love in philosophy essay

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1 Love: The Basic Questions

Susan Wolf is Edna J. Koury Distinguished Professor of Philosophy Emerita at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

• Published: 11 January 2018
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It is a common and plausible thought that love is one of the most important things in life. This essay sets out to explain why. After noting that outlooks like hedonism and stoicism fail to acknowledge love’s fundamental importance, the essay considers the variety of kinds of love, and argues that any love that involves caring deeply and personally about something for its own sake can have the relevant kind of importance. Specifically, love orients us in and roots us motivationally to the world in a way that self-interest does not. Consideration of how love would affect our attitude to Nozick’s experience machine reinforces this point.

One basis for an attraction to philosophy is an interest in finding answers to big questions about the human condition. Does life have a meaning? Are values objective? What are the limits of knowledge? Those of us who come to philosophy in this way tend to search and indeed hope for universal truths, but often we also have a skeptical bent, that makes us qualify if not totally dismiss every proposal that is offered.

Among the Big Questions that philosophers (and others!) ask, none are older (or, arguably, bigger) than questions about how to live. What are the ingredients of a good human life? Is there a single thing that is most important, that any good life must include? Given the enormous range of people’s abilities, tastes, and temperaments, and the relevance of culture in shaping human needs and values, there may be no truly universal and yet substantive answer to these questions that can stand the test of critical scrutiny. Still, philosophers, theologians, pop psychologists, and artists press on, offering slogans and maxims about a life well lived as well as more complex and academic theories of well-being. Among the multitude of candidates proposed as essential to a good life, one stands out for me as by far the most plausible: love. And, of course, it is proposed a lot: Songs, novels, movies, not to mention framed needlepoint pictures, proclaim that “Love makes the world go round”; “Love conquers all”; “All we need is love”; “’Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.”

1. Love and Philosophical Theories of Well-Being

Common and plausible as this view of life is, however, if one looks at the history of Western philosophy (Eastern philosophy, too, judging from the little I know of it), it is remarkable how infrequently this sentiment is reflected. Over its history, philosophy has given love surprisingly little attention. The most dominant philosophical theories about what is important in life do not mention love at the fundamental level. To the extent that these theories assign love a place in their schemes, their accounts of love’s value are too contingent and instrumental to jibe with the attitude toward love that so many people have.

Hedonism, for example, identifies the fundamental source of value with pleasure and the absence of pain. According to hedonism, the more pleasure and less pain an individual life contains, the better it is. To the hedonist, then, the questions of whether and why love might be important and valuable depend for their answers on how love contributes to or detracts from the more ultimate aim of maximizing pleasure. Since love is in fact the source of a vast array of pleasures, hedonism has no difficulty giving love a very important and positive weight. Still, according to this view, love’s value is conditional. If a person—or a world—could be just as happy without love as with it, then love would serve no function, and its value would be nil. Further, love famously does not always add to our pleasure; it often detracts from it—not only when love is unrequited, but when one’s loved ones get sick or get fired, when they must be far away from us, and, of course, when they die. According to hedonism, when love increases pain, its value is worse than nothing. We would be better off without it. But that is precisely the opposite of the popular sentiment that it is my goal in this essay to better understand.

In contrast to hedonism stands another tradition, associated with the Stoics and with Kant, which identifies the best life not with pleasure but with virtue. According to this line of thought, if you live virtuously, in a way you can look back on with pride, then nothing can hurt you. On this view, love’s importance comes from the way in which it opens up opportunities for virtue. Since love really does generate opportunities for virtue, this theory, too, has no trouble crediting love with an important role in our lives. For example, love typically puts you in closer and more intimate contact with other people than you would otherwise have. It allows you to know better when certain people are in trouble and what they might need; and it may make it possible for them to receive comfort from you that they could not accept or enjoy from a stranger or acquaintance. Moreover, a virtue theorist might point out that in accepting love, one gives others an opportunity for virtue, and so there is a kind of virtue made possible not only in loving but also in being loved. Interestingly, the very aspects of love that a hedonist has a hard time making sense of as valuable—aspects that are called up when one’s beloved is suffering and in need—are those that the virtue theorist can most easily recognize as good.

Nonetheless, the account this theory provides of the value of love is no better than the hedonist’s. After all, even if love creates some opportunities for virtue that you would not otherwise have, there are plenty of opportunities available without it. You do not have to love an undernourished family in order to feed them, you do not have to love a wounded child in order to donate blood for her, you do not have to love a stranded motorist in order to help change his tire. Furthermore, just as love famously can be a source of pain as well as a source of pleasure, it can be a motive for vice as well as virtue. If love expands your opportunities to act well for the sake of your loved ones, it also tempts you to act badly in neglecting or even harming people whose needs or interests put them in competition with those you love. According to those who identify goodness with virtue, then, as well as those who identify goodness with pleasure, love’s importance is too contingent and conditional to satisfyingly explain the distinctive importance I and others take it to have.

2. The Basic Questions

What, then, (if anything) is so great about love? What makes love so special? One might think that before proceeding to address these questions, we ought to be clearer about what love is. The word “love” is used in myriad ways, to characterize relationships of an enormous variety—with friends, family, pets, one’s country. We talk sometimes of loving an activity, such as philosophy or basketball. (I live in North Carolina, where we talk about loving basketball quite a lot.) We are asked to love our enemies, our neighbors, or more generally our fellow human beings. Do we mean the same thing by “love” in all these instances? Is there anything they all have in common? Insofar as we entertain such thoughts as “love makes the world go around,” do we have one kind of relationship in particular in mind?

In a Wittgensteinian spirit, I take it that the inquiry into what love is that is important for our enterprise need not be a quest for an explicit definition that sets out necessary and sufficient conditions for “love,” but rather an exploration of the word’s many uses with an interest in seeing what, if anything, they all have in common, and what common strands link many of them together beyond that. Nor does it seem particularly fruitful to keep this inquiry separate from and prior to an exploration of the question of love’s importance that motivates it. In other words, rather than proceed by first asking and answering what love is, and only then moving on to ask why love might be special, it seems best to treat these questions as equal partners, to be explored together. To put it another way, we can approach the topic by asking what love can be, such that it is plausible to think of it as being a universal or near universal ingredient of a good life, and in virtue of what is love, so understood, so important. These, what might be called the basic questions about love, are the subject of this essay.

3. The Varieties of Love

What can love be, then, such that it is plausible to think of it as a deeply important feature of (almost) any good life? What can we mean by “love” when we so much as entertain the thought that it makes the world go round? I have said that it can be used to refer to myriad relationships. In fact, the term is used more broadly still, sometimes in a way that does not explicitly invoke relationships at all. Thus, it is sometimes said that God is love, though this has always struck me as mysterious. And hearts and people are sometimes described as full of love, even when they have no one to give it to or to share it with. (This use seems especially common in country music.) There is also a superficial use of “love,” as in “I love what you’ve done with your hair.” But I shall set these uses aside—they are not what I, nor, I think, what anyone has in mind when they ponder love’s importance in a life well lived. Rather, I shall simply assume that when people talk or write about love’s importance, what they have in mind, first and foremost, are loving relationships , and, typically, loving relationships with other human beings. Even within this narrowed range, however, the kinds of relationships that uncontroversially count as loving ones vary tremendously.

Thus, some people, when they talk abstractly about love, are thinking especially of romantic love, or perhaps of a kind of love that can be exemplified either by romantic love or close friendship. Others take family relations, especially the relation between parent and child, as their paradigm. Clearly, some of the things it makes sense to say of one kind of love relationship would be implausible and inappropriate when applied to another. It is a salient fact about loves of romance and of friendship that, in some sense, they are chosen. Something about the other person attracts you, and, if the love is reciprocal, something about you attracts them. Much of what is wonderful about such loves is connected to this feature. Falling in love tends to involve finding the person delightful, as well as admiring them, seeing them as good. And so the chance to be with them, even time spent thinking about them, is a source of intense pleasure. A further, often equally intense pleasure, comes from the perception that the person you love loves you back—“he chose me!” can be, among other things, an incredibly strong compliment, and an enormous boost to one’s self-esteem.

Love among family members is not typically like that. While it would be crazy for romantic love or love of a close friend not to be based on qualities of the loved ones to which the lover responds, it is chilling to imagine a parent whose attitude to her child waits upon finding out what the child is like, and pretty unpalatable to think of siblings relating to each other in this way, too. Parents of wanted children tend to stand ready to love them no matter what they are like. The thought that love is or should be unconditional comes most quickly to mind when thinking of relationships like this.

In important ways, these different kinds of loving relationship play different roles in our lives: they serve different functions, and address different needs. Insofar as one finds it plausible to think of love as an especially important and nearly universal value, is it one of these types of relationship rather than another that one has in mind? Alternatively, is there something these types of relationship have in common, in virtue of which they are all, in at least partly the same sense, instances of love? If so, can this plausibly be the feature that makes love—of any such kind—distinctively valuable?

I am attracted to the second answer, for at least two reasons. One is that it just seems false to me that a life without children, or a life without romance, is bound to be a less complete and successful life than one with such relationships. Even though children may be rewardingly at the center of life for many people, it does not take that much observation or imagination to see that a life can also be immensely successful and gratifying without them. The same goes for a life without a romantic partner. Philosophers, even more than most people, may have a tendency to project too much of their own needs and desires onto the rest of humanity, inclining them to make remarks like “a life without music (or access to nature or contemplation) is not worth living.” Though there may be universals or near universals like this—indeed, this essay is in part an inquiry into the plausibility of one of them—we should be cautious and circumspect in assessing and supporting them.

Second, although the character of loving relationships between lovers and friends, on the one hand, and siblings, parents, and children on the other, may well be markedly different in their early stages, they tend to grow more similar to each other over time, suggesting that they do have something valuable in common worth trying to articulate. Thus, although a new parent stands ready to love her child no matter what the child will turn out to be like, as the child develops and reveals her personality, the parent comes to be proud and appreciative of her, loving qualities in the child as well as the child herself. And the longer the relationship with a friend or romantic partner goes on, the freer one’s attachment tends to become from the characteristics that originally brought the lovers or friends together. It is frequently said that you can choose your friends, but you cannot choose your family. But, as one of my friends pointed out to me, it is not true—you cannot choose your friends either. At least much of the time, once you have your friends, you have them for life, even if, were you meeting them now you might not like them as much or have as much in common with them as you do with others in your community who do not happen to be your friends.

In some ways, then, love of friends and of family are importantly alike, and, I would suggest, importantly alike in value. Many of us have close friends and close family—both types of relationships play large, and sometimes competing, roles in our lives. But other people’s lives are more exclusively centered on family or on nonfamilial friends, and I see no reason to think one sort of life is in general more rewarding or meaningful or better than another. The contrast between a life without love and a life with it seems different. A life without love seems sad, empty, missing an important, possibly essential ingredient (for a good life) no matter what else it contains. It has a void that can only be filled by love, but what kind of love may not matter.

4. Defining Features of Love

But what is it about love, common to relationships of friendship, romance, and family, that make it so irreplaceable in a life well lived? To repeat the linked and basic questions we are exploring, what is love such that it is plausibly taken to be a universal ingredient of a good life, and in virtue of what is love so important?

In a brilliant and provocative article, 1 the philosopher David Velleman surveys what analytic philosophers have had to say about love, concluding that they, like Freud, tend to conceive of love as having a characteristic aim or aims. Of the many philosophers he quotes, Henry Sidgwick’s description is paradigmatic: after noting that love always involves a desire to do good to the object beloved, he adds, “it includes, besides the benevolent impulse, a desire of the society of the beloved.” 2 A similar view is echoed by Laurence Thomas, who writes, “love is feeling anchored in an intense and nonfleeting … desire to engage in mutual caring, sharing, and physical expression with the individual in question.” 3 William Lyons uses abstract variables to say the same thing: “For X to love Y, … X must not merely evaluate Y as appealing …, but X must want certain things in regard to Y as well. X must want to be with Y, to please Y, to cherish Y, to want Y to return the love, to want Y to think well of him.” 4 John Rawls, somewhat more cautiously, writes, “Love clearly has among its main elements the desire to advance the other person’s good as this person’s rational self-love would require.” 5

If these philosophers are right in thinking that love is or essentially includes desires to be with and to benefit the objects of one’s love, the answer to the question “What is so important about love?” may be connected to the desires that are so closely associated with it. Specifically, a proposal that suggests itself on this assumption is that love’s function is that it gives one something to do. Since loving someone supplies one with wishes and goals—to be with the beloved, to enhance his or her life—it gives an otherwise aimless person direction and purpose.

Velleman’s response to this litany of characterizations of love, however, is eye-opening: “In my opinion,” he writes, “the foregoing quotations express a sentimental fantasy…. In this fantasy, love necessarily entails a desire to ‘care and share,’ or to ‘benefit and be with’. But, surely,” Velleman goes on,

it is easy enough to love someone whom one cannot stand to be with. [Just think of] a troublemaking relation. [The] meddlesome aunt, cranky grandfather, smothering parent, or overcompetitive sibling is dearly loved, …: one just has no desire for his or her company. The same ambivalence can occur in the most intimate relationships. When divorcing couples tell their children that they still love one another but cannot live together, they are telling not a white lie but a dark truth. In the presence of such everyday examples, the notion that loving someone entails wanting to be with him seems fantastic indeed. There is only slightly more realism, in the suggestion that loving someone entails being moved to do him good. In this case, the authors quoted above seem to be thinking of a blissful family in which caring about others necessarily coincides with caring for them or taking care of them…. yet when I think of [many of the] people I love—parents, brothers, friends, … —I do not think of myself as an agent of their interests. I would of course do them a favor if asked, but in the absence of some such occasion for benefiting them, I have no continuing or recurring desire to do so. At the thought of a close friend, my heart doesn’t fill with an urge to do something for him, though it may indeed fill with love.

Indeed, Velleman goes on to suggest,

In most contexts, a love that is inseparable from the urge to benefit is an unhealthy love, bristling with uncalled-for impingements. Love becomes equally unhealthy if too closely allied with some of the other desires mentioned in these passages—the desire to please or to be well-thought-of, and so on. Of course, there are occasions for pleasing and impressing the people one loves, just as there are occasions for caring and sharing. But someone whose love was a bundle of these urges, to care and share and please and impress—such a lover would be an interfering, ingratiating nightmare. 6

Velleman may be going too far, but his remarks are a useful antidote to our tendency to identify love with its most rewarding instances, and, even more to the point, with its most active expressions. By focusing too much on certain paradigms, we forget the equal validity of other cases. In any event, I find Velleman’s claim that love ought not to be conceived as a bundle of desires persuasive. For a person whose children are grown and self-sufficient, whose parents are cared for, whose friends live far away, there may be nothing to do or even sensibly to want to do to benefit his loved ones. Still, he has loved ones, and that he has them enhances his life in an important way, even if under the circumstances, the loving relationships operate mainly in the background. But in what way?

Unfortunately, Velleman’s positive characterization of love seems to me as skewed and as unsatisfactory as the view he criticizes. Having found reason to question the assumption “that love is essentially a pro-attitude toward a result,” he suggests, “love is … an attitude toward the beloved himself but not toward any result at all” (354). Rather, he suggests, love is “an arresting awareness of (a person’s) value” (360), an appreciation, as it were, of a person’s rational nature (see 365) that somehow “arrests our tendencies toward emotional self-protection” “disarm[ing] our emotional defenses [and] mak[ing] us vulnerable to the other” (361).

Velleman defends his view of love, in part, on phenomenological grounds. Comparing his view to the one he has criticized, he writes, “love does not feel (to me, at least) like an urge or impulse or inclination toward anything; it feels rather like a state of attentive suspension, similar to wonder or amazement or awe” (360). Reading this, one wonders whether Velleman has forgotten about his meddlesome aunt and his overcompetitive brother. And does he really feel amazement and awe for his children (or anything similar) when he is stuck on the New Jersey Turnpike in Thanksgiving traffic and they are fighting with each other in the back seat? Just as Velleman’s opponents focus too much on the circumstances in which love for another allows or even calls for active participation in the other’s life, Velleman concentrates too narrowly on cases at the other end of the spectrum, when circumstances allow one to simply stop and contemplate one’s beloved. Moreover, and even despite warning against it, Velleman, like his adversaries, seems to be thinking only of love of people one also enjoys or admires, leaving aside the challenge of accommodating those relationships which, even though they are loving, are also temporarily or permanently annoying, frustrating, and difficult.

It is not surprising that when one takes seriously the search for a feature or features all loving relationships share—keeping in mind the variety that ranges not only from sweethearts to siblings but also from soul mates to meddlesome aunts—one will not find much. Indeed, I find only one such feature, that may seem almost too obvious to mention. Specifically, loving someone always involves caring about the person for his or her own sake. That is, when one loves someone, one wants his good. One wants him to flourish, if flourishing is an option. Moreover, one wants this at least in part unselfishly, that is, for the beloved’s own sake, and independently of whether his flourishing or his continued existence contributes to one’s own. 7

This is not to say that love is necessarily or even typically disinterested—though love always involves caring about the other for her own sake, it frequently also includes a desire for a (certain kind of) relationship with the beloved, and if that relationship is denied—a lover is spurned, a friend is betrayed—the love might not unreasonably be withdrawn. Nor do I mean to offer this feature as a complete definition of love. Though it seems to me love always involves caring about the loved one for her own sake, one might care about someone for her own sake in a way that we would not want to identify with love. Certainly, a general attitude of good will to all men, or to all people, or to all of sentient creation, falls short of what I mean by love. Such an attitude may be too casual or too slight to really count as a form of caring at all. But even a robust and disinterested concern for humanity may be motivated by duty or some other sense of what is called for that seems intuitively different from love. When you love someone, your attachment is not only deep; it is personal in a way that other forms of caring about something or someone for its own sake are not. Who and what I love says something about me that distinguishes me from other people. In loving someone or something, I declare a commitment to it that is different from the commitment I have and expect others to have of impersonal values.

Most of us, of course, love only a (relatively) few people, and in loving them rather than others we reflect and reveal something about who we particularly are. Indeed, it is sometimes said that who and what we love defines us; our loves are closely bound up with and partly constitutive of our identities. It seems to me that something of this personal character exists even in the case of love that is less selective: a person who genuinely loves all of humanity, for example, has an attachment and concern for others that is different from that of even the most conscientiously benevolent people who are motivated by moral principle.

There may be no more to be said, at so general a level, about the wide range of relationships that we call love than that love involves caring, deeply and personally, about the objects of love for their own sakes. Obvious and abstract as this generalization is, though, it can explain why the two more striking proposals that we considered and rejected were at least plausible candidates for a characterization of love.

Though loving someone need not in general involve a desire actively to benefit her, the disposition to benefit, to comfort, to help the loved one if she needs it follows directly from the fact that you care about her good. If one’s grown children neither want nor need one’s help—they are doing perfectly well on their own, thank you very much—a good parent’s love may rightly express itself simply in her rejoicing in her children’s well-being and accomplishment and nothing more. Similarly, there may be nothing to do or to want to do in relation to a beloved but far away friend whose life is full and going well without your assistance. But if one’s loved one is in trouble and one is in a position to help, one will necessarily be moved to relieve her distress. Thus, even if Velleman is right that love as such is not to be identified with a set of aims, the disposition to acquire such aims under appropriate conditions is inseparable from the attitude of deep caring that is fundamental to love.

Velleman’s own proposal to understand love as “an arresting awareness of [a person’s] value” seems to me similarly connected to the attitude of deep caring. It is commonly recognized that caring for someone for her own sake means that her good is directly a good for you; her pleasures, as it were, are your pleasures; her pains are your pains. But caring involves something more than this, that the characterization just given does not make explicit—namely, that one embraces the emotional vulnerability that this characterization describes. One can imagine one’s pleasure or pain being tied to that of another unwillingly, like an unwanted addiction. One might see one’s emotional attachment to another person as a sickness or a curse. But such an attitude would be in tension with caring about the other for her own sake; it would be incompatible with wholehearted love. If one genuinely cares about the other person, in other words, one not only feels pleasure at her well-being, it seems right to one that one should do so: one takes her existence and her flourishing to be good in itself. That is, one values the beloved; one regards her life (or her memory, if she is dead) as worth preserving and protecting. We may express this by saying that when one loves someone, one values the beloved as an end in herself. That is, her existence and her good are a part of one’s system of ends, which one takes to provide reasons as well as motives for action independently of their effect on one’s own happiness. 8 And this has implications. Specifically, even though valuing someone does not necessarily involve focusing on her status as valuable—and so it does not require that one actually have “an arrested awareness of the beloved’s value,” it does seem to imply that one is prepared to see her as valuable if circumstances call for one to focus on her in that way.

This explains how one can genuinely love one’s children even as they are whining in the backseat, how it can be true that one loves one’s meddlesome aunt even if one anticipates her upcoming visit with less than wholehearted enthusiasm. Even during periods when you do not like the people you love very much, you continue to value them. And though your valuing them may remain in the background for much of the time, when circumstances call for you to focus on your loved ones in a certain way, you stand ready to see and appreciate their value.

Loving, then, is, fundamentally, caring, deeply and personally, for a person for her own sake. It is this attitude toward the beloved that underlies both the desires to benefit and be with her and the admiring and appreciative images of her that the other philosophers I have mentioned have been tempted to identify with love. Love is, if you will, an orientation in the world , that shapes our responses to the shifting circumstances in which we and our loved ones find ourselves. In some situations, it makes us think about people in a certain way; in others, it inspires us to action. Is it this feature of love that makes love so distinctively and exceptionally valuable?

5. The Distinctive Importance of Love

I suspect that it is, and I suspect further that the reason it is, to put it as succinctly as possible, is that caring deeply and personally for another person or persons for their own sakes roots us, motivationally, to the world. Let me explain.

Part of what I mean in saying that love roots us motivationally to the world is simply that love gives us reasons to live. That is, it gives us reasons to get up in the morning, to go to work, to feed ourselves, to face another day. Often these reasons include the fact that by living we can help the people we love, we can contribute to their welfare—we can raise our children, care for our parents, or just “be there” for our spouses and friends. In addition, we have reason to want simply to share the world with our loved ones 9 —to spend time with them in joint activity and conversation, and sometimes just to observe as their lives go along on their own tracks.

