing, too. The reciprocity has tended to be discounted since the birth of modern science because of the way dispassionate objectivity is valued, a stance that has brought gains. But perhaps for not much longer. ‘We do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them but by waiting for them,’ Weil observed, because gifts are given in love and spotted by the right quality of attention.

The ramifications of reincorporating something of the premodern view are far reaching. Existential loneliness can be tried, found wanting, and reframed: it’s not all in your head. Or there is the feeling of wonder and connectedness that comes with awareness of the extraordinary nature of reality. The experience is offered a rationale: our minds fit the intelligence that shapes the world. Maybe, too, a love recognised as drawing us can invite us to stop trying to turn our corner of the universe into a tortured, technological paradise, and instead consider how we might design ways of life that deepen our attention, better harmonise with the planet and our nonhuman fellows, and even raise awareness of its divine wellspring. We might want to attend to the best once more, and bear what it takes to commune with this abundance, because there is a cosmic love and we can move with its power, along with everything else that is.

Stories and literature

On Jewish revenge

What might a people, subjected to unspeakable historical suffering, think about the ethics of vengeance once in power?

Shachar Pinsker

Building embryos

For 3,000 years, humans have struggled to understand the embryo. Now there is a revolution underway

John Wallingford

Design and fashion

Sitting on the art

Given its intimacy with the body and deep play on form and function, furniture is a ripely ambiguous artform of its own

Emma Crichton Miller

Learning to be happier

In order to help improve my students’ mental health, I offered a course on the science of happiness. It worked – but why?

Consciousness and altered states

How perforated squares of trippy blotter paper allowed outlaw chemists and wizard-alchemists to dose the world with LSD

Last hours of an organ donor

In the liminal time when the brain is dead but organs are kept alive, there is an urgent tenderness to medical care

Ronald W Dworkin

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Love & Romance

The philosophy of romantic love, peter keeble says philosophy, like love, is a many-splendoured thing..

Philosophy is normally not shy in dealing with highly emotive issues: Philosophers often tell us what we should not do and that certain cherished beliefs are nonsense. However, not many modern philosophers have written about individual emotions, such as the feeling of romantic love. Yet it would seem a subject ripe for analysis of the kind that Phenomenologists do – to examine in a detailed, neutral way what it is like to be in love. Analytical philosophers have also occasionally dipped their toes in the subject. Romantic love therefore presents a chance to look at how these different forms of modern philosophy tackle the same topic, and compare their strengths and weaknesses.

A neat way of getting at the difference between the phenomenological and analytic approaches is to say that one looks at inner feelings, the other at outer meaning. Phenomenology makes no claims about reality beyond our experience, only about the content and structure of experience. Analytical philosophy, by contrast, is more interested in looking at concepts to ensure that we do not reach unjustified conclusions about ourselves, our world, and what we can know. Thus romantic love can be viewed phenomenologically as an experience of which you are the subject, and analytically as a concept and object of study. The one relies heavily on introspection – whether your own or reports from others – and the other on an analysis of meaning and usage.

We are looking specifically at romantic love here, not love of family or friends, not intellectual love, nor love of your neighbour. Nonetheless, romantic love has many facets and phases. Among these are: falling in love, infatuation, unreciprocated love, erotic love, love within a long-term relationship, falling out of love, unrequited love, and bereavement. They may not all have the same one thing in common, and so might best be grouped together in terms of Wittgenstein’s ‘family resemblances’. In what follows I’ll be concentrating on falling in love and love within long-term relationships, which are closely allied.

A. The Phenomenology of Love

The term ‘phenomenology’ can be used to describe the examination of experiences, as I mentioned, but it can also refer more specifically to the philosophical school centred on our experience of the world. A third meaning of ‘phenomenology’ is the body of alleged findings of particular phenomenological philosophers with regard to how our experiences are structured, as well as their practical or ethical implications.

There are two main schools of phenomenological analysis: Edmund Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology , and Martin Heidegger’s hermeneutic (or interpretative) phenomenology .

This is terrifying terminology! But put simply, Husserl’s approach, as applied to romantic love, requires us to be aware of all our preconceptions about love and then ‘bracket’ them off, in order to become a stranger in its strange land and observe our experience of it as objectively as possible.

This is already problematic for our present interests. For instance, is it not the case that any experience of love is to some extent moulded by our upbringing in a society that has written and sung so much about this emotion? If so, then our preconceptions about the experience are part of the experience! Indeed, isn’t the experience largely the product of such cultural influence? Maybe even more to the point: how will I know if I’ve rid myself of all the artificial biases of my perception of love? Perhaps it would require extensive training under the tutelage of some transcendental guru.

It is something of a relief to turn to Heidegger’s phenomenology, which gives interpretation a central role in our perceptions. Heidegger’s perspective recognises there is no way to separate yourself from the human world you are in. It is therefore necessary to try to make your personal experience and thinking explicit, in a statement of pre-understanding. Being aware of initial feelings about the experience being investigated should help ensure they are not smuggled back into what one reports.

Making this statement too is problematic, but let me have a go: I think I have a tendency to believe that love is a sometimes-unnervingly-overwhelming emotion that is often overrated as a justification for how people behave. Watch out that this preconception doesn’t sneak in without any evidence.

