Love

Tony Milligan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781844655069
• eBook ISBN: 9781317547617
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

What is love? What is it to be loved? Can we trust love? Is it overrated?

These are just some of the questions Tony Milligan pursues in his novel exploration of a subject that has occupied philosophers since the time of Plato. Tackling the mood of pessimism about the nature of love that reaches back through Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard, he examines the links between love and grief, love and nature, and between love of others and loving oneself. We love too few things in the world, Milligan concludes, adding that we need to be loved too, to appreciate our own value and the worth of life itself.

1.  Introduction

Love can be several splendid things, a source of joy and gladness, a support or a consolation or a wonderful surprise. But it can also be a source of unease, of fruitless longing and regret. We may be harmed by love, harmed by loving and perhaps even harmed by the love of another. Love does us no good when we love the wrong person. If such love is reciprocated (and perhaps especially if it is reciprocated) it can lead us to waste the best years of our lives. It may lead us to lose our chance of contentment without in any way adding to the well-being of the person that we love. Similarly, we may love someone who could make us happy if they were to love us in return but they do not do so. Our love may be unreciprocated and yet it may stubbornly refuse to go away. Under such circumstances, love can be little more than a subtle form of self-laceration. These considerations may lead us to accept that love does not conquer all.

In spite of such drawbacks, and in spite of the difficulties of loving someone suitable and doing so in the right way, we are creatures who need to love and who need to be loved. This is a claim that shapes a good deal of what follows. Another claim that helps to give shape to this book is that sexualized and intimate love of the sort that often exists between partners and spouses is a good exemplar of love of any kind. Although I write about love in general, about parental love and about the love of neighbours, it is love of this sort that is the main focus of my attention. It is a love that is sometimes regarded with suspicion, partly because it is sexualized and partly because it involves a special attachment to the exclusion of all others.

One familiar charge against sexualized and intimate love is that, in some unavoidable way, it is too grasping and too selfish. It may then be tempting to regard it as a poor model for love in general and to look elsewhere for the latter, to the love that is built into friendship, to the love of unselfish parents, or to love that is a gratuitous gift to our neighbours. A rather different, but equally familiar, charge is that sexualized intimate love is (again unavoidably) delusional and requires an overestimation of the person we love. Why else would we single them out if not because we regard them (delusionally) as uniquely and supremely beautiful, accomplished or charming?

Such doubts (which may also apply to a greater or lesser degree to any other love) are instances of what I shall call “pessimism about the nature of love” or more simply “pessimism about love”. For the pessimist, it is not simply the case that sometimes love is delusional or shaped by egocentricity, or that it tends towards overestimation during some initial and perhaps romantic stage. Rather, for the pessimist, love (of whatever sort they regard with suspicion) is always and unavoidably delusional or compromised by our human egocentricity and cannot escape from being so compromised. The oversights and delusions that can sometimes accompany love are taken by the pessimist to be characteristic of the kind of love that they wish to place in doubt. On such a view, the fact that someone loves another person tells us more about them than it does about the person they love. And what it tells us is far from flattering.

Through an exploration of some obvious, and some not so obvious, features of love (features that stand in sharp relief in the case of sexualized love), I shall try to defuse such pessimism. And here I do mean “defuse” rather than directly confront. I shall not pretend to have a knock-down argument against it. Instead, I shall try to show, in a steady and piecemeal manner, that pessimism about the nature of love involves a limited and distorted picture of love, a picture that is based on what happens on those occasions when love fails or when it goes wrong. I take this gradual approach because of the involved nature of the subject and also because pessimism about love can be motivated and supported by doubt of another and more personal sort. This other kind of doubt may not be removed simply by accepting that love can be warm, generous and truthful. It may even be made worse by such an acceptance.