In this respect, love contrasts with other kinds of valuing. Thus, as I mentioned before, it seems to me that there are ways in which one may care, even care quite a lot, about others for their own sake, which most of us would not classify as cases of love. While I was working on the first draft of this essay, a catastrophic earthquake in Haiti occurred, and thousands of people responded immediately and energetically with offers of help and donations of money, of food, and of physical assistance. As with previous natural as well as some unnatural disasters, it tempered the sorrow and the horror of the tragic events to see the gratifying display of people caring, and acting to express their care for their fellow human beings for their own sakes. But such care, though genuine, does not amount to love, at least for most of us, and this is reflected in the fact that (again, for most of us) the chance to help those who desperately need it around the world, to be ready when the next earthquake or tsunami or hurricane hits, does not provide us with a reason to get up in the morning. Our commitments to justice, to honesty, to morality more generally, occupy similar places in our motivational systems. As inhabitants of the earth and members of the human community, most of us are committed to doing our share to respect if not to improve the world of which we are a part. But that commitment does not give us reasons to be in the world. They only come into play because we are here—and motivated to continue to be here—anyway. 10 Arguably, the fact that love is different from duty or other kinds of disinterested valuing in this respect may constitute an objection to the Stoic view of the good life I mentioned earlier in this essay, according to which the best life is a life of virtue. Even if one agrees that a virtuous life is unilaterally better than a less virtuous one, if it does not provide you with a reason to live, how good can it be? If the theory is meant to capture the ingredients of a fully successful life, of a life well lived, then something seems missing from it—and love will fill the bill.

6. Two Objections Considered

But is love the only thing that will fill the bill? It would have to be if, as I am suggesting, the fact that love “roots us motivationally to the world” is what makes love special. Two objections to this claim spring to mind, however, almost as soon as I express this suggestion.

The first is that my presentation of love’s motivational power seems to presume that, were it not for loved ones in our lives, the day-to-day business of living would be for us nothing but a series of arduous chores. It is sad but true that many people are in precisely that situation: they have mind-numbing or back-breaking jobs; they battle daily with physical pain and discomfort; and they have little or no prospect of their circumstances improving. For a significant portion of such people, it may be the love of their friends and family that keeps them going and that makes their lives worthwhile. But many of us—most of those reading this essay, I expect—are luckier than that. We have plenty of reasons to get up in the morning that have nothing to do with our loved ones. We do not need a reason to drag ourselves to work, because we love our work. Or because we love the courses we are taking, the books we are reading, the research we are doing. Or, we may love other things in our lives—our daily walks, our cello practice, the tennis matches we play, the lectures and performances we attend.

Understood one way, this is an objection I am happy to accept. It brings out a need to modify my proposal, but in a way that preserves its intended spirit. If what is meant by the idea that one loves one’s work or one’s hobby or the woods outside one’s house is that these activities or their associated objects are, for one, ends in themselves, whose existence and flourishing one cares about for their own sake, then granting this objection does not show that love is not special in rooting us motivationally to the world. Rather, it shows that love need not be restricted to love of other people. We may love philosophy, or music, or the Great Smoky Mountains as well. In these cases, too, when we love, we care deeply and personally about something for its own sake.

It is true that ordinarily when we say or approve of the thought that love makes the world go round, it is interpersonal love that we have in mind, and empirically it is likely that this is the most common and the deepest type of love people tend to have. But I see no harm in admitting the possibility of extending the range of loves to other possible objects.

There is another way of understanding this objection, however, for a different, and perhaps even more common, way to understand someone who says that he loves his work (or philosophy or the mountains) is that he very much enjoys it and that, because of this, going to work (or reading philosophy or hiking) is a pleasure and a good for him . This is related to the second objection to my proposal—namely, why is self -love not enough to root us motivationally to the world? Having good friends and family is great, one might say, and most of us would be much less happy than we are if we did not have them, but that does not mean that in their absence we would be suicidal. People have strong survival instincts, indeed strong drives not just for bare survival but for success in whatever form they happen to conceive it. Do these drives not provide them with reason enough to get up and face another day? Do these not suffice to root most of us motivationally to the world?

Now, one might think that I could respond to this objection in the same way I responded to the first—by suggesting that these challenges only serve to show that the kind of love we are interested in should be extended yet again, not just to include love of activities and objects other than people but also to include love of self. To concede this, however, would violate the spirit of the familiar saying to such an extent as to deprive it of its point. To someone who includes self-love in the love that she understands as making the world go around, at least if self-love is understood to be roughly equivalent to a healthy self-interest, it would be appropriate to ask, “As opposed to what?” To put it another way, the familiar adage that love makes the world go round is most sensibly understood as making a claim about love that is meant to set love’s power apart from the pervasive force of self-interest. At any rate, that is the sense of the adage that I have been concerned to defend.

My proposal then is that love—meaning love of others—roots us motivationally to the world in a way that self-interest fails to do. But, as the objection we are considering rightly notes, love is not the only thing that motivates people to get up in the morning or that gives them a reason to live. Most people also want to live for their own sakes, and for the sake of satisfying their self-interested desires.

Responding to this objection gives me an opportunity to explain further what I mean in saying that love (love of others, that is) roots us motivationally to the world. In making this claim, rather than the simpler and more straightforward claim that love has the power to motivate period , I mean to indicate something nontrivial about different possible attitudes to the world. Specifically, it seems to me that when one loves someone (or something) other than oneself, one has a reason to care about the world that is different in kind from the reasons one has if one cares only about oneself. For the world—the real world, I want to say, for emphasis, and to contrast it with a fantasy world—is the place, the only possible place, in which you and your loved one can meet—it is the plane of existence you share with the object of your love, and it is the only place where your loved one can flourish. So if you love someone you have a stake in the world, in being in and in appropriate touch with the world; you have a reason therefore to care, not only about the ones you love but about the world in which they and you both live.

Now, a critic might object that you would have reason to care about the world even if you care only about yourself. For you live in the world, too—where else would you live? And you had better pay attention to it if you want to go on living. No matter what reason you have to get out of bed in the morning that bed is in the world (the real world, as I put it) and if you are not in proper touch with it, you might fall getting out of it and break your neck. You had better see the real world train that is rushing at you so that you know to jump out of the way; you had better find some real world food with which to nourish yourself; and so on. The interest one must have in the world in these latter examples, however, is purely instrumental. If someone else took care of your safety and sustenance for you, it would be just as well.

7. The Experience Machine

The point I am trying to make can be reinforced by reflecting on a thought experiment, introduced to the philosophical world by Robert Nozick in 1974. 11 Nozick asked us to imagine “an experience machine”—a science fictional contraption one can hook oneself up to that would induce in us all the thoughts and feelings that conform to whatever life we think would be the best possible for us. If one wanted to be a movie star, an Olympic athlete, a Nobel Prize winner, the experience machine would give you the experience of being one. If you wanted to climb Mount Everest, bask on the beach, or sip a fine aged Burgundy wine, the machine would give you the sensations that the best version of these activities would involve. The point of the imaginative exercise comes in asking oneself whether, if one had such a machine available and had perfect confidence in its not breaking down, one would choose to hook oneself up to it and live happily, albeit, delusionally, ever after.

Not everyone answers the question the same way. Some people react by saying “Where do I sign up?” Others are appalled at the idea. To me the answer all depends (or at least, depends most cogently) on love.

From a purely egoistic perspective, the experience machine has evident attractions. At least, it would assure you more net happiness and less net suffering than you are likely to achieve if you live life “the hard way.” But if there are loved ones in your life, that is apt to give you a decisive reason not to plug yourself in. For the experience machine would deprive you of your loved ones—you would never be able to see them or talk to them, to comfort or be comforted by them, again. You could have simulated experiences of love, but they would involve figments of your or of the machine’s imagination. Your actual spouse or parent or child or best friend would be forever lost to you.

The reasons love gives you not to plug into the experience machine are reflective of a kind of attachment to the world that one has, and that one has reason to have if one loves someone else, and that, I suggest, one does not have if there is nothing and no one outside of yourself whom you love. This is what I mean when I suggest that love (of another) gives you a stake in the world, and roots you, motivationally to it.

The point, which is reinforced by contemplation of the experience machine, is that although love and self-interest may both motivate you to get up in the morning, and provide you with reasons to live, they give you different reasons, with implications that go well beyond the self-evident ones that self-interest moves you to pursue your own good while love moves you to pursue the good of the beloved. In saying that love gives you a stake in the world, I mean to point out that if you love, you have a reason to be interested in the world, a reason why what happens in the world matters to you. Thus, whereas self-interest gives you reasons that move you to get up in the morning so as to experience the world, love gives you reasons that move you to connect to the world and to act on and within it. Perhaps this is part of what people mean to express by the idea that love makes the world go round—love, and not virtue, love and not the pursuit of individual happiness. Moreover, if this is what they mean by the adage, they would be right.

1. J. David Velleman , “Love as a Moral Emotion,” Ethics 109 (January 1999), 338–374 .

2. Henry Sidgwick , The Methods of Ethics (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1981), 244 .

3. Laurence Thomas , “Reasons for Loving,” in The Philosophy of (Erotic) Love , ed. Robert C. Solomon and Kathleen M. Higgins (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1991), 470 .

4. William Lyons , Emotion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 64 .

5. John Rawls , A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 190 . See also 487.

Velleman, “Love as a Moral Emotion,” 353.

7. In this respect and many others, my view is like Harry Frankfurt’s. See Frankfurt , The Reasons of Love (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 42 .

See again Frankfurt, The Reasons of Love , 42.

As the Elton John song says, “How wonderful life is with you in the world.”

10. Bernard Williams introduces the concept of a categorical desire to refer to desires that are not conditional on one’s being alive and which can serve to give one reason to stay alive (in his terms, they “propel one forward” in life) in Williams , Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 11 . In these terms, my point may be put by saying that love is distinctive in essentially involving or giving rise to categorical desires.

11. Robert Nozick , Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974), 42–45 .

Frankfurt, Harry.   The Reasons of Love . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004 .

Google Scholar

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Lyons, William.   Emotion . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980 .

Nozick, Robert.   Anarchy, State, and Utopia . New York: Basic Books, 1974 .

Rawls, John.   A Theory of Justice . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971 .

Sidgwick, Henry.   The Methods of Ethics . Indianapolis: Hackett, 1981 .

Thomas, Laurence. “Reasons for Loving.” In The Philosophy of (Erotic) Love , edited by Robert C. Solomon and Kathleen M. Higgins , 467–476. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1991 .

Velleman, J. David. “ Love as a Moral Emotion. ” Ethics 109 (January 1999): 338–374.

Williams, Bernard.   Moral Luck . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981 .

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The Ethics of Love

• Published: 05 November 2021
• Volume 25 , pages 423–427, ( 2021 )

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Editor’s Introduction

What duties do we owe to people we love, people who love us, and people we have fallen out of love with? Can we be morally blameworthy for our romantic and sexual preferences? While the philosophy of love has long been a focus of philosophical attention (for an overview see Helm 2021 ), these issues relating specifically to the ethics of love were, until recently, relatively neglected. While philosophers from the past such as Aristotle, Plato, Confucius, Montaigne, Kant, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche all discussed some ethical dimensions of love (see May 2011 ), this topic has only recently reemerged as a topic of sustained philosophical investigation.

In the recent literature, philosophers have begun to investigate several important issues that relate to the moral principles that ought to govern our romantic, friendship, sexual and other forms of relationship with others. This includes discussions about the ethics of sexual and romantic preferences. This debate has considered, among other topics, whether it is morally wrong to have sexual or romantic preferences for people from particular ethnic backgrounds (Zheng 2016 ) and whether it is unjust that some groups of people are desired less than others (O’Shea 2020 ; Srinivasan 2021 ). Philosophers have also begun to investigate whether we have a human right to be loved (Liao 2015 ) or to be free from social deprivation (Brownlee 2020 ) and whether we have duties to make friends with others (Collins 2013 ). Similarly, the recent literature has also involved discussions of a number of ethical issues that arise from romantic and sexual relationships such as consent (Dougherty 2013 ), infidelity (McKeever 2020 ), the use of love drugs (Earp and Savulescu 2020 ; Spreeuwenberg and Schaubroeck 2020 ), and ethical issues that arise at the end of relationships (Lopez-Cantero and Archer 2020 ). Relatedly, philosophers have also explored the ethical status of relationships that go against conventional heterosexual norms such as homosexuality (MacLachlan 2012 ), polyamory (Brunning 2018 ), and asexuality (Brunning and McKeever 2021 ). While far from a comprehensive overview, this hopefully provides a general idea of the kinds of ethical issues relating to love, sex and relationships that have been the focus of philosophical attention in recent years.

This special issue arises from a workshop on the Philosophy of Love that was held at Tilburg University on the 13th and 14th of February 2020. I would like to thank all the speakers, commentators, and attendees of this workshop. Special thanks to my fellow organizers Wim Dubbink, Martine Prange and Roos Slegers. Special thanks too to Wietske Petrisor who did an excellent job as the student assistant for the workshop and to the production team at Springer, particularly Kavitha Gunasekaran, Saritha Hemanth and Subaysala Ravichandran. Little did we realize as we enjoyed two days of fascinating talks that this would be the last in-person philosophy event that many of us would attend for quite some time. I am glad that the last in-person workshop I attended before a COVID-enforced 18-month break was such an interesting, enjoyable, and memorable one.

While the topic of the workshop was on the philosophy of love more generally, several papers focused specifically on the ethics of love. From these papers, several were invited to submit to this special issue of the Journal of Ethics and six of these made it through the peer-review process. These papers form the bulk of this special issue and include the contributions from Morgan Gagnon, Anca Gheaus, Laura Candiotto and Hanne De Jaegher, Roos Slegers and Alfred Archer. These papers were subject to the journal’s standard peer review process, with Alfred Archer serving as the acting associate editor for the papers from Gagnon, Gheaus, and Candiotto and Jaegher. To ensure an impartial review process, the papers from Slegers and Archer were handled by a different associate editor for the journal who was unknown to them.

The contributions from Paddy McQueen and Kamila Pacovská were submitted to the journal independently of this workshop. In McQueen’s case, the paper was handled as a normal submission and only after the paper was accepted did I offer McQueen the chance to include his paper in this issue. In Pacovská’s case the paper was handled as a submission for the special issue from the start and went through the standard review process for special issue submissions.

The first two papers in this issue examine ethical issues related to love and sex. Morgan Gagnon’s ‘The Ethical Potential of Love in the Wake of Sexual Violence’ investigates how people ought to respond to sexual violence committed within their communities or by their loved ones. In such cases, love may make it more difficult to respond appropriately to these offenders. However, these same loving relationships can also play an important role in helping to encourage atonement and moral development from the wrongdoers and wider changes in the community that helped facilitate this harm. This, argues Gagnon, has important consequences for how we should respond to sexual violence.

Paddy McQueen’s ‘Sexual Interactions and Sexual Infidelity’ continues the exploration of the ethics of love and sex by developing an account of the nature of sexual interaction and then using this account to defend a view of the nature of sexual infidelity. According to McQueen, a sexual interaction is an interaction in which two or more people engage in sexual activity together with the aim of satisfying a sexual desire in a mutually supportive way. This account has the implication that a wide range of actions can constitute sexual infidelity, including, perhaps surprisingly, the private use of pornography.

The next two papers investigate the connection between love and reactive attitudes like remorse and resentment. Kamila Pacovská’s ‘Remorse and Self-love: Kostelnička’s Change of Heart’ draws on Janáček’s opera Jenůfa to argue that self-hatred is not an appropriate response to one’s own wrongdoing. Self-hatred, Pacovská argues, is a response that stems from a vicious form of pride and self-love which prevents people from acknowledging their own moral shortcomings. This self-hatred is in part caused by the view many of us have of ourselves as morally virtuous people which is threatened when we act immorally. Instead of self-hatred, Pacovská argues that true remorse focuses on the victim rather than the wrongdoer and involves taking a humbler attitude to one’s own moral qualities.

Anca Gheaus’ ‘Unrequited Love, Self-victimisation and the Target of Appropriate Resentment’ examines whether we are justified in feeling resentment when we love someone who does not love us back. According to Carlsson ( 2018 ), we are justified in feeling resentment in such cases. Even though we are not wronged here, we are harmed by the fact that the person we love does not love us in return. In response to this line of thought, Gheaus argues that those who do not return our love do not harm us but rather fail to benefit us. This failure to benefit is insufficient to warrant resentment, so we should not resent those we love unrequitedly.

The next two papers investigate the ethics of love from feminist perspectives. In ‘Love In-Between’ Laura Candiotto and Hanne De Jaegher develop an enactive account of loving which is inspired by Irigaray’s ( 1996 ) account of love. According to Candiotto and De Jaegher, loving involves participatory sense-making. This means that love involves two people trying to make sense both of each other and the relationship they have with each other. Candiotto and De Jaegher then explore the ethical implications of viewing love in this way, arguing that love should involve a willingness to accept the ways in which the person we love is different from us. Acknowledging difference is seen as the first step for engaging in dialectical processes of transformation. We should also open ourselves up to being changed by those we love and allowing ourselves to be vulnerable with them, so that we can better know ourselves and each other. This implies a fundamental transformation in how lovers speak to each other.

Roos Slegers’ ‘The Ethics and Economics of Middle Class Romance: Wollstonecraft and Smith on Love in Commercial Society’ examines the similarity between Adam Smith and Mary Wollstonecraft’s philosophies of love. Both philosophers were concerned that commercial societies leave little room for romantic love. According to both Smith and Wollstonecraft, the growth of commerce and the development of the middle class encourages vanity. Men are encouraged to be vain about their wealth power and statues and women are encouraged to be vain about their appearance. This vanity gets in the way of developing human connections with others and so acts an impediment to romantic love. The rather depressing result is that it will be very difficult, according to Smith and Wollstonecraft to develop genuine loving relationships in commercial societies.

The final paper in this volume examines the ethics of fandom. How should fans of celebrities or sports clubs respond when the object of their fandom has behaved immorally? Fandom, Archer argues, shares many features with romantic love such as an appreciation of the particular qualities of the loved one or object of fandom, participation in attachment developing practices and changes to how the fan or lover perceive their beloved. Based on this, Archer argues that fandom can be morally dangerous, as it can encourage fans to provide support for immoral behavior, to adopt an immoral point of view and to engage in acts of retaliation against those who uncover the immorality of the fan’s idol. This provides some reason for fans to abandon their fandom. However, it does not necessarily mean that fans have a duty to do so. Fans may instead choose to adopt a critical stance to their idol rather than abandoning their fandom altogether. However, fans have good reason to be cautious about their ability to take a truly critical stance towards their idols.

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Archer, A. The Ethics of Love. J Ethics 25 , 423–427 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-021-09387-x

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Couple in the kitchen, USA, 1952. From the series ‘Love Story’. Photo by Dennis Stock/Magnum

Love is a joint project

For simone de beauvoir, authentic love is an ethical undertaking: it can be spoilt by devotion as much as by selfishness.

by Kate Kirkpatrick   + BIO

The desires to love and be loved are, on Simone de Beauvoir’s view, part of the structure of human existence. Often, they go awry. But even so, she claimed, authentic love is not only possible but one of the most powerful tools available to individuals who want to be free. So what, exactly, is this authentic love?

In The Second Sex (1949), Beauvoir argued that culture led men and women to have asymmetrical expectations, with the result that ‘love’ frequently felt like a battlefield of conflicting desires or a graveyard for their disappointments. Surely, she argued, the situation could be improved – and everyone is ‘judge and party’ in the question of how to love well. Beauvoir’s account of ‘authentic love’ in this book was the product of more than 20 years of philosophical reflection. As a young philosophy student in Paris, she had already recognised that some conceptions of ‘love’ legitimated injustice and perpetuated suffering. As a teenager, she began a project of revaluating love, in both theory and practice, that would last most of her life. Caricatures of her beliefs put all the emphasis on the existential theme of freedom, on whom you love and how, but there was far more to authentic love for Beauvoir than unhindered individual choice. For the later Beauvoir, in order for love to be authentic, it must be reciprocal and non-exploitative. But it was difficult to achieve this, because society perpetuated myths of love that idealised unethical relations between the sexes.

Beauvoir’s ethics were shaped by a tradition according to which whom and what we love plays a pivotal role in whom we become. For the Augustine-infused Catholicism of her childhood, one of the key ‘rules of life’ was to ‘love your neighbour as yourself’. Her philosophical education kept returning to it: the ‘love command’ of the Hebrew Bible, reiterated in the New Testament by Jesus Christ and St Paul, features in many classic works of normative ethics; both Immanuel Kant and John Stuart Mill, for example, claimed to offer answers to the difficult question: how can I love another as myself? Søren Kierkegaard’s Works of Love (1847) – though less frequently considered a core text of moral philosophy – analysed the command word by word, in the hope that obeying it could overcome a deep human dread: ‘the dread of being alone in the world’.

But despite the efforts of these and many other philosophers, ‘love’ remains a notoriously ambiguous concept, and what it means in practice is often obscured by a cloudy cocktail of need, pain and desire. Beauvoir thought its ambiguity led to exploitation: in theory, the imperative to love applied universally to all souls, whether sanctioned by duty, utility or divine command. In practice, it was abused to legitimate forms of hierarchy that were anathema to love itself (as she saw it).

In Beauvoir’s student notebooks from 1926, ethical interpersonal love is described in contrast to two forms of failed love. She calls these vices narcissism (or selfishness, or self-interest, in some English translations) and devotion . In their earliest formulations, she defined narcissism as ‘loving oneself and loving in the other, the love he has for you’. The failure of narcissism is that it forgets that there are two in love: the narcissist fails to remember that love must seek the good of the other. Her lover is a minor character in the great plot of her story. Devotion, by contrast, is an ‘absolute gift’ of the lover to the beloved, a ‘self-abnegation’ where the lover’s own consciousness is obliterated for the sake of the other. The devoted lover wants no plot but the one his beloved writes him; he either doesn’t want, or can’t hold, his own pen. In forgetting himself, his love likewise fails to accommodate two – in the young Beauvoir’s words, it’s a form of ‘moral suicide’.

