Love Analyzed

Roger Lamb

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429973116
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Philosophers have turned their attention in recent years to many previously unmined topics, among them love and friendship. In this collection of new essays in philosophical and moral psychology, philosophers turn their analytic tools to a topic perhaps most resistant to reasoned analysis: erotic love. Also included is one previously published paper by Martha Nussbaum.Among the problems discussed are the role that qualities of the beloved play in love, the so-called union theory of love, intentionality and autonomy in love, and traditional issues surrounding jealousy and morality.

1

Love and the Individual: Romantic Rightness and Platonic Aspiration

Martha C. Nussbaum

Veritas

motto, Harvard University

In Deo Speramus

motto, Brown University

Last month, while I was worrying about how to write a paper on this impossible topic, I was moving all my books and papers from Harvard down to Brown. The movers carried my files and boxes of papers into the Philosophy Department building, storing them in a closet under the stairs where I had been given permission to leave my things for the year. There in this closet, on the floor, I noticed a strange document: a manuscript of some 38 pages, typewritten. Its title was ‘Love and the Individual: Romantic Rightness and Platonic Aspiration. A Story’. Now this was a remarkable coincidence; for I had just chosen this title for my presentation at Stanford. I sat down right there in the closet and read it through. It was an odd document indeed, a strange hybrid of fiction and philosophy. But it was on my topic, a topic on which I myself had found nothing at all to say. I began to consider taking it and reading parts of it at Stanford. But I could not figure out who its author was. I strongly suspected that it was a woman, and a philosopher. The setting is a real place, a philosopher’s house; I’ve even been there. I thought immediately of my one female colleague in philosophy; but, I reasoned, she works on completely different topics. This author is clearly familiar with Plato and Aristotle, Proust and Henry James. Her interests, in fact, lie very close to mine. What’s odder still, she introduces as a sentence allegedly written by one of her characters (the one called “she”) a sentence that I wrote and published in an article on Plato’s Symposium.¹ Her other character (the one called “I”) claims to have written my article on Henry James.² Well, I thought, sitting on the closet floor, whoever she is, if she can lift my words, I can lift hers. So I have decided to do that here.

A STORY

Or incomincian le dolenti note

a farmisi sentire; or son venuto

là dove motto pianto me percuote.

Now the sounds of misery have begun

to reach my ears. Now I come to a place

where many cries of anguish beat against me.

Dante, Inferno V.25–27

Late one January night, in that winter of 1982, when it snowed all over Florida, blighting the orange crop, she found herself wide awake in Tallahassee, thinking about love. And, not surprisingly, about an individual who was the object of hers. Her guest room looked out over a white-blanketed golf course whose genteel contours, enduring with Protestant dignity the region’s prospective loss of millions, offered a polite reproof to her more disorderly experience of loss. The insouciant smile of the country club moon, floating above natural disaster as clear and round and single-natured and unaffected as a Platonic form—or a resurrected orange—seemed to her to express the Platonic thought that loved individuals, like orange crops or even like oranges themselves, always came along one following the other in due succession, essentially undistinguishable from one another in their health-bringing and energizing properties. A loss of one could be compensated fully and directly by the coming-into-being of the homogeneous next. One had only, therefore, to endure a brief interstitial period of whiteness, snow, and clear light.

Finding this hygienic Diotiman optimism impossibly at odds with her messier ruminations, finding it, indeed, not to speak genteelly, absurd as a consolation addressed to real personal loss (for it was in those days a point of honor with her to accept no replacements, to insist that any willingness to be so consoled was a falling off from grace), she rejected it and considered other possibilities. As she leaned out the window, feeling the preternaturally calm starry air on her eyelids, she saw that the appropriate next step would be to break up that calm; to demonstrate somehow her complicity with Diotima’s opponent Alcibiades and his more accurate view of love. Perhaps by going out and smashing several sacred statues; or by doing violence to the seventeenth green. But the truth was that she was a gentle character, for whom the consolation of violence was a constitutional impossibility. And besides, wasn’t her own real view the view she had found and described in writing about the Phaedrus, namely, that personal love was not necessarily linked with disorder, but was actually constitutive of the best sort of orderly life, a life dedicated to understanding of value and goodness? That madness and sanity, personal passion and rational aspiration, were, in their highest forms, actually in harmony with or even fused with one another? That we do not really need to choose between Socrates and Alcibiades? It was just this, indeed, that she saw as her problem; for if only disorder were gone one might even contrive to be pleased.

