8.1: Love

Love comes in many varieties. A few varieties of love identified in ancient Greece continue to provide useful points of orientation. The Greek terms for these are Philia, eros and agape. Philiais friendship (this word is also the root of “philosophy” literally translated as the love of wisdom). Eros refers to erotic love, and agape we are most familiar with through the Christian tradition as something like universal love for all people. Agape is the sort of love that God has for all people and it also provides the foundation for Christian ethical precepts.

The classic account of Philia comes from Aristotle who takes friendship to be a concern for the good of another for her sake. In friendship we adopt the good of another as a good of our own. It’s important that we understand this as expanding our sphere of concern beyond ourselves. Concern for another just because of some benefit she will bring to us is not genuine friendship. Cultivating a relationship with someone because you think it will improve your social standing or help you land a job is not really love in the sense of friendship. This is the significance of having concern for another for his or her own sake. Given this view, we can see the cynical view that everyone is ultimately motivated only by narrow self-centered self-interest as entailing the non-existence of Philia or friendship. For this reason cynicism seems a rather sad and lonely view.

Friendship is not, on Aristotle’s view, opposed to self-interest. It is common to think that when we come to genuinely care for another we do so at the expense of self-interest. Love, on this popular view often involves a measure of self-sacrifice for the sake of another. But this popular view is at best a bad distortion of Aristotle’s view of friendship. This is because Aristotle takes love in the sense of friendship to involve an expansion of our own sphere of concern to include the good of another, not the refocusing of it away from ourselves. Of course there will be conflicting desires among friends. But among friends these aren’t mere conflicts between their individual wills. Rather, when I love my friend in the sense of Philia and I want one thing while my friend has a competing desire, I experience this as an internal conflict of my own will, and perhaps my friend does, too. It might not be obvious to either of us which movie we should see on our night out together. But the question of my self-interest versus my friend’s dissolves in our mutual concern for each other for his or her own sake. The salient issue becomes what movie we should see together.

We often suppose that loving another means feeling good about that person. But love is emotionally more complicated than that, and Aristotle’s account of Philia sheds some light on this. A parent who loves his child will generally feel good about that child when things are going well. But another emotional manifestation of whole hearted love for the child might include disappointment when the child makes an irresponsible choice. This makes perfect sense on Aristotle’s account since to love the child is to adopt the good for the child as the good for the parent. When the child’s bad choice threatens what’s good for the child, being disappointed can be seen as part of caring about what is best for the child. A corollary of this insight is that coddling or spoiling a child is not the loving thing for a parent to do when this is liable to undermine what is good for the child in the long run.

Loving things

If philosophy is genuinely a case of Philia, then we should be able to make sense out of talk of loving things other than persons. We do commonly talk of loving chocolate, loving this or that band, or loving our house. In most cases this probably shouldn’t be taken literally. Love is not mere appreciation, preferring, or desiring. So saying I love the new Spoon album isn’t saying that I care for it for its own sake or that I have adopted its interests as my own. It doesn’t have interests that I’m in any position to adopt as my own. So, talk of loving things other than persons is often merely metaphorical. But is it always metaphorical?

Philia requires that a thing have a good of its own that we can adopt as part of the good for ourselves. We don’t ordinarily regard things other than persons and relatively sophisticated animals as having a good of their own. My computer has value only in that it is useful to me. We refer to this kind of value as instrumental value. This is the sort of value a thing has because it is instrumental to satisfying other ends that we have. Typically we deny that non-sentient things have any value beyond their usefulness to us. In this frame of mind we are prone to think the young hot-rodder who takes his vintage Mustang to have a good of its own, a value that is intrinsic to it and not merely instrumental to him and its admirers, as suffering from a kind of delusion. But perhaps this doesn’t tell us so much about whether non-sentient things can have the kind of value that can make them appropriate objects of love as it does about the shortcomings of our ordinary state of mind. It might be worth considering the matter from a more creative state of mind and pondering the relationship between an artist and his or her art.