Ethical love, by contrast, consists in what Beauvoir calls ‘equilibrium’ and ‘reciprocity’. In equilibrium there is self-giving without self-loss: lover and beloved ‘simply walk side by side, mutually helping each other a little’. Because people don’t always feel equal to each other – or worthy of love at all – Beauvoir discusses the dynamics that threaten this equilibrium: dynamics in which one person sees him or herself as inferior or superior. The ‘most fruitful’ type of love, Beauvoir claimed, was ‘not a subordination’, but rather a relationship in which each person supported the other in seeking an independent, individual life.

B y 1926, Beauvoir, aged 18, had established the framework of reciprocal love that was so celebrated in The Second Sex . But it was a further 18 years later that she published her first essay on ethics, Pyrrhus and Cinéas (1944). In this essay, she sets out the ethical theory that Sartrean existentialism lacked. She discusses ‘the love command’ of the New Testament, pointing out that, when the disciples asked Jesus Christ: ‘Who is my neighbour?’, he didn’t respond by giving them an abstract enumeration of an ethics. Instead, he told them a story, the parable of the Good Samaritan, who made a neighbour of the man abandoned on the roadside by covering him with his coat. On Beauvoir’s view: ‘One is not the neighbour of anyone. One makes the other a neighbour by treating him as a neighbour in action.’ Love, then, on her view, requires action – but what action it requires depends on the particularities of the person and the situation.

Beauvoir belonged to a generation of French philosophers who were wrestling with questions about the ‘death of God’ and the meaning of life: her student diaries attest to the fact that these questions affected her deeply. In Pyrrhus and Cinéas , she articulated an answer to the problem of how human life could have value, and how ethics could have a foundation, without a God to provide them. Her proposal was that, in the absence of a divine law-giver, our actions should be oriented to the human others because, even without an infinite being, our actions can take on an infinite dimension by being witnessed – by being seen by others, and by laying the foundations of other people’s projects.

There is a developmental element to her account, according to which the healthy transition from childhood to maturity is a process that involves both enchantment and bereavement: enchantment because small children, when loved by their parents, can be shielded from questioning the value of their lives or the arbitrariness of the rules that govern them; bereavement because these values and rules were reassuring and have now been lost. When a child finishes a drawing, she writes, he is eager to show it to his parents – his accomplishment gains reality by being seen by them. And tempting though it might be to think that we can outgrow this desire to be loved and valued by others, on Beauvoir’s view, we can’t. Although solitude can be enjoyable, Beauvoir wrote, no one is satisfied with it for an entire life: human beings need to be affirmed by a particular kind of gaze of love and recognition.

‘To will oneself free is also to will others free’

In maturity, this need is often unmet or misdirected. She outlines two wayward patterns it can follow: ‘devotion’ and ‘self-interest’. Developing ideas from her student notebooks and anticipating claims that she would make in The Second Sex , in Pyrrhus and Cinéas she claims that devotion has been the wish of ‘many men, and even more women’. On Beauvoir’s view, each human being wants to feel that his existence is justified – not just in the abstract sense that all human lives have value, but in the particular sense that my life is valued by others. The allure of devotion is that it promises rest from this exigency: the devoted person believes his or her life is justified because it is valued by, and meets the needs of, someone else. Devotion does not escape the problems of Christ’s neighbour; it still raises the question: ‘To whom shall I devote myself?’ But problematically, the devoted person takes the end of the other as a means to their own end – and wants it ‘without him and against him’. Devotion can be tyrannical – it claims to want the good of the other but in fact it imposes a value on the other that might not be of his or her choosing. The ‘ethics of self-interest’, by contrast, assumes that only I could meet the other person’s need for justification: it makes the other a satellite, whose value is contingent upon being in my orbit.

What is truly needed, on Beauvoir’s view, is that the other be respected as ‘a freedom’: as a person who is perpetually becoming, with projects for her life that must be of her choosing. Whether the love in question is one of friendship, family or erotic, to be ethical there must be two freedoms, both of which respect the value of freedom in each other – such that neither of them suffers the mutilation of subordination. It was inconsistent, she argued, to value one’s own freedom without valuing the freedoms of others: as she put it in The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947): ‘To will oneself free is also to will others free.’

Beauvoir’s particularism resists being made into a general account of what this means in practice. But over the 1940s, she outlined several common patterns of bad faith that she thought obstructed virtuous, reciprocal love, and in her later works she became more explicitly feminist and political in her treatment of them. In her essay ‘Existentialism and Popular Wisdom’ (1945), Beauvoir describes ‘bad faith’ as a kind of hiding behind an alibi ­– a false alibi. For example, those who claimed that self-interest was ‘human’, or that ‘human nature will never change’, on her view, could ‘renounce any expectations of generosity or greatness from man’. They could laugh at the kind of reciprocal love she described as an ‘illusion of youth’ or ‘guilty folly’, rather than see it as something that was both possible and difficult.

In 1945 Beauvoir claimed that women, in particular, were encouraged not to expect great things of men. She wrote that contemporary young women’s newspapers warned them that ‘all men are pitiful beings, that their husbands will be no exception, and that they must indulge his weaknesses …, humour his pride’. ‘Feminine wisdom’ prepared women for romance and marriage by telling them to expect tyranny in the name of love, and to cope by manipulating it with guile. The good woman should accept her man ‘in his irremediable misery while feigning to respect an illusory freedom in him’. Women were also encouraged to find this situation funny: to hold their heads high and laugh at mediocrity rather than show that they were disappointed by it. She couldn’t help but wonder: were they so ‘quick to laugh at such a portrait for fear of being compelled to cry’?

F our years later, Beauvoir’s The Second Sex was published, a milestone in feminist philosophy. One of its central claims, as I read it, was that freedom was something that needs to be fought for at multiple levels – collectively at the level of legislation and culture, and individually within women and men, in the process of each particular life. She agreed with G W F Hegel, that ‘man in his very nature is destined to be free’ – but she also believed that woman was too.

Collectively, legislation for suffrage, labour and property rights clearly changed the concrete possibilities that were available to women in important ways. But individually, each woman had to become an ethical self, who valued freedom for herself and others, for herself . And this was a struggle, Beauvoir claimed, not merely in the sense that becoming an ethical self is difficult for any human being, but because the legacy of women’s subordination lived on in conventions of ‘culture’ in ways that made it tempting to participate in its perpetuation. Cultural myths of romantic and sexual ‘love’ glorified the subordination of women and celebrated distorted desires in ways that were trickier to leave behind than, say, unequal access to the ballot.

Beauvoir wrote The Second Sex in part because she believed that both men and women underestimated the extent of the difficulty that women faced on this front:

It is difficult for men to measure the enormous extent of social discrimination that seems insignificant from the outside and whose moral and intellectual repercussions are so deep in woman that they appear to spring from an original nature.

Building upon the developmental account that she offered in Pyrrhus and Cinéas , Beauvoir claimed that, before men and women became men and women, they were boys and girls who were presented with very different visions of their value and the possibilities their futures could hold. In 1949, the rules of some childhoods were much more reassuring than others. Boys, generally speaking, were encouraged to have projects for their lives – to see love as part of life, not all of it, and to believe that success was possible in more than one part at once. Girls, by contrast, were encouraged to see love as life itself – and to believe that to succeed at other things might make them less loveable.

‘They seek a glowing image of admiration and gratitude, deified in the depths of a woman’s two eyes’

Girls were encouraged to be accomplished and educated – but not too accomplished, not too educated. Most girls could not escape the recognition that, however accomplished or educated a girl became, she would be ‘judged, respected, or desired in relation to how she looks’. In puberty, many were alienated from their own bodies by the experience of being treated as sexual ‘prey’, as recipients of utterly unwanted desire. They knew they were not objects to be consumed – but they were not encouraged to react as conscious beings who could look back at their hunters and question the morality of their gaze. These are tropes and trends, not universal truths, so of course they admit exceptions. But they were widespread enough in 1949, Beauvoir thought, that certain patterns of bad faith were more tempting for men, and others more tempting for women.

In the first volume of The Second Sex , Beauvoir came to the conclusion that, for men, the worst alibi was the claim that it was just in their nature to dominate women – and that it was in women’s nature to submit. She wrote that:

The average Western male’s ideal is a woman who freely submits to his domination, who does not accept his ideas without some discussion, but who yields to his reasoning, who intelligently resists but yields in the end.

Instead of ‘a truthful revelation’ from another, Beauvoir wrote, ‘they seek a glowing image of admiration and gratitude, deified in the depths of a woman’s two eyes’. It was understandable that they wanted their mediocrity to be met with blithe laughter and feigned respect: but why did women hide their disappointment?

Beauvoir believed that culture shaped imagination, and imagination shapes life by enabling us to conceive of new possibilities to pursue in action. She dedicated a large section of the first volume of The Second Sex to representations of love in the influential literature that shaped her own imagination. She scrutinised the ways that women’s loves were depicted, noting how frequently they were vilified or idolised by men for the limitations they imposed on, or the salvation they delivered to, men. It was no wonder that men and women were confused: what she found was a ‘multiplicity of incompatible myths’. But myths always serve a purpose and, on Beauvoir’s view, beneath the multiplicity of myths, the purpose served was to show women that their true calling was ‘self-forgetting and love’.

I n the second volume of The Second Sex , Beauvoir analysed what it was like to become a woman in the context of these contradictory myths, under the constraints of choice they imposed. She returned to inauthentic and authentic love, arguing that women were disproportionately encouraged to see love, not freedom, as their destiny – as the defining value of their lives. Whether in marriage, motherhood or religious life, love was presented to women as their ‘vocation’, their ‘supreme accomplishment’, as a ‘total abdication for the benefit of a master’. Since many women were taught that their value was conditional upon being loved by men, girls were encouraged to conceive of themselves ‘as seen through the man’s eyes’, to fulfil men’s fantasies and help them pursue their projects rather than dream dreams or pursue projects of their own.

Here, Beauvoir offers a portrait of ‘the woman in love’ as an exemplar of ‘devotion’. The woman in love attempts to see herself through her beloved’s eyes, to shape her world around his desires, to read what he reads, listen to what he listens to, and to take an interest in his ideas, art, politics and friends. In sexual life, she is treated as a means to his pleasure, not as a sexual subject with desires of her own. The woman in love delights in saying ‘we’ because she likes the security of identifying with her beloved; what she wants is to serve him, to feel useful; she never asks for reciprocity because of the risks that being ‘demanding’ might entail. But, as Beauvoir says, ‘this glorious felicity is seldom stable’. Eventually, she will realise that she has mistaken the desire for love for love itself.

‘Is it not possible to conceive a new kind of love in which both partners are equals?’

Many women have recognised themselves in Beauvoir’s portrait of ‘the woman in love’ – some have even accused her of writing self-portraiture. But whatever its accuracy as autobiography, her philosophical point was that it is hard to learn to love ethically when there are so few examples of reciprocity between women and men. History and literature attest to myriad ways in which men have expected women to give themselves in ways they never expected to give back. And in ordinary women’s lives, Beauvoir thought, the expectation to give without reciprocity leads many to become ‘split subjects’, torn between the desire to affirm herself and the desire to efface herself – in the hope of being more lovable. In a 1950 essay, she asked: ‘Is it not possible to conceive a new kind of love in which both partners are equals – one not seeking submission to the other?’

Beauvoir claimed to have caught partial glimpses of reciprocal love in the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Leo Tolstoy and D H Lawrence, who recognised that ‘true and fruitful love’ included both the physical presence of the beloved and the beloved’s aims in life. But they, too, proposed this ideal to woman , since ‘love’ was her destiny. In ethical love, Beauvoir argued that women would still aspire to help their lovers pursue their projects – but the same ideal would be more widely shared by men:

The man, instead of seeking a kind of narcissistic exaltation in his mate, would discover in love a way of getting outside himself, of tackling problems other than his own. With all the twaddle that has been written about the splendour of such generosity, why not give the man his chance to participate in such devotion, in the self-negation that is considered the enviable lot of women?

Why not, indeed? If both partners conceived of love as a joint project, if both thought ‘simultaneously of the other and self’, Beauvoir argued, they could succeed at ‘finding the appropriate mean’ between narcissism and devotion. It will not deliver salvation. But neither does it settle for the mutilation of subordination in place of ‘an inter-human relation’ and the satisfaction of authentic love.

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Thinking about Love: Essays in Contemporary Continental Philosophy

Diane Enns and Antonio Calcagno (eds.), Thinking about Love: Essays in Contemporary Continental Philosophy,  Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015, 262pp., $84.95 (hbk), ISBN 9780271070964.

Reviewed by Helen A. Fielding, The University of Western Ontario

This collection addresses a lacuna in contemporary continental philosophy: thinking about love. As the editors explain, Western philosophers tend to avoid addressing love since it is associated more closely with the body and emotion, instead attending to what is deemed to be the business of philosophy, delimiting reason. The matter of love has been left to poets and musicians. But as they further point out, "love is not beyond thinking." Love both motivates and transforms us, and is thus part of the human condition (1). While a few philosophers in the Anglo-American philosophical tradition have explicitly addressed love, within the continental tradition, philosophical meditation on love has generally been linked to theology. This means there is a need for attention from continental philosophers on this theme since they raise different kinds of questions concerning love, questions about subjectivity, identity and the ways we relate to one another. As such, this collection provides a much-needed intervention on the intertwinings of thinking and love. To this end, the book is thematically organized: divided into five parts it addresses the limits of love, love's intersection with the divine, with politics and with phenomenological experience as well as the stories love allows us to tell.

In the first section, "Human Vulnerability and the Limits of Love," three philosophers explore what defines love as love, and their conclusions vary widely, provoking the question of whether it's even possible to find agreement about what constitutes love. Perhaps it is precisely the varied possibilities for defining love's limits -- possibilities that cannot be discovered through reason -- that make it so difficult to thematize and yet provide the other side to reason that makes it human. For Todd May, the limit of love is our mortality. That we will die is what guarantees its intensity. Exploring the ways in which love has been taken up in the analytic tradition, he concludes that the one common element is that romantic love entails an intensity of engagement (23). Because romantic love between two people "occurs not only for but also with the other," it requires that the relationship be between equals who also "consider each other to be equals" (24). In his reading of the film Ground Hog Day (1993), where one day is repeated over and over again, he further concludes that a relationship between equals not governed by the limit of death would lose its intensity, and similarly, watching our lover age reminds us of the limit of the time we will be together, of its ephemerality.

Diane Enns' lyrical essay, "Love's Limit", takes a completely different turn. Countering the liberal perspective that champions love between equal and sovereign selves who enjoy a love that endures and "is not supposed to fail" (33), she defends love between imperfect individuals, where there is jealously, obsessiveness, and abandonment of the self. It is love that is more often referred to as "masochism, repetition compulsion, fantasy, an unhealthy attachment" (34). In dialogue with Beauvoir she suggests we consider the limit of love from the "perspective of the loving self". This shift in focus from autonomy to vulnerability entails openness and risk: "For there is no love without abandoning one's position and 'crossing' over an abyss like an acrobat" (36-37). To love imperfectly is human, and "failed relationships do not necessitate failed love" (41). Thus to love is to open ourselves to the other's vulnerabilities and weaknesses, to open our selves to being transformed by love. Accordingly, the limit of love for Enns is when the lover's "capacity for love is harmed." For "lovers cannot endure all things." What must be preserved are the conditions of love that allow for a spacing and "movement of love between two" (43). It is the question of whether it's even possible to love in our contemporary world that John Caruana explores. Drawing on the work of Julia Kristeva, he explores the symbolic and semiotic aspects of love, arguing that contemporary phenomena of self-harm ranging from cutting to the ISIS terrorist "prepared to maim and kill innocents" point towards "an unparalleled crisis in subjectivity, an inability to love" (47). What are required are narratives and images to support psychic renewal, and the ability to believe again in the world, "a secular symbolic discourse that would promote flourishing subjects" (59).

The four essays in part two, "Love, Desire, and the Divine," focus on love as transcendence. In this section, we see consistency amongst the authors who all seem to conclude in some way that transcendence can be found in the particularity of love, in its erotic articulations rather than the universality of love as general and passionless. Christina M. Gschwandtner turns critically to the work of contemporary continental philosophers of religion who are inspired by theological affirmations of Christ's "kenotic" love, which she describes as one of devotion and self-sacrifice. It is the exclusivity of kenotic love that is problematic for Gschwandtner, in that applied to our everyday lives it can provide justification for the kind of self-sacrificing love often demanded of women, or that provides justifications for all kinds of abuse (75). Kenotic love does have place in philosophy, but only as a religious phenomenon rather than a "general phenomenological account of all loving relations". Mélanie Walton, drawing on Lyotard, privileges eros over caritas or charity. The problem with caritas , the Christian narrative of love, is that it ultimately produces a closed system, "a universal, circular, and conditional logic" with a "meaning that has been given in advance," and that "necessitates one's free commitment". As a universal love it does not recognize the particularities of love: "the subject marching under this banner does not actually have the freedom to choose and enact love toward another subject." (103) Erotic desire on the other hand, because it is unpredictable, provides for an open system from which change, and justice can be effected.

Felix Ó Murchadha also comes out on the side of erotic love, arguing against the duality of self that separates the responsible self from passion in the philosophical tradition. Ó Murchadha observes that though there is always the danger of losing oneself in love, ultimately we become fully ourselves only through being in love; thus privileging the autonomous thinking subject is to forget that the self emerges from "the between space of being in love" (96). While Ó Murchadha, focusing on the emergence of the self, concludes that "to be a person is to be in love," Antonio Calcagno turns his attention to the way that desire motivates the mind in its engagement with the world (90). Focusing critically on the work of Hannah Arendt, Calcagno argues her account of the life of the mind requires a "more robust understanding of desire." As he points out, the object of desire, which lies outside the self, is precisely that which moves us to "to desire to think, judge, and will" (114). Indeed, thinking, judging and willing as described by Arendt entail a "kind of passivity or receptivity," which opens the mind to that which is other than the self. The mind's activity is accordingly "solicited by desire" for that which lies beyond the self, and this desire needs to be taken into account in our theorizing about the life of the mind.

While the thematic arrangement of the essays does work, any such arrangement sets up particular conversations. The two essays on love and politics, for example, consider how change can emerge when love is considered as a social phenomenon. Sophie Bourgault considers the role of love in politics by turning to the seemingly disparate perspectives of Arendt and Simone Weil. There is no place for love and compassion in politics according to Arendt, while for Weil, compassion is precisely what is called for. For Arendt, politics is characterized by speech and action, but Weil's concern is that those who are most disadvantaged have no voice. But as Bourgault points out, the two thinkers do come together in their agreement that what is needed in our modern world is "more thoughtfulness and (empathetic) attention" (165). Rethought as attention, love has a place in the social and political world. This is not insignificant, as Christian Lotz reminds us. For, within the context of recent left political philosophy developed by thinkers such as Hardt, Negri, and Badiou, love seems to be granted a metaphysical status. Lotz reminds us, however, of the Marxist critique of essentialist conceptions of love which "tend to overlook the material, historical, and social form that love takes on in real individuals" shaped by class (131). Also connecting the particular to the general, Lotz points out that "What we can see, feel hear is not sensual in an abstract sense; rather, it is the result of concrete historical forms of how we are related to one another, and of how the sensual world is itself reproduced through labor" (133). In other words, love allows us to engage in particular and concrete relations in a world that is shaped through material relations. Lotz concludes that rather than thinking about love "in terms of a truth procedure (Badiou) or an ontological event (Negri)," it is the social aspect of love, and the ways in which it is produced to which we should turn our attention (147).

Dorothea Olkowski, whose essay completes the fourth part on the phenomenological experience of love, is also concerned with forms of love, in particular in light of recent neurophysiological explanations of love that cannot account for intentionality. In working through her ontology of love, she draws on Merleau-Ponty, in particular his early work "on the interplay of the organism and the phenomenal field" (202). Like Lotz, Olkowski thinks through sensory perception drawing on form. In this case the "sensory value of each element is determined by its function in the whole and varies with it. Every action undertaken modifies the field where it occurs and establishes lines of force within which action unfolds and alters the phenomenal field" (207). This means that sensory input alone is not sufficient for explaining why we respond in certain ways. Instead, what is needed is an account of intentionality, of consciousness of certain objects and the ways we take them up, consciousness of the actions we take, of the words we speak, and the ways in which these "consciously constitute the intention(s) in which they are involved" (207). Consciousness and the world are intertwined. Relations are motivated and not causal in one direction, and "there is a 'network of significative intentions,' more or less clear, lived rather than known" (208). So desire cannot be mere instinct or drive. Instincts are part of an entire organism or structure, which means that they cannot be separated out from perception, intelligence and emotions. Physical events do not equate with situations, which are the lived interpretation of what takes place.

Also drawing on Merleau-Ponty and our intertwinement with the world, Fiona Utley explores the ways in which the loving bonds we create in the world not only anchor us there but also provide us with "another self who shares and knows the intimate structures of our world" (169). This means for Utley that to love we must trust. Thus, the trust that sustains this love must be central to human existence. Utley picks up here on a theme others in this volume have explored, namely that loving makes us vulnerable. It opens us to the risk of heartbreak, of "violence, cruelty and death" (175). Marguerite La Caze explores this close relation between love and hate through the work of Beauvoir. Supporting Utley's findings, she concludes that love allows for both reciprocal and ambiguous relations that belong to being human. Hate, however, is not relational as such. It stresses the "material, object status of the hated offender."

The final two essays are thematized as love stories. Dawne McCance writes eloquently about Derrida as a philosopher who did not practice "philosophical detachment" when he wrote about love. Coming back to the opening theme that any binary of reason and emotion is doomed from the start, she explains how Derrida's "deconstruction is not only about acknowledging difference", but "is also about being open to being altered in one's encounter" with it (222). It is about changing how we think as well as what we think about. Alphonso Lingis puts this into practice, dwelling on practices of loving and living that shape the ways we think about ourselves and our relations to nature.

This collection opens up an overdue discussion of the intersections of love and thinking within the continental tradition. Some of the observations were ones I anticipated; others were surprising. My only real criticism is that there is no mention of the work of Luce Irigaray, a contemporary continental philosopher for whom love is at the center of her work. Nonetheless, it is easy to fault a work for what it has not done. In the end it must be judged by what it has accomplished, and that by all measures is much.

