Robert C. Solomon believed that in reality, love is completely ordinary. It does not reach the level of being universal, nor is it the answer to all of life’s problems, and it is sometimes heartbreaking.
In today’s digital consumer world, love is marketed extensively and repeatedly across various products, including films, television series, and songs in various languages and artistic genres. The idea of the perfect partner and lovability are also marketed. This has a significant impact on our emotional relationships in real life, which in turn makes the concept of love more superficial and far from the essence of love itself; as one party must be successful and worthy of love, and this must be visible through their occupation, clothes, possessions, and characteristics, while the other must be beautiful, attractive, and trendy. This model may be clear in the movie Don Jon, which focused on Don’s physical build, religious beliefs, style, and home décor. That is why his relationship with Barbara was based on material things such as gifts, the social benefits of appearing with a beautiful woman, and finally the private intimate benefits.
There is no doubt that everyone searches for love and expects to encounter it in its purest form. Not in its tragic literary form, but in the form that helps a person reach his potential and become a better version of themselves. In this article, I try to shed light on this concept philosophically, away from all the common and wrong opinions attached to it that complicate our understanding of love. Let us not forget Fernando Pessoa’s words: “Anyone who doesn’t take love as their starting-point will never discover what philosophy is about.” To love means to struggle beyond isolation, to fight against everything that makes you happy. Love is a well of happiness and security that overflows within you, within your significant other, and within you both.
Modern versus Historical Love
Love is one of the concepts that has preoccupied humanity and whose traces have been found across history; it may drive some people to madness at times, as happened with Qais bin Al-Malouh or Ibn Zaydun in Arab heritage, or it may push others to death and destruction, as happened with the Trojan War in Homer’s The Iliad in Greek heritage or in Anna Karenina in the Russian literary heritage. Romance has inspired the greatest works of poets, musicians, and artists, and they competed to describe the intense feelings of love that are perceived as milestones in a person’s life without sounding tacky.
Love stories are rarely happy. The greatest love stories end in the worst possible ways; death, on the one hand, is a common ending. Death is what gives love its shape, just as it does to life, as Albert Camus wrote in his memoirs. On the other hand, marriage in these stories is also a possible ending, within which death is implicit, not necessarily manifested in the death of the lovers or their love, but it rather signifies the end of the love story itself.
But the truth is, in real life, it’s rare for cases of love to reach such exceptional conclusions. It appears that the model of realistic love is completely different from what is narrated in literary works. A person might be struck with love once or twice; the joy of mutual admiration, the exhilaration of having a crush, or unrequited love. The individual will find that when put in many similar situations faced by the main characters of historical love stories, he makes completely different decisions, as if historical love stories – folklore – had no connection to reality.
Although, what Saint Augustine says about time applies exactly to love: the less we think about it, the more intuitive it feels, and the more we think about it, the more we get lost in its depth and meaning. Poets, for reasons unknown to them, do not write about what is known, but rather about the unknown. This lack of knowledge and the complex feelings it brings represent the primary motivation for holding a pen, quill, or musical instrument; as anger, sadness, overwhelming emotions, money, etc., all come second to love. If the situation had been different, all these poems, letters, novels, and plays would not have existed.
We should also not lose sight of the nature of artistic work, as a process of stopping and recording time with the feelings, desires, and heartbreak it encompasses. Considering that this process is highly selective, it may eliminate some of the historical and psychological context , with all its implications and effects, or it will include events that have nothing to do with the story, which is why the manifestations of love or its expressions in historical stories appear very sharp, or even vague in extreme cases.
On the other hand, love in our world today faces challenges that are completely different from yesterday’s challenges. The modern individual can plan a good healthy marriage that checks all the material and intimate boxes without necessarily being in love. Therefore, from this perspective, as the philosopher Alain Badiou puts it, “[…] love, in today’s world, is caught in this bind, in this vicious circle and is consequently under threat […] the world is full of new developments and love must also be something that innovates.”