What I allude to here is a kind of doubt that I shall call “scepticism about being loved”. The sceptic about being loved cannot accept that they are loved in a genuine or authentic manner. Many of us have, at one time or another, suffered from scepticism of this sort. It is a familiar predicament. Any one of us may come to believe that we have good reasons for doubting another’s declared love for us. But at the same time we may remain sensitive to the possibility that, in spite of our doubts, the love in question may still be genuine. One circumstance that gives rise to such a sceptical predicament is the fact that love does not always turn out the way that we imagine. It does not always take the form that we have expected or come from a source that we have anticipated. Another, and perhaps more obvious, circumstance that may give rise to scepticism about being loved is self-doubt. At the back of our minds a question may always linger: “Why would such a person love me?” or, even worse, “Why would anyone love me?”

In the opening chapter I shall suggest, and up to a point try to show, that pessimism about the nature of love and scepticism about being loved can feed off one another. Operating together or in sequence, either kind of doubt can hamper our best attempts to live well. They can prevent us from accepting that we love and prevent us from fully embracing the possibility that we may be loved in return. But, considered on their own separate merits, these doubts are not always equally misleading. Whereas pessimism about the nature of love is ultimately based on a distorted view of what love must involve, and should never therefore be endorsed, scepticism about being loved is not always misplaced. There are occasions on which others seem to love us, declare that they love us and believe that they love us, but nonetheless they do not do so. Under such circumstances, doubting the love of the other person may be the best and most realistic option. By way of a contrast, there are other occasions on which scepticism is misplaced. It is also true that any serial scepticism, carried from relationship to relationship, may deprive us of the chance to see ourselves in the light of another’s love. Openness to the possibility that we may be loved is an important human virtue that is incompatible with such a serial scepticism.

My sampling of arch-pessimists in the opening chapter will include Freud, Schopenhauer and Proust. One thing they share is the conviction that although love is delusional it is also “deep”. Chapter 2 will explore this important idea of the depth of love and will suggest that love’s depth is at least partly a matter of its connection to our shared human need to live a life that is well motivated and to acknowledge our own worth. On the one hand, loving gives order and structure to our world, it shapes our everyday actions and our attitudes towards those things we regard as important. On the other hand, being loved is bound up with the recognition of our own value.

Chapter 3 will attempt to show that our sense of self-worth cannot rest solely on the fact that we are autonomous rational agents. We need to accept that we are or have been loved, and that we remain lovable, in order to see ourselves in a realistic manner, as the valuable beings that we are. However there remains the possibility that our need to be loved may be accepted in combination with a restricted pessimism about the nature of love. It remains a possibility that someone may accept that love is egocentric or delusional (or that some kinds of love such as sexualized intimate love have this drawback) while claiming that there is a special kind of love that is exempt from the problem. A well-known example of such exception-building is Anders Nygren’s rejection of erotic love in favour of a restricted and problematic account of Christian love. But if pessimism about the nature of love, and more especially about intimate love, is ultimately misplaced, this is an exception we do not need. Furthermore, Christian love may be understood in a more attractive and less restrictive manner that involves a rejection of any pessimism about the nature of love and instead embraces the idea that all kinds of love (including sexualized intimate love) can have a praiseworthy spiritual dimension. Even so, a modified conception of Christian love may still remain associated with the problematic view that neighbourly love can be extended outwards in all directions and that we are all equally suitable recipients. I regard this as problematic because it is not obvious that we ought to love everyone or that all humans are lovable. There may be some humans whose actions place them beyond the reach of a reasonable and defensible love. Part of the reason for this is that any kind of love for other humans involves the desire that their lives should go well, or at least the desire that they should come to no great harm. In the case of humans who are guilty of evil beyond vice, such a desire may be inappropriate.

Love of other humans not only involves the desire that their lives go well: it also involves a binding of our own well-being to theirs. This is particularly clear in the case of sexualized intimate love. Such love emerges out of our nature as humans, and it emerges out of our shared need to be loved. As a brief summary, sexualized love, like any other kind of love, involves seeing, wanting and needing. But while this claim can be given support, and may be expanded on in various ways, it does not generalize out into a complete theory of everything that we are inclined to call “love”. Nor does it give us the fundamental building blocks for such a theory. Readers may therefore find that what follows is more systematic than a cluster of comments but less systematic than a comprehensive account. This limitation has less to do with the available space than it has to do with love itself. While we may explore all sorts of important features of love, and do so in illuminating and interesting ways, love remains, in some respects, mysterious. Recognition of this allows us to understand another sense in which love is deep. It is deep in the sense that it is up to a point unfathomable.