That afternoon when she first saw him, years before, he was walking down the sun-streaked hallway, laughing and talking, his whole body fiercely illuminated from behind by the light from the door, so that he looked to her like Turner’s Angel Standing in the Sun. Or, better, like some counterpart good angel, equally radiant but entirely beneficent in power. Like what the Phaedrus calls a “form truly expressing beauty and nobility”. It is not necessary to choose between Socrates and Alcibiades. Under the right circumstances.

At odds, then, with both Diotima’s order and Alcibiades’ violence; feeling not like Turner’s fishermen, irradiated by that angel’s light; or even like the lover of the Phaedrus, awestruck by the splendor of some beautiful boy; feeling more like Plato’s Stesichorus, blinded by the gods, groping for the verses that would restore his sight, she turned for help and light to the only help that occurred to her. Nothing dramatic, or even Platonic. Aristotelian rather. She turned into the room and began looking through the books.

There are too many individuals, and all of them are married. This is the only piece of general wisdom I have to offer on this topic about which I so rashly agreed to write. Socrates said in the Symposium, “I understand nothing—with the exception of love”. This preposterous statement tips us off, of course, that something funny is going on. For, sure enough, it turns out that the claim to have grasped and understood the nature of love is part and parcel of an enterprise that is busy converting loved persons into instantiations of a universal, and so into proper objects of (scientific) understanding, all in order to repudiate and transcend the phenomenon of love as ordinary mortals experience it. The sight of the knowing intellect is incompatible, Diotima tell us, with the sight of the human body. Uttered about ordinary passion by an ordinary mortal, the claim to have a general understanding of love is as good an example of the self-refuting proposition as anything philosophy has to offer. More: like Socrates’ claim, it is also some sort of denial or refusal of love’s dangers. As Alcibiades, telling his love story, shows. (”Oh love. I know all about that.” I’d say that in the same tone of voice I used for my opening “general truth”. For similar reasons.) The question, then, becomes how to write about love of the individual, if one does not wish, even tacitly, to make the Socratic claim to general understanding. How to limit and undercut one’s claims, making it clear that they are not guilty of Socratic “overweening”. How, at the same, to authenticate such limited statements as are made, showing where they come from and what gives them any claim to be telling human truth. Thinking of what I had written about Alcibiades, about Henry James, above all about Proust, I could not avoid the conclusion that I would only be entitled to speak about love in the form of a narrative.

This will, to be sure, be a conspicuously philosophical narrative. Most of its “plot” will be a story of thought and work. Its title sounds like the title of an article. Part of it will be an article, or a sketch for one. It will tell you at length about this lady’s general reflections; how she thought and even wrote; how she interpreted the Phaedrus; how she marshaled objections and counterexamples. For thought is one of the things that occupies space in a life, especially this one. It is also a major device by which this life tries to keep itself in line. A love story should not fail to show this.

And her story is philosophical in yet another way—in the way in which Aristotle said poetry was philosophical and history was not. For it is, like Alcibiades’ narrative, like Proust’s, not simply the record of some idiosyncratic things that in fact happened. (You should doubt whether any of it happened as told.) It is, rather, a record, addressed to the reader, of “the sort of thing that might happen” in a human life. And if the reader is not determined to conceive of himself or herself as radically individual, sharing with this lady no relevant responses and possibilities, the reader can take it to be, mutatis mutandis, his or her own love story.