As a listener I can admire or enjoy a Spoon song or a Rachmaninov piano concerto, but I’m not in much of a position to adopt the good of the work as a good of my own. However, Britt Daniel and his colleagues are in a position to adopt the good of a Spoon song as a good of their own. Rachmaninov could very well be concerned with the aesthetic quality of his piano concerto for its own sake. The cynic will snidely remark that artists only aim to please their audience for the sake of drawing praise and honor on themselves. But I think the cynic fails to understand the artist and the experience of creating art. Practicing artists are typically not too concerned with reviews and prizes while they are actively creating. The concert pianist invests most of her time and concern in playing well. The adulation of an audience may be icing on the cake, but what really matters to the serious artist is the art. The creative activity is not a mere means to some further end, but it’s absorbing, even all consuming. The artist is concerned with playing well, dancing well, making a beautiful and functional building, cooking well. We might worry that this is all just so much self-indulgence. The cynic might claim that artists are just doing what they want to, and if they are really lucky, others might like it too. But again, this doesn’t really do justice to the nature of creative activity. When I bake an apple pie I might be inclined to do so this way or that, and I might be perfectly happy with the results. But I don’t get to set the standard of apple pie goodness. If I’m to be serious about my baking, I have to learn from people who know. Then I have to practice a lot, recognize my mistakes, and learn from them. In this process I have to sublimate my own inclinations and aspire to standards of excellence that lie well beyond my self-interest narrowly conceived. Really baking well requires a kind of aspiration and devotion that goes beyond self-indulgence. In recognizing this we can see the potential for love in creative activity. Creative activity can involve expanding one’s sphere of concern to include the goodness of some activity or product for its own sake and this is the essence of Philia. Art, I’d suggest, is distinguished in part by the loving devotion of the artist. Now, depending on your inclination, listen to some Rachmaninov or some Spoon and see if you get my point.

Self-Esteem

What if we apply Aristotle’s classic treatment of Philia to ourselves? The result is just that to love ourselves is to adopt the good for ourselves as a good of our own. Broadly speaking, to love yourself is just to care about what is best for you. We haven’t yet said much about what is best for you. But let’s suppose for now that what is best for you is in some ways subjective and to be understood in terms of what I love. If what’s best for me is just what’s good for the things I love, then to love myself is just to love what I love. This is pretty much the view of self-love advanced by Harry Frankfurt in his essay, “The Dear Self,” which is the last chapter of his book The Reasons of Love.

The idea that to love yourself is just to love what you love sounds kind of poetically appealing, but a significant worry about this application of Aristotle’s view of Philia to the self is that it is also appears to be trivial. After all, how could you fail to love what you love? If loving what you love is all there is to self-esteem this would seem to make poor self-esteem logically impossible. Our account of self-esteem should not rob the idea of all content. Frankfurt appreciates this problem and addresses it in an interesting way. He argues that we can fail to love what we love by being half-hearted. Sometimes we are at odds with ourselves in ways that undermine our love for the things we love. To take an all too common example, many of us both love our health and at least like things like fatty foods that aren’t so good for our health. Our appetite for unhealthy food frustrates and undermines our love of being healthy. So we are half-hearted and at odds with ourselves about the prospect of going to the gym and having tofu for dinner. To have low self-esteem on Frankfurt’s account just is to have a divided will that leaves us half-hearted about the things we love. So we might love our bodies, but not whole-heartedly when we hold ourselves to unrealistic standards of physical beauty. Too many of us love our lovers, but not whole-heartedly because we still wish they were somehow more ideal. Or we might love our work, but not whole-heartedly if we feel it is under-appreciated or if it has too much drudgery attached to it. On Frankfurt’s account, these are all examples of ways in which we might suffer from low self-esteem. To love yourself is nothing more than to love your friends and family, your community, your activities, and projects whole-heartedly. To love yourself is to wholeheartedly love what you love.

This might sound pretty good. Enough so that it can be easy to miss just how dramatic a departure Frankfurt’s account of self love is from conventional popular wisdom. We are frequently told that we have to love ourselves before we can love others. And in this conventional wisdom, loving ourselves just means feeling good about ourselves or thinking we are perfectly fine the way we are. But this is the narcissistic approach to self-esteem, a self- referential approach that is continually and simultaneously perpetuated and exploited in our consumer culture. Pop psychology tells us that we can’t care for others until we care for ourselves and consumerism makes sure that we are never quite done taking care of ourselves. This view is so deeply ingrained in our culture that it can be hard to penetrate even with pretty clear and compelling argument. What Frankfurt is recommending, perhaps without enough fanfare, is that this popular cult of self-esteem gets things backwards. Leading a meaningful life and loving yourself is a matter of whole-heartedly caring about other things. There is no reference to feeling good about yourself in Frankfurt’s account of self-love. If things go well, feeling good about yourself might be the result of whole-heartedly loving what you love. But trying to feel good about yourself is exactly the wrong starting place.

