Love -- the most valuable (and often elusive) thing in the world

“Money can’t buy me love”, the Beatles sang in their heyday. And, as Joan Copjec has remarked about the founding psychoanalytical concept, “foreclosure” (the fact that some “originary, irredeemable loss” structures our “reality”), something that capitalism’s “logic of gain” cannot tolerate, one could say that love, too, escapes capitalism’s attempts to invest in it, with the expectation of a “return” of sorts.

Some people who read this, will sneer and say: “But what about prostitution at all levels, from the street corner variety to high class call girls (or boys)?” Their mistake would be the same as the common one of conflating love and sex. Don’t get me wrong — I’m not knocking sex. I used to counsel my children that sex is the second-best thing we have, with the purpose of answering the invariably predictable question, by saying that “the best being love, of course”.

Everyone who has discovered this, also knows that there is a big difference between sex and lovemaking — sex, or lust, certainly has its own rewards, but when practised in the context of a genuine love-relationship, it becomes magical; I could almost say, mystical (but then, I’m a romantic, as my lover knows very well).

One of the most accurate insights about the nature of love is found in Plato’s Symposium, where Socrates, in his contribution to the debate about the nature of love, claims that a woman by the name of Diotima taught him that love is the offspring of poverty and resourcefulness (or contrivance). According to Diotima, the latter two had sexual intercourse at a party in celebration of the birth of Aphrodite. The nature of love can therefore be comprehended in the light of what it/he inherited from both parents. In Diotima’s (that is, Plato’s) words (translated into English):

” … having Contrivance [Resourcefulness] for his father and Poverty for his mother, he bears the following character. He is always poor, and, far from being sensitive and beautiful, as most people imagine, he is hard and weather-beaten, shoeless and homeless, always sleeping out for want of a bed, on the ground, on doorsteps, and in the street. So far he takes after his mother and lives in want. But, being also his father’s son, he schemes to get for himself whatever is beautiful and good; he is bold and forward and strenuous, always devising tricks like a cunning huntsman; he yearns after knowledge and is full of resource and is a lover of wisdom all his life, a skilfull magician, an alchemist, a true sophist. He is neither mortal nor immortal; but one and the same day he will live and flourish (when things go well with him), and also meet his death; and then come to life again through the vigour that he inherits from his father. What he wins he always loses, and is neither rich nor poor, neither wise nor ignorant.”

In consummately poetic, and experientially compelling fashion, Plato here describes the paradoxical nature of love as an inter-personal phenomenon. Experience enables one to recognise in Plato’s evocative characterisation the features of “lack” or absence (that “just out of reach” experience of one’s beloved), and energetic, resourceful attempts to win the affection of the desired “object” of one’s love. Besides, as Plato further points out through the character of Diotima (and here one perceives the parallel between philosophy as love of wisdom, and love for a person), it would be absurd for a god to desire wisdom, because gods are already wise, or for ignorant people to want it, because they are, typically, complacent in their ignorance. The strangely paradoxical, ambivalent nature of love is therefore brought out beautifully: whether it is love of wisdom (in the case of the philosopher, who “knows” that he or she does not “have” it, but always has to strive for it), or for someone (who is desired only in so far as he or she is not already “possessed” or dominated), love displays the paradoxical, “impossible” character of something which simultaneously “is and is not”. Instead, it is perpetually in the process of resourcefully overcoming an existing non-being (“poverty”) via a momentary, short-lived actualization, only to fall back into a condition of non-being or poverty. As far as I can judge, this poetic depiction of love on the part of Plato corresponds accurately with the experience of love.

I realise that Plato’s assessment of love would strike most people living in this postmodern world as rather strange; largely, I suspect, because love has been so thoroughly conflated with sex (which is certainly thoroughly intertwined, but not identical, with it). And then there is the cynical legacy of some varieties of existentialism (regarding the possibility of love) which, even if people are not directly familiar with it, has filtered through into society from the work of people such as Sartre. Sometimes this filtering happens via cinema, as in the case of Bertolucci, whose indebtedness to existentialism is evident in his rather desolate film, The Sheltering Sky, and which also permeates other films, like his Last Tango in Paris (which, in a specific scene between the characters portrayed by Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider, gave the idea of anal sex as a “last resort” a huge fillip), as well as Antonioni’s The Passenger.

Small wonder that so many people cynically reject the possibility of love — everything around them either reduces it to sheer sentimentalism, as in popular soaps, or reduces it to a kind of possessive, tit-for-tat sex (pun intended). But deep down, I suspect, it is because most people know with a kind of intuitive wisdom that love entails the greatest risk they can take in their lives on this planet — because it can make the difference between a meaningful life and an empty, meaningless one, even when one is surrounded by everything money can buy. As the Beatles evidently knew.

It is worth recalling in greater detail what Sartre thought of love, and perhaps also the “anatomy of love” from someone who had a less pessimistic understanding of it. But that will have to wait till next time.