We now enter the hermeneutic circle . Here we break down the elements of the matter in hand – the experience of romantic love – and look at what each part adds to the whole and how they are related in the totality of the experience.

At this stage we must gather data about what it is like to be in love. The sources include our own introspections, and reports of other peoples’ introspections. When it comes to love, these include, for instance, popular song lyrics.

Collecting Experience Data

Introspection is considering how something appears or feels to you. In my case, looking at feelings of romantic love yielded among other things, what I think is a seldom remarked-on physiological factor, namely a sort of ache in the lower throat and upper chest. However, this is not peculiar to romantic love in my experience – it is similar to my experience of nostalgia or sympathy for a dying child or homesickness.

What of popular music? I was struck by this lyric from Jackie De Shannon, made popular by The Searchers: “I can feel a new expression on my face / I can feel a glowing sensation taking place / … Every time that you / Walk in the room” (‘When You Walk In The Room’, 1964). Here the uncontrollable and unbidden nature of the feeling is emphasised. Here it comes again, along with certainty, in Katie Melua’s ‘Nine Million Bicycles’ (2012): “There are nine million bicycles in Beijing / That’s a fact / It’s a thing we can’t deny / Like the fact that I will love you till I die.” While there is often a sexual element to the romantic experience, this is not always the case. This comes across in a traditional Somerset song collected by Cecil Sharp with the lines, ‘She looked so fine and nimble/ Washing all her linen, oh’ (“Dashing Away with the Smoothing Iron’). Here the beloved is engaged in a mundane task, but there is something about the way it is done that manifests qualities that the lover appreciates.

Romantic love may simply be an appreciation of and attraction to physical beauty. However, the experience of love may also be much more than mere appreciation, but transformative, even a matter of life and death. There are so many examples of this in music: here are two. The first was written in 1958 by Philip Spector and performed by the Teddy Bears: “Just to see him smile / Makes my life worthwhile”. In 1970, just before her death, Janis Joplin sang, “But I’d trade all of my tomorrows for one single yesterday / To be holdin’ Bobby’s body next to mine” (‘Me & Bobby Magee’). So overwhelming may the experience of love be that it can seem irrational – as when Dusty Springfield sings, “No matter what you do / I only want to be with you” (1964). This can spill over into a rather unpleasant possessiveness, such as “I want you no matter what you do” – as sung by the Four Seasons in 1966 (‘Opus 17’).

Here we have collected some data about what people say it is like to be in love. But this seems to only be a collection of factoids – interesting and thought-provoking, no doubt, but no more than open-minded social research.

Does it help to gather these insights into one overarching description of what it’s like to be in love? Doing so might produce the following: to be in love is to experience a strong emotion we’re often unable to control that’s accompanied by a sort of ache and an overwhelming admiration for someone, along with a possibly irrational desire to be in their presence and to help them. Put more succinctly, Love is a powerful experience centred on one other person that enriches your whole perspective on life, apparently forever.

This certainly helps to tease out the various aspects of what we experience when in love, but it is not particularly philosophical, more a survey of popular culture ideas about love. Nothing about romantic love necessarily follows from it, such as how we should respond to it. With the benefit of these insights we might be more likely to indulge the strange behaviour of those who claim to be in love: but we might just as well conclude that we should not do so.

Heidegger in Love (Perhaps)

At this stage I turned to various summaries of Heidegger’s phenomenology. In what follows I try to apply these analyses to the nature of romantic love. I should emphasise that this is not taken directly from Heidegger. Rather, it is an attempt to apply his conceptual system to romantic love, and to illustrate how a hermeneutic phenomenologist might turn experiential data into something more profound.

For Heidegger we are inherently social beings who experience and operate through interpretation in such a way that we already see the world, and the loved one, in a particular and to some extent socially-determined way.

Heidegger thought we always see an object as something; in other words, we cannot but be always wearing our cultural spectacles. If I see a door, I see it not as a meaningless piece of wood that I afterwards interpret as an entrance; on the contrary, when I see it, I see it as an entrance. In this sort of way, one’s experiences of love represent a particular way of interpreting one’s experience of another person, the beloved. Love is indeed a very intense example of how we don’t see other people as mere humanoids, or shapes, but rather as people of a certain kind. We do not see a person and then think we love them. Instead, once we’re in love, the other person immediately presents to us as someone we want to be in the presence of and to do good to because they enrich our perspective on life. We feel, to use a phenomenological term, that we want to ‘fuse our horizon’ with them. We want to fuse horizons with another being, and to forge a sort of third being in the interaction between lover and beloved – one which contains some of the qualities of both.

Unless we’re particularly self-conscious, this perception steals up on us. Perhaps on first meeting we just saw another person; but once in love we see the beloved with all their qualities and our shared history, in one gestalt experience. This is what Heidegger calls a ‘coping state’ – one in which we are not fully aware of what we’re doing, in the same sort of way an accomplished carpenter is not particularly aware of the hammer they’re using. If something goes wrong with the hammer, or with the love relationship, we are jolted out of our coping state and pay it attention. That’s analogous to what happens when we first fall in love – our normal state of chugging along is suddenly shaken up by the awareness of love. It disturbs our everyday coping state.