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For centuries, people have tried to understand the behaviors and beliefs associated with falling in love. What explains the wide range of emotions people experience? How have notions of romance evolved over time? As digital media becomes a permanent fixture in people’s lives, how have these technologies changed how people meet?

Examining some of these questions are Stanford scholars.

From the historians who traced today’s ideas of romance to ancient Greek philosophy and Arab lyric poetry, to the social scientists who have examined the consequences of finding love through an algorithm, to the scientists who study the love hormone oxytocin, here is what their research reveals about matters of the heart.

The evolution of romance

How romantic love is understood today has several historical origins, says Robert Pogue Harrison , the Rosina Pierotti Professor in Italian Literature and a scholar of romance studies.

For example, the idea of finding one’s other half dates back to ancient Greek mythology, Harrison said. According to Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium , humans were once complete, “sphere-like creatures” until the Greek gods cut them in half. Ever since, individuals have sought after their other half.

Here are some of those origin stories, as well as other historical perspectives on love and romance, including what courtship looked like in medieval Germany and in Victorian England, where humor and innuendo broke through the politics of the times.

Stanford scholar examines origins of romance

Professor of Italian literature Robert Pogue Harrison talks about the foundations of romantic love and chivalry in Western civilization.

Medieval songs reflect humor in amorous courtships

Through a new translation of medieval songs, Stanford German studies Professor Kathryn Starkey reveals an unconventional take on romance.  

The aesthetics of sexuality in Victorian novels

In Queen Victoria’s England, novelists lodged erotic innuendo in descriptive passages for characters to express sexual desire.

Getting to the ‘heart’ of the matter

Stanford Professor Haiyan Lee chronicles the Chinese “love revolution” through a study of cultural changes influenced by Western ideals.

Love in the digital age

Where do people find love today? According to recent research by sociologist Michael Rosenfeld , meeting online is now the most popular way to meet a partner. 

“The rise of the smartphone took internet dating off the desktop and put it in everyone’s pocket, all the time,” said Rosenfeld. He found that 39 percent of heterosexual couples met their significant other online, compared to 22 percent in 2009. 

As people increasingly find connections online, their digital interactions can provide insight into people’s preferences in a partner. 

For example, Neil Malhotra , the Edith M. Cornell Professor of Political Economy, analyzed thousands of interactions from an online dating website and found that people seek partners from their own political party and with similar political interests and ideologies. Here is some of that research. 

Online dating is the most popular way couples meet

Matchmaking is now done primarily by algorithms, according to new research from Stanford sociologist Michael Rosenfeld. His new study shows that most heterosexual couples today meet online.

Cupid’s code: Tweaking an algorithm can alter the course of finding love online

A few strategic changes to dating apps could lead to more and better matches, finds Stanford GSB’s Daniela Saban.

Political polarization even extends to romance

New research reveals that political affiliation rivals education level as one of the most important factors in identifying a potential mate.

Turns out that opposites don’t attract after all

A study of “digital footprints” suggests that you’re probably drawn to personalities a lot like yours.

Stanford scholars examine the lies people tell on mobile dating apps

Lies to appear more interesting and dateable are the most common deception among mobile dating app users, a new Stanford study finds.

The science of love

It turns out there might be some scientific proof to the claim that love is blind. According to one Stanford study , love can mask feelings of pain in a similar way to painkillers. Research by scientist Sean Mackey found intense love stimulates the same area of the brain that drugs target to reduce pain. 

“When people are in this passionate, all-consuming phase of love, there are significant alterations in their mood that are impacting their experience of pain,” said Mackey , chief of the Division of Pain Medicine. “We’re beginning to tease apart some of these reward systems in the brain and how they influence pain. These are very deep, old systems in our brain that involve dopamine – a primary neurotransmitter that influences mood, reward and motivation.”  

While love can dull some experiences, it can also heighten other feelings such as sociability. Another Stanford study found that oxytocin, also known as the love hormone because of its association with nurturing behavior, can also make people more sociable. Here is some of that research. 

Looking for love in all the wrong hormones

A study involving prairie vole families challenges previous assumptions about the role of oxytocin in prosocial behavior.

Give your sweetheart mushrooms this Valentine’s Day, says Stanford scientist

A romantic evening of chocolate and wine would not be possible without an assist from fungi, says Stanford biology professor Kabir Peay. In fact, truffles might be the ultimate romantic gift, as they exude pheromones that can attract female mammals.

Love takes up where pain leaves off, brain study shows

Love-induced pain relief was associated with the activation of primitive brain structures that control rewarding experiences.

Come together: How social support aids physical health

A growing body of research suggests that healthy relationships with spouses, peers and friends are vital for not just mental but also physical health.

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Love & Romance

The philosophy of romantic love, peter keeble says philosophy, like love, is a many-splendoured thing..

Philosophy is normally not shy in dealing with highly emotive issues: Philosophers often tell us what we should not do and that certain cherished beliefs are nonsense. However, not many modern philosophers have written about individual emotions, such as the feeling of romantic love. Yet it would seem a subject ripe for analysis of the kind that Phenomenologists do – to examine in a detailed, neutral way what it is like to be in love. Analytical philosophers have also occasionally dipped their toes in the subject. Romantic love therefore presents a chance to look at how these different forms of modern philosophy tackle the same topic, and compare their strengths and weaknesses.

A neat way of getting at the difference between the phenomenological and analytic approaches is to say that one looks at inner feelings, the other at outer meaning. Phenomenology makes no claims about reality beyond our experience, only about the content and structure of experience. Analytical philosophy, by contrast, is more interested in looking at concepts to ensure that we do not reach unjustified conclusions about ourselves, our world, and what we can know. Thus romantic love can be viewed phenomenologically as an experience of which you are the subject, and analytically as a concept and object of study. The one relies heavily on introspection – whether your own or reports from others – and the other on an analysis of meaning and usage.

We are looking specifically at romantic love here, not love of family or friends, not intellectual love, nor love of your neighbour. Nonetheless, romantic love has many facets and phases. Among these are: falling in love, infatuation, unreciprocated love, erotic love, love within a long-term relationship, falling out of love, unrequited love, and bereavement. They may not all have the same one thing in common, and so might best be grouped together in terms of Wittgenstein’s ‘family resemblances’. In what follows I’ll be concentrating on falling in love and love within long-term relationships, which are closely allied.

A. The Phenomenology of Love

The term ‘phenomenology’ can be used to describe the examination of experiences, as I mentioned, but it can also refer more specifically to the philosophical school centred on our experience of the world. A third meaning of ‘phenomenology’ is the body of alleged findings of particular phenomenological philosophers with regard to how our experiences are structured, as well as their practical or ethical implications.

There are two main schools of phenomenological analysis: Edmund Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology , and Martin Heidegger’s hermeneutic (or interpretative) phenomenology .

This is terrifying terminology! But put simply, Husserl’s approach, as applied to romantic love, requires us to be aware of all our preconceptions about love and then ‘bracket’ them off, in order to become a stranger in its strange land and observe our experience of it as objectively as possible.

This is already problematic for our present interests. For instance, is it not the case that any experience of love is to some extent moulded by our upbringing in a society that has written and sung so much about this emotion? If so, then our preconceptions about the experience are part of the experience! Indeed, isn’t the experience largely the product of such cultural influence? Maybe even more to the point: how will I know if I’ve rid myself of all the artificial biases of my perception of love? Perhaps it would require extensive training under the tutelage of some transcendental guru.

It is something of a relief to turn to Heidegger’s phenomenology, which gives interpretation a central role in our perceptions. Heidegger’s perspective recognises there is no way to separate yourself from the human world you are in. It is therefore necessary to try to make your personal experience and thinking explicit, in a statement of pre-understanding. Being aware of initial feelings about the experience being investigated should help ensure they are not smuggled back into what one reports.

Making this statement too is problematic, but let me have a go: I think I have a tendency to believe that love is a sometimes-unnervingly-overwhelming emotion that is often overrated as a justification for how people behave. Watch out that this preconception doesn’t sneak in without any evidence.

We now enter the hermeneutic circle . Here we break down the elements of the matter in hand – the experience of romantic love – and look at what each part adds to the whole and how they are related in the totality of the experience.

At this stage we must gather data about what it is like to be in love. The sources include our own introspections, and reports of other peoples’ introspections. When it comes to love, these include, for instance, popular song lyrics.

Collecting Experience Data

Introspection is considering how something appears or feels to you. In my case, looking at feelings of romantic love yielded among other things, what I think is a seldom remarked-on physiological factor, namely a sort of ache in the lower throat and upper chest. However, this is not peculiar to romantic love in my experience – it is similar to my experience of nostalgia or sympathy for a dying child or homesickness.

What of popular music? I was struck by this lyric from Jackie De Shannon, made popular by The Searchers: “I can feel a new expression on my face / I can feel a glowing sensation taking place / … Every time that you / Walk in the room” (‘When You Walk In The Room’, 1964). Here the uncontrollable and unbidden nature of the feeling is emphasised. Here it comes again, along with certainty, in Katie Melua’s ‘Nine Million Bicycles’ (2012): “There are nine million bicycles in Beijing / That’s a fact / It’s a thing we can’t deny / Like the fact that I will love you till I die.” While there is often a sexual element to the romantic experience, this is not always the case. This comes across in a traditional Somerset song collected by Cecil Sharp with the lines, ‘She looked so fine and nimble/ Washing all her linen, oh’ (“Dashing Away with the Smoothing Iron’). Here the beloved is engaged in a mundane task, but there is something about the way it is done that manifests qualities that the lover appreciates.

Romantic love may simply be an appreciation of and attraction to physical beauty. However, the experience of love may also be much more than mere appreciation, but transformative, even a matter of life and death. There are so many examples of this in music: here are two. The first was written in 1958 by Philip Spector and performed by the Teddy Bears: “Just to see him smile / Makes my life worthwhile”. In 1970, just before her death, Janis Joplin sang, “But I’d trade all of my tomorrows for one single yesterday / To be holdin’ Bobby’s body next to mine” (‘Me & Bobby Magee’). So overwhelming may the experience of love be that it can seem irrational – as when Dusty Springfield sings, “No matter what you do / I only want to be with you” (1964). This can spill over into a rather unpleasant possessiveness, such as “I want you no matter what you do” – as sung by the Four Seasons in 1966 (‘Opus 17’).

Here we have collected some data about what people say it is like to be in love. But this seems to only be a collection of factoids – interesting and thought-provoking, no doubt, but no more than open-minded social research.

Does it help to gather these insights into one overarching description of what it’s like to be in love? Doing so might produce the following: to be in love is to experience a strong emotion we’re often unable to control that’s accompanied by a sort of ache and an overwhelming admiration for someone, along with a possibly irrational desire to be in their presence and to help them. Put more succinctly, Love is a powerful experience centred on one other person that enriches your whole perspective on life, apparently forever.

This certainly helps to tease out the various aspects of what we experience when in love, but it is not particularly philosophical, more a survey of popular culture ideas about love. Nothing about romantic love necessarily follows from it, such as how we should respond to it. With the benefit of these insights we might be more likely to indulge the strange behaviour of those who claim to be in love: but we might just as well conclude that we should not do so.

Heidegger in Love (Perhaps)

At this stage I turned to various summaries of Heidegger’s phenomenology. In what follows I try to apply these analyses to the nature of romantic love. I should emphasise that this is not taken directly from Heidegger. Rather, it is an attempt to apply his conceptual system to romantic love, and to illustrate how a hermeneutic phenomenologist might turn experiential data into something more profound.

For Heidegger we are inherently social beings who experience and operate through interpretation in such a way that we already see the world, and the loved one, in a particular and to some extent socially-determined way.

Heidegger thought we always see an object as something; in other words, we cannot but be always wearing our cultural spectacles. If I see a door, I see it not as a meaningless piece of wood that I afterwards interpret as an entrance; on the contrary, when I see it, I see it as an entrance. In this sort of way, one’s experiences of love represent a particular way of interpreting one’s experience of another person, the beloved. Love is indeed a very intense example of how we don’t see other people as mere humanoids, or shapes, but rather as people of a certain kind. We do not see a person and then think we love them. Instead, once we’re in love, the other person immediately presents to us as someone we want to be in the presence of and to do good to because they enrich our perspective on life. We feel, to use a phenomenological term, that we want to ‘fuse our horizon’ with them. We want to fuse horizons with another being, and to forge a sort of third being in the interaction between lover and beloved – one which contains some of the qualities of both.

Unless we’re particularly self-conscious, this perception steals up on us. Perhaps on first meeting we just saw another person; but once in love we see the beloved with all their qualities and our shared history, in one gestalt experience. This is what Heidegger calls a ‘coping state’ – one in which we are not fully aware of what we’re doing, in the same sort of way an accomplished carpenter is not particularly aware of the hammer they’re using. If something goes wrong with the hammer, or with the love relationship, we are jolted out of our coping state and pay it attention. That’s analogous to what happens when we first fall in love – our normal state of chugging along is suddenly shaken up by the awareness of love. It disturbs our everyday coping state.

To introduce a bit more of Heidegger’s terminology, in your interactions with your beloved, you see them as useful to your life project. You are projecting a different future which gives your life further (or some) meaning. I think Heidegger would also say when we are in love we see at least some of the essence of the beloved. But there is also a danger that our feelings are inauthentic and the product of the cliched ‘they’ world – in Heidegger’s German, the world of ‘das Mann’. This is why we must pay particular attention to what we actually feel in order to determine whether it is true love. We might see the sort of love lyrics we’ve just looked at as a guide or litmus test for love.

There are clear links with existentialism here. The authenticity of your love may not lead you into any different behaviours than your inauthentic neighbours, but it might. For instance, authentic love may well decide to break some social taboos of the ‘they world’, regarding race, sex, or age, for instance.

This is fascinating, and perhaps useful. However, it seems to me essentially arbitrary. A pre-existing Heideggerian ideology of authenticity has been bolted on to the experiences of love outlined above. It reveals some possible insights into the experience of love, but it’s like a sculpture adorning an office block, in that it does not have to be that specific sculpture. Another sculpture in a different style would work as well and could have revealed and emphasised other aspects of love. Feminism, Marxism, or evolutionary psychology could just as easily have been bolted on to the experience.

B. Romantic Love: Analytical Philosophy’s Perspective

One approach of analytical philosophy applied to love has highlighted dilemmas of fungibility. If love is based on properties of the beloved then this suggests the beloved can be replaced by someone with similar or superior versions of these properties. If, however, the beloved is irreplaceable because of a history of shared experiences, the possibility arises of being trapped forever with a partner who may change and become less desirable. Here, however, I will concentrate on Gabriele Taylor’s examination of whether we are entitled to pass comment on the appropriateness of somebody’s claim to love another person.

In her article ‘Love’ ( Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 76, 1976), Taylor asks whether falling in love, which we tend to think of as a bolt out of the blue that cannot be questioned, is so different from a large set of other emotions where we can feel justified in questioning whether the feeling is reasonable. She suggests we can question infatuation too. First, she points out that it is the structure of other emotions, such as fear, which enables us to make judgements as to their reasonableness. Fear involves someone thinking that an object, animal, or person has certain determinable qualities which result in and may (or may not) justify that emotion. Suppose, for instance that Sheila fears a cobra because she believes it is venomous. From this we infer:

• Sheila must have some relevant want . In this case, not to be killed.

• Sheila must believe the snake has the determinable quality of being venomous.

• Sheila must believe there is a causal connection between the determinable quality (venomous) and her want (to stay alive).

• The determinable quality can’t be just anything : it must explain the emotion.

So there are criteria by which we can judge if the emotion of fear is justified in any particular case. On closer inspection, we may find that Sheila is wrong in thinking the cobra in front of her is venomous; she may even be wrong in believing it is a snake and not a stick. Or she may not know that the snake is venomous and could kill her, but be fearful of it for some absurd reason, such as an intense dislike of spaghetti.

Taylor claims that there seems to be no comparable structure for love. What is the determinate quality of the object of your love? Lovability ? But this seems too empty and subjective to be useful – so much so that it is a tautology rather than a possible explanation, What, we feel entitled to ask, are the specific properties of lovability that justifiably inspire love? They surely vary markedly from person to person. Nonetheless, Taylor says, although there may not be easily-identified determinable qualities for love, we can observe the common wants of those who are in love. These include:

• A wanting to be with B

• A wanting to communicate with B

• A wanting to cherish and benefit B

• A wanting B to take an interest in A (and for B to admire them – hence all that showing off)

In relation to qualities, most of us will deem these wants to be justifiable if A identifies that B is kindly, or attractive, or has a sense of humour, for example. All that is reasonable. But we would not think it reasonable for A to love B if she thought B was a crushing bore. She might love B despite thinking him a crushing bore, but it would be absurd to love him because she recognises his extreme boorishness.

Taylor concludes that we can ask whether it is reasonable for someone to be in love. However, this is not so much because of easily identifiable characteristics, as in the case of fear (for example, the object of fear has features that are dangerous; and everyone knows cobras are dangerous). Lovable characteristics are to a greater extent in the eye of the beholder, whose wants may also be less clear. Nevertheless, there are some limits on what is reasonable in love. The properties of the beloved must not directly contradict the wants of the lover.

I think Taylor is correct that it is possible to make judgements about whether people are really in love, but I believe her to be wrong in saying that there is a difference in kind between love and, say, fear. Love and fear may be better thought of as placed on a continuum of emotions. At the ‘fear’ end are emotions whose objects have more objective criteria with wider public agreement. At the ‘love’ end. the opposite is true.

The reason we can be so sure about the reasonableness or otherwise of fear, is that there are more clearly objective criteria for identifying fearsome qualities, such as those of a cobra, which most of us would agree are fearsome. However, it seems that the criteria for lovability are more numerous, more subtle, and more subjective. Still, we do expect there to be some identifiable qualities in the beloved that the lover could with some thought identify – and, moreover, some of those qualities (such as being a crushing bore) would be seen as unlovable. Ultimately, who we fall in love with is a bit of an enigma, but not a total mystery. And in any case, doesn’t infatuation have an analogue with the irrational fears known as phobias? As with infatuation, there often seems to be no objective reason for a phobic emotion.

Taylor goes on to consider situations where we might be inclined to argue with someone about the reasonableness of their proclaimed love. For example, it may be obvious that B does not possess the spontaneous sense of humour that A thinks they have. Or it may be clear that B dislikes A. Or A may have an inflated belief that marriage will solve all B’s shortcoming. In each of these situations we would feel justified in sitting down with A and having a good heart to heart with them.

Finally, Taylor looks at examples where someone proclaiming their love does so for all the wrong reasons, including where the love is overly coloured by the lover’s interests. In an example taken from Henrik Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House , Taylor tells us that Helmer’s love for Nora is unreasonable because it requires Nora to remain passive rather than develop into a fully rounded person in her own right.

Some Conclusions

I have argued that phenomenology is good at identifying and appreciating an emotion like love, but may bring an arbitrary ideology to bear as a response to it. Analytical philosophy may provisionally assume an understanding of love, before going on to reveal controversies and insights, such as concerning our ability to judge another’s love.

I think that phenomenology and analytical philosophy are not mutually exclusive but collectively revealing. Philosophy, like love, is a many-splendoured thing.

© Peter Keeble 2022

Peter Keeble is a retired local government research officer and teacher in London.

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What Is Love? A Philosophy of Life

Natural Philosopher, Alchemist, Visual Artist

Don't let the word love define your LOVE

Love is the most powerful emotion a human being can experience. The strange think is, that almost nobody knows what love is. Why is it so difficult to find love? That is easy to understand, if you know that the word "love" is not the same as one's feeling of love.

The word "love" is used and abused for the expression of different sets of feelings.

The word love is used as an expression of affection towards someone else (I love you) but it also expresses pleasure (I love chocolate). To make it a little more complicated, the word "love" also expresses a human virtue that is based on compassion, affection and kindness. This is a state of being, that has nothing to do, with something or someone outside yourself. This is the purest form of Love.

The ancient Greek used 7 words to define the different states of love:

Storge: natural affection, the love you share with your family.

Philia: the love that you have for friends.

Eros: sexual and erotic desire kind of love (positive or negative)

Agape: this is the unconditional love, or divine love

Ludus: this is playful love, like childish love or flirting.

Pragma: long standing love. The love in a married couple.

Philautia: the love of the self (negative or positive)

These are 7 different kind of feelings. The love you feel for your partner is not the same as the love you feel for your mother. Even the love for your partner changes in time. You feel different emotions for different situations and people.

But still, we use the same word. It is easy to understand that a confusion is easy made while communicating. I can say "I love you" to two different people (and mean it), but I am actually feeling in a different way.

This confusion is not only the case while 2 people are talking, your own brain does not get it.

What you feel is controlled by the right side of your brain and language is controlled by your left side. If you use the word "love" 10 times a day with different situations, it losses power. Your left part or your brain does not get fully activated when you really mean "I love you" and want to get exited about it. 50% of your brain is a lot.

The first thing that you need to do is learn the differences of the (7?) states of love. Not the words, but how they feel. It is easy if you recognize the words. It is basic training. Awareness, that is the secret to love.

Love is a practice, it is not something you find or don't find. You can practice love for the rest of your life.

Don't abuse the word love. Use other words where you are not addressing emotion towards other people.

Example: I love chocolate, becomes: I enjoy chocolate. I love my job, becomes: I have passion for what I do.

Enjoying, loving and passion are 3 different emotions. It is essential to learn (again) the true meaning of words, not merely to communicate with someone else, but also so learn to experience them. Words are very powerful instruments. Not only to communicate with others, but also with your self. The words you use, creates awareness and eventually your reality.

If you use words wisely, you can learn to recognize what kind of love you are feeling, and enjoy the different kinds of love. With one person of different ones.

If you don't know how to find love with in you, you will never find it outside you.

Words are agreements to express ideas or feelings. The meaning of words is not absolute, it is always a personal interpretation. The group of feelings associated with the word "love" is difficult to understand, and even more difficult to express to other person. Let put is this way: it is impossible with only one word.

With the creation of a word, you can give it a special meaning. Some lovers create words to express what they feel to each other. A word creates and agreement or memories. This moments can be repeated when you use that word or when you think about it.

In other languages exist words, related to love, that expresses different situations that don't have a translation to English. When you know this words, you recognize this feelings. You get more grip in what you are experiencing.

