Three philosophical accounts of love

In my last post I wrote about Plato’s account of love in his Symposium. But different thinkers have had very diverse conceptions of this phenomenon — and I deliberately do not say “feeling”, because, although love is usually accompanied by certain, fairly intense feelings that people generally locate in their chest or breast area (hence the association of love with the human heart), love is much more than a bunch of feelings. This much is already clear from Plato’s account, and when one jumps from ancient Greece to thinkers from more or less the present era, things are no different in this respect.

The French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre regards love as a “futile passion” — futile, because it is invariably directed at another person, and yet, according to Sartre, one cannot ever “reach” the other. This rather pessimistic conclusion follows from his philosophical anthropology where he describes human beings as being “no-thing” or “nothing” in a very specific sense. In contrast to things like trees, rocks, motor cars and the like, which Sartre describes as “being-in-itself”, human beings are “being-for-itself”, in so far as they are not opaquely closed within themselves, but transparent to themselves because of the human capacity for self-reflection.

This comes at the price, however, of not ever “coinciding” with themselves the way that being-in-itself does. In fact, humans are characterised by the fact that, as being-for-itself, they exist, or rather, they ex-ist in the literal sense of standing out of, or away from, themselves. They are inescapably self-transcendent, for Sartre, and this means that no person, in her or his attempt to “reach” the other in the act of loving, is ever able to find the other “at home”, as it were; like oneself, the other is also, always, “standing away from” the supposed centre of their being. This is why they are “no-thing” or “nothing”, or, to put it verbally, why they unavoidably, by virtue of their “ex-istence”, “negate” things in the world around them.

Simultaneously, it explains why love is futile, for Sartre — it is an attempt to coincide with the other, but the other, being “nothing”, does not even coincide with him — or herself, so love turns out to be futile, and invariably “degenerates” into sexual copulation, for Sartre.

At first blush, Jacques Lacan’s account of love appears to be as pessimistic as Sartre’s, but I believe that this impression is mistaken. Following Freud, Lacan regards love as being essentially narcissistic, that is, as really being a species of self-love, even when one loves another. This seems very pessimistic, though, for it would appear to imply that one is solipsistically imprisoned within the confines of one’s own monadic subjectivity.

This is not quite the case, however — the other, whom one loves, does enter the picture, albeit in an unexpected way. For Lacan, the other acts as a kind of relay, or mirror, for one’s love, in so far as she or he reflects one’s love back onto oneself, but in a specific sense. The person with whom one falls in love, “relays” one’s “self-love” in so far as the latter pertains to what one unconsciously holds to be most worthy or valuable in oneself, for which the other functions as a kind of barometer. To put it differently, in psychoanalytical terms: one’s unique “desire” (not in the sense of sexual desire, but as that which makes you different from every other human being; your deepest, and usually unconscious, wish) finds in the person with whom you fall in love a resonating “tympanum” or voice, as it were.

And one falls in love with a specific person because she or he is uniquely able to “co-respond” with or to your own desire. In that sense, at least, such a person is a worthy beloved or lover. The fact that it is this person whom one loves, is a measure of one’s own, tacit, unconscious, self-love in the sense of self-evaluation, which projects itself in the form of one’s singular desire. In a very fundamental sense, therefore, love is not anything that one is in a position to “give” to another; it always deflects back onto oneself, although the other’s specificity is undeniably significant because not just anyone could fulfil the role of being the “relay-point” for this self-love.

The phenomenologist Max Scheler’s account of love is more optimistic than the previous two thinkers. For Scheler, love has to be thought of in terms of value — the value of the person one loves. This does not imply that one could list everything about such a person which one finds “valuable” (which turns out, more often than not, to mean “useful”, anyway) and find that it would add up to loving that person. For instance, one could list his or her “beloved’s” valuable attributes as: beauty, intelligence, considerateness, compassion and sympathy, reliability, and so on (too good to be true, I know), but when these are “added up”, they do not equate with “love” (or lovable), because invariably, one would be able to find other individuals who also exhibit these personality traits, and by right one should therefore love them equally (which is not the case, of course). The reason for this, according to Scheler, is that a beloved person does not merely “have” value; he or she IS a unique, irreplaceable value. This is more than saying that she or he is unique; in a sense every human being who has ever lived (including serial killers) is unique, but that is not sufficient to love them — she or he has to be experienced as being uniquely, singularly valuable to the one who loves such a person.

Personally, although Lacan’s account of love is psychoanalytically persuasive (in so far as the unconscious plays a role in most of what we do), I like Scheler’s account best of these three because it resonates with my own experience of love as something which revolves around the unique value that one’s beloved IS in one’s life (and, in a wider sense of love than erotic love, that the people one loves ARE in your life). The test for this is that, even if, on occasion, the person one loves does not treat one as well as one would like to be treated — that is, when all those wonderful qualities one tends to attribute to one’s beloved, do not ring true — one nevertheless still loves her or him.