Abstract
I distinguish, describe and explore two different conceptions of love that inform our lives. One conception found its classic philosophical articulation in Plato, the other its richest expressions in Christian thought. The latter has not had the same secure place in our philosophical traditon as the former. By trying to bring out what is distinctive in this second conception of love, centrally including its significance in revealing the fundamental value of human beings, I aim to show the importance of extending our philosophical reflection to acknowledge it.
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Notes
F. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil Preface, paragraph 5.
M. Scheler, “Christian morality and ressentiment” in his Ressentiment (New York: Schocken Books 1961), pp. 83–95.
My aim below is to identify and describe the difference. Why it has been so often either denied or overlooked or misrepresented is a further question, but Christianity’s involvement with Greek philosophy has been from the outset a two-edged sword. Am I rehearsing a familiar contrast between eros and agape? Yes and no. One reason for the ‘no’ is that the contrast has been drawn by so many in so many ways that it is scarcely ‘familiar’. Moreover, in every discussion I know of, including Nygren’s classic Protestant reading (A. Nygren, Agape and Eros, Westminster Press, 1953), some of the ways are misleading and unhelpful. A fresh exploration of differences between Platonic and Christian understandings of love is warranted. Revisiting extant discussions in its light would of course then be desirable.
Plato, Symposium 200e, trans M. Joyce, in E.Hamilton and H. Cairns eds The Collected Dialogues of Plato (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press 1961), p. 553.
Plato, Phaedrus 247b–e, trans R. Hackforth, in Hamilton and Cairns op. cit., p. 494.
William Wordsworth, “Ode on Intimations of Immortality”, in Selections from Wordsworth (London: Leopold Hill 1933), p 11.
This passage from the Timaeus, about the Demiurge, may be thought to present a different view: “He was good, and the good can never have any jealousy of anything. And being free from jealousy, he desired that all things should be as like himself as they could be. This is in the truest sense the origin of creation and of the world …” (Plato, Timaeus 29e–30a, trans B. Jowett, in Hamilton and Cairns op.cit. p. 1162) This does imply a creativity of goodness without eros. But it does not entail that love of some other kind is the source of the creativity. It is revealing, perhaps, that the sentence is framed negatively: the source of the Demiurge’s desire that all things should be good is simply the absence of jealousy in him. But my argument in the text does not anyway depend on thus reading this passage. The Timaeus is a later work than those I have drawn on so far, and Plato’s thinking does undergo some changes. I do not insist that there are no intimations anywhere in Plato of the very different conception of love of which Christian thought affords such striking exemplars, nor do I deny that there are other real affinities between Plato and Christian thought. (Even so—though discussion of this is beyond this paper—I think later Platonists, Christian and pagan, sometimes blurred important differences in making the most of the affinities they saw.)
‘We’? As this sentence makes clear, I write from the perspective of western cultural history with its Christian inheritance. In fact I think my themes have still broader application, but I do not claim so here.
Plato, Lysis 215a–b, trans J. Wright, in Hamilton and Cairns op. cit., p. 158.
This raises a further problem. Given that we love what is good, how can another as ‘neither good nor bad’ be the object of friendship. T. Penner and C. Rowe, in their Plato’s “Lysis” (Cambridge University Press 2005) give a sustained and interesting account of Plato’s (attempted) resolution of this difficulty among others.
This problem about philia flows through to Aristotle’s discussion of friendship, where it has been more often noticed and discussed. While Aristotle says that the good man needs friends, the explanation given for his having them is that his friend is ‘another self’ (Nicomachean Ethics 1166a31), so that friendship risks becomes something like two people each celebrating his own self-sufficiency in front of the other.
Plato, Republic 443d–e, trans P. Shorey, in Hamilton and Cairns op. cit., p. 686. Dikaiosune is sometimes translated as ‘morality’, sometimes as ‘justice’. Context helps decide which is preferable.
And perhaps also differences about the level at which goal-directed action is to be applied, leading to significant structural differences in moral theories. The details of these differences are outside the scope of the present sketch.
While the difference is indeed large, it is not totally unbridgeable. As I said, it is a crucial feature of the aporia of the Lysis that Plato already spontaneously thinks of philia as a love emanating from the goodness of those who are friends: the problem is that he cannot reconcile this spontaneous conviction—later to be central to Christian love—with his philosophical picture of love.
In highlighting this distinctive conception of love as seminal historically and also now in our lives, I am not denying that the Platonic conception I described also has been and is important. (I touch on this again below.) I am highlighting the former conception just because it has been philosophically sidelined, and—partly (but only partly) for that reason—has never had the kind of security of tenure in our cultural life that the other conception has had.
G. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (Radford, VA: Wilder Pubs, 1908/2007) pp. 17–18.
Symposium 212a.
Op. cit., p. 87. Scheler is here speaking of love ‘in the Christian view’.
Ibid.
E. Fromm, The Art of Loving (London: Unwin Books 1962), pp. 33–6.
Op. cit., p. 34.
There are other interesting questions here: Might the child mistakenly take mother’s love to be unconditional when it is not? How, on the basis of merely finite experience of mother’s love is the infant able to experience it as unconditional at all? These questions warrant attention, but on another occasion.
The Bible (AV), Epistle to the Romans 8:38–39.
Vlastos, G. “The individual as an object of love in Plato”, in Vlastos, Platonic Studies (Princeton 1981), pp. 3–48.
L. Kosman, “Platonic Love” in W.H.Werkmeister ed. Facets of Plato’s Philosophy (Van Gorcum 1976), pp. 64–5.
This is at the same time the lover’s own true self-actualisation. That is the point of the image of the lover ‘lead[ing] [the beloved] to walk in the ways of their god’. ‘Their’ god? What realises the ‘true self’ of the beloved will also realise the true self of the lover.
I. Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on philosophy and literature (London: Chatto and Windus 1997), p. 274.
This is one reason that talk of such love, especially by people about their own loving, can easily become a rhetorical self-indulgence, and we should be wary of it.
W. Shakespeare, Sonnet 116, in The Oxford Shakespeare 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1986) p. 793.
I deliberately say that such an aspiration ‘can’ be part of one’s orientation in loving. The modalities here are tricky. Just as no-one can know that his love is unconditional, so no-one can know that his horror at the thought of his love failing is itself a ‘pure’ horror, as it were. He can trust that it is so, and perhaps indeed it is so. But in no respect is the purity of our love determinable by our will or intention.
S. Weil. The Notebooks vol. 1 (London: Routledge, 1956), p. 148.
It is a different matter, needing discussion in a fuller treatment of these issues, that ‘helping one’s neighbour’ in everyday ways of (for example) tending sickness, and providing food and shelter, is simply not part of the Platonic ethical landscape. The reason seems to be that the love informing such help does not have as an element the ‘goal’ of partaking in the other’s becoming his ‘true self’.
This is the territory of a now-familiar objection to the limitation of Kantian duty. In my view the many imaginative defences of Kant against the objection, by Christine Korsgaard, Marcia Baron, Barbara Herman and others, do not dislodge it: acting from duty, however fine a thing to do, is not whole-heartedly responding to this human being. My discussion of respect and dignity, below, makes this point from a slightly direction. And I pick up Kantian concerns again in considering David Velleman’s account of love at the end.
S. Weil, “The love of God and affliction”, in Science, Necessity and the Love of God (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1968), p. 172.
I hope it is clear that I am not saying that love of this kind is possible only in extreme contexts like the one Weil describes. But such a context does let it stand out more clearly.
Homer, The Iliad trans. R. Lattimore (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press 1967), Book 5: 69–75, p. 130.
R. Gaita, A Common Humanity (Melbourne: Text Publishing 1999), p. 45.
“Love as a Moral Emotion”, in his Self to Self: Selected Essays (New York: Cambridge University Press 2006), pp. 70–109.
Op. cit., 96.
Op. cit., 105.
Op. cit., 106.
Op. cit., 101.
Essentially the same critical point, about Velleman’s attempt to spell out the ‘appreciative’ essence of love in Kantian terms, is made by Elijah Millgram, “Kantian Crystallizations”, Ethics 114, 2004, pp 113–115
Op. cit., 100.
Cited in Iris Murdoch, “The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited”, in Existentialists and Mystics, London: Chatto and Windus 1997, p. 285
Does this make the fundamental value of human beings ‘objective’? That depends on what is meant by ‘objectivity’, a topic too murky for resolution here. On the picture I’ve sketched, this value of human beings is revealable only to the eye of love. Some will find that a reason for saying that the value is not ‘objective’—for what is objective must (they will say) also be knowable otherwise than by love. Others will disagree, finding no warrant for that ‘must’. My own view, though, is that the question does not advance the discussion anyway. If we find ourselves affirming that the mode of love in question realises a deep truth about those on whom it lights, one with no ‘ground’ beyond their very being—as I have argued we do—then we are thereby affirming the reality of their human value. Why insist that this affirmation then be hostage to the question about ‘objectivity’? Is finding ourselves committed to the reality of something not enough? But of course, defending this deflection of the question about objectivity is for another time.
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Cordner, C. Two Conceptions of Love in Philosophical Thought. SOPHIA 50, 315–329 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-011-0238-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-011-0238-4