Another Reflection on Love

 

I never feel comfortable using the word love in a public setting. I feel it has become irreparably cheapened by countless pop songs ("all you need is love"), sentimental love stories, etc. etc.

     Linguistically, the word "love" has undergone what they call semantic inflation. A word originally used to name something profound and demanding has been extended to cover an enormous range of experiences: we love our wives, Bach, pizza, TV shows, Paris, and our children. The same word is asked to do too much work. And so its meaning becomes diffuse. It suffers from what philosophers of language sometimes call a loss of semantic density.

    Philosophically, the problem is even deeper. In the traditions of Plato, Augustine, Aquinas, Scheler, Pieper, Murdoch, Sartre, and Gaita, love is not primarily a feeling. It is an orientation toward reality, a mode of attention, an affirmation of being, a participation in the good. In contemporary culture, however, "love" often means a strong positive feeling, an attraction, or emotional intensity. The older metaphysical and moral dimensions largely disappear. Thus when we use the word "love," many listeners hear merely "a powerful subjective feeling." I want to mean something more like a truthful affirmation of another's reality and goodness (real love-worthiness). That’s a damn big gap.

    Culturally, I think this is connected to modern, capitalist privatization of value. Capitalist culture typically treats love as something happening inside me, involving my feelings. The older traditions treat love as a response to something objective: for example, the reality of another person, the goodness of creation, the Good itself, God. The center of gravity shifts from the beloved to the lover. This is one reason why the phrase "all you need is love" can sound almost vacuous to someone influenced by Plato or Aquinas. What kind of love? Love of what?  Ordered by what conception of the good? For Plato in the Gorgias, Callicles loves power. For Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor, one might say he loves humanity in a certain sense. For a fanatic, love of nation can justify atrocities. Love is not self-interpreting. We are drawn toward what we admire, attend to, and affirm. Therefore love shapes not only what we know but what we are. To love money, power, pleasure, or vanity is gradually to acquire a soul ordered around those things. To love truth, goodness, beauty, and persons rightly is gradually to become truthful, good, beautiful in character, and capable of genuine communion. Love reveals reality and simultaneously forms the lover. We become what we love (Plato) because love is the deepest movement of the soul toward what it takes to be real and good. There is also what Charles Taylor (very fine philosopher, who gave a talk I attended and then sat in our seminar – quite a privilege!) described as part of the modern "culture of authenticity." Love becomes associated with self-expression and emotional sincerity rather than truth, goodness, fidelity, sacrifice, or attention. Once that happens, the word acquires a sentimental aura.

     My discomfort with the word is that has become sentimentalized. Sentimentality is not the same thing as emotion. Writers such as Oscar Wilde describe sentimentality as emotion detached from reality. It is emotion enjoyed for its own sake. Sentimentality wants the feeling of love without the difficult work of seeing another person truthfully. That is almost the opposite of Murdoch's "loving attention." Murdoch's love is hard, disciplined, reality-oriented. Sentimental love is easy, self-confirming, ego-oriented. “Love" has become equivocal. In ordinary public discourse, it often names a cluster of feelings and preferences. In the philosophical and theological traditions I inhabit, it names something much more akin to attention (Murdoch), disclosure (Scheler), affirmation of being (Pieper), willing the good of another (Aquinas), and recognition of absolute value (Gaita). The thinkers I admire often avoid the word itself and speak instead of attention, charity, compassion, friendship, reverence, affirmation, justice, mercy, participation, even seeing. Trying to rescue to depth of the concept. Gaita is a good example. He never sounds sentimental, and yet almost everything he writes is about love. When he describes the nun caring for psychiatric patients, or a father paying the rent for a wife and friend that betrayed him because he couldn’t do otherwise, the word "love" recedes into the background while the reality itself comes into view.

      The phrase "all you need is love" names a cultural cliché. But when Spock takes Kirk's hand at the end of Star Trek: The Motion Picture and says that this simple human feeling is beyond V'Ger's comprehension, the word suddenly recovers its weight. There it no longer means sentiment or emotional warmth. It means the capacity to affirm another person, to belong to another person, and to know another person.

 

. . .

 

   So what got me thinking today about love were two maxims, one of Goethe’s and one of Leonardo DiVinci’s, which are quote at the beginning of the German philosopher Max Scheler’s (1874-1928) book Liebe und Erkenntnis (Love and Knowledge). Here are the texts. 

Goethe

„Man lernt nichts kennen, als was man liebt, und je tiefer und vollständiger die Kenntnis werden soll, desto stärker, kräftiger und lebendiger muss die Liebe, ja Leidenschaft sein.“ 

("One comes to know nothing except what one loves; and the deeper and more complete the knowledge is to become, the stronger, more vigorous, and more alive the love, indeed, the passion, must be.")