Erotic Love

Even the most subtle minds are often overly tempted by the lure of simplification. So it is not too surprising to hear smart people speaking of erotic love as nothing more than friendship plus sex. This view has the attraction of reducing erotic love to just a special variety of Philia. But the world has seen plenty of serious lovers that for one reason or another can’t or don’t have sex. And we are familiar enough with the notion of “friends with benefits” that aren’t cases of erotic love. We also struggle here with the unfortunate fact that the word “erotic” has acquired a seedy connotation over the past century or two and now often serves as a code word for “X Rated.”This is somewhat worse than a distortion of the word’s traditional meaning. Erotic love does involve desire, attachment, and passion that is focused on a person, but this is not exhausted by the desire for sex. It’s not even clear that this kind of love entails desire for sex. So it’s probably best to try to examine erotic love on its own terms, first and then maybe somewhere down the line think about how it relates to Philia or friendship.

The classic work on erotic love is Plato’s Symposium. This dialogue is a literary masterpiece as well as an interesting philosophical discussion of enduring themes on love. Do we search for our ideal other half in love? Do we love for reasons? And if so, what of the individuals we love? Do they matter except for the qualities we find loveable in them? These issues remain relevant in the very active contemporary literature on erotic love.

Erotic love is traditionally thought of as the kind of love that involves passionate longing or desire. This would appear to make erotic love self-centered and this seems to be at odds with the idea of Philia where another is valued for his or her own sake. A developed account of eros might resolve this apparent tension. And some further reflection on passionate longing might motivate this. If erotic love is hopelessly mired in selfish desire, then we might deem it a bad thing, nothing more than a euphemism for lust. But this would entirely miss what many people seek and sometimes find in erotic loving relationships.

When we desire something we generally have our reasons. There is something about it we appreciate. When we are attracted to and desire some person, it may be because of this person’s wit, beauty or some other quality we find charming. Socrates makes this point in Plato’s Symposium and it becomes the first step towards a highly impersonal view of eros. We might love an individual for their beauty, but this is just a step towards loving beautiful people generally and ultimately to loving beauty itself. As Socrates sees it, this is all for the good as our attention and love is drawn ever closer to the most real and divine of things, the form of goodness itself. Attachment to a particular individual is not the proper aim of erotic love and may even be a hindrance. The view of erotic love voiced by Socrates in the Symposium becomes refocused on God in the thought of Augustine with the result that in some veins of the Christian tradition proper erotic love becomes passionate devotion to God. When focused on a person, it is dismissed as mere sinful lust, a misguided eros focused on less than worthy objects.

Christianity aside, the Socratic conception of erotic love is much broader than personal love. Any passionate aspiration can fall under the scope of the erotic on this broad view. An artist’s passionate devotion to creative activity might count as erotic even when it has nothing to do with sexuality per se. Frued offers a kind of inversion of this view. All creative aspiration is erotic, but Frued sees erotic aspiration as essentially sexual. When our sexual longings get thwarted or repressed, they surface in other kinds of creative activity. So Socrates would say that aspiration generally is erotic and not necessarily sexual. Frued would also say all aspiration is erotic and still indirectly sexual.

Socrates’ view of erotic love in the Symposium is a highly intellectualized view that most people simply can’t relate to. The contemporary literature on the erotic love has framed the problem with this impersonal view of erotic love in new ways. Robert Nozick, for instance, has pointed out that if erotic love for another is focused on qualities we find charming or desirable, then it should make sense for us to “trade up” whenever we find another individual who has those qualities to a higher degree or those qualities plus others we find charming. Indeed, in the shuffle of immature relationships we see this happen often enough. He dumps her for someone hotter, or she dumps him for someone cooler. And granted some adults never quite outgrow this behavior. But as erotic loving relationships go, we see something deficient in this “trading up” behavior. We are inclined to say that these are rather sad cases where some of the people involved don’t really know how to love. And we are inclined to say this precisely because there is something superficial about loving the just the qualities we find attractive to the exclusion of the individual person that might have some of those qualities. So, insofar as passionate longing or desire is focused on qualities we find attractive or charming, we seem to be missing most of what we find valuable in loving relationships. Perhaps what we do prize is a mix of Philia and eros. But just saying this hardly solves the problems of erotic love, since it should be clear now how there is liable to be some tension between the two.

The Ideal Union

Nozick proposes a model of love as a kind of union. In Nozick’s version of the union model lovers form a “we” which is a new and different kind of entity, something more than just the sum of two individuals. We might be on to Nozick’s idea of a “we” when we think of lovers as couples. Being part of a couple changes how we relate to the rest of the world. The IRS now wants to hear from “us” every year. We now socialize with other couples as a couple. I might be known as her husband to some and she will be known as my wife to others.

