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Love as Intense Liking
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 March 2012
Abstract
ABSTRACT: Love is a broad mental phenomenon, its objects not restricted to thinking beings. Yet most philosophical theories of love focus on some case of interpersonal intimacy. Such theories ignore a wide range of relevant instances and thus fail to capture what is distinctive of love generally. I explore a straightforward alternative hypothesis that deserves a hearing but has been discussed less often: Love consists in intense desire for and delight in its objects. The account is defended against various objections, among them the claim that caring concern is what is most characteristic or central in loving.
RÉSUMÉ: L’amour est un vaste phénomène mental dont les objets ne se limitent pas aux êtres pensants. Pourtant, la plupart des théories philosophiques de l’amour se concentrent sur des relations intimes entre personnes; ces théories laissent de côté un grand nombre de cas pertinents et ne réussissent donc pas à cerner l’amour en général. J’examine une hypothèse alternative peu étudiée: l’amour consisterait en un désir intense et un sentiment de plaisir lié à son objet. Cette analyse est défendue contre diverses objections, par exemple celle qui suggère que l’amour est surtout caractérisé par une préoccupation bienveillante envers son objet.
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- Articles
- Information
- Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 50 , Issue 4 , December 2011 , pp. 725 - 740
- Copyright
- Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 2012
References
Notes
I am grateful to many people who contributed directly or indirectly to this paper, including some anonymous referees. Earlier versions benefited from comments by Nathan Brett, Neb Kujundzic, Ray Martin, and Scott Stewart, among others, in Fredericton, Cape Breton and in London, Ontario. A conversation with Jana Svecena in Prague helped sharpen the issues for me, as have discussions with Huron University College students about Plato’s Phaedrus and Symposium.
1 For some reflections on the ways in which universals and particulars may be objects of love, see Stephen Leighton, “What We Love,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 71 (2), June 1993: 145-58.
2 E.g., C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves (New York: Harper Collins, 1998). As a matter of classical Greek usage, the terms do not have only the senses Lewis adopts in this widely read book. The word agapē is an ordinary term not specially reserved for charity or unselfish love. Kenneth Dover, Greek Homosexuality (New York: MJF Books, 1989), 50, notes a sixth- or fifth-century Attic vase with the word agapē inscribed next to a half-naked woman on a bed. Philia goes beyond friendship, since it is used by Plato and Aristotle to cover familial love. A famous passage in Plato’s Phaedrus 241d has Socrates (admittedly not in the course of stating his own view) using the verb agapaō to describe the attitude of wolves towards lambs and phileō for cool sensualists who are after sex. In Plato and elsewhere the verb philein sometimes broadly conveys a liking or being apt to do something, and so on.
3 Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros, trans. Philip S. Watson (London: SPCK, 1953). See chap. 3, “The Fundamental Contrast between Agape and Eros.” Nygren’s treatment of Plato’s erōs as egoistic is open to dispute. Related struggles between spiritual and sensual love have often been represented in works of art, as in Richard Wagner’s Tannhäuser, for example.
4 Irving Singer, Philosophy of Love: A Partial Summing Up (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009), 75.
5 Cf. semantic tests for ambiguity that employ noun and verb deletion in James D. McCawley, Everything That Linguists Have Always Wanted to Know about Logic, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), section 1.3.
6 See “Love Undigitized” in Love Analyzed, ed. Roger E. Lamb (Boulder CO: Westview Press, 1997), 204. On “essence anxiety” and the multi-dimensional continuum of emotions, see pp. 193-5 and passim. To be fair, Socrates himself, presumably the star representative of essence anxiety, seems not to have been an unusually anxious man.
7 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953), §66.
8 Harry Frankfurt, The Reasons of Love (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 10-8, 42-3.
9 O. H. Green, “Is Love an Emotion?” in Love Analyzed (n. 6, above), 216. Green’s views about emotion are worked out in greater detail in O. H. Green, The Emotions: A Philosophical Theory (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1992). For reasons having to do with a seeming absence of belief-based intentionality and rationality in love, Green denies that love strictly qualifies as an emotion, but I will not take up that view here.
10 Green, The Emotions, 216.
11 The importance of understanding the “-able” suffix in terms of adequacy and sufficiency was stressed to me by Richard Bosley in conversation.
12 William Blake, “The Clod and the Pebble,” in Songs of Experience, 1794. The hard little pebble sings a different tune. Neither is right about the nature of love, as we shall see, since love can take both selfish and selfless forms.
13 Kierkegaard, Works of Love, trans. Howard and Edna Hong (London: Collins, 1962) is an eloquent defense of this view. Nygren 1953 also explores it at length. Gene Outka, in Agape: An Ethical Analysis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), surveys a body of literature on the same theme. A more recent discussion of selflessness in love is Gary Foster, “Romantic Love and Knowledge: Refuting the Claim of Egoism,” Dialogue XLVII (2008), 235-51.
14 Confucius tells us that the Way is summed up in not doing to others what we would not like to have done to ourselves. Some relevant passages in the Analects on love and reciprocity include: 4:15; 5:12; 6:30; 12:2,5,22; 14:34; 15:24; 17:4. In the Four Books of classical Chinese philosophy, see also the Mencius 7A:17, chapter 13 of The Doctrine of the Mean, and the beginning of chapter 10 of The Great Learning.
15 N. K. Badhwar, “Love,” in Oxford Handbook of Practical Ethics, ed. H. Lafollette (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 45.
16 Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 1739. Reprint, ed. David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), bk. 2, pt. 2, sect. 6, para. 6.
17 Worth stressing once more is the fact that the well-wishing concern story cannot explain such expressions as “I love the colour of your coat”; “We love the ocean view.” Cf. “I’m crazy about the décor / the latest pop sensation / the new dance.” Are you crazy? Are you certifiable, ripe for sedation, fit to be restrained? Of course not; it’s just that your enthusiasm exceeds some norm. Exaggeration is a peripheral form of usage, but those focused on well-wishing should not therefore excuse themselves from accounting for it. Why do expressions of love for (say) Korean food have nothing to do with solicitude for the pickled cabbage?
18 This characterization of loving someone as a friend has some clear similarities to Aristotle’s account of virtue friendship in Nicomachean Ethics VIII-IX and his description of the friend as a “second self.”
19 Frankfurt, Reasons, 42.
20 Frankfurt, Reasons, 80-2.
21 Frankfurt, Reasons, 85.
22 Pace Kierkegaard, in the chapter “Love of Neighbour”: “Since one’s neighbour is every man, unconditionally every man, all distinctions are indeed removed from the object” (p. 77), and “. . . he is every man, the first the best, taken quite blindly” (p. 79).
23 In The Chinese Classics, vol. 2, trans. James Legge (Oxford: Clarendon, 1895), 464. See also 3B9.9-10 (Legge 282-4); 3A5 (Legge 257-60); 7B26 (Legge 491).
24 Kierkegaard, 77-80.
25 Confucius, Analects, with Selections from Traditional Commentaries, trans. Edward Slingerland (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003). Analects 4.3 says that only the good person is capable of loving people and of hating people, indicating that hatred is sometimes appropriate. And to be disliked by bad people is more praiseworthy than being liked by everybody (13.24, 15.28).