Love is all around. A romantic cliche? No, a fact of human life. Just ask Anne Marie Pahuus, a Danish philosopher at Aarhus University. Love is essentially the closest, most intense relationships we have, for instance with our partners and children. Its wide range of emotions runs from erotic passion to friendship, from delight to torment. Love can conquer all, and it can bring life-long sorrow. Down through the ages - in a variety of guises - love has been the favourite theme of thinkers and artists, as indeed it remains to this day.
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In love, everything is possible except indifference. Pity can be mistaken for love, and love can even turn to hate, but being superficial towards a loved one is incredibly hard. Does this mean love is always solemn and soulful? Certainly not. Often love is brief and light-hearted. Many narratives cast uncomplicated love as silly, sentimental stuff, but when discussing âtrue loveâ or âgreat love storiesâ we should bear in mind that any creeping sense of banality is not caused by the feelings that make up love.
âTrue loveâ does not seem clichĂŠd because its range of emotions leaves us unmoved. It seems clichĂŠd when the narratives around it make our own emotions congeal into preset patterns. Emotions cannot lie, but they can be cultivated for their own sake, and words can inflate them till they become worthless. Our feelings can flounder in surging swells of clever talk, the wordiness drowning out our experience of encountering love. Thatâs what makes film such an excellent medium for the wordless kiss or embrace. Such scenes often speak volumes about the spirit of a relationship. Whether the iconic portrayal of Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio on the prow of the Titanic expresses love as idealised or trite remains a matter for the reader â or viewer â to decide.
When we cultivate love and attempt to express or capture its essence, we often find the emotive force pushing us towards the banal rather than the intellectual. We are moved to tears, sometimes by mediocre imagery. Paintings of teary-eyed gypsy children, trite as they may be, effectively evoke a sense of helplessness as we flash-back to our own younger selves: forlorn toddlers lost and alone in the world. Such faded memories tend to redouble vague sentiments of loss and consolation, making us teary-eyed in the face of kitsch. Our original emotions may be real enough, but they are being cultivated when art plays on them to produce a certain reaction rather than exploring the actual reasons behind the emotion being expressed, be it desolation, hope, delight, disappointment, sorrow, joy or gratitude. If the plot of a romantic narrative is too thin, the love it portrays becomes proportionately dull.
So would we be better off simply leaving the theme of love alone? By constantly flogging the topic, do we not risk reducing it to something stale, unoriginal? Or risk theoretically intellectualising that which ought to be lived instead? And am I, as an author, even doing philosophy a service by dealing with love as a philosophical theme? Some philosophers gladly let the psychologists deal with issues of human emotion. Others, meanwhile, choose to deal with love but remain aware of the dangers of over-intellectualisation. The Danish thinker and theologian Søren Kierkegaard belongs to the latter group: those who have dealt with love in detail while being careful not to see love as one specific thing. Someone who really loves, he says, can hardly derive any joy, satisfaction or progress from trying to puzzle out a definition.
Perhaps this means we ought to curb our interest in analysing intimate, loving relationships and simply leave love, mental and physical, to those who feel it. How deeply should we delve? Instead we could apply ourselves to other, wider theoretical issues. Why not Nature, or the societies humans are able to create?
THE GREATEST OF THESE IS LOVE
Only recently, relatively speaking, did love become a personal matter between mothers and fathers, parents and children. Pre-nineteenth century thought saw no contradictions between, say, the laws of Nature and the freedom of the people on the one hand and love on the other. Until then several philosophers, including Plato in antiquity and the Dutch philosopher Baruch de Spinoza in the 1600s, understood love as a glimpse into the necessities of the Universe, into the Divine. Rumi, a Sufi mystic and poet of the 1200s, held that without love the world would be frozen and lifeless. âKnowâ, he wrote, âthat the wheeling heavens are turned by the waves of Love.â
The apostle Paul probably presented the best-known Christian interpretation of love â âcharityâ in the scripture â as the centre of all things in a letter to the congregation at Corinth: âCharity suffereth long and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not, is not puffed up, doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth. Beareath all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.â Paul sees faith and hope as two of the three preconditions for everything else, concluding that âthe greatest of these is charity.â
Love is still the biggest thing around, but God and the Universe no longer define the boundaries between daily living and the parts of our lives governed by love. Today loveâs main function is to create and maintain the sort of interpersonal relationships that challenge our firm belief in the individualâs right to self-determination. In short:
Love makes us see another person as more important to our lives than we are. This can be a frightening experience, but once we have come through it we are changed forever. In this sense love reaches beyond close personal relations and sets the stage for all manner of trust, acceptance and respect. When we can give ourselves to another person and spend the rest of our lives with them, then, as the American poet Walt Whitman says in âSong of the Open Roadâ, we are laying the foundation for an entire society:
Mon enfant! I give you my hand! I give you my love, more precious than money, I give you myself, before preaching or law; Will you give me your self? Will you come travel with me? Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?
THE RECIPROCITY OF LOVE
Love creates lasting reciprocity.
It takes love to even make a person capable of reciprocating trust with trust. Love can also be institutionalised in a contract of marriage, a coupleâs promise meant to last âuntil death do us partâ.
Over the past 200 years love has gradually become the only reason to get married, a state of affairs that was still being lamented in the mid-1900s. The Danish writer Karen Blixen believed this led to disappointment in love, and in marriage as an institution. In post-feudal societies all social functions became cut off from marital and family ties, and ownership of family lands no longer depended on marriage.
Blixen saw great value in the way family ties, through marriage, had relieved the pressure on love. She held that marriage, in her day, had become an inert, powerless institution whose very foundations had been ripped away. In noble families an individualâs behaviour could no longer be measured by whether their actions were useful or beneficial to the family, and because of their huge properties noble families potentially stood to lose a great deal when marriages were made.
It was artists, poets and painters of the Romantic age who propagated the idea of great love, linking it to the idea of finding and marrying a âone and only true loveâ. In Blixenâs opinion, this was detrimental to marriage and to love.
Several decades later another well-known Danish author, Suzanne Brøgger, supported Blixen in this view. Brøggerâs 1973 debut Deliver Us from Love laid bare the hollow declarations of happiness where people proclaim, to their partner and the world at large, how wonderful their marriage is. They blare out their joy and bliss, the celebrity press praising every wedded couple as âa match made in heavenâ â until the divorce is announced.
The concept of true love as an ideal certainly spread with the Romantics, but its legacy goes back to the chivalrous poetry and courtly love of the Middle Ages. One example is the legend of Tristan and Isolde. Here, as in other tales of chivalry, the overarching theme is true love as a force unto itself, a blind passion that overcomes all else. Tristan and Isolde are rebellious lovers who meet in secret, each betrothed to another. Their trysts go on in the castle garden, in the forest, even in Isoldeâs wedding bed while her husband is away. The coupleâs love is magnified by and feeds on the adversity that surrounds it.
Such hot passion cannot tolerate society or community of any sort â not even with the beloved. So says the Swiss cultural theoretician Denis de Rougemont in his 1939 investigation of passionate romantic love entitled Love in the Western World. He refers to the form it has assumed in Western culture as Liebestod: love to die for. Love that kills you. Or m...