 Leonardo

"Every great love is the daughter of a great knowledge."

 The juxtaposition with Leonardo is brilliant. Knowledge gives birth to love for Leonardo; Goethe says almost the opposite: we know only what we love, i.e. love gives birth to knowledge. Chicken and egg. Scheler's book can be read as an attempt to show that Goethe has grasped something fundamental that the dominant modern tradition had forgotten. Against the intellectualist picture (i.e., first perception, then judgment, then perhaps emotion), Scheler argues that love is itself a kind of disclosure, revealing, making clear. That is, love is not merely a feeling added to an already known object. It is a movement of the spirit that reveals values, meanings, and dimensions of reality that would otherwise remain hidden to the dispassionate intellect.  Scheler also writes that love is a kind of Erschließung (opening up). Through love, something deep become visible. A simple example might be a child. A detached observer may know many facts about a child: height, age, IQ, habits. But a loving parent often sees possibilities, depths, vulnerabilities, and excellences invisible to the detached observer. The parent is not merely adding subjective feelings to the same object. He is, at least potentially, seeing more of the reality of the child.  I saw a kid the other day in the tram. Young teen. Obese. Probably from a poor background. I started speculating on his life and future and it was not pleasant. I thought of him as loved, by a father, by Christ, and how they would see him, in the pure light of love. He became transfigured in my imagination. When you love someone, they become beautiful in a way no matter what the conventions of capitalist society. And the point is that the latter is alienating while the former unmasks that shadow and reveals truth.

    This kind of thing is behind the more poetic language of the great philosophers. For Plato, eros draws the soul toward reality. For Augustine, "my love is my weight” i.e., what we love directs our attention and understanding. For Aquinas, charity perfects both will and intellect. For Murdoch, loving attention defeats egoistic fantasy and allows us to see another person justly. For Gaita, pity, remorse, gratitude, and love are ways of grasping the significance of reality. Indeed, Wittgenstein’s remark that pity can be "the conviction that someone is suffering" is very close in spirit. Compassion is not merely caused by the recognition of suffering; compassion may itself be the mode in which the suffering is fully recognized.

     What Scheler is rejecting is the picture of knowledge as a purely neutral gaze. A person may look and yet not see. Love is what enables genuine seeing. Scheler most definitely does not mean that love invents value. He is not a subjectivist. Love does not project significance onto a valueless world. Rather, love is the act by which objective significance becomes visible. That is so important to me because it implies that the scientific picture of the world as a neut

al, indifferent, causally determined closed system is not the whole of reality. “There is more in Heaven and Earth than is dreamt of in your science!” To modify Shakespeare a bit.

 

. . .

 

    I want to connect this with another line of thought I have tried to trace out in the past, which I learned from Josef Pieper’s Über die Liebe (On Love), one of the most important books I have ever read. Pieper's account of love provides the foundation in reality for what Goethe and Scheler are saying epistemologically. Pieper knows what Thomas Aquinas wrote about love, namely, that to love is to will the good of another. Not necessarily like the other or have warm feelings about the other. To make a true judgment about what the other needs, his good, and do want you can.

     But Pieper argues that this is not the whole story. Beneath willing the good lies something even more fundamental. Genuine love contains in its deepest core the judgment that "it is good that you exist." (Gut, dass du da bist.) Or, as he sometimes paraphrases it, "How wonderful that you are." Love is therefore at bottom an affirmation of reality. It is a "yes" to the being of another. (Think of Genesis, God looking down on his Creation and saying is was “good, very good,” which is to say God loved Creation.)

    Now compare this with Goethe’s we know only what we love. Why should love lead to knowledge? For Pieper, the answer is that love directs us toward the reality of the beloved. The lover wants the beloved to be, to flourish, to reveal himself. Love is therefore intrinsically opposed to reducing the beloved to a function, a category, an object of use, or a projection of the ego. The ego says "What are you for me?" Love says "How wonderful that you are." And because love affirms the other's reality, it becomes capable of seeing the other more truthfully. This is also close to Murdoch's notion of "loving attention." Fantasy and self-interest distort vision. Love is a discipline of reality. It allows the beloved to appear as he truly is. For Scheler love just doesn’t discover already visible qualities but  discloses deeper possibilities and values in the beloved. Love sees what is there, but what is there is richer than the detached observer imagined. In summary, reality possesses intelligibility and value. Love is an affirmation of that reality. Because love affirms reality, it attends to reality. Because it attends rightly, it sees more deeply. Therefore love becomes a source of knowledge.