An Intentional Purposeless Risk
When writing about the components of happiness in the modern era, British philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote that: “The more things a man is interested in, the more opportunities of happiness he has, and the less he is at the mercy of fate,” keeping in mind that the limited lifespan of humans makes caring about everything life has to offer a form of madness. In The Conquest of Happiness, Russell touches upon the topic of love by saying: “Affection in the sense of a genuine reciprocal interest for two persons in each other, not solely as means to each other’s good, but rather as a combination having a common good, is one of the most important elements of real happiness.”
To analyze the concept of love philosophically, it can be agreed upon that love is loving something – as was stated during Socrates’ questioning of Agathon. Love is initially intentional, referring to something either material or abstract as the object of one’s affection. Therefore, love is not the result of mood swings, since one’s mood is not related to a specific external object, but rather the result of a clear and continuous desire, regardless of the challenges it faces. This – intentional – desire has a goal, but it has no purpose, and that is why Alain Badiou describes it as a “purposeless risk.” Meanwhile, the goal is the mutual experience between the two parties and the pleasure that brings them together, “and the thing that gives meaning to the life of almost every individual.” Therefore, this is why love cannot be formed in the complete absence of risk. Furthermore, love is completely separate from pain, no matter how closely related the two concepts are, as pain is static and unrelated to anything else, remaining as pain whether we know its cause or not.
The essence of love is encapsulated in the momentum of love. Therefore, love becomes the momentum that moves toward what Plato calls the “idea” or thing. Alain Badiou says, “[…] love encompasses the experience of the possible transition from the pure randomness of chance to a state that has universal value. Starting out from something that is simply an encounter, a trifle, you learn that you can experience the world on the basis of difference and not only in terms of identity.” It is an implicit agreement that in the face of difficulties and challenges, we shall accept all suffering for the sake of the love we have, or as Badiou continues in his comment on Plato’s idea: “[Love] takes us into key areas of the experience of what is difference and, essentially, leads to the idea that you can experience the world from the perspective of difference. In this respect it has universal implications: it is an individual experience of potential universality, and is thus central to philosophy, as Plato was the first to intuit.”
As for why we love, the reasons are ultimately confusing. It is simply impossible to come up with a satisfactory and comprehensive answer from a single scientific perspective, but contemplating the issue from three different perspectives may help in painting a clear picture: the perspective of the lover, the objective observer, and the beloved. As a lover, the reason could be the pleasant thoughts and feelings when they think about their object of affection; those mental snapshots that depict the qualities that were the cause for this initial love and its subsequent growth. The objective observer may discover the true reasons that remain mysterious to the lover, as seen through narrators in love stories, or the psychologists that may doubt love’s existence. Every objective observer may have a different independent opinion about the reason for love as well.
In general, whichever perspective is most correct, the extent to which love depends on the lover’s qualities or inclinations determines a series of possibilities ranging from objective to subjective. Objectively, love may be driven by our innate tendency to learn towards everything that is beautiful and good. Subjectively, it may be driven by the first meeting going well.
From the beloved’s perspective, the most common reason might seem to be the desire to be loved for who we are. This reason can be explained in two ways: the first is the desire to be loved unconditionally “for ourselves,” which implicitly assumes that the lover’s feelings will not change with changing circumstances. “[…] love is not love / Which alters when it alteration finds” (Shakespeare, Sonnet 116). The second way to explain this reason refers to the essential qualities of one’s essence as a basic condition. In that case, love cannot remain constant except by the continuation of those qualities, and thus this understanding of the concept of love is fundamentally conditional.
The First Meeting in the Path of Free Love
Considering that love is loving something – as was stated during Socrates’ questioning of Agathon – love involves the desire for what one lacks, or as Arnold Pernes says: “Love is the acute awareness of the impossibility of possession.” Love is based primarily on desire, and desire is usually what one lacks. The word “desire” carries within it all the meanings of loss and need. If you desire something, you “need” it, which means you do not have it. This is what makes love, in Badiou’s words, “an existential project: to construct a world from a decentred point of view other than that of my mere impulse to survive or re-affirm my own identity.”
The philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote, “A too powerful ego is a prison from which a man must escape if he is to enjoy the world to the full. A capacity for genuine affection is one of the marks of the man who has escaped from this prison of self. To receive affection is by no means enough; affection which is received should liberate the affection which is to be given, and only where both exist in equal measure does affection achieve its best possibilities.”
