Philosophers on Love. I

Love is a subject knowledge of which none can afford to not to have. Love is on the lips and constantly in the thought of all people "in love". People tend to want their love to remain unchanged from the moment they fall in love and to want it to last forever or as they sometimes say, to be "eternal" . Poets and song writers never cease to sing about the beauty, magic, the rapture of love and as frequently repine its loss and their longings for love. Everybody thinks he is qualified to talk about it from their own most intimate personal experience. Each one has his own story of love found or love lost. Love makes the world go round!  It is something within which we have our being. Yet few want to know the "truth" about love, something they desperately need but seldom bother to find out, often until it is too late, when they mourn its loss and then mindlessly and blissfully drift into another starry-eyed voyage in the land of love, in search of another dream lover, until disaster strikes again and they go through another heart-rending round of depression and perhaps  even contemplate taking their own lives. What is love? Is it something like what Augustine says about time: "What, then, is time? If no one ask of me, I know; if I wish to explain it to him who asks, I know not" What then is the nature of love? What can we reasonably expect it to do for us? What kind of things can it never be expected to do for us? What kind of ideas and values should we take with us when we think or feel that we are about to fall in love or fall in love again? Is there anything useful philosophers, who are supposed to be wise  people who have thought long and hard on various topics which may touch on human life, have to say about this most universal and absorbing subject. I turn to my favourite resource, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. What follows is what I found. It's written by Bennett Helm.

He writes about what  he calls "personal love". We love our wives, our mothers, our children and our friends and objects or activities we like to do very differently. He asks: "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?"

He says that we often say e.g  that  1 "I love chocolate (or skiing" or 2. "I love doing philosophy or being a father" or 3. "I love my dog or cat" or 4. "I love my wife, mother, child or friend" etc. In (1), it merely means that I like this thing
or activity very much. In (2) I typically imply 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 or that I value these. By contrast, (3) and (4) seem to indicate "a mode of concern that cannot be neatly assimilated to anything else." There, it implies that it is a matter of caring about another animal or person as the animal or 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". But Helm  wishes to focus primarily on
the sort of love for people as a person.

From Greek times, philosophers have analyzed love into three different partially overlapping components eros (a passionate sexual desire for a person as an object, an egocentric or selfish and acquisitive desire for the object of one's desire or more generally for some quality in such object eg. beauty or generally  goodness, and in the latter case as being responsive to its merits and to that extent dependent on reason; ; agape a creative and initiatory love that does not depend upon the value of its object e.g the sort of love God has for us as an individual person or our love for God, irrespective of whether the object of our love deserves it and irrespective of the individual character or qualities of the object of our love and, by extension, of our love for each other, a kind of brotherly love and is “spontaneous and unmotivated,” : it is a kind of love for the sake of loving and philia (a kind of affectionate regard or friendly feeling towards not just one's friends and more generally towards family members, business partners, and one's country at large. Like eros, philia generally but not universally depends on the qualities of the object of one's beloved but without the sexual element. Thus love in its various form may be understood generally as a positive attitude we take towards our beloved. It is a more intensive form of liking (which may often treats the beloved as an object  which does not have any intrinsic (value in itself) but as having chiefly but not exclusively instrumental value in satisfying our personal desire). Some philosophers  distinguish loving from liking by the "depth" of the relevant feeling and think that loving involves an "identification" of the lover with her beloved: to love someone is somehow to identify yourself with him. It involves much greater "commitment": it's like choosing and dedicating oneself to particular way of life with the beloved . Helm says that 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.”". If love also involves evaluation,  we can "justify" loving or continuing to love a particular beloved only if the beloved "deserves" to be so loved ie. how constant or committed is the beloved's commitment to the continuation of the love relationship.

Helm classifies "theories of love" into four types:
 (1) love as union
 (2) love as robust concern
 (3) love as valuing and
 (4) love as an emotion
but sensibly puts in a caveat that the ideas in such theories are not mutually exclusive and may often overlap because all schemes of classification tend to be reductionistic, never comprehensive. As a result, there is no clear and obvious way to classify particular theories, let alone identify what the relevant classes should be.