Beautiful words in other languages:

Yuanfen (Chinese): A love relationship that has been established by lot, based on principles of Chinese culture.

Mamihlapinatapei (Yaghan): A look that without words is shared by two people who want to initiate something, but neither start.

Cafuné (Brazilian Portugees): Slowly stroking your fingers through someone else's hair.

Retrouvailles (France): The happiness of seeing someone again after a long time.

La Douleur Exquise (France): The enormous pain in your heart when you desire someone you cannot have.

Ya'aburnee (Arabic): The hope that you will die earlier than the other, so you don't need to live without the other.

Forelsket (Nordic): The euphoria you feel when you fall in love for the first time.

Saudade (Portugees): The feeling of longing for someone you love, but is far away.

This "moments" are so important in other cultures that they have words to express them. My point is, don't use just one word to define your love. Learn this "words" and recognize them when you are living them.

With love, you get what you put in

Love is an emotion in action. You can learn how to feel and cultivate your love... First learn and know the different situations of love. Learn how to recognize them when you are feeling them. Then you go and share your love with others.

Love between 2 people can only begin if the interaction is based on truth, trust and respect. That is something you start giving. This is essential to grown mutual love between 2 individuals. If the other person gives you wat you give, then you start feeling love for each other and it can grow...

It is not difficult to understand love, once you know how love works.

It is very easy to fall in love with someone. The difficulty is to stay in love. But if it is difficult to stay in love, that means, that it is not the love of your life. It is a love experience. Love is always beautiful, if it is not beautiful, it is not love. Time to move on. Sometimes, love just fades away. It is better to move on when you don't feel anything, then when you feel the opposite of love.

Finding your loved one or a relationship...

If you want to find the love of your life, start being aware of your use of the word love. Saying and thinking I want to find the love of my life and not I want a relationship is fundamental. You find what you are looking for.

"Being in a relationship" is a marketing term invented in magazines. Everyone that is not single is in a relationship. To address a large group of people it is perfect, but it is to vague to define your personal situation.

The only important question for you should be: "Am I experiencing love or not?"

This is the first philosophy essay forming a series under the name: "Natural Philosophy" about the most important matters of life, trying to define a "Theory of everything". Continue reading here .

Support the crowd source campaign to publish a ebook, and distribute it for free. (Link in my profile) or download the first ebook in the Natural Philosophy series here

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It may seem doubtful that philosophers have much to tell us about love (beyond their love of wisdom). Surely it is the poets who have the market cornered when it comes to deep reflection on the nature of love. John and Ken question the notion that love cannot be captured by the light of reason by turning their attention to the philosophy of love with philosopher-poet Troy Jollimore from CSU Chico. Troy is the author of Love’s Vision, as well as two collections of poems: At Lake Scugog and 2006's Tom Thomson in Purgatory , which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. This program was recorded live at the Mill Valley Public Library, just north of San Francisco. 

Listening Notes

Many people have claimed (at least once) that they are in love, and it is a theme in countless books and songs. But what is love? Is it rational or irrational? John and Ken agree right off the bat that it’s a complicated concept. Troy Jollimore, philosophy professor, poet, and author of  Love’s Vision , is invited to the conversation to puzzle with them.

John begins with the million dollar question: “What is love?” Troy responds by saying that love is an emotion, but there are more than simple feelings involved. Love is also a perception of value and a commitment of will. Feelings come and go, but along with this ebb is a consistency of decision to be devoted to someone. 

Next, Ken wonders how subject love is to reasons. He describes a few of the reasons why he loves his wife; she’s smart, beautiful, and cares about animals. But if those qualities are the reasons why he loves his wife, Ken wonders, then why wouldn’t he begin to love someone else who had more of the same qualities? And why don’t other people love his wife if they agree that his reasons are good ones? Troy calls these two scenarios the trading up problem and the universality problem. He insists that love is rational, but not in the coldly calculated, economic way of comparison that we usually associate with rationality. He categorizes love is a type of perception which is effected by perspective; to a degree, love is actually “blind,” but this does not mean that it is irrational, because all of Ken’s reasons for loving his wife are still good ones.  Although Ken, John, and Troy mostly discuss reciprocal romantic love, they also touch upon friendship, the love a parent has for a child, unrequited love, and the case of arranged marriages.  

The last audience comment wistfully compares love to a revolution. Both starts with an idea, come about because something is missing (either in one’s life or in the state of a country), and no two are the same. John finds this comparison apt, and Ken continues by commenting how love is special in that it allows one person to see another in their full, unique particularity. Troy agrees, proclaiming love to be the cure for solipsism.

• Roving Philosophical Reporter  (Seek to 6:10): In this segment, the audience is made privy to two highly personal, real life love stories. One is about love found through the ordeal of a life-threatening medical emergency, and the other is about love lost after a deadly robbery at gunpoint.  
• 60-Second Philosopher  (Seek to 48:36): First bemoaning the fact that “love is boring unless you’re in it,” Ian Shoales briefly describes a few spectacular love stories about romance-induced pity and punishment from Greek and Roman gods. He then proceeds to call to mind some of the most famous couples from popular culture.

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Full episode downloads via Apple Music and abbreviated episodes (Philosophy Talk Starters) via Apple Podcasts , Spotify , and Stitcher

Unlimited Listening

Buy the episode, related blogs, what is (this thing called) love, related resources.

Web Resources

Botton, Alain de (2012). “ Schopenhauer on Love .”  Philosophy: A Guide to Happiness  (YouTube series).

Fisher, Helen (2008). “ Helen Fisher studies the brain in love . TED.

Helm, Bennett (2009). “ Love .”  The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy .

Jollimore, Troy (2008). “ The Psychology of Exclusivity .”  Les Ateliers de L’Ethique .

Pinker, Steven (2008). “ Crazy Love .”  TIME Magazine .

Rice, Maureen (2003). “ Love in the 21st century .”  The Guardian .

Zimmer, Carl (2008). “ Romance Is An Illusion .”  TIME Magazine . 

Amini, Thomas et. al (2001).  A General Theory of Love . ISBN: 0375709223 .

Fisher, Helen (2004).  Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love . ISBN: 0805077960 .

Horstman, Judith (2011).  The Scientific American Book of Love, Sex, and the Brain: The Neuroscience of How, When, Why, and Who We Love . ISBN: 0470647787 .

Jollimore, Troy (2011).  Love’s Vision . ISBN: 0691148724 .

Pakaluk, Michael (1991).  Other Selves: Philosophers on Friendship . ISBN: 0872201139 .

Soble, Alan (1998).  Eros, Agape and Philia: Readings in the Philosophy of Love . ISBN: 1557782784

Vernon, Mark (2010).  The Meaning of Friendship . ISBN: 023024288X. 

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Comments (9)

Friday, January 15, 2021 -- 12:39 PM

What is love? It is simple. One molecular cluster connects with the other to try to create a more viable system for the next generation of clusters.

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Thursday, February 11, 2021 -- 10:44 PM

Love is human in the sense discussed here. It has a context of time, place and community.

It seems more elusive than hate, but not apossite to it or any other feeling.

Love is a feeling for sure. It is a projection through memory. It is emotional without its own category. Jealousy, lust, power, regret, grief, peace...there seems no end to the emotions and other feelings with which it can mix.

Love is not the end all. It is fickle. To love is to be vulnerable.

I don't know if solipsism is possible with love, but I think I have loved and I still have worries I am alone.

When a loved one dies l have never felt more alone. Yet I persist and other emotions persist, but love is gone. Did I make it up...I don't know.

Sunday, February 28, 2021 -- 12:36 PM

Just trying to ketchup, catsup, er catchup---yeah, that's what I'm talking about. Long absence from this delightful venue. Words and meanings are so, ambivalent ( rwo-sided): ambidextrous ( two handed); unilateral ( one-sided).Love,for example. The word does not mean much. If I say I love lobster thermador, the expression means nothing. For two reasons: 1. I have never eaten the dish. 2. Loving food is irrelevant...the objective is avoidance of starvation,not some higher-order humanistic sort of transcendent experience .You can't have love without hate. Seems a paradox. A few thousand years of civilization affirm this. So...,is love meaningless? No. Do we really know what we are talking about when we talk about love? More-or-less, yes. Still, it is a paradox---triadox ---- quadradox. You choose. Or, reject... we vocalize the doxical aspects--- to make each other feel better. And meet social expectations---something Davidson called propositional attitude. It does not pay the rent...does not foster world peace...

Sunday, March 7, 2021 -- 12:28 PM

I guess my understanding of philosophy is all wrong. Love of wisdom? I have never thought so. Why? Well, wisdom is ephemeral. Subjective. More in the eye of the beholder. Like, uh, beauty. Maybe, just maybe, it depends on the meaning of sophistic, or, sophism. I once knew a man who hated sophism. Said he did. Said it was never acceptable. So, is sophism the love of wisdom? Or a love of knowledge? Was my older antagonist's dislike all about wisdom or knowledge? Did he even know what HE was lalking about?

Seems to me, wisdom is much more ephemeral than knowledge. If love of knowledge is more about philosophy than love of wisdom, then it seems Jack Baird did not know what he was talking about. So, what's it going to be? What is the difference among wisdom and knowledge? It is not, you see, a matter of 'between'. How many ways can there be? Aris-tot-tel; So-crates and Pla-too were primitives. They muddled through, best they could. Giants? No. Pygmies... Those have always preceded giants. Seems to me...

Sunday, March 7, 2021 -- 12:35 PM

Or, less philosophically, what is love? Five feet of heaven in a ponytail. The cutest ponytail, that sways with a wiggle, when she walks.

Friday, March 19, 2021 -- 3:30 PM

There did not appear to be anywhere to add this comment, in current discussion. So, I'll put it here. Something about happiness. Finland. Another one of those Scandinavian countries: Number 1. In happiness. I have commented on conditions in Sweden---their social democracy---their level of content---and anything, everything else one might want to entertain. i don't need to speculate on happiness in Scandinavia. It is self-evident. I don't know about Alaska either. It is cold, I hear. It can be cold in Canada---I know. Happiness runs in a circular motion... We have a newscaster here from Canada. He seems to have forgotten where he came from.

Monday, March 22, 2021 -- 7:07 AM

As we go along in this life we are given, it becomes clear that certain of our concepts, imaginings and perceptions resist definition. I have briefly remarked elsewhere on the illusiveness of truth, and notions about a totality of circumstances. In a similar sense, it seems to me that totality applies to what we call love. Love embodies other of what Davidson called propositional attitudes: belief; desire; expectation;and so on. Perhaps key, though, is trust, because no matter how strong we may imagine our love to be, it blows up; breaks down; falls apart and wears out when we lose trust. Even parental love, I think the most powerful, may not endure if trust is abused and lost. And, romantic love sours dramatically if trust is betrayed. Courtfoom television aptly demonstrates this, whether it is otherwise absurd or somehow believable. So, love is both simple and complex. As with so much of life.

Saturday, June 19, 2021 -- 5:56 AM

Like desire, belief, expectation, ideology and several others,I think love is a propositional attitude, after Davidson, et. al. There is quid pro quo entailed. And, there is no such love as unconditional love, accordingly. Even among our domesticated animal friends, their love for us is conditioned on our kind and gentle treatment of them. If we change that treatment to cruelty, they wil fear us. Or worse. This is how it works. Anything more profound is impossible.

Monday, February 21, 2022 -- 12:14 PM

Further reflection led to the following thesis. If sensoria lead to things such as belief; desire; expectation; and other such propositions, is love much different? Because, it seems to me, many of those propositions are essential for engagement and cultivation of that emotion we call love. If any are neglected, abused or lost, love withers. Dies. Such is the fragility of love. It just cannot weather any sort of neglect.

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Love’s Enduring Legacy: Insights from 1st Corinthians 13

This essay about the enduring legacy of love, as depicted in 1st Corinthians 13, explores the profound virtues it embodies. From patience and kindness to trust and perseverance, love emerges as a guiding force in human relationships. Through its unwavering commitment to goodness and integrity, love offers solace and strength in the face of adversity. Ultimately, this text reminds us of love’s transformative power, urging us to cultivate relationships rooted in compassion and understanding.

How it works

In the vast tapestry of human experience, few themes resonate as profoundly as love. It is the bedrock upon which relationships are built, the force that propels us to connect, and the balm that heals our wounds. Within the annals of literature, poetry, and philosophy, few passages capture the essence of love as eloquently as 1st Corinthians 13.

Often recited at weddings, engraved on anniversary rings, and cherished in moments of both joy and sorrow, this ancient text transcends its origins to offer timeless wisdom on the enduring legacy of love.

Let us delve into its verses, exploring the insights it offers and the implications it holds for our lives.

“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.”

These opening lines paint a portrait of love as a virtuous force, embodying qualities that uplift and inspire. Patience, kindness, humility—these virtues form the foundation of love’s enduring legacy. Love, in its truest form, is not tainted by jealousy or arrogance. It does not seek to elevate itself at the expense of others, nor does it harbor resentment or grievances. Instead, it fosters empathy, understanding, and forgiveness, nurturing bonds that withstand the tests of time.

“Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.”

Here, we encounter a vision of love as a guardian of goodness and a champion of integrity. True love rejoices in honesty and integrity, refusing to partake in deceit or wrongdoing. It is a beacon of trust and hope, offering solace in times of uncertainty and strength in the face of adversity. Love’s enduring legacy lies in its unwavering commitment—to protect, to trust, to hope, and to persevere, even when the path ahead seems fraught with challenges.

“Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away.”

In these final lines, we confront the inexorable truth of love’s supremacy. While the trappings of worldly knowledge and human endeavors may fade into obscurity, love endures. It transcends the confines of time and space, outlasting the transient nature of human existence. Love, in its purest form, is eternal—a testament to the resilience of the human spirit and the capacity for boundless compassion.

As we reflect on the insights gleaned from 1st Corinthians 13, we are reminded of love’s transformative power. It is the thread that weaves through the fabric of our lives, connecting us inextricably to one another and to the world around us. Love’s enduring legacy lies not in grand gestures or fleeting passions, but in the quiet moments of tenderness, the shared laughter, and the steadfast presence that sustains us through life’s trials.

In a world often fraught with division and discord, the message of love contained within these ancient verses offers a beacon of hope—a reminder of our shared humanity and the profound interconnectedness of all beings. May we strive to embody the virtues of love in our daily lives, cultivating relationships rooted in compassion, understanding, and grace. And in doing so, may we leave behind a legacy of love that transcends the boundaries of time and space, echoing through the ages as a testament to the enduring power of the human heart.

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Laura Jarrett reveals what it was like to read Trump’s historic verdict on live TV

NBC News senior legal correspondent Laura Jarrett thrives under pressure. So Jarrett was ready to go the afternoon of May 30, when a New York jury found Donald Trump guilty on all 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. TODAY’s Savannah Guthrie and Nightly News’ Lester Holt were delivering a special report, when suddenly Jarrett’s voice could heard in the background. It was urgent.

“Guys! We need to go,” Jarrett said. “We need to go.”

“Go,” Savannah said. 

The cameras then turned to Jarrett, who read off each count, one by one. Trump became the first former United States president to be convicted of felony crimes.

It’s moments like this that inspired Jarrett to leave her career practicing law to become a legal analyst on TV. 

“I’ve always loved putting the puzzle pieces together and figuring out how to tell a complicated story in the most straightforward and compelling way as possible,” Jarrett previously told TODAY.com . 

Here, Jarrett recounts what was going through her mind at that historic moment. 

“IN THIS MOMENT , my thoughts were this: Be calm. Play it straight. You know this case. Those of us who cover high profile legal cases are used to pressure.

But 5:00 p.m. on Thursday — when former President Donald Trump became the first U.S. president to be convicted of felony crimes — was next level. I went to law school, I clerked for judges, I practiced law, and I gave it all up — for this. This was the moment that sealed that I made the right choice.

I thought carefully about my dress, and more importantly — sneakers! I knew it could be a long day, but the bathroom situation when waiting outside of court is always tricky. Turns out when you are reading ‘guilty’ on live television 34 times with millions watching, you forget you sort of needed to pee.  

As I looked at the first ‘G’ for count of the jury’s verdict on our Google spreadsheet entered by our intrepid correspondent in the courtroom, Tom Winter, I felt eerily relaxed. But then you realize, you have 33 more to go! So I just kept going. We had a plan. And I love a plan. So I kept at it.

I haven’t seen my two young children in days. But on Friday morning, for the first time in weeks, I will walk my son to school. His very last day of pre-school. Because he has his mama back.”

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The Big AI Risk Not Enough People Are Seeing

Beware technology that makes us less human.

“Our focus with AI is to help create more healthy and equitable relationships.” Whitney Wolfe Herd, the founder and executive chair of the dating app Bumble, leans in toward her Bloomberg Live interviewer. “How can we actually teach you how to date?”

When her interviewer, apparently bemused, asks for an example of what this means, Herd launches into a mind-bending disquisition on the future of AI-abetted dating: “Okay, so for example, you could in the near future be talking to your AI dating concierge, and you could share your insecurities. ‘I just came out of a breakup. I have commitment issues.’ And it could help you train yourself into a better way of thinking about yourself. And then it could give you productive tips for communicating with other people. If you want to get really out there, there is a world where your dating concierge could go and date for you with other dating concierges.” When her audience lets out a peal of uneasy laughter, the CEO continues undeterred, heart-shape earrings bouncing with each sweep of her hands. “No, no, truly. And then you don’t have to talk to 600 people. It will then scan all of San Francisco for you and say, These are the three people you really ought to meet. ”

What Herd provides here is much more than a darkly whimsical peek into a dystopian future of online dating. It’s a window into a future in which people require layer upon layer of algorithmic mediation between them in order to carry out the most basic of human interactions: those involving romance, sex, friendship, comfort, food. Implicit in Herd’s proclamation—that her app will “ teach you how to date”—is the assumption that AI will soon understand proper human behavior in ways that human beings do not. Despite Herd’s insistence that such a service would empower us, what she’s actually describing is the replacement of human courtship rituals: Your digital proxy will go on innumerable dates for you, so you don’t have to practice anything so pesky as flirting and socializing.

Read: America is sick of swiping

Hypothetical AI dating concierges sound silly, and they are not exactly humanity’s greatest threat. But we might do well to think of the Bumble founder’s bubbly sales pitch as a canary in the coal mine, a harbinger of a world of algorithms that leave people struggling to be people without assistance. The new AI products coming to market are gate-crashing spheres of activity that were previously the sole province of human beings. Responding to these often disturbing developments requires a principled way of disentangling uses of AI that are legitimately beneficial and prosocial from those that threaten to atrophy our life skills and independence. And that requires us to have a clear idea of what makes human beings human in the first place.

In 1977, Ivan Illich, an Austrian-born philosopher, vagabond priest , and ruthless critic of metastatic bureaucracies, declared that we had entered “the age of Disabling Professions.” Modernity was characterized, in Illich’s view, by the standardization and professionalization of everyday life. Activities that were once understood to be within the competencies of laypeople—say, raising children or bandaging the wounded—were suddenly brought under the purview of technical experts who claimed to possess “secret knowledge,” bestowed by training and elite education, that was beyond the ken of the untutored masses. The licensed physician displaced the local healer. Child psychologists and their “cutting edge” research superseded parents and their instincts. Data-grubbing nutritionists replaced the culinary wisdom of grandmothers.

Illich’s singular insight was that the march of professional reason—the transformation of Western civilization into a technocratic enterprise ruled by what we now call “best practices”—promised to empower us but actually made us incompetent, dependent on certified experts to make decisions that were once the jurisdiction of the common man. “In any area where a human need can be imagined,” Illich wrote , “these new professions, dominant, authoritative, monopolistic, legalized—and, at the same time, debilitating and effectively disabling the individual—have become exclusive experts of the public good.” Modern professions inculcate the belief not only that their credentialed representatives can solve your problems for you, but also that you are incapable of solving said problems for yourself. In the case of some industries, like medicine, this is plainly a positive development. Other examples, like the ballooning wellness industry, are far more dubious.

If the entrenchment of specialists in science, schooling, child-rearing, and so on is among the pivotal developments of the 20th century, the rise of online dating is among the most significant of the 21st. But one key difference between this more recent advancement and those of yesteryear is that websites such as Tinder and Hinge are defined not by disabling professionals with fancy degrees, but by disabling algorithms . The white-coated expert has been replaced by digital services that cut out the human middleman and replace him with an (allegedly) even smarter machine, one that promises to know you better than you know yourself.

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And it’s not just dating apps. Supposed innovations including machine-learning-enhanced meal-kit companies such as HelloFresh, Spotify recommendations, and ChatGPT suggest that we have entered the Age of Disabling Algorithms as tech companies simultaneously sell us on our existing anxieties and help nurture new ones. At the heart of it all is the kind of AI bait-and-switch peddled by the Bumble CEO. Algorithms are now tooled to help you develop basic life skills that decades ago might have been taken as a given: How to date. How to cook a meal. How to appreciate new music. How to write and reflect. Like an episode out of Black Mirror , the machines have arrived to teach us how to be human even as they strip us of our humanity. We have reason to be worried.

As conversations over the dangers of artificial intelligence have heated up over the past 18 months—largely thanks to the meteoric rise of large language models like ChatGPT—the focus of both the media and Silicon Valley has been on Skynet scenarios. The primary fear is that chat models may experience an “intelligence explosion” as they are scaled up, meaning that LLMs might proceed rapidly from artificial intelligence to artificial general intelligence to artificial superintelligence (ASI) that is both smarter and more powerful than even the smartest human beings. This is often called the “fast takeoff” scenario, and the concern is that if ASI slips out of humanity’s control—and how could it not—it might choose to wipe out our species, or even enslave us.

These AI “existential risk” debates—at least the ones being waged in public —have taken on a zero-sum quality: They are almost exclusively between those who believe that the aforementioned Terminator-style dangers are real, and others who believe that these are Hollywood-esque fantasies that distract the public from more sublunar AI-related problems, like algorithmic discrimination , autonomous weapons systems , or ChatGPT-facilitated cheating . But this is a false binary, one that excludes another possibility: Artificial intelligence could significantly diminish humanity, even if machines never ascend to superintelligence, by sapping the ability of human beings to do human things.