To introduce a bit more of Heidegger’s terminology, in your interactions with your beloved, you see them as useful to your life project. You are projecting a different future which gives your life further (or some) meaning. I think Heidegger would also say when we are in love we see at least some of the essence of the beloved. But there is also a danger that our feelings are inauthentic and the product of the cliched ‘they’ world – in Heidegger’s German, the world of ‘das Mann’. This is why we must pay particular attention to what we actually feel in order to determine whether it is true love. We might see the sort of love lyrics we’ve just looked at as a guide or litmus test for love.

There are clear links with existentialism here. The authenticity of your love may not lead you into any different behaviours than your inauthentic neighbours, but it might. For instance, authentic love may well decide to break some social taboos of the ‘they world’, regarding race, sex, or age, for instance.

This is fascinating, and perhaps useful. However, it seems to me essentially arbitrary. A pre-existing Heideggerian ideology of authenticity has been bolted on to the experiences of love outlined above. It reveals some possible insights into the experience of love, but it’s like a sculpture adorning an office block, in that it does not have to be that specific sculpture. Another sculpture in a different style would work as well and could have revealed and emphasised other aspects of love. Feminism, Marxism, or evolutionary psychology could just as easily have been bolted on to the experience.

B. Romantic Love: Analytical Philosophy’s Perspective

One approach of analytical philosophy applied to love has highlighted dilemmas of fungibility. If love is based on properties of the beloved then this suggests the beloved can be replaced by someone with similar or superior versions of these properties. If, however, the beloved is irreplaceable because of a history of shared experiences, the possibility arises of being trapped forever with a partner who may change and become less desirable. Here, however, I will concentrate on Gabriele Taylor’s examination of whether we are entitled to pass comment on the appropriateness of somebody’s claim to love another person.

In her article ‘Love’ ( Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 76, 1976), Taylor asks whether falling in love, which we tend to think of as a bolt out of the blue that cannot be questioned, is so different from a large set of other emotions where we can feel justified in questioning whether the feeling is reasonable. She suggests we can question infatuation too. First, she points out that it is the structure of other emotions, such as fear, which enables us to make judgements as to their reasonableness. Fear involves someone thinking that an object, animal, or person has certain determinable qualities which result in and may (or may not) justify that emotion. Suppose, for instance that Sheila fears a cobra because she believes it is venomous. From this we infer:

• Sheila must have some relevant want . In this case, not to be killed.

• Sheila must believe the snake has the determinable quality of being venomous.

• Sheila must believe there is a causal connection between the determinable quality (venomous) and her want (to stay alive).

• The determinable quality can’t be just anything : it must explain the emotion.

So there are criteria by which we can judge if the emotion of fear is justified in any particular case. On closer inspection, we may find that Sheila is wrong in thinking the cobra in front of her is venomous; she may even be wrong in believing it is a snake and not a stick. Or she may not know that the snake is venomous and could kill her, but be fearful of it for some absurd reason, such as an intense dislike of spaghetti.

Taylor claims that there seems to be no comparable structure for love. What is the determinate quality of the object of your love? Lovability ? But this seems too empty and subjective to be useful – so much so that it is a tautology rather than a possible explanation, What, we feel entitled to ask, are the specific properties of lovability that justifiably inspire love? They surely vary markedly from person to person. Nonetheless, Taylor says, although there may not be easily-identified determinable qualities for love, we can observe the common wants of those who are in love. These include:

• A wanting to be with B

• A wanting to communicate with B

• A wanting to cherish and benefit B

• A wanting B to take an interest in A (and for B to admire them – hence all that showing off)

In relation to qualities, most of us will deem these wants to be justifiable if A identifies that B is kindly, or attractive, or has a sense of humour, for example. All that is reasonable. But we would not think it reasonable for A to love B if she thought B was a crushing bore. She might love B despite thinking him a crushing bore, but it would be absurd to love him because she recognises his extreme boorishness.

Taylor concludes that we can ask whether it is reasonable for someone to be in love. However, this is not so much because of easily identifiable characteristics, as in the case of fear (for example, the object of fear has features that are dangerous; and everyone knows cobras are dangerous). Lovable characteristics are to a greater extent in the eye of the beholder, whose wants may also be less clear. Nevertheless, there are some limits on what is reasonable in love. The properties of the beloved must not directly contradict the wants of the lover.

I think Taylor is correct that it is possible to make judgements about whether people are really in love, but I believe her to be wrong in saying that there is a difference in kind between love and, say, fear. Love and fear may be better thought of as placed on a continuum of emotions. At the ‘fear’ end are emotions whose objects have more objective criteria with wider public agreement. At the ‘love’ end. the opposite is true.

The reason we can be so sure about the reasonableness or otherwise of fear, is that there are more clearly objective criteria for identifying fearsome qualities, such as those of a cobra, which most of us would agree are fearsome. However, it seems that the criteria for lovability are more numerous, more subtle, and more subjective. Still, we do expect there to be some identifiable qualities in the beloved that the lover could with some thought identify – and, moreover, some of those qualities (such as being a crushing bore) would be seen as unlovable. Ultimately, who we fall in love with is a bit of an enigma, but not a total mystery. And in any case, doesn’t infatuation have an analogue with the irrational fears known as phobias? As with infatuation, there often seems to be no objective reason for a phobic emotion.