   Conversely, hatred, contempt, or indifference produces blindness. If love says "yes" to reality, hatred says "no." The hater often becomes incapable of seeing the object of hatred justly. The hated person is caricatured. Love and hatred are not merely feelings added to perception; they shape what becomes visible.

   From a Thomistic perspective, love is a privileged path to truth because both love and truth are forms of participation in being. To know something truly is to receive its reality into the intellect; to love something truly is to affirm and participate in that same reality with the will. The intellect and the heart are therefore not rivals but two responses to the same act of being.

 

. . .

 

An elaboration on Pieper’s development of love as affirmation of being and it connection to love as willing to good of the other. Aquinas's definition seems practical: "To love is to will the good of another." This can sound almost like benevolence: I love you because I want good things to happen to you. But Pieper digs deeper, asking why I would will your good in the first place. If I regard you merely as a useful object, I may wish you to function well, just as I want my car to function well. That is not love. What distinguishes love is that I first affirm you. The willing of your good presupposes that your existence already matters to me. In other words, I don’t love you because I will your good; I will your good because I love you. And what is this love? "It is good that you exist." Thus the spiritual movement becomes the affirmation of the beloved's being, the desire for the flourishing of that being, the concrete willing of the beloved's good. The second and third follow from the first. Pieper is really uncovering what Aquinas means by good. For Aquinas, being and goodness are inseparable. Whatever exists is good insofar as it exists. Thus when I say "It is good that you exist," I am already saying something about the good. The good I will for you is not something external to you. It is the fulfillment, flourishing, and perfection of the being whose existence I affirm.

    This I know is a rejection of the modern/capitalist picture in which intellect first establishes a neutral inventory of facts and only then emotion arrives afterward. For Aquinas love is not an after-effect of knowledge and it is not a blind feeling. Love and knowledge are mutually implicated because both are responses to reality itself. That is why Goethe's sentence can be read as a Thomistic insight: namely, we know only what we love - not because love invents reality, but because love is the fullest affirmation of reality, and therefore the deepest openness to what is there. Hope that is clear.

 

. . .

 

   So what is loved, is loveable, worthy of love, good. But that which is loveable in us is darkened by the state of sin we are in (theologically), by the fat relentless ego to put it another way. What is it in a person who is loved that is loveable? I recall in Dead Man Walking, Sister Helen Prejean telling that rapist and murderer is loved, he is loved over and over before his execution. That seems like a paradox, like an absurdity even. We naturally love what is beautiful, good, intelligent, kind, useful, charming, or admirable. But Dead Man Walking poses the deeper question: what is lovable when all those qualities are darkened by cruelty, degradation, and guilt? Why does Sister Helen tell Matthew Poncelet that he is loved? Certainly not because he is innocent or morally admirable. Not because his crimes do not matter – the book and movie make that clear.

     I guess you have to say because his guilt does not exhaust what he is. The Christian answer is that what is lovable is the person himself. What is the person? For Aquinas, every human being possesses an intrinsic dignity because he is a rational creature made for truth, goodness, and ultimately God – loved into existence by God. Sin (alienation, the breaking of connections) wounds this nature but does not destroy it. The image of God may be obscured, but it cannot be annihilated. This is why Christianity can insist simultaneously that what he did was evil and he remained worthy of love.

    The capitalist mind struggles with this because it identifies the person with his actions, preferences, achievements, or psychological profile. If that is all a person is, then some people become unlovable. But the Christian tradition refuses that conclusion. One way to put it is that beneath the sinner stands the creature. And beneath the creature stands the beloved of God. Sister Helen's task is not to deny the murderer's guilt but to witness to a reality deeper than his guilt. This connects to Pieper's formula "It is good that you exist." Which of course does not mean that it was good he raped and murdered. (The movie was so good because part of you could feel the parents’ pain and wanted to scumbag to get his come-up-ins too.) But it does mean that it is good that he is (was), that we at least cannot say it would have been better had he never been born. That is mind-blowing. Who can blame the parents of the murdered youth for not being able to see that? The distinction between existence and moral condition is crucial.

   Connect this back to Scheler's Goethe quotation. We know only what we love. The crowd sees "rapist and murderer." The victim's families understandably see "the man who killed my child," as I certainly would have. The state sees "the condemned prisoner." Sister Helen, because she loves him, comes to see something more. Not something different, but something deeper. She sees the man who committed those crimes, but she also sees the human being whom those crimes do not finally define. Perhaps only the saint, by grace, can do that.

 

. . .

 

    In A Common Humanity, Gaita argues that our deepest moral concepts arise from a recognition of the absolute value of persons. The saint, the disabled child, the dying prisoner, the senile old woman, the criminal, each can be seen as possessing a significance that transcends any assessment of usefulness, achievement, or social worth. When Gaita writes about the nun caring for psychiatric patients whom others regarded as "human rubbish," the nun does not first discover some hidden utility or talent in them. She sees them as fellow human beings. That vision is already moral knowledge.   Theologically, one could say that she sees them as God sees them.