The epochal impact of online dating is there for all to see in a simple line graph from a 2019 study . It shows the explosive growth of online dating since 1995, the year that Match.com, the world’s first online-dating site, was launched . That year, only 2 percent of heterosexual couples reported meeting online. By 2017, that figure had jumped to 39 percent as other ways of meeting—through friends or family, at work or in church—declined precipitously.

Besides online dating, the only way of meeting that increased during this period was meeting at a bar or restaurant. However, the authors of the study noted that this ostensible increase was a mirage: The “apparent post-2010 rise in meeting through bars and restaurants for heterosexual couples is due entirely to couples who met online and subsequently had a first in-person meeting at a bar or restaurant or other establishment where people gather and socialize. If we exclude the couples who first met online from the bar/restaurant category, the bar/restaurant category was significantly declining after 1995 as a venue for heterosexual couples to meet.” In other words, online dating has become hegemonic. The wingman is out. Digital matchmaking is in.

But even those selling online-dating services seem to know there’s something unsettling about the idea that algorithms, rather than human beings, are now spearheading human romance. A bizarre Tinder ad from last fall featured the rapper Coi Leray playing the role of Cupid, perched on an ominously pink stage, tasked with finding a date for a young woman. A coterie of associates, dressed in Hunger Games chic, grilled a series of potential suitors as Cupid swiped left until the perfect match was found. These characters put human faces on an inhuman process.

Leif Weatherby, an expert on the history of AI development and the author of a forthcoming book on large language models, told me that ads like this are a neat distillation of Silicon Valley’s marketing playbook. “We’re seeing a general trend of selling AI as ‘empowering,’ a way to extend your ability to do something, whether that’s writing, making investments, or dating,” Weatherby explained. “But what really happens is that we become so reliant on algorithmic decisions that we lose oversight over our own thought processes and even social relationships. The rhetoric of AI empowerment is sheep’s clothing for Silicon Valley wolves who are deliberately nurturing the public’s dependence on their platforms.” Curtailing human independence, then, is not a bug, but a feature of the AI gold rush.

Of course, there is an extent to which this nurtured dependence isn’t unique to AI, but is an inevitable by-product of innovation. The broad uptake of any new technology generally atrophies the human skills for the processes that said technology makes more efficient or replaces outright. The advent of the vacuum was no doubt accompanied by a corresponding decline in the average American’s deftness with a broom. The difference between technologies of convenience, like the vacuum or the washing machine, and platforms like Tinder or ChatGPT is that the latter are concerned with atrophying competencies, like romantic socializing or thinking and reflection, that are fundamental to what it is to be a human being.

Read: AI has lost its magic

The response to our algorithmically remade world can’t simply be that algorithms are bad, sensu stricto. Such a stance isn’t just untenable at a practical level—algorithms aren’t going anywhere—but it also undermines unimpeachably positive use cases, such as the employment of AI in cancer diagnosis . Instead, we need to adopt a more sophisticated approach to artificial intelligence, one that allows us to distinguish between uses of AI that legitimately empower human beings and those—like hypothetical AI dating concierges—that wrest core human activities from human control. But making these distinctions requires us to re-embrace an old idea that tends to leave those of us on the left rather squeamish: human nature.

Both Western intellectuals and the progressive public tend to be hostile to the idea that there is a universal “human nature,” a phrase that now has right-wing echoes . Instead, those on the left prefer to emphasize the diversity, and equality, of varying human cultural traditions. But this discomfort with adopting a strong definition of human nature compromises our ability to draw red lines in a world where AI encroaches on human territory. If human nature doesn’t exist, and if there is no core set of fundamental human activities, desires, or traits, on what basis can we argue against the outsourcing of those once-human endeavors to machines? We can’t take a stand against the infiltration of algorithms into the human estate if we don’t have a well-developed sense of which activities make humans human , and which activities—like sweeping the floor or detecting pancreatic cancer —can be outsourced to nonhuman surrogates without diminishing our agency.

One potential way out of this impasse is offered by the so-called capability approach to human flourishing developed by the philosopher Martha Nussbaum and others. In rejection of the kind of knee-jerk cultural relativism that often prevails in progressive political thought, Nussbaum’s work insists that advocating for the poor or marginalized, at home or abroad, requires us to agree on universal “basic human capabilities” that citizens should be able to develop. Nussbaum includes among these basic capabilities “being able to imagine, to think, and to reason” and “to engage in various forms of familial and social interaction.” A good society, according to the capability approach, is one in which human beings are not just theoretically free to engage in these basic human endeavors, but are actually capable of doing so.

As AI is built into an ever-expanding roster of products and services, covering dating, essay writing, and music and recipe recommendations, we need to be able to make granular, rational decisions about which uses of artificial intelligence expand our basic human capabilities, and which cultivate incompetence and incapacity under the guise of empowerment. Disabling algorithms are disabling precisely because they leave us less capable of, and more anxious about, carrying out essential human behaviors.

Of course, some will object to the idea that there is any such thing as fundamental human activities. They may even argue that describing behaviors like dating and making friends, critical thinking, or cooking as central to the human condition is ableist or otherwise bigoted. After all, some people are asexual or introverted. Others with mental disabilities might not be adept at reflection, or written or oral communication. Some folks simply do not want to cook, an activity which is historically gendered besides. But this objection relies on a sleight of hand. Identifying certain activities as fundamental to the human enterprise does not require you to believe that those who don’t or can’t engage in them are inhuman, just as embracing the idea that the human species is bipedal does not require you to believe that people born without legs lack full personhood. It only asks that you acknowledge that there are some endeavors that are vital aspects of the human condition, taken in the aggregate, and that a society where people broadly lack these capacities is not a good one.

Without some minimal agreement as to what those basic human capabilities are—what activities belong to the jurisdiction of our species, not to be usurped by machines—it becomes difficult to pin down why some uses of artificial intelligence delight and excite, while others leave many of us feeling queasy.

What makes many applications of artificial intelligence so disturbing is that they don’t expand our mind’s capacity to think, but outsource it. AI dating concierges would not enhance our ability to make romantic connections with other humans, but obviate it. In this case, technology diminishes us, and that diminishment may well become permanent if left unchecked. Over the long term, human beings in a world suffused with AI-enablers will likely prove less capable of engaging in fundamental human activities: analyzing ideas and communicating them, forging spontaneous connections with others, and the like. While this may not be the terrifying, robot-warring future imagined by the Terminator movies, it would represent another kind of existential catastrophe for humanity.

Whether or not the Bumble founder’s dream of artificial-intelligence-induced dalliances ever comes to fruition is an open question, but it is also somewhat beside the point. What should give us real pause is the understanding of AI, now ubiquitous in Big Tech, that underlies her dystopian prognostications. Silicon Valley leaders have helped make a world in which people feel that everyday social interactions, whether dating or making simple phone calls, require expert advice and algorithmic assistance. AI threatens to turbocharge this process. Even if your personalized dating concierge is not here yet, the sales pitch for them has already arrived, and that sales pitch is almost as dangerous as the technology itself: AI will teach you how to be a human.

Why study philosophy? Well, for one, because we’re humans.

Why do people study philosophy ( “When the PhD path leads to career struggles,” Letters, May 28)? Philosophy is that science above all other sciences in which we acquire, polish, and secure our values — unless we are reductionists and choose to live as something other than human. We have no other choice than to do philosophy, and the real question is whether to do it better or worse.

Donald Novak

Globe Opinion

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• in memoriam: philosophy professor frank schalow

CAMPUS NEWS: MAY 30, 2024

In memoriam, in memoriam: philosophy professor frank schalow.

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Frank Schalow, a University of New Orleans philosophy faculty member, died May 25, 2024.

Frank Schalow, a University of New Orleans philosophy faculty member for nearly three decades and an internationally renowned authority on German philosopher Martin Heidegger, died on May 25 at the age of 68.

Schalow started his career at UNO in 1995 as an adjunct faculty member. In 2001, he was promoted to assistant professor and became a full professor in 2010. He taught classes including Introduction to Philosophy, Social Ethics, Ethics, The Philosophy of Kant and The Philosophy of Heidegger.

Schalow was a prolific author and researcher. He wrote 12 books on Heidegger and was the longtime co-editor of “Heidegger Studies,” an international journal published in four languages. Considered one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century, Heidegger was best known for his philosophy of existentialism. Schalow’s other areas of research interest included ethics, medical ethics, phenomenology, and 19th and 20th century German thought.

“Dr. Schalow had the admiration of his students and the respect of his colleagues,” said Robert Stufflebeam, associate professor of philosophy. “He was the embodiment of the philosophy professor stereotype. He was brilliant, but quirky. He always wore a tie, even if it bore no stylistic relation to whatever shirt he was wearing. He always spoke thoughtfully and logically. He was never heard to raise his voice in anger. The philosophy program has suffered a great loss. Professor Schalow was one of a kind. He will be missed.”

In addition to the dozen books he authored on Heidegger, Schalow co-edited three books, wrote 16 chapters, and authored several dozen journal articles, review essays, critical discussions and book reviews, Stufflebeam said.

According to colleagues, Schalow’s commitment to his discipline was matched only by his devotion to the stray cats for which he cared for in his New Orleans neighborhood and his beloved New York Yankees.

Schalow earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Denver, and both a master’s and doctorate in philosophy from Tulane University.

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This essay focuses on personal love, or the love of particular persons as such. Part of the philosophical task in understanding personal love is to distinguish the various kinds of personal love. For example, the way in which I love my wife is seemingly very different from the way I love my mother, my child, and my friend. This task has typically proceeded hand-in-hand with philosophical analyses of these kinds of personal love, analyses that in part respond to various puzzles about love. Can love be justified? If so, how? What is the value of personal love? What impact does love have on the autonomy of both the lover and the beloved?

1. Preliminary Distinctions

2. love as union, 3. love as robust concern, 4.1 love as appraisal of value, 4.2 love as bestowal of value, 5.1 love as emotion proper, 5.2 love as emotion complex, 6. problems concerning love, bibliography, other internet resources, related entries.

In ordinary conversations, we often say things like the following:

• I love chocolate (or skiing).
• I love doing philosophy (or being a father).
• I love my dog (or cat).
• I love my wife (or mother or child or friend).

However, what is meant by ‘love’ differs from case to case. (1) may be understood as meaning merely that I like this thing or activity very much. In (2) the implication is typically that I find engaging in a certain activity or being a certain kind of person to be a part of my identity and so what makes my life worth living; I might just as well say that I value these. By contrast, (3) and (4) seem to indicate a mode of concern that cannot be neatly assimilated to anything else. Thus, we might understand the sort of love at issue in (4) to be, roughly, a matter of caring about another person as the person she is, for her own sake. (Accordingly, (3) may be understood as a kind of deficient mode of the sort of love we typically reserve for persons.) Philosophical accounts of love have focused primarily on the sort of personal love at issue in (4); such personal love will be the focus here.

Even within personal love, philosophers from the ancient Greeks on have traditionally distinguished three notions that can properly be called “love”: eros , agape , and philia . It will be useful to distinguish these three and say something about how contemporary discussions typically blur these distinctions (sometimes intentionally so) or use them for other purposes.

‘ Eros ’ originally meant love in the sense of a kind of passionate desire for an object, typically sexual passion (Liddell et al., 1940). Nygren (1953a,b) describes eros as the “‘love of desire,’ or acquisitive love” and therefore as egocentric (1953b, p. 89). Soble (1989b, 1990) similarly describes eros as “selfish” and as a response to the merits of the beloved—especially the beloved's goodness or beauty. What is evident in Soble's description of eros is a shift away from the sexual: to love something in the “erosic” sense (to use the term Soble coins) is to love it in a way that, by being responsive to its merits, is dependent on reasons. Such an understanding of eros is encouraged by Plato's discussion in the Symposium , in which Socrates understands sexual desire to be a deficient response to physical beauty in particular, a response which ought to be developed into a response to the beauty of a person's soul and, ultimately, into a response to the form, Beauty.

Soble's intent in understanding eros to be a reason-dependent sort of love is to articulate a sharp contrast with agape , a sort of love that does not respond to the value of its object. ‘ Agape ’ has come, primarily through the Christian tradition, to mean the sort of love God has for us persons, as well as our love for God and, by extension, of our love for each other—a kind of brotherly love. In the paradigm case of God's love for us, agape is “spontaneous and unmotivated,” revealing not that we merit that love but that God's nature is love (Nygren 1953b, p. 85). Rather than responding to antecedent value in its object, agape instead is supposed to create value in its object and therefore to initiate our fellowship with God (pp. 87–88). Consequently, Badhwar (2003, p. 58) characterizes agape as “independent of the loved individual's fundamental characteristics as the particular person she is”; and Soble (1990, p. 5) infers that agape , in contrast to eros , is therefore not reason dependent but is rationally “incomprehensible,” admitting at best of causal or historical explanations. [ 1 ]

Finally, ‘ philia ’ originally meant a kind of affectionate regard or friendly feeling towards not just one's friends but also possibly towards family members, business partners, and one's country at large (Liddell et al., 1940; Cooper, 1977). Like eros , philia is generally (but not universally) understood to be responsive to (good) qualities in one's beloved. This similarity between eros and philia has led Thomas (1987) to wonder whether the only difference between romantic love and friendship is the sexual involvement of the former—and whether that is adequate to account for the real differences we experience. The distinction between eros and philia becomes harder to draw with Soble's attempt to diminish the importance of the sexual in eros (1990).

Maintaining the distinctions among eros , agape , and philia becomes even more difficult when faced with contemporary theories of love (including romantic love) and friendship. For, as discussed below, some theories of romantic love understand it along the lines of the agape tradition as creating value in the beloved (cf. Section 4.2 ), and other accounts of romantic love treat sexual activity as merely the expression of what otherwise looks very much like friendship.

Given the focus here on personal love, Christian conceptions of God's love for persons (and vice versa ) will be omitted, and the distinction between eros and philia will be blurred—as it typically is in contemporary accounts. Instead, the focus here will be on these contemporary understandings of love, including romantic love, understood as an attitude we take towards other persons. [ 2 ]

In providing an account of love, philosophical analyses must be careful to distinguish love from other positive attitudes we take towards persons, such as liking. Intuitively, love differs from such attitudes as liking in terms of its “depth,” and the problem is to elucidate the kind of “depth” we intuitively find love to have. Some analyses do this in part by providing thin conceptions of what liking amounts to. Thus, Singer (1991) and Brown (1987) understand liking to be a matter of desiring, an attitude that at best involves its object having only instrumental (and not intrinsic) value. Yet this seems inadequate: surely there are attitudes towards persons intermediate between having a desire with a person as its object and loving the person. I can care about a person for her own sake and not merely instrumentally, and yet such caring does not on its own amount to (non-deficiently) loving her, for it seems I can care about my dog in exactly the same way, a kind of caring which is insufficiently personal for love.

It is more common to distinguish loving from liking via the intuition that the “depth” of love is to be explained in terms of a notion of identification: to love someone is somehow to identify yourself with him, whereas no such notion of identification is involved in liking. As Nussbaum (1990, p. 328) puts it, “The choice between one potential love and another can feel, and be, like a choice of a way of life, a decision to dedicate oneself to these values rather than these”; liking clearly does not have this sort of “depth.” Whether love involves some kind of identification, and if so exactly how to understand such identification, is a central bone of contention among the various analyses of love.

Another common way to distinguish love from other personal attitudes is in terms of a distinctive kind of evaluation, which itself can account for love's “depth.” Again, whether love essentially involves a distinctive kind of evaluation, and if so how to make sense of that evaluation, is hotly disputed. Closely related to questions of evaluation are questions of justification: can we justify loving or continuing to love a particular person, and if so, how? For those who think the justification of love is possible, it is common to understand such justification in terms of evaluation, and the answers here affect various accounts’ attempts to make sense of the kind of constancy or commitment love seems to involve, as well as the sense in which love is directed at particular individuals.

In what follows, theories of love are tentatively and hesitantly classified into four types: love as union, love as robust concern, love as valuing, and love as an emotion. It should be clear, however, that particular theories classified under one type sometimes also include, without contradiction, ideas central to other types. The types identified here overlap to some extent, and in some cases classifying particular theories may involve excessive pigeonholing. (Such cases are noted below.) Part of the classificatory problem is that many accounts of love are quasi-reductionistic, understanding love in terms of notions like affection, evaluation, attachment, etc., which themselves never get analyzed. Even when these accounts eschew explicitly reductionistic language, very often little attempt is made to show how one such “aspect” of love is conceptually connected to others. As a result, there is no clear and obvious way to classify particular theories, let alone identify what the relevant classes should be.

The union view claims that love consists in the formation of (or the desire to form) some significant kind of union, a “we.” A central task for union theorists, therefore, is to cash out just what such a “we” comes to—whether it is literally a new entity in the world somehow comprised of the lover and the beloved, or whether it is merely metaphorical. Variants of this view perhaps go back to Aristotle (cf. Sherman 1993) and can also be found in Montaigne (1603/1877) and Hegel (1997); contemporary proponents include Solomon (1981, 1988), Scruton (1986), Nozick (1989), Fisher (1990), and Delaney (1996).

Scruton, writing in particular about romantic love, claims that love exists “just so soon as reciprocity becomes community: that is, just so soon as all distinction between my interests and your interests is overcome” (1986, p. 230). The idea is that the union is a union of concern, so that when I act out of that concern it is not for my sake alone or for your sake alone but for our sake. Fisher (1990) holds a similar, but somewhat more moderate view, claiming that love is a partial fusion of the lovers’ cares, concerns, emotional responses, and actions. What is striking about both Scruton and Fisher is the claim that love requires the actual union of the lovers’ concerns, for it thus becomes clear that they conceive of love not so much as an attitude we take towards another but as a relationship: the distinction between your interests and mine genuinely disappears only when we together come to have shared cares, concerns, etc., and my merely having a certain attitude towards you is not enough for love. This provides content to the notion of a “we” as the (metaphorical?) subject of these shared cares and concerns, and as that for whose sake we act.

Solomon (1988) offers a union view as well, though one that tries “to make new sense out of ‘love’ through a literal rather than metaphoric sense of the ‘fusion’ of two souls” (p. 24, cf. Solomon 1981; however, it is unclear exactly what he means by a “soul” here and so how love can be a “literal” fusion of two souls). What Solomon has in mind is the way in which, through love, the lovers redefine their identities as persons in terms of the relationship: “Love is the concentration and the intensive focus of mutual definition on a single individual, subjecting virtually every personal aspect of one's self to this process” (1988, p. 197). The result is that lovers come to share the interests, roles, virtues, and so on that constitute what formerly was two individual identities but now has become a shared identity, and they do so in part by each allowing the other to play an important role in defining his own identity.

Nozick (1989) offers a union view that differs from those of Scruton, Fisher, and Solomon in that Nozick thinks that what is necessary for love is merely the desire to form a “we,” together with the desire that your beloved reciprocates. Nonetheless, he claims that this “we” is “a new entity in the world…created by a new web of relationships between [the lovers] which makes them no longer separate” (p. 70). In cashing out this web of relationships, Nozick appeals to the lovers “pooling” not only their well-beings, in the sense that the well-being of each is tied up with that of the other, but also their autonomy, in that “each transfers some previous rights to make certain decisions unilaterally into a joint pool” (p. 71). In addition, Nozick claims, the lovers each acquire a new identity as a part of the “we,” a new identity constituted by their (a) wanting to be perceived publicly as a couple, (b) their attending to their pooled well-being, and (c) their accepting a “certain kind of division of labor” (p. 72):

A person in a we might find himself coming across something interesting to read yet leaving it for the other person, not because he himself would not be interested in it but because the other would be more interested, and one of them reading it is sufficient for it to be registered by the wider identity now shared, the we . [ 3 ]

Opponents of the union view have seized on claims like this as excessive: union theorists, they claim, take too literally the ontological commitments of this notion of a “we.” This leads to two specific criticisms of the union view. The first is that union views do away with individual autonomy. Autonomy, it seems, involves a kind of independence on the part of the autonomous agent, such that she is in control over not only what she does but also who she is, as this is constituted by her interests, values, concerns, etc. However, union views, by doing away with a clear distinction between your interests and mine, thereby undermine this sort of independence and so undermine the autonomy of the lovers. If autonomy is a part of the individual's good, then, on the union view, love is to this extent bad; so much the worse for the union view (Singer 1994; Soble 1997). Moreover, Singer (1994) argues that a necessary part of having your beloved be the object of your love is respect for your beloved as the particular person she is, and this requires respecting her autonomy.

Union theorists have responded to this objection in several ways. Nozick (1989) seems to think of a loss of autonomy in love as a desirable feature of the sort of union lovers can achieve. Fisher (1990), somewhat more reluctantly, claims that the loss of autonomy in love is an acceptable consequence of love. Yet without further argument these claims seem like mere bullet biting. Solomon (1988, pp. 64ff) describes this “tension” between union and autonomy as “the paradox of love.” However, this a view that Soble (1997) derides: merely to call it a paradox, as Solomon does, is not to face up to the problem.

The second criticism involves a substantive view concerning love. Part of what it is to love someone, these opponents say, is to have concern for him for his sake. However, union views make such concern unintelligible and eliminate the possibility of both selfishness and self-sacrifice, for by doing away with the distinction between my interests and your interests they have in effect turned your interests into mine and vice versa (Soble 1997; see also Blum 1980, 1993). Some advocates of union views see this as a point in their favor: we need to explain how it is I can have concern for people other than myself, and the union view apparently does this by understanding your interests to be part of my own. And Delaney, responding to an apparent tension between our desire to be loved unselfishly (for fear of otherwise being exploited) and our desire to be loved for reasons (which presumably are attractive to our lover and hence have a kind of selfish basis), says (1996, p. 346):

Given my view that the romantic ideal is primarily characterized by a desire to achieve a profound consolidation of needs and interests through the formation of a we , I do not think a little selfishness of the sort described should pose a worry to either party.

The objection, however, lies precisely in this attempt to explain my concern for my beloved egoistically. As Whiting (1991, p. 10) puts it, such an attempt “strikes me as unnecessary and potentially objectionable colonization”: in love, I ought to be concerned with my beloved for her sake, and not because I somehow get something out of it. (This can be true whether my concern with my beloved is merely instrumental to my good or whether it is partly constitutive of my good.)