Taylor goes on to consider situations where we might be inclined to argue with someone about the reasonableness of their proclaimed love. For example, it may be obvious that B does not possess the spontaneous sense of humour that A thinks they have. Or it may be clear that B dislikes A. Or A may have an inflated belief that marriage will solve all B’s shortcoming. In each of these situations we would feel justified in sitting down with A and having a good heart to heart with them.

Finally, Taylor looks at examples where someone proclaiming their love does so for all the wrong reasons, including where the love is overly coloured by the lover’s interests. In an example taken from Henrik Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House , Taylor tells us that Helmer’s love for Nora is unreasonable because it requires Nora to remain passive rather than develop into a fully rounded person in her own right.

Some Conclusions

I have argued that phenomenology is good at identifying and appreciating an emotion like love, but may bring an arbitrary ideology to bear as a response to it. Analytical philosophy may provisionally assume an understanding of love, before going on to reveal controversies and insights, such as concerning our ability to judge another’s love.

I think that phenomenology and analytical philosophy are not mutually exclusive but collectively revealing. Philosophy, like love, is a many-splendoured thing.

© Peter Keeble 2022

Peter Keeble is a retired local government research officer and teacher in London.

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What the philosophers think about love

BY Mandi Goodier

2nd Dec 2022 Dating & Relationships

Plato: The other half

"Love itself comes from human imperfection, lack and need"

• The children of the Sun became homosexuals 
• The children of the Earth became lesbians
• The children of the Moon became straight

Socrates: Platonic love

• The least important would be  biological offspring
• The next, heroic deeds and lasting fame
• Finally came the things that indeed make us human: art, education, science, politics, culture and so on

The evolution of love

St Augustine: Love and shame

"St Augustine has probably had more impact on the way the modern world feels about sex than any other man"

Mary Wollstonecraft: Love outside of marriage

Freud: Oedipus complex

Sartre: love and freedom.

Simone de Beauvoir: Dare to love differently 

"The only solution to this is for lovers to be deemed equal"

Alain Badiou: In praise of love

What Is Love? A Philosophy of Life

Natural Philosopher, Alchemist, Visual Artist

Don't let the word love define your LOVE

Love is the most powerful emotion a human being can experience. The strange think is, that almost nobody knows what love is. Why is it so difficult to find love? That is easy to understand, if you know that the word "love" is not the same as one's feeling of love.

The word "love" is used and abused for the expression of different sets of feelings.

The word love is used as an expression of affection towards someone else (I love you) but it also expresses pleasure (I love chocolate). To make it a little more complicated, the word "love" also expresses a human virtue that is based on compassion, affection and kindness. This is a state of being, that has nothing to do, with something or someone outside yourself. This is the purest form of Love.

The ancient Greek used 7 words to define the different states of love:

Storge: natural affection, the love you share with your family.

Philia: the love that you have for friends.

Eros: sexual and erotic desire kind of love (positive or negative)

Agape: this is the unconditional love, or divine love

Ludus: this is playful love, like childish love or flirting.

Pragma: long standing love. The love in a married couple.

Philautia: the love of the self (negative or positive)

These are 7 different kind of feelings. The love you feel for your partner is not the same as the love you feel for your mother. Even the love for your partner changes in time. You feel different emotions for different situations and people.

But still, we use the same word. It is easy to understand that a confusion is easy made while communicating. I can say "I love you" to two different people (and mean it), but I am actually feeling in a different way.

This confusion is not only the case while 2 people are talking, your own brain does not get it.

What you feel is controlled by the right side of your brain and language is controlled by your left side. If you use the word "love" 10 times a day with different situations, it losses power. Your left part or your brain does not get fully activated when you really mean "I love you" and want to get exited about it. 50% of your brain is a lot.

The first thing that you need to do is learn the differences of the (7?) states of love. Not the words, but how they feel. It is easy if you recognize the words. It is basic training. Awareness, that is the secret to love.

Love is a practice, it is not something you find or don't find. You can practice love for the rest of your life.

Don't abuse the word love. Use other words where you are not addressing emotion towards other people.

Example: I love chocolate, becomes: I enjoy chocolate. I love my job, becomes: I have passion for what I do.

Enjoying, loving and passion are 3 different emotions. It is essential to learn (again) the true meaning of words, not merely to communicate with someone else, but also so learn to experience them. Words are very powerful instruments. Not only to communicate with others, but also with your self. The words you use, creates awareness and eventually your reality.

If you use words wisely, you can learn to recognize what kind of love you are feeling, and enjoy the different kinds of love. With one person of different ones.

If you don't know how to find love with in you, you will never find it outside you.

Words are agreements to express ideas or feelings. The meaning of words is not absolute, it is always a personal interpretation. The group of feelings associated with the word "love" is difficult to understand, and even more difficult to express to other person. Let put is this way: it is impossible with only one word.