Nozick is hardly the first to think of erotic love as a kind of union. The first was probably, once again, Plato, who has Aristophanes offer a colorful telling of the myth of the origins of love at the outset of the Symposium. In this story people were once two-headed eight-limbed round beings who upstaged the gods in their joyful vitality. To instill a bit of humility, the gods split them in two, and since then erotic love has been the attempt by us incomplete halves to find our other half and rejoin, if only temporarily. Less mythical versions of a union model of erotic love have been articulated by several contemporary philosophers of love.

Critics of the union model often see a metaphor run amuck. To think of the couple as a new entity distinct from the individuals that form it obscures the underlying reality. In fact, lovers are autonomous individuals making their own decisions. My selfishness and my self-sacrifice remain relevant in the relationship, but they are impossible to conceptualize on the union model. Our individual tastes, desires, and transgressions get dissolved in a “we.” Love as a kind of union sounds appealing as an ideal, but it may shed only limited light on the nature of our relationships and attitudes, even when these are at their best.

However philosophical theories of love as a union work out, many of us seek partners we think will be ideal complements to ourselves. The dream of a “soul mate” has powerful appeal. In the grip of this vision we often find ourselves projecting what we want to see on to others who probably don’t actually live up to our desires. This may be a pretty good description of infatuation. A classic literary expression of “the birth of love” is given by the French writer Stendhal (1822 On Love). Stendhal describes falling in love as a process of crystallization, referring to how a twig left in a salt mine for a period of time will be retrieved covered in salt crystals. Similarly, our perception of our beloved is laced with projections of our own imaginative desire. In infatuation, our imagination gets the best of us and presents a distorted picture of another. The prospects for disappointment are built into such high expectations. If you haven’t personally fallen victim to the cycle of infatuation, disillusionment, and heartbreak yourself, I’m sure you know others who have.

Perhaps the stumbling block of distorting imagination is just a practical problem and the quest for one’s soul mate can be redeemed if only we can get a clear picture of who really is ideal for us. But there are other stumbling blocks built into the quest for one’s soul mate. A problem inherent to this quest is that, except for the searching, it puts one in a totally passive position, expecting another to conform to one’s own needs and desires. There is a tendency towards narcissism in this view when it encourages us to limit our sphere of concern to our own desires. This passivity renders us vulnerable to dependency and disappointment.

Another problem with the ideal union vision of love is that people are not just packages of qualities and capacities. People are active, dynamic, malleable beings that have their own will, grow in their own way, and have their own experience of the world. The person with the qualities you like might not have them tomorrow. Or you might come to prefer different qualities. The person you admire has his or her own desires and will, and fixating on what you want in a partner will render you ill equipped to be responsive to the autonomy and agency of another person.

Our challenge at this point is to find a way of understanding erotic love that is not both selfish and self-defeating. As easy as it might be to fall victim to cynicism, we should find hope in the many cases of people who do find mutually enriching loving relationships. It might help to turn our attention away from what we want and towards trying to understand how erotic love enriches the lives of lovers when it does.

Bestowal

Notice how lovers affect each other. A kindness from a lover isn’t just pleasant, it can also improve the beloved. A sincere complement isn’t just acknowledgement of something attractive or admirable in us, it amplifies that attractive or admirable quality. When we value something or someone we generally appraise that thing or person positively. Further, doing so can make that thing or person more praiseworthy. Through valuing something we bestow value on it. The marketplace provides a simple illustration of this in a very straightforward sense. If lots of people value a house when it goes on the market, its value in a very objective sense increases. It will fetch a higher price as a result. We bestow objective market value through subjectively appraising things highly. Popularity and attraction works something like this in a superficial way. A person’s popularity can be substantially boosted by a few people deeming him or her to be likable. But this is not the kind of bestowal of value that makes loving relationships so enriching to the lives of lovers.

The marketplace example is just supposed to illustrate how valuing something can make it more valuable. Popularity and attractiveness are fleeting things that are as liable to mask vices and insecurities as contribute to flourishing. Much more significant kinds of bestowal are at work in loving relationships. When people care about each other they have much greater impact on each other. And this is not just a matter of degree. We affect those we care about in very different ways. Valuing an admirable quality in someone we love is a way of cultivating that quality. The contemporary philosopher of love Irving Singer has made bestowal of value central to his treatment of erotic love. Irving’s central idea is that through valuing another in a loving relationship we create value and bestow it on our beloved. Loving another is not just a feeling on this view, it’s a creative activity. Loving another and being loved brings out the best in us and improves the quality of our lives. It might seem obvious enough when put this way. What Singer would underscore is that through loving, we create and bestow value. Of course, as most of us will recognize, the value we bestow on people we care about is not always positive. We can tear down our lovers by being overly critical or unkind. So the first rule of being a good lover is to try to be charitable and kind. Love, when it goes well, is the cultivation of value and goodness in the person we love.