What Is Love Anyway?

Philosophers have a way of asking what seem to be obvious questions, as though they were born yesterday. Questions like, "What is place?" or "What is love?" Many people would simply reply to the latter, "What a stupid question. Everyone knows what love is."

But the philosopher's whole point is to show precisely that we don't know what love is, not really. As with anything else, when you really start thinking about it deeply and trying to define it, you soon get lost and confused. Even your physical surroundings and your own self can start to dissolve when you spend any time thinking deeply about what they really are. If it serves no other purpose, philosophy reveals to us how ultimately mysterious everything is.

And what could be more mysterious than love? What is love, anyway? The problem is made more complex by the fact that the English word "love" actually refers to a number of different phenomena, so that any discussion of love without further clarification will inevitably result in a confusion of tongues. The Greeks did better in this regard by having at least four different words to describe four different things that English speakers all lump together as "love":

1. Storge, familial love or affection.

2. Philia, friendship.

3. Eros, sexual or romantic love.

4. Agape, unconditional love.

It is very important to note two things here:

1. The above brief definitions of these Greek words are oversimplified and potentially misleading. Eros, in particular, as the term is used in philosophy, is far broader than its commonly understood meaning of sexual love.

2. These four types of love, though they are different, can of course coexist in various combinations. For instance, one might very well feel all four types of love toward one's spouse.

In this series, I am primarily interested in focusing on eros, which, as I say, means far more than what the above simple definition suggests. Since it is connected and related to the other loves, however, I will also inevitably touch upon each of them in the course of my musings. But it is primarily eros that has become of particular philosophical interest to me. I am especially fascinated by Plato's ideas on the subject, which I explored this summer while composing my novel.

One thing philosophy accomplishes is that it shows us how our concepts are often unclear, and that we can conflate and confuse things that should be differentiated, or that we might fail to see that what we think are a variety of phenomena are actually different aspects of one and the same thing. In the case of love, it has become very clear to me that we fail to make certain crucial distinctions, a mistake that leads to much unnecessary unhappiness.

We have already touched upon one of these problems, which is inherent in the English language, and that is the fact that we have but a single word that is used to refer to a variety of phenomena, thereby generating confusion when anyone speaks about "love". My next step is to attempt to show that even the subcategory of erotic love needs further subdivisions in order to help us understand and properly respond to our desires and feelings.

In an age that is split between puritanical overcautiousness and Freudian oversexualization, it is nigh impossible to arrive at a proper and healthy understanding of eros, in all of its complexity and richness and fullness, without the aid of philosophy. Because of the peculiar misunderstanding of eros that characterizes modern Western (and especially American) society, much damage is done not only to relationships and individuals but also to the potential for happiness that exists in each of us and in each of our lives.

My hope is that with a proper understanding of our desires, much unnecessary fear might be overcome and that more people would be capable of having fuller and richer and deeper relationships with more people. We have become liberated sexually at the grievous and unnecessary cost of having become more repressed in terms of our nonsexual relationships.

The Book of Love: Introduction

The topic of love has not been addressed by philosophers nearly as much as it deserves. It is evidently one of the most important aspects, some would say the single most important aspect, of human existence, and yet one must search far and wide to find mention of it in the works of great philosophers. Plato is a notable exception (from his ideas we derive the term "platonic love"), but by and large philosophers seem not to have regarded love as being of great philosophical interest.

Love has always been of great philosophical interest to me, at least since around 1989, when, as I mentioned after my daughter was born, I came to the conclusion that the ultimate meaning of life could be found in the phenomenon of love, as an irreducible good for which no further explanation is possible or necessary.

In the late 90s, I briefly toyed with the idea of writing a philosophy book about love, particularly the variety known as eros (which does not, as I shall explain in a later post, mean the same thing as sexual love, though there is certainly overlap), and even more particularly the subcategory of eros that is the painful experience of unrequited love.

Since my separation this year, I have been thrust into a sort of existential relationship space which has given me cause to revisit and examine afresh my ideas about love in all its forms. The novel I wrote this summer, in fact, largely revolves around these themes (though it is also about much more than that). Even more recently I have begun to revive my old idea of writing a book on the philosophy of love, with special focus on the special problem of unrequited love. What I am doing right now in this blog is to attempt to start fleshing out my thoughts on the subject, in preparation for the writing of such a book.

You may well ask why unrequited love should be of such special significance from a philosophical point of view. One reason is precisely the fact that it is unhappy, and anything unhappy can lead one to become philosophical. I should also point out that when I say unrequited love, I mean something more than the transitory and superficial phenomena that we call crushes and infatuations. I have experienced plenty of those, but I have had two experiences in my life of a more lasting and profound type of unrequited love (feelings and experiences which I drew upon in the writing of my novel), and it is this more serious type of psychological suffering that might well cause one to wax philosophical (as well as wax poetical).

But it is not just unrequited love that I wish to examine and analyze for meaning. I am also recently much more interested in examining the nature of things like friendship, eros in general, platonic love, courtly love, and the phenomenon which psychologists call "limerence" and which the rest of us call being "in love" (or romantic love). I am particularly interested in examining the relationships among these various but interrelated phenomena, and in showing how many of our common conceptions about them might be mistaken and therefore counterproductive.

These are all very real phenomena and I don't think they can be readily dismissed by philosophers of the human condition. Each of these phenomena tells us something, not only about ourselves, but also about reality. Human beings are certainly a part of reality, and the things we feel, and even the things we invent, can all provide clues as to the nature of the world that produces us. The philosopher's task is to start with the familiar facts of human experience and to dig down through all the layers to discover what these phenomena can tell us about the nature of ourselves and of the world in which we live.

Though philosophy inevitably and necessarily involves some level of abstraction, my own style of philosophizing tends to be more personal and essayistic. I will no doubt draw upon and make reference to my own experiences, but I will not reveal the actual names of other people in order to respect both their privacy and my own. This project is not intended to be a confessional but a philosophical meditation. It is just that I like to relate my philosophical speculation to concrete experience as much as possible.

To some degree, I have already devoted much writing, in my novel, to speculation, meditation, and analysis of and on these subjects, but nonfiction writing provides a different means to think about and present the topics and issues. Fiction (including poetry) and nonfiction can address things in complementary ways and can work together to create a fuller picture. In both modes of writing, my discussion of these topics is meant to be exploratory rather than dogmatic. I am not providing definitive answers (as though I had them) as much as I am simply asking questions and exploring concepts in a search for understanding and truth. In this ongoing series of posts, I hope to begin painting a fuller picture of love, its nature and its meaning and its possibilities, not only for others but also for myself.