With the creation of a word, you can give it a special meaning. Some lovers create words to express what they feel to each other. A word creates and agreement or memories. This moments can be repeated when you use that word or when you think about it.

In other languages exist words, related to love, that expresses different situations that don't have a translation to English. When you know this words, you recognize this feelings. You get more grip in what you are experiencing.

Beautiful words in other languages:

Yuanfen (Chinese): A love relationship that has been established by lot, based on principles of Chinese culture.

Mamihlapinatapei (Yaghan): A look that without words is shared by two people who want to initiate something, but neither start.

Cafuné (Brazilian Portugees): Slowly stroking your fingers through someone else's hair.

Retrouvailles (France): The happiness of seeing someone again after a long time.

La Douleur Exquise (France): The enormous pain in your heart when you desire someone you cannot have.

Ya'aburnee (Arabic): The hope that you will die earlier than the other, so you don't need to live without the other.

Forelsket (Nordic): The euphoria you feel when you fall in love for the first time.

Saudade (Portugees): The feeling of longing for someone you love, but is far away.

This "moments" are so important in other cultures that they have words to express them. My point is, don't use just one word to define your love. Learn this "words" and recognize them when you are living them.

With love, you get what you put in

Love is an emotion in action. You can learn how to feel and cultivate your love... First learn and know the different situations of love. Learn how to recognize them when you are feeling them. Then you go and share your love with others.

Love between 2 people can only begin if the interaction is based on truth, trust and respect. That is something you start giving. This is essential to grown mutual love between 2 individuals. If the other person gives you wat you give, then you start feeling love for each other and it can grow...

It is not difficult to understand love, once you know how love works.

It is very easy to fall in love with someone. The difficulty is to stay in love. But if it is difficult to stay in love, that means, that it is not the love of your life. It is a love experience. Love is always beautiful, if it is not beautiful, it is not love. Time to move on. Sometimes, love just fades away. It is better to move on when you don't feel anything, then when you feel the opposite of love.

Finding your loved one or a relationship...

If you want to find the love of your life, start being aware of your use of the word love. Saying and thinking I want to find the love of my life and not I want a relationship is fundamental. You find what you are looking for.

"Being in a relationship" is a marketing term invented in magazines. Everyone that is not single is in a relationship. To address a large group of people it is perfect, but it is to vague to define your personal situation.

The only important question for you should be: "Am I experiencing love or not?"

This is the first philosophy essay forming a series under the name: "Natural Philosophy" about the most important matters of life, trying to define a "Theory of everything". Continue reading here .

Support the crowd source campaign to publish a ebook, and distribute it for free. (Link in my profile) or download the first ebook in the Natural Philosophy series here

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It may seem doubtful that philosophers have much to tell us about love (beyond their love of wisdom). Surely it is the poets who have the market cornered when it comes to deep reflection on the nature of love. John and Ken question the notion that love cannot be captured by the light of reason by turning their attention to the philosophy of love with philosopher-poet Troy Jollimore from CSU Chico. Troy is the author of Love’s Vision, as well as two collections of poems: At Lake Scugog and 2006's Tom Thomson in Purgatory , which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. This program was recorded live at the Mill Valley Public Library, just north of San Francisco. 

Listening Notes

Many people have claimed (at least once) that they are in love, and it is a theme in countless books and songs. But what is love? Is it rational or irrational? John and Ken agree right off the bat that it’s a complicated concept. Troy Jollimore, philosophy professor, poet, and author of  Love’s Vision , is invited to the conversation to puzzle with them.

John begins with the million dollar question: “What is love?” Troy responds by saying that love is an emotion, but there are more than simple feelings involved. Love is also a perception of value and a commitment of will. Feelings come and go, but along with this ebb is a consistency of decision to be devoted to someone. 

Next, Ken wonders how subject love is to reasons. He describes a few of the reasons why he loves his wife; she’s smart, beautiful, and cares about animals. But if those qualities are the reasons why he loves his wife, Ken wonders, then why wouldn’t he begin to love someone else who had more of the same qualities? And why don’t other people love his wife if they agree that his reasons are good ones? Troy calls these two scenarios the trading up problem and the universality problem. He insists that love is rational, but not in the coldly calculated, economic way of comparison that we usually associate with rationality. He categorizes love is a type of perception which is effected by perspective; to a degree, love is actually “blind,” but this does not mean that it is irrational, because all of Ken’s reasons for loving his wife are still good ones.  Although Ken, John, and Troy mostly discuss reciprocal romantic love, they also touch upon friendship, the love a parent has for a child, unrequited love, and the case of arranged marriages.  

The last audience comment wistfully compares love to a revolution. Both starts with an idea, come about because something is missing (either in one’s life or in the state of a country), and no two are the same. John finds this comparison apt, and Ken continues by commenting how love is special in that it allows one person to see another in their full, unique particularity. Troy agrees, proclaiming love to be the cure for solipsism.

• Roving Philosophical Reporter  (Seek to 6:10): In this segment, the audience is made privy to two highly personal, real life love stories. One is about love found through the ordeal of a life-threatening medical emergency, and the other is about love lost after a deadly robbery at gunpoint.  
• 60-Second Philosopher  (Seek to 48:36): First bemoaning the fact that “love is boring unless you’re in it,” Ian Shoales briefly describes a few spectacular love stories about romance-induced pity and punishment from Greek and Roman gods. He then proceeds to call to mind some of the most famous couples from popular culture.