Although Whiting's and Soble's criticisms here succeed against the more radical advocates of the union view, they in part fail to acknowledge the kernel of truth to be gleaned from the idea of union. Whiting's way of formulating the second objection in terms of an unnecessary egoism in part points to a way out: we persons are in part social creatures, and love is one profound mode of that sociality. Indeed, part of the point of union accounts is to make sense of this social dimension: to make sense of a way in which we can sometimes identify ourselves with others not merely in becoming interdependent with them (as Singer (1994, p. 165) suggests, understanding ‘interdependence’ to be a kind of reciprocal benevolence and respect) but rather in making who we are as persons be constituted in part by those we love (cf., e.g., Rorty 1986/1993; Nussbaum 1990).

Along these lines, Friedman (1998), taking her inspiration in part from Delaney (1996), argues that we should understand the sort of union at issue in love to be a kind of federation of selves:

On the federation model, a third unified entity is constituted by the interaction of the lovers, one which involves the lovers acting in concert across a range of conditions and for a range of purposes. This concerted action, however, does not erase the existence of the two lovers as separable and separate agents with continuing possibilities for the exercise of their own respective agencies. [p. 165]

Given that on this view the lovers do not give up their individual identities, there is no principled reason why the union view cannot make sense of the lover's concern for her beloved for his sake. [ 4 ] Moreover, Friedman argues, once we construe union as federation, we can see that autonomy is not a zero-sum game; rather, love can both directly enhance the autonomy of each and promote the growth of various skills, like realistic and critical self-evaluation, that foster autonomy.

Nonetheless, this federation model is not without its problems—problems that affect other versions of the union view as well. For if the federation (or the “we”, as on Nozick's view) is understood as a third entity, we need a clearer account than has been given of its ontological status and how it comes to be. Relevant here is the literature on shared intention and plural subjects. Gilbert (1989, 1996, 2000) has argued that we should take quite seriously the existence of a plural subject as an entity over and above its constituent members. Others, such as Tuomela (1984, 1995), Searle (1990), and Bratman (1999) are more cautious, treating such talk of “us” having an intention as metaphorical.

As this criticism of the union view indicates, many find caring about your beloved for her sake to be a part of what it is to love her. The robust concern view of love takes this to be the central and defining feature of love (cf. Taylor 1976; Newton-Smith 1989; Soble 1990, 1997; LaFollette 1996; Frankfurt 1999; White 2001). As Taylor puts it:

To summarize: if x loves y then x wants to benefit and be with y etc., and he has these wants (or at least some of them) because he believes y has some determinate characteristics ψ in virtue of which he thinks it worth while to benefit and be with y . He regards satisfaction of these wants as an end and not as a means towards some other end. [p. 157]

In conceiving of my love for you as constituted by my concern for you for your sake, the robust concern view rejects the idea, central to the union view, that love is to be understood in terms of the (literal or metaphorical) creation of a “we”: this concern for you is fundamentally my concern, even if it is for your sake and so not egoistic. [ 5 ]

At the heart of the robust concern view is the idea that love “is neither affective nor cognitive. It is volitional” (Frankfurt 1999, p. 129). Frankfurt continues:

That a person cares about or that he loves something has less to do with how things make him feel, or with his opinions about them, than with the more or less stable motivational structures that shape his preferences and that guide and limit his conduct.

This account analyzes caring about someone for her sake as a matter of being motivated in certain ways, in part as a response to what happens to one's beloved. Of course, to understand love in terms of desires is not to leave other emotional responses out in the cold, for these emotions should be understood as consequences of desires. Thus, just as I can be emotionally crushed when one of my strong desires is disappointed, so too I can be emotionally crushed when things similarly go badly for my beloved. In this way Frankfurt (1999) tacitly, and White (2001) more explicitly, acknowledge the way in which my caring for my beloved for her sake results in my identity being transformed through her influence insofar as I become vulnerable to things that happen to her.

Not all robust concern theorists seem to accept this line, however; in particular, Taylor (1976) and Soble (1990) seem to have a strongly individualistic conception of persons that prevents my identity being bound up with my beloved in this sort of way, a kind of view that may seem to undermine the intuitive “depth” that love seems to have. (For more on this point, see Rorty 1986/1993.) [ 6 ]

Critics of the robust concern view worry that it offers too thin a conception of love because, by emphasizing robust concern, it understands other features we think characteristic of love, such as one's emotional responsiveness to one's beloved, to be the effects of that concern rather than constituents of it. Thus Velleman (1999) argues that robust concern views, by understanding love merely as a matter of aiming at a particular end (viz., the welfare of one's beloved), understand love to be merely conative. However, he claims, love can have nothing to do with desires, offering as a counterexample the possibility of loving a troublemaking relation whom you do not want to be with, whose well being you do not want to promote, etc. Similarly, Badhwar (2003) argues that such a “teleological” view of love makes it mysterious how “we can continue to love someone long after death has taken him beyond harm or benefit” (p. 46). Moreover Badhwar argues, if love is essentially a desire, then it implies that we lack something; yet love does not imply this and, indeed, can be felt most strongly at times when we feel our lives most complete and lacking in nothing. Consequently, Velleman and Badhwar conclude, love need not involve any desire or concern for the well-being of one's beloved.

This conclusion, however, seems too hasty, for such examples can be accommodated within the robust concern view. Thus, the concern for your relative in Velleman's example can be understood to be present but swamped by other, more powerful desires to avoid him. Indeed, keeping the idea that you want to some degree to benefit him, an idea Velleman rejects, seems to be essential to understanding the conceptual tension between loving someone and not wanting to help him, a tension Velleman does not fully acknowledge. Similarly, continued love for someone who has died can be understood on the robust concern view as parasitic on the former love you had for him when he was still alive: your desires to benefit him get transformed, through your subsequent understanding of the impossibility of doing so, into wishes. [ 7 ] Finally, the idea of concern for your beloved's well-being need not imply the idea that you lack something, for such concern can be understood in terms of the disposition to be vigilant for occasions when you can come to his aid and consequently to have the relevant occurrent desires. All of this seems fully compatible with the robust concern view.

One might also question whether Velleman and Badhwar make proper use of their examples of loving your meddlesome relation or someone who has died. For although we can understand these as genuine cases of love, they are nonetheless deficient cases and ought therefore be understood as parasitic on the standard cases. Readily to accommodate such deficient cases of love into a philosophical analysis as being on a par with paradigm cases, and to do so without some special justification, is dubious.

Nonetheless, the robust concern view as it stands does not seem properly able to account for the intuitive “depth” of love and so does not seem properly to distinguish loving from liking. Although, as noted above, the robust concern view can begin to make some sense of the way in which the lover's identity is altered by the beloved, it understands this only an effect of love, and not as a central part of what love consists in. [ 8 ]

4. Love as Valuing

A third kind of view of love understands love to be a distinctive mode of valuing a person. As the distinction between eros and agape in Section 1 indicates, there are at least two ways to construe this in terms of whether the lover values the beloved because she is valuable, or whether the beloved comes to be valuable to the lover as a result of her loving him. The former view, which understands the lover as appraising the value of the beloved in loving him, is the topic of Section 4.1 , whereas the latter view, which understands her as bestowing value on him, will be discussed in Section 4.2 .

Velleman (1999) offers an appraisal view of love, understanding love to be fundamentally a matter of acknowledging and responding in a distinctive way to the value of the beloved. (For a very different appraisal view of love, see Kolodny 2003.) Understanding this more fully requires understanding both the kind of value of the beloved to which one responds and the distinctive kind of response to such value that love is. Nonetheless, it should be clear that what makes an account be an appraisal view of love is not the mere fact that love is understood to involve appraisal; many other accounts do so, and it is typical of robust concern accounts, for example (cf. the quote from Taylor above , Section 3 ). Rather, appraisal views are distinctive in understanding love to consist in that appraisal.

In articulating the kind of value love involves, Velleman, following Kant, distinguishes dignity from price. To have a price , as the economic metaphor suggests, is to have a value that can be compared to the value of other things with prices, such that it is intelligible to exchange without loss items of the same value. By contrast, to have dignity is to have a value such that comparisons of relative value become meaningless. Material goods are normally understood to have prices, but we persons have dignity: no substitution of one person for another can preserve exactly the same value, for something of incomparable worth would be lost (and gained) in such a substitution.

On this Kantian view, our dignity as persons consists in our rational nature: our capacity both to be actuated by reasons that we autonomously provide ourselves in setting our own ends and to respond appropriately to the intrinsic values we discover in the world. Consequently, one important way in which we exercise our rational natures is to respond with respect to the dignity of other persons (a dignity that consists in part in their capacity for respect): respect just is the required minimal response to the dignity of persons. What makes a response to a person be that of respect, Velleman claims, still following Kant, is that it “arrests our self-love” and thereby prevents us from treating him as a means to our ends (p. 360).

Given this, Velleman claims that love is similarly a response to the dignity of persons, and as such it is the dignity of the object of our love that justifies that love. However, love and respect are different kinds of responses to the same value. For love arrests not our self-love but rather

our tendencies toward emotional self-protection from another person, tendencies to draw ourselves in and close ourselves off from being affected by him. Love disarms our emotional defenses; it makes us vulnerable to the other. [1999, p. 361]

This means that the concern, attraction, sympathy, etc. that we normally associate with love are not constituents of love but are rather its normal effects, and love can remain without them (as in the case of the love for a meddlesome relative one cannot stand being around). Moreover, this provides Velleman with a clear account of the intuitive “depth” of love: it is essentially a response to persons as such, and to say that you love your dog is therefore to be confused.

Of course, we do not respond with love to the dignity of every person we meet, nor are we somehow required to: love, as the disarming of our emotional defenses in a way that makes us especially vulnerable to another, is the optional maximal response to others’ dignity. What, then, explains the selectivity of love—why I love some people and not others? The answer lies in the contingent fit between the way some people behaviorally express their dignity as persons and the way I happen to respond to those expressions by becoming emotionally vulnerable to them. The right sort of fit makes someone “lovable” by me (1999, p. 372), and my responding with love in these cases is a matter of my “really seeing” this person in a way that I fail to do with others who do not fit with me in this way. By ‘lovable’ here Velleman seems to mean able to be loved, not worthy of being loved, for nothing Velleman says here speaks to a question about the justification of my loving this person rather than that. Rather, what he offers is an explanation of the selectivity of my love, an explanation that as a matter of fact makes my response be that of love rather than mere respect.

This understanding of the selectivity of love as something that can be explained but not justified is potentially troubling. For we ordinarily think we can justify not only my loving you rather than someone else but also and more importantly the constancy of my love: my continuing to love you even as you change in certain fundamental ways (but not others). As Delaney (1996, p. 347) puts the worry about constancy:

while you seem to want it to be true that, were you to become a schmuck, your lover would continue to love you,…you also want it to be the case that your lover would never love a schmuck.

The issue here is not merely that we can offer explanations of the selectivity of my love, of why I do not love schmucks; rather, at issue is the discernment of love, of loving and continuing to love for good reasons as well as of ceasing to love for good reasons. To have these good reasons seems to involve attributing different values to you now rather than formerly or rather than to someone else, yet this is precisely what Velleman denies is the case in making the distinction between love and respect the way he does.

It is also questionable whether Velleman can even explain the selectivity of love in terms of the “fit” between your expressions and my sensitivities. For the relevant sensitivities on my part are emotional sensitivities: the lowering of my emotional defenses and so becoming emotionally vulnerable to you. Thus, I become vulnerable to the harms (or goods) that befall you and so sympathetically feel your pain (or joy). Such emotions are themselves assessable for warrant, and now we can ask why my disappointment that you lost the race is warranted, but my being disappointed that a mere stranger lost would not be warranted. The intuitive answer is that I love you but not him. However, this answer is unavailable to Velleman, because he thinks that what makes my response to your dignity that of love rather than respect is precisely that I feel such emotions, and to appeal to my love in explaining the emotions therefore seems viciously circular.

Although these problems are specific to Velleman's account, the difficulty can be generalized to any appraisal account of love (such as that offered in Kolodny 2003). For if love is an appraisal, it needs to be distinguished from other forms of appraisal, including our evaluative judgments. On the one hand, to try to distinguish love as an appraisal from other appraisals in terms of love's having certain effects on our emotional and motivational life (as on Velleman's account) is unsatisfying because it ignores part of what needs to be explained: why the appraisal of love has these effects and yet judgments with the same evaluative content do not. Indeed, this question is crucial if we are to understand the intuitive “depth” of love, for without an answer to this question we do not understand why love should have the kind of centrality in our lives it manifestly does. [ 9 ] On the other hand, to bundle this emotional component into the appraisal itself would be to turn the view into either the robust concern view ( Section 3 ) or a variant of the emotion view ( Section 5.1 ).

In contrast to Velleman, Singer (1991, 1994) understands love to be fundamentally a matter of bestowing value on the beloved. To bestow value on another is to project a kind of intrinsic value onto him. Indeed, this fact about love is supposed to distinguish love from liking: “Love is an attitude with no clear objective,” whereas liking is inherently teleological (1991, p. 272). As such, there are no standards of correctness for bestowing such value, and this is how love differs from other personal attitudes like gratitude, generosity, and condescension: “love…confers importance no matter what the object is worth” (p. 273). Consequently, Singer thinks, love is not an attitude that can be justified in any way.

What is it, exactly, to bestow this kind of value on someone? It is, Singer says, a kind of attachment and commitment to the beloved, in which one comes to treat him as an end in himself and so to respond to his ends, interests, concerns, etc. as having value for their own sake. This means in part that the bestowal of value reveals itself “by caring about the needs and interests of the beloved, by wishing to benefit or protect her, by delighting in her achievements,” etc. (p. 270). This sounds very much like the robust concern view, yet the bestowal view differs in understanding such robust concern to be the effect of the bestowal of value that is love rather than itself what constitutes love: in bestowing value on my beloved, I make him be valuable in such a way that I ought to respond with robust concern.

For it to be intelligible that I have bestowed value on someone, I must therefore respond appropriately to him as valuable, and this requires having some sense of what his well-being is and of what affects that well-being positively or negatively. Yet having this sense requires in turn knowing what his strengths and deficiencies are, and this is a matter of appraising him in various ways. Bestowal thus presupposes a kind of appraisal, as a way of “really seeing” the beloved and attending to him. Nonetheless, Singer claims, it is the bestowal that is primary for understanding what love consists in: the appraisal is required only so that the commitment to one's beloved and his value as thus bestowed has practical import and is not “a blind submission to some unknown being” (1991, p. 272; see also Singer 1994, pp. 139ff).

Singer is walking a tightrope in trying to make room for appraisal in his account of love. Insofar as the account is fundamentally a bestowal account, Singer claims that love cannot be justified, that we bestow the relevant kind of value “gratuitously.” This suggests that love is blind, that it does not matter what our beloved is like, which seems patently false. Singer tries to avoid this conclusion by appealing to the role of appraisal: it is only because we appraise another as having certain virtues and vices that we come to bestow value on him. Yet the “because” here, since it cannot justify the bestowal, is at best a kind of contingent causal explanation. [ 10 ] In this respect, Singer's account of the selectivity of love is much the same as Velleman's, and it is liable to the same criticism: it makes unintelligible the way in which our love can be discerning for better or worse reasons. Indeed, this failure to make sense of the idea that love can be justified is a problem for any bestowal view. For either (a) a bestowal itself cannot be justified (as on Singer's account), in which case the justification of love is impossible, or (b) a bestowal can be justified, in which case it is hard to make sense of value as being bestowed rather than there antecedently in the object as the grounds of that “bestowal.”

More generally, a proponent of the bestowal view needs to be much clearer than Singer is in articulating precisely what a bestowal is. What is the value that I create in a bestowal, and how can my bestowal create it? On a crude Humean view, the answer might be that the value is something projected onto the world through my pro-attitudes, like desire. Yet such a view would be inadequate, since the projected value, being relative to a particular individual, would do no theoretical work, and the account would essentially be a variant of the robust concern view. Moreover, in providing a bestowal account of love, care is needed to distinguish love from other personal attitudes such as admiration and respect: do these other attitudes involve bestowal? If so, how does the bestowal in these cases differ from the bestowal of love? If not, why not, and what is so special about love that requires a fundamentally different evaluative attitude than admiration and respect?

Nonetheless, there is a kernel of truth in the bestowal view: there is surely something right about the idea that love is creative and not merely a response to antecedent value, and accounts of love that understand the kind of evaluation implicit in love merely in terms of appraisal seem to be missing something. Precisely what may be missed will be discussed below in Section 6 .

5. Emotion Views

Given these problems with the accounts of love as valuing, perhaps we should turn to the emotions. For emotions just are responses to objects that combine evaluation, motivation, and a kind of phenomenology, all central features of the attitude of love.

Many accounts of love claim that it is an emotion; these include: Wollheim (1984), Rorty (1986/1993), Brown (1987), Hamlyn (1989), Baier (1991), and Badhwar (2003). [ 11 ] Thus, Hamlyn (1989, p. 219) says:

It would not be a plausible move to defend any theory of the emotions to which love and hate seemed exceptions by saying that love and hate are after all not emotions. I have heard this said, but it does seem to me a desperate move to make. If love and hate are not emotions what is?

The difficulty with this claim, as Rorty (1980) argues, is that the word, ‘emotion,’ does not seem to pick out a homogeneous collection of mental states, and so various theories claiming that love is an emotion mean very different things. Consequently, what are here labeled “emotion views” are divided into those that understand love to be a particular kind of evaluative-cum-motivational response to an object, whether that response is merely occurrent or dispositional (‘emotions proper,’ see Section 5.1 , below), and those that understand love to involve a collection of related and interconnected emotions proper (‘emotion complexes,’ see Section 5.2 , below).

An emotion proper is a kind of “evaluative-cum-motivational response to an object”; what does this mean? Emotions are generally understood to have several objects. The target of an emotion is that at which the emotion is directed: if I am afraid or angry at you, then you are the target. In responding to you with fear or anger, I am implicitly evaluating you in a particular way, and this evaluation—called the formal object —is the kind of evaluation of the target that is distinctive of a particular emotion type. Thus, in fearing you, I implicitly evaluate you as somehow dangerous, whereas in being angry at you I implicitly evaluate you as somehow offensive. Yet emotions are not merely evaluations of their targets; they in part motivate us to behave in certain ways, both rationally (by motivating action to avoid the danger) and arationally (via certain characteristic expressions, such as slamming a door out of anger). Moreover, emotions are generally understood to involve a phenomenological component, though just how to understand the characteristic “feel” of an emotion and its relation to the evaluation and motivation is hotly disputed. Finally, emotions are typically understood to be passions: responses that we feel imposed on us as if from the outside, rather than anything we actively do. (For more on the philosophy of emotions, see entry on emotion .)

What then are we saying when we say that love is an emotion proper? According to Brown (1987, p. 14), emotions as occurrent mental states are “abnormal bodily changes caused by the agent's evaluation or appraisal of some object or situation that the agent believes to be of concern to him or her.” He cashes this out by saying that in love, we “cherish” the person for having “a particular complex of instantiated qualities” that is “open-ended” so that we can continue to love the person even as she changes over time (pp. 106–7). These qualities, which include historical and relational qualities, are evaluated in love as worthwhile. [ 12 ] All of this seems aimed at cashing out what love's formal object is, a task that is fundamental to understanding love as an emotion proper. Thus, Brown seems to say that love's formal object is just being worthwhile (or, given his examples, perhaps: worthwhile as a person), and he resists being any more specific than this in order to preserve the open-endedness of love. Hamlyn (1989) offers a similar account, saying (p. 228):

With love the difficulty is to find anything of this kind [i.e., a formal object] which is uniquely appropriate to love. My thesis is that there is nothing of this kind that must be so, and that this differentiates it and hate from the other emotions.

Hamlyn goes on to suggest that love and hate might be primordial emotions, a kind of positive or negative “feeling towards,” presupposed by all other emotions. [ 13 ]

The trouble with these accounts of love as an emotion proper is that they provide too thin a conception of love. In Hamlyn's case, love is conceived as a fairly generic pro-attitude, rather than as the specific kind of distinctively personal attitude discussed here. In Brown's case, cashing out the formal object of love as simply being worthwhile (as a person) fails to distinguish love from other evaluative responses like admiration and respect. Part of the problem seems to be the rather simple account of what an emotion is that Brown and Hamlyn use as their starting point: if love is an emotion, then the understanding of what an emotion is must be enriched considerably to accommodate love. Yet it is not at all clear whether the idea of an “emotion proper” can be adequately enriched so as to do so.

The emotion complex view, which understands love to be a complex emotional attitude towards another person, may initially seem to hold out great promise to overcome the problems of alternative types of views. By articulating the emotional interconnections between persons, it could offer a satisfying account of the “depth” of love without the excesses of the union view and without the overly narrow teleological focus of the robust concern view; and because these emotional interconnections are themselves evaluations, it could offer an understanding of love as simultaneously evaluative, without needing to specify a single formal object of love. However, the devil is in the details.

Rorty (1986/1993) does not try to present a complete account of love; rather, she focuses on the idea that “relational psychological attitudes” which, like love, essentially involve emotional and desiderative responses, exhibit historicity : “they arise from, and are shaped by, dynamic interactions between a subject and an object” (p. 73). In part this means that what makes an attitude be one of love is not the presence of a state that we can point to at a particular time within the lover; rather, love is to be “identified by a characteristic narrative history” (p. 75). Moreover, Rorty argues, the historicity of love involves the lover's being permanently transformed by loving who he does.

Baier (1991), seeming to pick up on this understanding of love as exhibiting historicity, says (p. 444):

Love is not just an emotion people feel toward other people, but also a complex tying together of the emotions that two or a few more people have; it is a special form of emotional interdependence.

To a certain extent, such emotional interdependence involves feeling sympathetic emotions, so that, for example, I feel disappointed and frustrated on behalf of my beloved when she fails, and joyful when she succeeds. However, Baier insists, love is “more than just the duplication of the emotion of each in a sympathetic echo in the other” (p. 442); the emotional interdependence of the lovers involves also appropriate follow-up responses to the emotional predicaments of your beloved. Two examples Baier gives (pp. 443–44) are a feeling of “mischievous delight” at your beloved's temporary bafflement, and amusement at her embarrassment. The idea is that in a loving relationship your beloved gives you permission to feel such emotions when no one else is permitted to do so, and a condition of her granting you that permission is that you feel these emotions “tenderly.” Moreover, you ought to respond emotionally to your beloved's emotional responses to you: by feeling hurt when she is indifferent to you, for example. All of these foster the sort of emotional interdependence Baier is after—a kind of intimacy you have with your beloved.