Love is a free independent process as Badiou describes it. First of all, a decision such as love cannot be made for you, free will is a basic condition for feeling love, and it cannot be felt through external force or will. Although if we accept that personal desires and preferences are the result of genetic endowment and upbringing that we have no power over, a free and independent human being must have his own desires, whatever their source. Likewise, if another person’s desires truly resonated with you, they will then become a part of your own desires.
The question of love can be approached from two basic points that are consistent with the experience of the majority; the first is that love is characterized by a separation or a “dislocation.” That is, the parties must be two different people, and this difference between them must be preserved alongside their unique interpretation of the experiences they share. Or as Badiou repeatedly says, “[…] love contains an initial element that separates, dislocates and differentiates. You have Two. Love involves Two.” The second point is that since love specifically involves separation – the moment in which two parties experience the world in different ways in the first “meeting” – love will only take a risky or consensual form.
The first meeting represents the starting point of love, and we have many different literary examples that describe this meeting. Many of them are based on situations in which the two parties are very different. They often do not belong to the same religion, social class, or clan, which poses difficult challenges for them. There are many romantic misconceptions that reduce love to this very meeting. It is true that love bursts out, consumes, and immerses the two lovers in magical, out-of-this-world moments, but “when things happen that way, we aren’t witnessing a ‘Two scene’ but a ‘One scene’,” as Badiou comments on this point. This romantic concept is too radical and should be rejected, despite being a very beautiful artistic concept. We may accept it as a powerful artistic myth. But in real life, it is nothing but a critical existential flaw, and it cannot be relied upon as an authentic philosophy of love. Badiou says the following about the role of the first meeting in constructing love:
“[…] love cannot be reduced to the first encounter, because it is a construction. The enigma in thinking about love is the duration of time necessary for it to flourish. In fact, it isn’t the ecstasy of those beginnings that is remarkable. The latter are clearly ecstatic, but love is above all a construction that lasts. We could say that love is a tenacious adventure. The adventurous side is necessary, but equally so is the need for tenacity. To give up at the first hurdle, the first serious disagreement, the first quarrel, is only to distort love. Real love is one that triumphs lastingly, sometimes painfully, over the hurdles erected by time, space and the world.”
Continuity and Reinvention of Life
In all of one’s social relationships, a person seeks and exchanges many things with others: trust, attention, responsiveness, companionship, etc., which are common to all forms of relations. However, the state of love differs in the degree of desire for these things from the other party, and there is a significant increase in two basic desires: “Consummation” and “Perpetuation” or continuity. The problem with these two desires is that they are subject to conflict, because consummation can also mark the ending.
A simple comparison between friendship and love can distinguish between them by physical contact, or any resonances of physical pleasure. Therefore, Badiou considers love to be a “more intellectual attachment” than friendship, regardless of the widespread reduction of this bodily contact today to various physical descriptions in literature and cinema. This physical pleasure requires a stronger bond than other social relationships; surrendering your body, taking your clothes off, and the subsequent physical acts (with all its noises and other signs of physical pleasure) are all evidence of surrendering to love. Or as Badiou puts it, “Love, particularly over time, embraces all the positive aspects of friendship but love relates to the totality of the being of the other, and the surrender of the body becomes the material symbol of that totality.”
Of course, what is meant by consummation in love can be different than mere physical contact. It may be assumed that marriage is consummation as a type of declaration of possession but love greatly contradicts the concept of possession. The possessed is not an active subject who gives his love freely. Possession can describe the relationship between a master and his slave, and according to Hegel’s reference, slavery not only limits the freedom of the slave, but also the power of the master. This is because the condition of slavery is the slave’s submission to his master’s superiority – submission loses its value if it’s coercive, and this truth is clearly manifested in love; unless love is given freely, it cannot be considered love. In other words, as Badiou puts it: “Love on bended knee is no love at all as far as I am concerned, even if love sometimes arouses passion in us that makes us yield to the loved one.”