Chapter 4 will examine the themes of togetherness and loss. I shall suggest that sexualized intimate love involves more than a desire for the well-being of the other plus a sexual desire for (or a sexual relationship with) them. But this is not because sex is irrelevant to intimacy. Rather, there is something about sexual togetherness and the sharing of pleasures that can exemplify the sharing of a life. In turn, what is involved in the sharing of a life is best understood by considering what it is like to lose, and to grieve for, someone we love. On occasions of loss we recognize, all too readily, that our own well-being and that of the person we have lost have become entangled. Understanding this goes to the heart of what intimacy involves.

Chapter 5 considers another aspect of the experience of loss. Part of what makes grief so difficult is the recognition that those we love are irreplaceable. But it is a mistake to imagine that we must understand this important idea by appeal to the delusion that our loved one is not only beautiful but uniquely beautiful, uniquely accomplished, charming or in possession of physical, behavioural or even spiritual properties that nobody else could match. Instead, what makes any human irreplaceable is their relation to the past. After all, we do not want to go home to copies, clones or duplicates of our loved ones. Rather, we want to go home to the loved ones with whom we have a shared history. In my own case, I want to go home to the Suzanne that I met at the end of my teens and who sat out with me under the stars. A duplicate just wouldn’t do. Once irreplaceability is understood in this way, there is no need to appeal to a special kind of overestimation in order to make sense of love. We can see those we love as the remarkable beings that they are, as beings with whom we have an important personal connection. We can love them just as they are and for what they are while still regarding them as unique.

The final chapter expands the scope of the enquiry to consider the bounds or limits of love. It poses a simple question: “What can we love?” In response, I suggest that we can love anything that we can grieve over. Where there is no place for the possibility of grief, there is also no place for the possibility of love. I have taken this as one of the ways in which an understanding of sexualized intimate love can inform our understanding of love of any sort, including the love of non-human creatures and the love of non-sentient things such as forests and familiar places. Grief over the loss of other creatures and other things is a real possibility. We can love them and we can do so in life-enriching ways that will leave us vulnerable to their loss. I shall also suggest that we should be more open to the possibilities of this kind of love and that we do not love enough.

Nevertheless, just so long as we regard the importance of the past and the possibility of grief as fundamental, it will be difficult to allow that we can, in any genuine and straightforward sense, love strangers. We may be able to love our neighbours and acquaintances, should we feel so inclined, but loving strangers is a quite different matter. We can, and ought to, do various things to show hospitality and to welcome the stranger in our midst. We can also show them due respect. But in the absence of a shared past of the relevant sort, we cannot love them. The shared past in question cannot, for example, simply reduce to our belonging to the same species or our sharing a connection to a broader evolutionary or social history. An interesting corollary of the fact that we cannot love strangers is that “love at first sight” is not possible if it is understood in the strictest sense. It is not my intention to suggest that talk about such love is misguided. Such talk can and often does track something. But what it tracks is the sudden beginnings of love’s emergence and not an instant love. A further corollary is that, although there are some humans who we ought not to love and others who we simply cannot love, there are nonetheless nonhuman creatures, things and places that we can and ought to love. Pessimism about the nature of love for the non-human is no more helpful and realistic than pessimism about the nature of sexualized intimate love.

2. Doubts about love

Love is deeply bound up with our humanity. It is also available in various shapes and sizes. There is the sustained, erotic and sexualized love that we can have for a partner; the transitory romantic love that idealizes its object; the love that is part of friendship; the parental and filial love that may exist between mother or father and child; the love of a sister or brother; love of the family dog; love of neighbours, of mankind, of the planet, of all living things and so on. Some of these loves have their own specialized terminology of philia, agape, eros and caritas, a terminology that has been passed on to us from antiquity.

