Abstract
How may science, philosophy and poetry aid us in our search for an understanding of the concept of love? By drawing on different attempts to articulate Wittgenstein’s notion that philosophizing about a concept is a matter of bringing it back to its natural home, the lives we live in language, this chapter presses what this may mean when the language we want to find the home for is the language of love. Is it a pre-requisite of such an investigation that it also speaks to us of love? What other existential dimensions and moral difficulties are there to be seen in the significance that different people are prepared to assign to different uses of ‘love’?
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Notes
- 1.
The notion that we receive knowledge of love through an act of divination, or through someone with more or less prophetical powers, is of course also familiar in the philosophy of love through Socrates’ speech in the Symposium where he recounts the teachings of love by Diotima.
- 2.
This is the route taken by Paul E. Griffiths (1997), who in What Emotions Really Are, suggests that the answer to this question is found by surveying the most recent studies into emotions. Jesse Prinz’s Gut Reactions (2004) follows this lead. What Griffiths gleans out of the scientific study of love in that study is that love is something of a pseudo emotion. It is a socially constructed emotion which involves the adoption of social roles ‘that reflect society’s conception of what is appropriate in that situation’ (Griffiths, 1997, p. 139). Under the pretext of being ‘carried away by love’, that is, passively suffering from one’s emotions, it, for example, allows one to cast off social ties ‘without questioning the legitimacy of those ties’ (Griffiths, 1997, p. 142).
- 3.
They do, however, say much about reasons, explanatory or justificatory, or as a matter of intelligibility. They speak of love as the bestowal or creation of value (e.g. Singer, 1984), and as a form of valuation (e.g. Kolodny, 2003). They speak of beliefs, desires (e.g. Taylor, 1979) and interests and ends (e.g. Velleman, 1999). I should add that what I am critical of in such discussions is not primarily speaking about love in terms of reasons, values or interests, and so on. What makes me somewhat numb to these discussions, and feeds my experience of them not speaking to me by contrast to other philosophical works that do, is rather the tendency to treat questions about the role of love for the human being as intellectual problems. Considering love’s place among the emotions, in relation to rationality or as a contested constituent of morality, becomes a matter of fitting love into one’s great puzzle, where the other pieces already are in place, or at least are lying on the table. Leaning on Gibran’s poem I would suggest that this is conducting a discussion of love at a place where one has already passed ‘out of love’s threshing-floor’. It is a place where one’s own fear of love, or difficulty to love, does not prevent one from attempting to gain knowledge about love, and construct definitions of it.
- 4.
There is internal criticism of the interventions proposed by positive psychology within psychology. Julia Norem (Azar, 2011), for example, raises the general criticism against positive psychology that being optimistic and positive may not benefit people who can be defined as defensive pessimists.
- 5.
Lars Hertzberg (1994) clearly exposes the problems in delineating nonsensical sentences from those that make sense.
- 6.
This picture of love as a more all-embracing experience is not as new as Fredrickson makes it out to be. It is quite a common picture of love among mystics, a becoming one with God, or the universe. To find these more watered out mystical ideas in Fredrickson’s book, is not as surprising at it may sound, since she alongside science appeals to Buddhist practices of meditation and mindfulness to teach us how to become more loving.
- 7.
This criticism is explicitly directed at Stanley Cavell and the sense in which Phillips thinks he departs from Wittgenstein’s conception of philosophy. I will not here take any particular stand on what the best way is to read Wittgenstein. I do this partly because I am uncertain whether there is such a best way to be discerned from his writing, partly because many of the differences between his interpreters depend on the specific remarks on which one builds one’s case and partly because I am doubtful whether any general conclusion can be drawn about the significance of these differing perspectives without considering the contribution they make to concrete cases.
- 8.
Cf. also what Gaita describes as a ‘call for seriousness’, which is
always to a particular individual, unique and irreplaceable, and it calls her to an individuate responsiveness—to speak out of what she has made, and should continuously be making, of experiences that are her history and that make her what she is. The call is at one and the same time that she speak disinterestedly in the sense that she should try to overcome the many temptations of what Iris Murdoch called the “fat relentless ego”, and that she speak personally, that she speak in or recover or, even for the first time, find the voice that reveals her distinctive take on the world, that reveals, as Kierkegaard puts it, that she has lived her own life and no one else’s. (Gaita, 2011, p. 28)
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Kronqvist, C. (2019). ‘Speak to us of love’: Some Difficulties in the Philosophical and Scientific Study of Love. In: Backström, J., Nykänen, H., Toivakainen, N., Wallgren, T. (eds) Moral Foundations of Philosophy of Mind. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18492-6_8
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