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Full episode downloads via Apple Music and abbreviated episodes (Philosophy Talk Starters) via Apple Podcasts , Spotify , and Stitcher

Unlimited Listening

Buy the episode, related blogs, what is (this thing called) love, related resources.

Web Resources

Botton, Alain de (2012). “ Schopenhauer on Love .”  Philosophy: A Guide to Happiness  (YouTube series).

Fisher, Helen (2008). “ Helen Fisher studies the brain in love . TED.

Helm, Bennett (2009). “ Love .”  The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy .

Jollimore, Troy (2008). “ The Psychology of Exclusivity .”  Les Ateliers de L’Ethique .

Pinker, Steven (2008). “ Crazy Love .”  TIME Magazine .

Rice, Maureen (2003). “ Love in the 21st century .”  The Guardian .

Zimmer, Carl (2008). “ Romance Is An Illusion .”  TIME Magazine . 

Amini, Thomas et. al (2001).  A General Theory of Love . ISBN: 0375709223 .

Fisher, Helen (2004).  Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love . ISBN: 0805077960 .

Horstman, Judith (2011).  The Scientific American Book of Love, Sex, and the Brain: The Neuroscience of How, When, Why, and Who We Love . ISBN: 0470647787 .

Jollimore, Troy (2011).  Love’s Vision . ISBN: 0691148724 .

Pakaluk, Michael (1991).  Other Selves: Philosophers on Friendship . ISBN: 0872201139 .

Soble, Alan (1998).  Eros, Agape and Philia: Readings in the Philosophy of Love . ISBN: 1557782784

Vernon, Mark (2010).  The Meaning of Friendship . ISBN: 023024288X. 

Bonus Content

Comments (9)

Friday, January 15, 2021 -- 12:39 PM

What is love? It is simple. One molecular cluster connects with the other to try to create a more viable system for the next generation of clusters.

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Thursday, February 11, 2021 -- 10:44 PM

Love is human in the sense discussed here. It has a context of time, place and community.

It seems more elusive than hate, but not apossite to it or any other feeling.

Love is a feeling for sure. It is a projection through memory. It is emotional without its own category. Jealousy, lust, power, regret, grief, peace...there seems no end to the emotions and other feelings with which it can mix.

Love is not the end all. It is fickle. To love is to be vulnerable.

I don't know if solipsism is possible with love, but I think I have loved and I still have worries I am alone.

When a loved one dies l have never felt more alone. Yet I persist and other emotions persist, but love is gone. Did I make it up...I don't know.

Sunday, February 28, 2021 -- 12:36 PM

Just trying to ketchup, catsup, er catchup---yeah, that's what I'm talking about. Long absence from this delightful venue. Words and meanings are so, ambivalent ( rwo-sided): ambidextrous ( two handed); unilateral ( one-sided).Love,for example. The word does not mean much. If I say I love lobster thermador, the expression means nothing. For two reasons: 1. I have never eaten the dish. 2. Loving food is irrelevant...the objective is avoidance of starvation,not some higher-order humanistic sort of transcendent experience .You can't have love without hate. Seems a paradox. A few thousand years of civilization affirm this. So...,is love meaningless? No. Do we really know what we are talking about when we talk about love? More-or-less, yes. Still, it is a paradox---triadox ---- quadradox. You choose. Or, reject... we vocalize the doxical aspects--- to make each other feel better. And meet social expectations---something Davidson called propositional attitude. It does not pay the rent...does not foster world peace...

Sunday, March 7, 2021 -- 12:28 PM

I guess my understanding of philosophy is all wrong. Love of wisdom? I have never thought so. Why? Well, wisdom is ephemeral. Subjective. More in the eye of the beholder. Like, uh, beauty. Maybe, just maybe, it depends on the meaning of sophistic, or, sophism. I once knew a man who hated sophism. Said he did. Said it was never acceptable. So, is sophism the love of wisdom? Or a love of knowledge? Was my older antagonist's dislike all about wisdom or knowledge? Did he even know what HE was lalking about?

Seems to me, wisdom is much more ephemeral than knowledge. If love of knowledge is more about philosophy than love of wisdom, then it seems Jack Baird did not know what he was talking about. So, what's it going to be? What is the difference among wisdom and knowledge? It is not, you see, a matter of 'between'. How many ways can there be? Aris-tot-tel; So-crates and Pla-too were primitives. They muddled through, best they could. Giants? No. Pygmies... Those have always preceded giants. Seems to me...

Sunday, March 7, 2021 -- 12:35 PM

Or, less philosophically, what is love? Five feet of heaven in a ponytail. The cutest ponytail, that sways with a wiggle, when she walks.

Friday, March 19, 2021 -- 3:30 PM

There did not appear to be anywhere to add this comment, in current discussion. So, I'll put it here. Something about happiness. Finland. Another one of those Scandinavian countries: Number 1. In happiness. I have commented on conditions in Sweden---their social democracy---their level of content---and anything, everything else one might want to entertain. i don't need to speculate on happiness in Scandinavia. It is self-evident. I don't know about Alaska either. It is cold, I hear. It can be cold in Canada---I know. Happiness runs in a circular motion... We have a newscaster here from Canada. He seems to have forgotten where he came from.