Of these different kinds of love, it is love of the sustained, erotic and sexualized sort that will be my primary focus, the love that we may have for a particular individual with whom we want to share our life and our bed. At the best of times, this love can be a source of pleasure, joy and a lightness of spirit. When it fails, ends or is unrequited it can be a source of deep unhappiness. Often it brings a mixture of pleasure, longing and loss into our lives and those who have experienced it will readily understand what I mean by saying that it can involve the whole of our being. I shall refer to it as “sexualized intimate love” and occasionally, for simplicity, as “sexualized love”. I will also take it as a good model for love of any sort. In what follows you may safely assume that, unless otherwise stated, I shall always have this love in mind. The decision to focus on love that is sexualized, rather than friendship love or a love of humanity, no doubt says something about my own life and about my own philosophical temperament. But I also hope to show that the approach is a good one and that we have strong reasons to reject longstanding suspicions and doubts about sexualized intimate love, doubts that may hinder our best efforts to live well and to be content.

Two kinds of doubt

When any one of us loves someone, in whatever way, we see them as special or unique. On an optimistic account, we recognize what we might otherwise miss. We see more of what there is to be seen. However, it is easy to appreciate the merits of a less optimistic attitude, an attitude that I shall call “pessimism about the nature of love”. For the pessimist, love of some specified sort, or love of any sort whatsoever, is blind in the sense of delusional. It unavoidably involves an inability to see things as they are. On such an account, when we love someone we tend to overlook their shortcomings and underestimate their faults; we project a whole series of imagined properties onto them, properties they do not, and perhaps never will, possess. Nobody else may seem so witty, pretty and important. But, for the pessimist, the wit, the allure and the importance are only present in the eye of the beholder. Others do not see these wonderful qualities for the simple reason that they are not there.

Sexualized intimate love, with its insistence on the special standing or the uniqueness of the other, is often taken to involve delusions of just this sort. Why else would we regard others as special or unique if not because of imagined properties and accomplishments? For the pessimist, love unsettles our ability to make good and sensible judgements. Even worse, the delusions that a sexualized love involves may turn out to be temporary. Were we able to sustain them indefinitely we might live in a blissful ignorance. But life may not be so kind. After an initial rush of enthusiasm for the other (the time of romance and of falling in love) we may come with greater or lesser speed to recognize that the person we love is quite ordinary. Separation, divorce or a sustained disappointment may then ensue. At best (or worst) there may be a dull mutual acceptance based on recognition that we have disappointed them just as they have disappointed us. In this way, pessimism about the nature of love, and more particularly about the nature and merits of sexualized love, may not identify our own predicament as anything special or unique, but nonetheless it can feed into doubts of a very personal sort.

In particular, it can feed into, and be reinforced by, another form of doubt that I shall call “scepticism about being loved”. We may or may not believe that love, or more especially sexualized love, is intrinsically delusional, but either way we can question whether we are its recipients. Personal insecurities can make us ready to believe the worst. Knowing what we do about ourselves, we may wonder how anyone could genuinely come to love us. And while the doubts that are involved in such scepticism may not rule out relationships or marriage, success in establishing and sustaining such convenient arrangements need not be taken as conclusive evidence that scepticism about being loved is misplaced. The other person may simply have settled for what they can get. The benefits of companionship, under circumstances of mutual disappointment, may even convince two individuals to stay together despite the fact that the benefits do not match up to what we have all hoped for in our more optimistic moments.

Personal doubts about the genuineness of someone’s love may also persist in the face of the obvious fact that most of us have been loved, and loved in an utterly genuine but different way, by our parents. Although when I suggest this I am assuming that the reader has largely overcome their childhood doubts about being loved, d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Doubts about love
• 3. The depth of love
• 4. A sense of worth
• 5. Togetherness and loss
• 6. Irreplaceability
• 7. What can we love?
• Further reading
• References
• Index