 

. . .

 

And then there is Murdoch’s "fat, relentless ego." The ego does not merely love itself too much. More fundamentally, it sees everything in relation to itself. What can this person do for me? How does this person affect me? Do I enjoy this person? Does this person confirm my identity? Such vision is inherently narrowing. Murdoch calls it fantasy. Augustine calls it “the soul curved inward upon itself.” The Christian doctrine of sin gives a theological description of the same phenomenon. The ego darkens the lovable because it sees only what relates to itself. Love, by contrast, is an act of outwardness. It allows the other person to stand forth in his own reality. This is why Murdoch's "attention" and Pieper's "affirmation" are so closely related. To attend lovingly to another person is already to say thatyou are more than my use for you or my judgment of you. You are more than your worst act. You are real. Theologically, you exist because God loved you into existence. In Christian language, love sees the person under the aspect of creation and redemption, not merely under the aspect of guilt. And that vision is possible because what is most fundamentally lovable in every person is neither virtue nor innocence, but the mysterious goodness of a being called into existence and sustained in existence by God. This is a mystery to me and I do not pretend to understand what I am saying by it.

 

. . .

 

    And it is hard in truth to find oneself loveable. Narcissism is a defense mechanism against that. And a lot of it comes from the inevitable wounds, failures of love, in family life I guess.

    One of the paradoxes of narcissism is that it is often mistaken for excessive self-love when it may be closer to an inability to believe oneself genuinely lovable. The narcissistic person is preoccupied with getting admiration, success, status, beauty, achievement, or recognition because these seem to provide evidence that he deserves love. This describes especially my teen self quite accurately. The underlying question is "Why should anyone love me if I am not exceptional?" The tragedy is that the more one seeks certainty of love-worthiness through achievement or image, the less one rests in the simple affirmation "It is good that I am." That is why narcissism can be understood as a defense against vulnerability. To accept oneself as lovable is to accept that one's worth cannot be guaranteed by one's accomplishments or controlled by one's own efforts. It requires a kind of trust.

     Family life is often where this drama begins (cf. Alice Miller, The Drama of the Gifted Child). No family is perfect. Every parent fails in some ways. Children are misunderstood, neglected, compared to siblings, criticized unfairly, or simply not seen deeply enough. Even loving parents cannot completely communicate to a child that "You are good, not because of what you do, but because you are." And children naturally hunger for exactly that affirmation. When it is absent, inconsistent, or mixed with conditions, many compensatory strategies emerge, like wanting to be successful or indispensable or attractive or powerful or self-contained or smart, etc. Each strategy seeks indirectly what was not securely received directly.

    This is one reason why both Christian theology and thinkers such as Murdoch and Gaita place so much emphasis on humility. Humility is not self-contempt. It is the ability to stand in reality without either self-exaltation or self-denigration.A narcissist feels that must be extraordinary to be love-able. A despairing person, the other side of the coin, feels they are at bottom worthless. Humility is the state of soul that apprehends it is neither a little god (or absolute) nor garbage – but a creature. A difficult position to inhabit!

    Gaita teaches that worth is not earned. The language of dignity, sacredness, and absolute value points to something that cannot be measured by achievement. A newborn infant has not accomplished anything, yet we do not regard him as worthless. The same is true of the dying person, the severely disabled person, or the prisoner on death row.  Theologically, this is where the doctrine of grace enters. If my existence itself is a gift, then the deepest affirmation of my worth cannot come from my own accomplishments. It must be received. This may be why self-acceptance is so difficult. It sounds easier than accepting others, but it is harder. We know our failures from the inside. We know the pettiness, resentment, vanity, cowardice, and selfishness that others do not see. To believe that one is still lovable despite all that can feel almost scandalous. I always come back to Pieper. The deepest human need is not praise, admiration, or even forgiveness. It is to really believe that "It is good that I exist." And not because I earned it. I think that is why the failure of love in family life can wound so deeply. The wound touches one's sense of reality itself. One begins to doubt whether one's existence is a gift or a burden. Much of human striving can then become an attempt to answer that question through achievement, image, control, or recognition. (My family was not perfect but I never felt unloved. That is a great gift.)

   The hopeful side of the story is that people can sometimes receive later in life what they did not fully receive as children: through friendship, marriage, parenthood, community, art, faith, or encounters with people who see them more truthfully than they see themselves. Love can disclose not only the reality of others but also one's own reality. We learn that we are lovable because we are first loved.