But it will be, this philosophical story, quite unlike a philosophical treatise or article on the same topic. For it will show her thoughts arising from pain, from hope, from ambition, from desperation—in short, from the confusion in which thought is born, more often than not. It will present them, these offspring, all wrinkled and naked and bloody, not washed and dressed up for the nursery photographer. You will be in no doubt as to their provenance, and also their fragility. And you will be encouraged to ask how their characteristics are explained by the particular desires and needs that engendered them. This should by no means make you dismiss the question of truth or treat them as mere subjective reportings. But when you entertain them as candidates for truth, you will be able to ask hard, suspicious questions about background conditions that might have biased the inquiry, questions about what bias is in such an inquiry, and what objectivity. While you are made suspicious, however, you are to feel in another way reassured. For seeing the blood and hearing the cries, you are to know that these babies did come out of somewhere real, that they are live, ordinary children of human life and action, not some philosophical changelings simply masquerading as children. For changelings never go so far as to masquerade the pain of being born.

I shall embark, then, on this rather confused lady’s philosophical love story. I am not certain that I am entitled now to write it. It is not 1982 now. Though once again it is cold and white and silent, and oranges (grapefruits, I believe, as well) are dying all over Florida. It is not 1982; and I am not, like her, mourning. In fact, I have been happily sitting in my kitchen this afternoon drinking tea and reading Dante. Just now I was in the middle of writing a love letter to somebody else. The title ‘Love and the Individual’ is, I now see, ambiguous. I took it as a question about the individuality of the object of love. But it also forces me to raise questions about my own individuality and continuity from one love to the next. As Wittgenstein said, the world of the happy man is different from the world of the unhappy man. Can the inhabitants of two such different worlds really be the same person?

My discontinuity from her is not, however, total. For the radio’s mournful announcement, last night, of the demise of fruit, the solemnly intoned tale of moribund grapefruit and of orange juice cut off before its prime, pulled me oddly back inside her old tale of the demise of a love. And today the newspaper photograph of a young orange wrapped in a sheath of ice reminded me of a sentence she once wrote: “When the light of Socrates ‘appears all at once’ for Alcibiades, it is the sort of light that, radiantly poured round the aspiring body, may seal or freeze it in, like a coat of ice. That is its beauty”. I don’t altogether approve of that, but it moves me. Now, in spite of my lack of sympathy with her more apocalyptic and self-indulgent responses, despite my desire to treat the topic playfully and not to weep over it at all, I find myself once again in her presence, seeing her and seeing the image of him that she then saw, that image more like a lightning bolt than a sun (as Alcibiades knew) in its power to strike, even as it brings illumination.

You shall have her story, then—but as I tell it. And you must, therefore, be on your guard. For you can see by now what an interest I have in making it come out one way rather than another. So that it will be both true and morally acceptable that I survived and am here cheerfully replacing. That, loving a different individual, I am myself the same one, and not too bad either. For I have an interest in being her heir and continuant, rather than a mere two-year old. And if I shall say, further, that to survive the death of love is not just logically possible but also morally best, if I even contend that the best conception of love is one that permits some sort of replacement of individuals, you must remember that these arguments, though placed in her mouth, may be shaped by the fact that I have just been writing a love letter to somebody else. It is not only in the context of war that survivor guilt is a useful explanatory concept.

Now, guarding against her and yet pulled by the power of her love, half toughly warding her off, half longing to know her passion, in the manner of cautious Dante before the spirit of Francesca, I approach her. What can I do but what he did: call her “by the love that leads” her? And like some mad, disorderly dove, through the dark air of that malignant winter, she comes before me, “directed by desire”, quite gentle in her grief. I’m not like that.

I said that her search through the books was Aristotelian. This was inexact. Augustine’s Tolle lege was, far more, the motivating hope. She wanted to have, right then, a text that would change the course of her life from damnation to salvation, a text that would set her on the path to beatitude, lifting her above the winds of longing onto a promontory from which she could survey all the world and her own place in it. She was not quite but almost nel mezzo dal cammin, as they liked to conceive of it in those unhealthy times, so it seemed about right that some salvation should come her way.