Monday, March 22, 2021 -- 7:07 AM

As we go along in this life we are given, it becomes clear that certain of our concepts, imaginings and perceptions resist definition. I have briefly remarked elsewhere on the illusiveness of truth, and notions about a totality of circumstances. In a similar sense, it seems to me that totality applies to what we call love. Love embodies other of what Davidson called propositional attitudes: belief; desire; expectation;and so on. Perhaps key, though, is trust, because no matter how strong we may imagine our love to be, it blows up; breaks down; falls apart and wears out when we lose trust. Even parental love, I think the most powerful, may not endure if trust is abused and lost. And, romantic love sours dramatically if trust is betrayed. Courtfoom television aptly demonstrates this, whether it is otherwise absurd or somehow believable. So, love is both simple and complex. As with so much of life.

Saturday, June 19, 2021 -- 5:56 AM

Like desire, belief, expectation, ideology and several others,I think love is a propositional attitude, after Davidson, et. al. There is quid pro quo entailed. And, there is no such love as unconditional love, accordingly. Even among our domesticated animal friends, their love for us is conditioned on our kind and gentle treatment of them. If we change that treatment to cruelty, they wil fear us. Or worse. This is how it works. Anything more profound is impossible.

Monday, February 21, 2022 -- 12:14 PM

Further reflection led to the following thesis. If sensoria lead to things such as belief; desire; expectation; and other such propositions, is love much different? Because, it seems to me, many of those propositions are essential for engagement and cultivation of that emotion we call love. If any are neglected, abused or lost, love withers. Dies. Such is the fragility of love. It just cannot weather any sort of neglect.

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The Nine Best Books on the Philosophy of Love

Lennox Johnson September 14, 2020 Books

From beginner-friendly introductions to classic books on the philosophy of love, this page features books to suit any learning style. It’s worth noting that there is no single best book on the philosophy of love. The best book for you will depend heavily on your preferred learning style and the amount of time/energy you’re willing to spend reading. For example, if you tend to find classic works of philosophy difficult to understand, you might want to start with a short, beginner-friendly introduction. If you prefer more depth, you can choose a more comprehensive introduction or pick up one of the classics.

It’s also worth noting that it is not a list of personal recommendations. Personal book recommendations tend to be highly subjective, idiosyncratic, and unreliable. This list is part of a collection of over 100 philosophy reading lists which aim to provide a central resource for philosophy book recommendations. These lists were created by searching through hundreds of university course syllabi , internet encyclopedia bibliographies , and community recommendations . Links to the syllabi and other sources used to create this list are at the end of the post. Following these links will help you quickly find a broader range of options if the listed books do not fit what you are looking for.

Here are the best philosophy books on love in no particular order.

Love: A Very Short Introduction – Ronald de Sousa

Publisher description: Although there are many kinds of love, erotic love has been celebrated in art and poetry as life’s most rewarding and exalting experience, worth living and dying for and bringing out the best in ourselves. And yet it has excused, and even been thought to justify, the most reprehensible crimes. Why should this be? This Very Short Introduction explores this and other puzzling questions. Do we love someone for their virtue, their beauty, or their moral or other qualities? Are love’s characteristic desires altruistic or selfish? Are there duties of love? What do the sciences – neuroscience, evolutionary and social psychology, and anthropology – tell us about love? …

Philosophy of Love: A Partial Summing-up – Irving Singer

Publisher description: The author of the classic philosophical treatment of love reflects on the trajectory, over decades, of his thoughts on love and other topics.

In 1984, Irving Singer published the first volume of what would become a classic and much acclaimed trilogy on love. Trained as an analytical philosopher, Singer first approached his subject with the tools of current philosophical methodology. Dissatisfied by the initial results (finding the chapters he had written “just dreary and unproductive of anything”), he turned to the history of ideas in philosophy and the arts for inspiration. He discovered an immensity of speculation and artistic practice that reached wholly beyond the parameters he had been trained to consider truly philosophical. In his three-volume work The Nature of Love , Singer tried to make sense of this historical progression within a framework that reflected his precise distinction-making and analytical background. In this new book, he maps the trajectory of his thinking on love. It is a “partial” summing-up of a lifework: partial because it expresses the author’s still unfolding views, because it is a recapitulation of many published pages, because love―like any subject of that magnitude―resists a neatly comprehensive, all-inclusive formulation. …

Eros, Agape, and Philia: Readings in the Philosophy of Love – Alan Soble

Publisher description: For centuries, popular writers and respected scholars have written about and analyzed the phenomenon of love without exhausting its potential for contemporary debate. By representing the three major traditions in the philosophy of love–Platonic eros, Christian agape, and Aristotelian philia–editor Alan Soble has not only examined the intellectual problem of what “love” is, but has designed a dialogue among the three traditions in genuine philosophical style. …

The Routledge Handbook of Love in Philosophy – Adrienne Martin

Publisher description: The Routledge Handbook of Love in Philosophy collects 39 original chapters from prominent philosophers on the nature, meaning, value, and predicaments of love, presented in a unique framework that highlights the rich variety of methods and traditions used to engage with these subjects. …

Lysis, Symposium, Phaedrus, Alcibiades, with Selections from Republic and Laws – Plato

Publisher description: This collection features Plato’s writings on sex and love in the preeminent translations of Stanley Lombardo, Paul Woodruff and Alexander Nehamas, D. S. Hutchinson, and C. D. C. Reeve.