Love, as a social contract or as a strong emotion, cannot eliminate its essential character of separation or dislocation, and the fact that each party maintains their independence. Rather, the matter goes beyond that because one’s independence is a psychological condition for the ability to construct and feel love, as psychologist Erich Fromm says: “Paradoxically, the ability to be alone is the condition for the ability to love.” Stripping one of the parties in the relationship from independence means that the relationship is a “One scene,” which contradicts the nature of love, and leads it to the wrong direction, or as Erich Fromm puts it: “Immature love says: ‘I love you because I need you.’ Mature love says: ‘I need you because I love you.’”
In general, “continuity of love” should not be understood to refer to everlasting love, nor to the idea that both parties will experience their feelings with equal levels of intensity over time. This is why Erich Fromm describes love as an “activity,” not just feelings. Naturally, both parties will face many challenges that will reinvent their love and tweak its details so that it grows and adapts to new situations as life also continues to grow and change. As Badiou says, “[…] everyone’s existence, when tested by love, confronts a new way of experiencing time. Of course, if we echo the poet, love is also the ‘the dour desire to endure’. But, more than that, it is the desire for an unknown duration. Because, as we all know, love is a re-invention of life. To re-invent love is to re-invent that re-invention.”
Love and Eternal Truth
As Badiou says, “The declaration of love marks the transition from chance to destiny,” and it bears the fear of choice and its consequences and subsequent responsibilities. “The declaration of love isn’t necessarily a one-off; it can be protracted, diffuse, confused, entangled, stated and re-stated.” When the words “I love you” are uttered, chance is curbed, fixed, and stabilized. It is not at all easy to pronounce these words if we truly accept the purity and honesty of those who utter them, even if they use more poetic and less common phrases to make this declaration. In general, whatever words are used to declare love, they always signify that the speaker is ready to transition from mere chance to a relationship that is more fixed and stable, through establishing a foundation that will endure and persist with commitment and loyalty, thereby transitioning from the consensual encounter to the solid construction phase.
Alain Badiou classifies love as a kind of “truth procedure,” meaning that it is the shared experience created by the differences between the two parties to form a renewed definition of life and truth, as a result of the dialogue and understanding that occurred to deal with this difference, or to interpret the thoughts that cross the minds of both. Love that accepts risks and faces challenges for the sake of its continuity inspired by history and past experiences will produce, from the perspective of difference or separation, a new truth about difference. Or as Badiou says, “I believe that love is indeed what I call in my own philosophical jargon a ‘truth procedure’, that is, an experience whereby a certain kind of truth is constructed. This truth is quite simply the truth about Two: the truth that derives from difference as such. And I think that love – what I call the ‘Two scene’ – is this experience.”
If days change, and skies become gray, love will remain a personal force from which a person derives his desire for continuity. Love remains one of the rare feelings through which you experience the manifestation of eternity, as Badiou says, “on the basis of chance inscribed in a moment,” referring to the first meeting. Lovers have always relied on the language of eternity in their promises; “always” and “never,” for example, are some words that occur frequently in the language of love. Badiou continues to say, “But love, the essence of which is fidelity in the meaning I give to this word, demonstrates how eternity can exist within the time span of life itself.”
This is why love is one of the core concepts that grabbed the attention of humanity throughout history – and it continues to do so today. We have seen many people get carried away by stories or experiences of love. Love offers a new experience of truth, based on the differences between two people and their two different ways of looking at life. In addition to being the force from which a person derives his desire to build stability in this world, it is also a way of life, as the Dutch painter Van Gogh once said, “If only one continues to love faithfully that which is verily worthy of love, and does not squander his love on truly trivial and insignificant and faint-hearted things, then one will gradually become more enlightened and stronger.” Whatever love is, it gives us new evidence that we can stand before this world and experience it with integrated, rather than isolated, awareness. That is why we love “love”, and we love to be loved, because we simply love the tranquility and stability that it creates within us, or as Bertrand Russell says, “The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.”
References
- Badiou, A., & Truong, N. (2012). In praise of love. New Press/ORIM.
- De Sousa, R. (2015). Love: A very short introduction (Vol. 415). Oxford University Press, USA.
- Fromm, E. (2000). The art of loving: The centennial edition. A&C Black.
- Plato. (n.d.). Plato’s Phaedrus.
- Plato. (n.d.). Plato’s Theaetetus.
- Russell, B. (2015). The conquest of happiness. Routledge.
- Süskind, P. (2006). On love and death. Overlook Press.
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