Badhwar (2003, p. 46) similarly understands love to be a matter of “one's overall emotional orientation towards a person—the complex of perceptions, thoughts, and feelings”; as such, love is a matter of having a certain “character structure.” Central to this complex emotional orientation, Badhwar thinks, is what she calls the “look of love”: “an ongoing [emotional] affirmation of the loved object as worthy of existence…for her own sake” (p. 44), an affirmation that involves taking pleasure in your beloved's well-being. Moreover, Badhwar claims, the look of love also provides to the beloved reliable testimony concerning the quality of the beloved's character and actions (p. 57).

There is surely something very right about the idea that love, as an attitude central to deeply personal relationships, should not be understood as a state that can simply come and go. Rather, as the emotion complex view insists, the complexity of love is to be found in the historical patterns of one's emotional responsiveness to one's beloved—a pattern that also projects into the future. Indeed, as suggested above, the kind of emotional interdependence that results from this complex pattern can seem to account for the intuitive “depth” of love as fully interwoven into one's emotional sense of oneself. And it seems to make some headway in understanding the complex phenomenology of love: love can at times be a matter of intense pleasure in the presence of one's beloved, yet it can at other times involve frustration, exasperation, anger, and hurt as a manifestation of the complexities and depth of the relationships it fosters.

This understanding of love as constituted by a history of emotional interdependence enables emotion complex views to say something interesting about the impact love has on the lover's identity. This is partly Rorty's point (1986/1993) in her discussion of the historicity of love ( above ). Thus, she argues, one important feature of such historicity is that love is “ dynamically permeable ” in that the lover is continually “changed by loving” such that these changes “tend to ramify through a person's character” (p. 77). Through such dynamic permeability, love transforms the identity of the lover in a way that can sometimes foster the continuity of the love, as each lover continually changes in response to the changes in the other. [ 14 ] Indeed, Rorty concludes, love should be understood in terms of “a characteristic narrative history” (p. 75) that results from such dynamic permeability. It should be clear, however, that the mere fact of dynamic permeability need not result in the love's continuing: nothing about the dynamics of a relationship require that the characteristic narrative history project into the future, and such permeability can therefore lead to the dissolution of the love. Love is therefore risky—indeed, all the more risky because of the way the identity of the lover is defined in part through the love. The loss of a love can therefore make one feel no longer oneself in ways poignantly described by Nussbaum (1990).

By focusing on such emotionally complex histories, emotion complex views differ from most alternative accounts of love. For alternative accounts tend to view love as a kind of attitude we take toward our beloveds, something we can analyze simply in terms of our mental state at the moment. [ 15 ] By ignoring this historical dimension of love in providing an account of what love is, alternative accounts have a hard time providing either satisfying accounts of the sense in which our identities as person are at stake in loving another or satisfactory solutions to problems concerning how love is to be justified (cf. Section 6 , especially the discussion of fungibility ).

Nonetheless, some questions remain. If love is to be understood as an emotion complex, we need a much more explicit account of the pattern at issue here: what ties all of these emotional responses together into a single thing, namely love? Baier and Badhwar seem content to provide interesting and insightful examples of this pattern, but that does not seem to be enough. For example, what connects my amusement at my beloved's embarrassment to other emotions like my joy on his behalf when he succeeds? Why shouldn’t my amusement at his embarrassment be understood instead as a somewhat cruel case of schadenfreude and so as antithetical to, and disconnected from, love?

Presumably the answer requires returning to the historicity of love: it all depends on the historical details of the relationship my beloved and I have forged. Some loves develop so that the intimacy within the relationship is such as to allow for tender, teasing responses to each other, whereas other loves may not. The historical details, together with the lovers’ understanding of their relationship, presumably determine which emotional responses belong to the pattern constitutive of love and which do not. However, this answer so far is inadequate: not just any historical relationship involving emotional interdependence is a loving relationship, and we need a principled way of distinguishing loving relationships from other relational evaluative attitudes: precisely what is the characteristic narrative history that is characteristic of love? Again, proponents of the emotion complex view need to provide a clearer, principled account of the relevant kind of pattern of emotional responses constitutive of love.

Why do we love? It has been suggested above that any account of love needs to be able to answer some such justificatory question. Although the issue of the justification of love is important on its own, it is also important for the implications it has for understanding more clearly the precise object of love: how can we make sense of the intuitions not only that we love the individuals themselves rather than their properties, but also that my beloved is not fungible—that no one could simply take her place without loss. Different theories approach these questions in different ways, but, as will become clear below, the question of justification is primary.

One way to understand the question of why we love is as asking for what the value of love is: what do we get out of it? One kind of answer, which has its roots in Aristotle, is that having loving relationships promotes self-knowledge insofar as your beloved acts as a kind of mirror, reflecting your character back to you (Badhwar, 2003, p. 58). Of course, this answer presupposes that we cannot accurately know ourselves in other ways: that left alone, our sense of ourselves will be too imperfect, too biased, to help us grow and mature as persons. The metaphor of a mirror also suggests that our beloveds will be in the relevant respects similar to us, so that merely by observing them, we can come to know ourselves better in a way that is, if not free from bias, at least more objective than otherwise.

Brink (1999, pp. 264–65) argues that there are serious limits to the value of such mirroring of one's self in a beloved. For if the aim is not just to know yourself better but to improve yourself, you ought also to interact with others who are not just like yourself: interacting with such diverse others can help you recognize alternative possibilities for how to live and so better assess the relative merits of these possibilities. Nonetheless, we need not take the metaphor of the mirror quite so literally; rather, our beloveds can reflect our selves not through their inherent similarity to us but rather through the interpretations they offer of us, both explicitly and implicitly in their responses to us. This is what Badhwar calls the “epistemic significance” of love. [ 16 ]

In addition to this epistemic significance of love, LaFollette (1996, Chapter 5) offers several other reasons why it is good to love, reasons derived in part from the psychological literature on love: love increases our sense of well-being, it elevates our sense of self-worth, and it serves to develop our character. It also, we might add, tends to lower stress and blood pressure and to increase health and longevity. Friedman (1993) argues that the kind of partiality towards our beloveds that love involves is itself morally valuable because it supports relationships—loving relationships—that contribute “to human well-being, integrity, and fulfillment in life” (p. 61). And Solomon (1988, p. 155) claims:

Ultimately, there is only one reason for love. That one grand reason…is “because we bring out the best in each other.” What counts as “the best,” of course, is subject to much individual variation.

This is because, Solomon suggests, in loving someone, I want myself to be better so as to be worthy of his love for me.

Each of these answers to the question of why we love understands it to be asking about love quite generally, abstracted away from details of particular relationships. It is also possible to understand the question as asking about particular loves. Here, there are several questions that are relevant:

• What, if anything, justifies my loving rather than not loving this person?
• What, if anything, justifies my coming to love this particular person rather than someone else?
• What, if anything, justifies my continuing to love this particular person given the changes—both in him and me and in the overall circumstances—that have occurred since I began loving him?

These are importantly different questions. Velleman (1999), for example, thinks we can answer (1) by appealing to the fact that my beloved is a person and so has a rational nature, yet he thinks (2) and (3) have no answers: the best we can do is offer causal explanations for our loving particular people. And, as will become clear below , the distinction between (2) and (3) will become important in resolving puzzles concerning whether our beloveds are fungible, though it should be clear that (3) potentially raises questions concerning personal identity (which will not be addressed here).

It is important not to misconstrue these justificatory questions. Thomas (1991) , for example, rejects the idea that love can be justified: “there are no rational considerations whereby anyone can lay claim to another's love or insist that an individual's love for another is irrational” (p. 474). This is because, Thomas claims (p. 471):

no matter how wonderful and lovely an individual might be, on any and all accounts, it is simply false that a romantically unencumbered person must love that individual on pain of being irrational. Or, there is no irrationality involved in ceasing to love a person whom one once loved immensely, although the person has not changed.

However, as LaFollette (1996, p. 63) correctly points out,

reason is not some external power which dictates how we should behave, but an internal power, integral to who we are.…Reason does not command that we love anyone. Nonetheless, reason is vital in determining whom we love and why we love them.

That is, reasons for love are pro tanto : they are a part of the overall reasons we have for acting, and it is up to us in exercising our capacity for agency to decide what on balance we have reason to do or even whether we shall act contrary to our reasons. To construe the notion of a reason for love as compelling us to love, as Thomas does, is to misconstrue the place such reasons have within our agency.

Most philosophical discussions of the justification of love focus on question (1) , thinking that answering this question will also, to the extent that we can, answer question (2) , which is typically not distinguished from (3) . The answers given to these questions vary in a way that turns on how the kind of evaluation implicit in love is construed. On the one hand, those who understand the evaluation implicit in love to be a matter of the bestowal of value (such as Telfer 1970–71; Friedman 1993; Singer 1994) typically claim that no justification can be given (cf. Section 4.2 ). As indicated above, this seems problematic, especially given the importance love can have both in our lives and, especially, in shaping our identities as persons. To reject the idea that we can love for reasons may reduce the impact our agency can have in defining who we are.

On the other hand, those who understand the evaluation implicit in love to be a matter of appraisal tend to answer the justificatory question by appeal to these valuable properties of the beloved. This acceptance of the idea that love can be justified leads to two further, related worries about the object of love.

The first worry is raised by Vlastos (1981) in a discussion Plato's and Aristotle's accounts of love. Vlastos notes that these accounts focus on the properties of our beloveds: we are to love people, they say, only because and insofar as they are objectifications of the excellences. Consequently, he argues, in doing so they fail to distinguish “ disinterested affection for the person we love” from “ appreciation of the excellences instantiated by that person ” (p. 33). That is, Vlastos thinks that Plato and Aristotle provide an account of love that is really a love of properties rather than a love of persons—love of a type of person, rather than love of a particular person—thereby losing what is distinctive about love as an essentially personal attitude. This worry about Plato and Aristotle might seem to apply just as well to other accounts that justify love in terms of the properties of the person: insofar as we love the person for the sake of her properties, it might seem that what we love is those properties and not the person. Here it is surely insufficient to say, as Solomon (1988, p. 154) does, “if love has its reasons, then it is not the whole person that one loves but certain aspects of that person—though the rest of the person comes along too, of course”: that final tagline fails to address the central difficulty about what the object of love is and so about love as a distinctly personal attitude.

The second worry concerns the fungibility of the object of love. To be fungible is to be replaceable by another relevantly similar object without any loss of value. Thus, money is fungible: I can give you two $5 bills in exchange for a $10 bill, and neither of us has lost anything. Is the object of love fungible? That is, can I simply switch from loving one person to loving another relevantly similar person without any loss? The worry about fungibility is commonly put this way: if we accept that love can be justified by appealing to properties of the beloved, then it may seem that in loving someone for certain reasons, I love him not simply as the individual he is, but as instantiating those properties. And this may imply that any other person instantiating those same properties would do just as well: my beloved would be fungible. Indeed, it may be that another person exhibits the properties that ground my love to a greater degree than my current beloved does, and so it may seem that in such a case I have reason to “trade up”—to switch my love to the new, better person. However, it seems clear that the objects of our loves are not fungible: love seems to involve a deeply personal commitment to a particular person, a commitment that is antithetical to the idea that our beloveds are fungible or to the idea that we ought to be willing to trade up when possible. [ 17 ]

In responding to these worries, Nozick (1989) appeals to the union view of love he endorses (cf. the section on Love as Union ):

The intention in love is to form a we and to identify with it as an extended self, to identify one's fortunes in large part with its fortunes. A willingness to trade up, to destroy the very we you largely identify with, would then be a willingness to destroy your self in the form of your own extended self. [p. 78]

So it is because love involves forming a “we” that we must understand other persons and not properties to be the objects of love, and it is because my very identity as a person depends essentially on that “we” that it is not possible to substitute without loss one object of my love for another. However, Badhwar (2003) criticizes Nozick, saying that his response implies that once I love someone, I cannot abandon that love no matter who that person becomes; this, she says, “cannot be understood as love at all rather than addiction” (p. 61). [ 18 ]

Instead, Badhwar (1987) turns to her robust-concern account of love as a concern for the beloved for his sake rather than one's own. Insofar as my love is disinterested — not a means to antecedent ends of my own—it would be senseless to think that my beloved could be replaced by someone who is able to satisfy my ends equally well or better. Consequently, my beloved is in this way irreplaceable. However, this is only a partial response to the worry about fungibility, as Badhwar herself seems to acknowledge. For the concern over fungibility arises not merely for those cases in which we think of love as justified instrumentally, but also for those cases in which the love is justified by the intrinsic value of the properties of my beloved. Confronted with cases like this, Badhwar (2003) concludes that the object of love is fungible after all (though she insists that it is very unlikely in practice). (Soble (1990, Chapter 13) draws similar conclusions.)

Nonetheless, Badhwar thinks that the object of love is “phenomenologically non-fungible” (2003, p. 63; cf. 1987, p. 14). By this she means that we experience our beloveds to be irreplaceable: “loving and delighting in [one person] are not completely commensurate with loving and delighting in another” (1987, p. 14). Love can be such that we sometimes desire to be with this particular person whom we love, not another whom we also love, for our loves are qualitatively different. But why is this? It seems as though the typical reason I now want to spend time with Amy rather than Bob is, for example, that Amy is funny but Bob is not. I love Amy in part for her humor, and I love Bob for other reasons, and these qualitative differences between them is what makes them not fungible. However, this reply does not address the worry about the possibility of trading up: if Bob were to be at least as funny (charming, kind, etc.) as Amy, why shouldn’t I dump her and spend all my time with him?

A somewhat different approach is taken by Whiting (1991). In response to the first worry concerning the object of love, Whiting argues that Vlastos offers a false dichotomy: having disinterested affection for someone—for her sake rather than my own—essentially involves an appreciation of her excellences as such. Indeed, Whiting says, my appreciation of these as excellences, and so the underlying commitment I have to their value, just is a disinterested commitment to her because these excellences constitute her identity as the person she is. The person, therefore, really is the object of love. Delaney (1996) takes the complementary tack of distinguishing between the object of one's love, which of course is the person, and the grounds of the love, which are her properties: to say, as Solomon does, that we love someone for reasons is not at all to say that we only love certain aspects of the person. Thus, Whiting's rejection of Vlastos’ dichotomy can be read as saying that what makes my attitude be one of disinterested affection—one of love—for the person is precisely that I am thereby responding to her excellences as the reasons for that affection. [ 19 ]

Of course, more needs to be said about what it is that makes a particular person be the object of love. Implicit in Whiting's account is an understanding of the way in which the object of my love is determined in part by the history of interactions I have with her: it is she, and not merely her properties (which might be instantiated in many different people), that I want to be with, it is she, and not merely her properties, on whose behalf I am concerned when she suffers and whom I seek to comfort, etc. This addresses the first worry, but not the second worry about fungibility, for the question still remains whether she is the object of my love only as instantiating certain properties, and so whether or not I have reason to “trade up.”

To respond to the fungibility worry, Whiting and Delaney appeal explicitly to the historical relationship. Thus, Whiting claims, although there may be a relatively large pool of people who have the kind of excellences of character that would justify my loving them, and so although there can be no answer to question (2) about why I come to love this rather than that person within this pool, once I have come to love this person and so have developed a historical relation with her, this history of concern justifies my continuing to love this person rather than someone else (1991, p. 7). Similarly, Delaney claims that love is grounded in “historical-relational properties” (1996, p. 346), so that I have reasons for continuing to love this person rather than switching allegiances and loving someone else. In each case, the appeal to both such historical relations and the excellences of character of my friend is intended to provide an answer to question (3) , and this explains why the objects of love are not fungible.

There seems to be something very much right with this response. Relationships grounded in love are essentially personal, and it would be odd to think of what justifies that love to be merely non-relational properties of the beloved. Nonetheless, it is still unclear how the historical-relational propreties can provide any additional justification for subsequent concern beyond that which is already provided (as an answer to question (1) ) by appeal to the excellences of the beloved's character (cf. Brink 1999). The mere fact that I have loved her in the past does not seem to justify my continuing to love her in the future. When we imagine that she is going through a rough time and begins to lose the virtues justifying my initial love for her, why shouldn’t I dump her and instead come to love someone new having all of those virtues more fully? Intuitively (unless the change she undergoes makes her in some important sense no longer the same person she was), we think I should not dump her, but the appeal to the mere fact that I loved her in the past is surely not enough. Yet what historical-relational properties could do the trick? (For an interesting attempt at an answer, see Kolodny 2003.)

In part the trouble here arises from tacit preconceptions concerning the nature of justification. If we attempt to justify a love in terms of particular historical facts about the relationship, then it seems like we are appealing to merely idiosyncratic and subjective properties, which might explain but cannot justify love. This seems to imply that justification in general requires the appeal to general, objective properties that others might share, which leads to the problem of fungibility. Solving the problem, it might therefore seem, requires somehow overcoming this preconception concerning justification—a task which no one has attempted in the literature on love.

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character, moral | emotion | friendship | impartiality | obligations: special | personal identity | Plato: ethics | Plato: rhetoric and poetry | respect | value: intrinsic vs. extrinsic

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Guest Essay

Men Fear Me, Society Shames Me, and I Love My Life

By Glynnis MacNicol

Ms. MacNicol is a writer, a podcast host and the author of the forthcoming memoir “I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself.”

I was once told that the challenge of making successful feminist porn is that the thing women desire most is freedom.

If that’s the case, one might consider my life over the past few years to be extremely pornographic — even without all the actual sex that occurred. It definitely has the makings of a fantasy, if we allowed for fantasies starring single, childless women on the brink of turning 50.

It’s not just in enjoying my age that I’m defying expectations. It’s that I’ve exempted myself from the central things we’re told give a woman’s life meaning — partnership and parenting. I’ve discovered that despite all the warnings, I regret none of those choices.

Indeed, I am enjoying them immensely. Instead of my prospects diminishing, as nearly every message that gets sent my way promises they will — fewer relationships, less excitement, less sex, less visibility — I find them widening. The world is more available to me than it’s ever been.

Saying so should not be radical in 2024, and yet, somehow it feels that way. We live in a world whose power structures continue to benefit from women staying in place. In fact, we’re currently experiencing the latest backlash against the meager feminist gains of the past half-century. My story — and those of the other women in similar shoes — shows that there are other, fulfilling ways to live.

It is disconcerting to enjoy oneself so much when there is so much to assure you to expect the opposite, just as it is strange to feel so good against a backdrop of so much terribleness in the world. But with age (hopefully) comes clarity.

Fifty is a milestone. And the fact my 50th birthday lands on or around some other significant 50ths has brought some things into focus. Last year was the 50th anniversary of Roe v. Wade. This year is the 50th of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, which may be less well known but remains significant: It allowed women for the first time to have bank accounts and credit cards in their own name, not needing a male signature.

That my birth date landed between the passing of these two landmark laws makes it easier for me to see that the life I’m living is a result of women having authority over both their bodies and their finances. I represent a cohort of women who lead lives that do not require us to ask permission or seek approval. I have availed myself of all the choices available to me, and while the results come with their own set of risks, they have been enormously satisfying.

The timing of my birthday also helps me see the violent rollback of women’s rights happening right now as a response to the independence these legal rights afforded women. Forget about the horror of being alone and middle-aged — there is nothing more terrifying to a patriarchal society than a woman who is free. That she might be having a better time without permission or supervision is downright insufferable.

My entry into middle age certainly had the makings of an unpleasant story.

Like many, I spent the early months of the pandemic by myself. It was the type of solitary confinement that popular science, and certain men with platforms, enjoy reminding us will be the terrible future that awaits a woman who remains single for too long. I went untouched by anyone. Unsmelled, too, which you might think is a strange thing to note, but it’s an even stranger thing to experience. Unseen except by the building exterminator and the remaining doormen of the Upper West Side who gave distant friendly greetings on my evening walks around Covid-empty New York.

Alone, unmarried, childless, past my so-called prime. A caricature, culture would have it, a fringe identity; a tragedy or a punchline, depending on your preference. At the very least a cautionary tale.

By August 2021, I was desperate — not for partnership but for connection. I bought a ticket to Paris, a place where I’d spent much of my free time before the pandemic and where I had a group of friends.

Paris, I reminded myself, prioritizes pleasure. I dived in. Cheese, wine, friendships, sex — and repeat.

At first it was shocking. I was ill prepared to get what I wanted, what it seemed I had summoned. There were moments when I wondered whether I should be ashamed. I had also never felt so free and so fully myself. I felt no shame or guilt, only the thrill that came with the knowledge I was exercising my freedom.

These days, generally speaking, there is little in cinema or literature, let alone the online world, to suggest that when you are a woman alone (forget about a middle-aged woman), things will go your way, as I have often experienced.

There have been better times. In the 1980s, sitcoms were stacked with starring women for whom men were a minor-character concern — “Designing Women,” “Murphy Brown,” “The Golden Girls” — all of which, if they premiered today (and that’s a big if), would feel radical. Later there was “Girlfriends.” Even “Sex and the City,” with its often regressive marriage plotting, remains surprisingly modern in its depictions of adult friendship and sexual mores. In each case, just as it looked as if these narratives might begin to fully take root in the real world, the women largely went back inside (or into body bags, in the case of many “Law & Order” plotlines). By the early aughts we were housewives again, real and imagined.

I suspect that a lot of this backlash is connected to the terror that men experienced at discovering that they are less necessary to women’s fulfillment than centuries of laws and stories have allowed them to believe. That terror is abundantly apparent today: From Harrison Butker’s commencement speech suggesting that women may find more fulfillment in marriage and children than in having a career, to the Supreme Court once again debating access to abortion to the push to roll back no-fault divorce laws: All are efforts to return women to a place where others can manage their access to … well, just about everything.

It’s in this light that my enjoyment begins to feel radical. Come fly with me. There’s no fear here.

Glynnis MacNicol is a writer, a podcast host and the author of the forthcoming memoir “I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself.”

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