Reeve’s Introduction provides a wealth of historical information about Plato and Socrates, and the sexual norms of classical Athens. His introductory essay looks closely at the dialogues themselves and includes the following sections: Socrates and the Art of Love; Socrates and Athenian Paiderastia; Loving Socrates; Love and the Ascent to the Beautiful; The Art and Psychology of Love Explained; and Writing about Love.

Nicomachean Ethics – Aristotle

Publisher description: A student of Plato and a teacher of Alexander the Great, Aristotle is one of the towering figures in Western thought. A brilliant thinker with wide-ranging interests, he wrote important works in physics, biology, poetry, politics, morality, metaphysics, and ethics.

In the Nicomachean Ethics , which he is said to have dedicated to his son Nicomachus, Aristotle’s guiding question is what is the best thing for a human being? His answer is happiness. “Happiness,” he wrote, “is the best, noblest, and most pleasant thing in the world.” But he means not something we feel, not an emotion, but rather an especially good kind of life . Happiness is made up of activities in which we use the best human capacities, both ones that contribute to our flourishing as members of a community, and ones that allow us to engage in god-like contemplation. …

The Art of Loving – Erich Fromm

Publisher description: The renowned psychoanalyst and social philosopher Erich Fromm has helped millions of men and women achieve rich, productive lives by developing their hidden capacities for love. In this astonishingly frank and candid book, he explores the ways in which this extraordinary emotion can alter the whole course of your life.

Most of us are unable to develop our capacities for love on the only level that really counts—a love that is compounded of maturity, self-knowledge, and courage. Learning to love, like other arts, demands practice and concentration. Even more than any other art it demands genuine insight and understanding.

In this classic work, Fromm explores love in all its aspects–not only romantic love, steeped in false conceptions and lofty expectations, but also love of parents, children, brotherly love, erotic love, self-love, and the love of God.

Existentialism and Romantic Love – Skye Cleary

Publisher description: This book is an existential study of romantic loving. It draws on five existential philosophers to offer insights into what is wrong with our everyday ideas about romantic loving, why reality often falls short of the ideal, sources of frustrations and disappointments, and possibilities for creating authentically meaningful relationships.

What Love Is: And What it Could Be – Carrie Jenkins

Publisher description: A rising star in philosophy examines the cultural, social, and scientific interpretations of love to answer one of our most enduring questions

What is love? Aside from being the title of many a popular love song, this is one of life’s perennial questions. In What Love Is , philosopher Carrie Jenkins offers a bold new theory on the nature of romantic love that reconciles its humanistic and scientific components. Love can be a social construct (the idea of a perfect fairy tale romance) and a physical manifestation (those anxiety- inducing heart palpitations); we must recognize its complexities and decide for ourselves how to love. Motivated by her own polyamorous relationships, she examines the ways in which our parameters of love have recently changed-to be more accepting of homosexual, interracial, and non-monogamous relationships-and how they will continue to evolve in the future. Full of anecdotal, cultural, and scientific reflections on love, What Love Is is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand what it means to say “I love you.” Whether young or old, gay or straight, male or female, polyamorous or monogamous, this book will help each of us decide for ourselves how we choose to love.

The following sources were used to build this list:

University Course Syllabi:

• Philosophy of Love and Sex – University of Oregon
• Love and Sex – University of Rhode Island
• Philosophy of Love – Temple University
• Philosophy of Sex and Love – William Patterson University

Bibliographies:

• Bibliography to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on Love
• Bibliography to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on Love

Other Recommendations:

• Books/essays on love?
• What are some good philosophical texts on “love”?
• Some book recommendations for Love?
• Good books on the philosophy of love
• What are the important works in the philosophy of love?
• Recommend me books/papers on the Philosophy of Love (beginner)

The Daily Idea aims to make learning about philosophy as easy as possible by bringing together the best philosophy resources from across the internet.

• Find the best philosophy books on a wide variety of topics with this collection of over 120 philosophy reading lists .
• Find free online philosophy articles, podcasts, and videos with this organised collection of 400+ free philosophy resources .

You can also follow The Daily Idea on Facebook and Twitter for updates.

A History of Western Philosophy in 500 Essential Quotations – Lennox Johnson

Category: Reference | Length: 145 pages | Published: 2019

Publisher’s Description: A History of Western Philosophy in 500 Essential Quotations is a collection of the greatest thoughts from history’s greatest thinkers. Featuring classic quotations by Aristotle, Epicurus, David Hume, Friedrich Nietzsche, Bertrand Russell, Michel Foucault, and many more, A History of Western Philosophy in 500 Essential Quotations is ideal for anyone looking to quickly understand the fundamental ideas that have shaped the modern world.

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