But there are no sacred books in Tallahassee. So what could she do but see what was in fact in the guest room, taking a book at random and reading her fate in its pages? (And how clear it was in any case that she desired the salvation not of religion but of love.)

Her hosts had filled this particular guest room with books by and about members of the Bloomsbury group. This did not seem promising. She would have preferred Proust. She knew little about the people of Bloomsbury, but she thought they were probably well suited to their Diotiman surroundings. She knew enough, at any rate, to suspect them of excessive gentility of feeling and a strong interest in the replacement of one person by the next. It was, then, with no very high expectations that she selected from the shelf nearest the windows a large volume of Dora Carrington’s letters and diaries and turned (hoping against hope, I suspect, for something tragic enough to suit her) to the end, though ignorant, as yet, of the nature of Carrington’s.

There she came upon the following entry. (She memorized much of it at once involuntarily and carried it about with her for some months as a ready source of tears, but I have had to get hold of it from the library. And when I read it I find that very little of it is even familiar. This makes me wonder.)

No one will ever know the special perfectness of Lytton. The jokes when he was gay. “The queen of the East has vanished.” I believe you eat my nail scissors and then at lunch pretending to play a grand fugue before we got up. And the jokes about the coffee never coming because I stayed so long eating cheese. Sometimes I thought how wasteful to let these jokes fly like swallows across the sky. But one couldn’t write them down. We couldn’t have been happier together. For every mood of his instantly made me feel in the same mood. All gone…. And now there is nobody, darling Lytton, to make jokes with about Tiber and the horse of the ocean, no one to read me Pope in the evenings, no one to walk on the terrace. No one to write letters to, oh my very darling Lytton.

…What point is there now in what I see every day, in conversations, jokes, beautiful visions, pains, even nightmares? Who can I tell them to, who will understand? One cannot find such another character as Lytton and curious as it may seem to G.B. these friends that he talks of as consolers and substitutes for Lytton cannot be the same, and it is exactly what Lytton meant to me that matters.

One cannot live on memories when the point of one’s whole life was the interchange of love, ideas, and conversation.

She felt that she had written this entry, so directly did it express her own mourning. She sat there, somewhat absurdly weeping into the book, and the phrase “special perfectness” conjured up an image so concrete that she shuddered at its nearness and wept again. (I find it difficult to describe this.)

Here, she thought, was something worth reading about love. Call it the view of Alcibiades. Call it (right now) her own. For she too knew those consolers and their games. She knew, and all too well, that what she loved and did not have was, as this woman said, a special perfectness, an exact, nonrepeatable thing that could not be found again. There was a value and a knowledge that were inseparable from this particular relation. To try to recapture or replace them would be as futile as to go hunting for a joke after it has gone by. And she thought of their jokes.

Well, what was this individuality? In what did it consist, according to Carrington? (You now begin to see how this lady is: she goes on thinking at all times. She won’t simply cry, she will ask what crying consists in. One tear, one argument: that’s how her life goes on.) Carrington had, in this passage, several distinct, though related, quarrels with her consolers. Three, to be exact. First, the friends do not seem to grasp the fact that unique, nonrepeatable properties are essential to love. They talk of others who could be substitutes. This implies that they believe that there are certain general features of Lytton...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• About the Contributors
• 1 Love and the Individual: Romantic Rightness and Platonic Aspiration
• 2 Love and Rationality
• 3 The Right Method of Boy-Loving
• 4 Union, Autonomy, and Concern
• 5 Love and Human Bondage in Maugham, Spinoza, and Freud
• 6 Love and Autonomy
• 7 Love and Solipsism
• 8 Love and Its Place in Moral Discourse
• 9 Jealousy and Desire
• 10 Love Undigitized
• 11 Is Love an Emotion?
• 12 Love and Intentionality: Roxane’s Choice
• 13 Love’s Truths
• Index
• About the Book and Editor