Love as Union

According to this view, which goes back to Aristotle (cf. N. Sherman  “Aristotle on the Shared Life”,1987 in N K. Badhwar “Friends as Ends in Themselves”, Philosophy & Phenomenological Research, 48:1–23(1993), 91–107.1993), also found in M Montaigne ( Essays of Montaigne.1603/1877) and G. W. F Hegel ( “A Fragment on Love”, in R C Solomon & K M Higgins (eds.) The Philosophy of (Erotic) Love,. (1991), 117–20 &.1997) and proposed by such contemporary philosophers as Solomon (1981, 1988), R Scruton (Sexual Desire: A Moral Philosophy of the Erotic, 1986) R  Nozick ( “Love's Bond”, in The Examined Life: Philosophical Meditations, 68–86.1989), M Fisher (Personal Love,1990), and N Delaney (“Romantic Love and Loving Commitment: Articulating a Modern Ideal”, American Philosophical
Quarterly, 33:375–405.1996), love consists in the desire to to the formation of some significant union, a “we., a union which may be a new metaphorical entity derived from but cannot be wholly identified with each member of such a union. Thus Scruton claims that love, especially romantic 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): whenever a lover acts, it is not just for his/her sake or interest alone but for the joint or common interest of both . Fisher thinks that love is only  a partial fusion of the lovers’ cares, concerns, emotional responses, and actions. But both think that love requires the actual union of the lovers’ concerns, for only then will it become clear that they conceive of love not so much as an attitude we
take towards another but as an actualized relationship:"the distinction between
your interests and mine genuinely disappears only when we together come to have shared cares, concerns, etc.," Solomon (1988) too thinks that union implies trying “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 although he does not define what a "soul" is): 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 lovers share their interests, roles, virtues in such a way that what formerly were two individual identities now become a shared identity, by each allowing the other to play an important role in defining his own identity. But Nozick thinks that all that is necessary for love is merely the desire to form a “we,”
together with the desire or expectation that your beloved reciprocates. But he too thinks 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): there will thus be a “pooling”  of their well-beings, in that the well-being of each is inseparably tied up with that of the other. However, although each still retains his/her "autonomy" but “each transfers some previous [individual] rights to make certain decisions unilaterally into a joint pool” (p. 71). In addition, Nozick claims, the lovers each acquires 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).
He gives an example of particular interest to couples who like to read: "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.^"

Some philosophers think the union view too restrictive. To them, the lovers should never give up their individual autonomy and should retain control not only on what she does but also who she is, as this is constituted by her interests, values, concerns,
etc. but by blurring the  clear distinction between the individual interests of each, the union view undermines the autonomy of the lovers. Helms says that ""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 (I Singer 1984, The Nature of Love, Volume 1: Plato to Luther,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."  Nozick (1989) does not agree. He thinks that a loss of autonomy in love is a desirable feature of the sort of union lovers can achieve. Fisher (1990)  thinks that the loss of autonomy in love is an acceptable consequence of love. Solomon (1988,pp. 64ff) rightly describes this “tension” between union and autonomy as “the paradox of love.” But A Soble. (ed.) Eros, Agape, and Philia: Readings in the Philosophy of Love, (1997) thinks that calling it a paradox does not solve the problem.

Another line of philosophers thinks that  part of what it means to love another is precisely to be concerned for the interest of the beloved for the beloved's sake, not one's own but the union views make such a concern unintelligible in that it tries to obliterate 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 see also L A Blum Friendship, Altruism, and Morality,1980, (ed.) Friendship: A Philosophical Reader 1993). But the unionists retort that a  lover will now freely and voluntarily view his/her own individual interest as as inextricably bound to the joint interest of both, and part of the way he demonstrates his individual  autonomy is by consciously surrendering it in the common interest of both lovers: his own individual interest now being viewed as a part of the newly forged "joint enterprise" for which he is prepared to give up part of his rights. It's a bit like the idea of aporia" a being or person deliberately emptying himself and giving up or depriving himself of certain of his rights and interest in favour of a greater project, rather like Jesus emptying his God nature to become man and to suffer as a man for the sake of our salvation and the Buddha voluntarily refusing to achieve nirvana by staying on for another 40 odd years to teach the Dharma of enlightenment to the un-enlightened . Man is always split between two contradictory desires: his/her desire to be loved unselfishly (for fear of otherwise being exploited) and his/her desire to be loved for reasons (which presumably are attractive to our lover and hence have a kind of selfish basis).Helm quotes Delaney: (96, 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. Helms seems to agree with J E Whiting ( “Impersonal Friends”, Monist, 74:3–29.1991, p. 10)  who says that 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.) but he thinks that Whiting and Soble fail to acknowledge the truth in the union view. He thinks that as humans, we are social creatures and love is " one  profound mode of that "sociality"  and that the union view makes sense of that "sociality" : sometimes, we identify ourselves with others and we recognize our interdependence upon and with each other,  understanding by "interdependence" not as Singer (1994, p. 165) suggests, as "a kind of reciprocal benevolence and respect" but rather as a way of making us who we are as persons to be constituted in part by those we love (cf., e.g., Rorty The Historicity of Psychological Attitudes: Love is Not Love Which Alters Not When It Alteration Finds”, in Badhwar (1993), 73–88.1986/1993; M Nussbaum  “Love and the Individual: Romantic Rightness and Platonic Aspiration”, in Love's Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature,  314–34.1990).

Along these lines, M A Friedman (What Are Friends For? Feminist Perspectives on Personal Relationships and Moral Theory,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]" If 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. 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. But Helm thinks that even so, if the "we" of Nozick  is understood as a third entity, we still need "a clearer
account than has been given of its ontological status and how it comes to be."