Love & Philosophy

un_amour_de_swann_fot_tony_kent_-_gettyimages-583022840-s.jpg, default, Swann's Love directed by Volker Schlöndorff, 1984, photo by Tony Kent / Getty Images, Love & Philosophy

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Being stupid in love is cool. But not for philosophers. Love poses the greatest challenge to their efforts, for it either supersedes all the efforts of reason and then philosophy is unnecessary, or it is the cause of an impulsive, unintelligent life, and then philosophy is also unnecessary because, after all, love cannot be removed from life, and thus aspirations of rational self-guidance are doomed from the outset.

In love the greatest certainty and the deepest ignorance coexist alongside each other. People who are driven by love act as if they can see signs from above, but when it comes to their own souls’ condition, they are terribly ignorant of it, not to mention that of their beloved. This is painfully experienced by Marcel in the penultimate volume of Marcel Proust's novel In Search of Lost Time:

Miss Albertine is gone! How far deeper than psychology does suffering reach the psyche! A moment ago, looking inward into myself, I thought that this parting in absentia was precisely the thing I longed for (...) I concluded that I no longer wanted to see her, that I no longer loved her. (...) But our intellect, however keen, cannot perceive its own components and does not suspect their existence until they, in the face of a phenomenon capable of separating them, begin to shift into the solid phase from the volatile one in which they are mostly positioned. I was mistaken in imagining that I could see clearly into my own heart. And this knowledge, which I would not have gained by the subtlest perceptions of the mind, was given to me by a hard, shining, strange, sudden reaction of suffering akin to crystalline salt.

An intellectual approach to one's own feelings brings disappointment to the narrator, but Proust forces him to continue his efforts, and his footsteps are followed by the American philosopher Martha Nussbaum, who quotes this passage in her insightful essay Love's Knowledge. Is it possible to avoid the pain described here? Is our mind capable of seeing our feelings clearly? Or are we always and irrevocably "all fools in love," as Charlotte Lucas says in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice? This phrase resonated with tender wisdom in the writer's words, but today we see it on the streets, printed on T-shirts. The people who walk around with the We Are All Fools in Love inscription don't seem keen to share their wisdom, nor are they disillusioned romantics; rather, they participate in an ironic game in which being called a fool is not too great a price to pay for the excitement of love itself and of talking about it. Being stupid in love is cool.

But not for philosophers. Love challenges their intentions to the utmost, for it either supersedes all the efforts of reason, in which case philosophy is superfluous, or it is the cause of an impulsive, unintelligent life, in which case philosophy is also superfluous, because, after all, love cannot be removed from life, and the aspirations of rational self-management are therefore doomed to failure in advance.

In this philosophical struggle with love, we are all indebted to Plato, who in his Feast orders the guests gathered at Agathon's to make speeches in praise of Eros. This figure is presented in the speeches as the oldest deity of all, accompanying the birth of the world and the gods. For it is his power is to combine and unify. He is also described as the youngest deity, the frivolous companion of Aphrodite, not entirely serious or responsible in f his use of arrows. In the end, however, Plato finds a place in his philosophy for this ambiguous figure. It has not been easy to repeat this feat in the subsequent ages; the nearer we get to our own time, the more difficult. There are beautiful passages on love in St. Augustine and St. Thomas, on whom, in turn, Dante Alighieri modelled his work. Later, however, the philosophers ceded the field to the poets, and in the twentieth century only a few dared write about it. Among those few are Josef Pieper, Dietrich Hildebrandt, and Karl Jaspers. For the time being, however, let us return to the unfortunate Marcel.

The Search for the Essence of Love

Reflections on love are a very significant part of Proust's great project: the search for balance between intellect and experience. The writer makes his narrator wonder about the possible existence of sensations that would not be subject to arbitrary interpretations and that would not fall prey to self-deception. Something similar was considered by the ancient Stoics under the name of 'cataleptic sensations'. They were supposed to provide data that would be guaranteed by the very nature of the way it was experienced. In these unique cases, how we experience and what we experience would be in perfect harmony. Unfortunately, in Marcel's predicament the only candidate for this role was pain, but it was not pain that he was looking for. Proust sought the truth of love in chemical metaphors; he saw the inner life of the mind as a volatile substance that requires condensation, or as a solution of unknown composition that will reveal its nature once crystallized. But even these notions don’t soothe the anxiety. Love is, after all, about desire, and desire is never subject to crystallization, it is always in motion. The search for the truth about love does not stop here.

Among the founding acts of our culture is the belief that the search for love and the search for truth are mysteriously intertwined. In his speech at Agathon's feast, Socrates argues that the seemingly frivolous energy of Eros leads souls to the knowledge of the Ideal. Only love is capable of sending man on the bumpy, thankless path of struggling against popular opinions and searching for truth. Man, set in motion by erotic energy, advances from the imperfect reflections of ideas (in this role we usually find the beautiful human body) to the ideas themselves. Later philosophers disagree as to what this movement toward ideas involves: whether it is merely an intellectual act of rejecting what is unnecessary, or perhaps the perfecting of the subject itself, or perhaps, finally, the self-sacrifice of that subject to a higher cognition in which individual will, desire, and cognition no longer mean anything.

Whatever the case may be, we find in the end a certain ideal form of humanity that is inseparable from ideas and facticity. Further, numerous Platonists and Neoplatonists considered that this process was also a refinement of man’s morality. It was inconceivable for them, that erotic progression, the pursuit of the very source of love through which its particular incarnations could come into being, could lead to evil. If the admirer of Eros frees himself from the bonds of society constraining him, if he tends to transgress, it is only because those bonds are evil. If he arouses the rage of his fellow citizens, like Socrates, it is only because the former have much to reproach themselves for.

Agnieszka Gralewicz has a similar reading of Proust's work her dissertation 'In Search of Lost Time' as a Philosophical Treatise:

The desire for transgression that pushes the narrator toward the most exquisite company, toward the heights of love, toward the heights of suffering, is thus not a desire for merely social (i.e., horizontal) transgression, but evidence of a cognitive hunger that pushes one to transcend successive limited worlds, intellectual particularisms.

The author demonstrates that in Proust's work love is always directed towards a certain archetype:

Physical love, though sometimes facilitated by man and corrupted, appears in its essence as sacred love, seeking union with the source of existence, remembering the original genesis, paradise.

Rejecting successive hypotheses about the essence of love-knowledge, Proust finally concludes (in the last volume of the series, Time Regained) that it is realized in the work of writing, in the laborious reconstruction of life, in the cathedral of memory, in the museum of patterns that experience has left behind. The repetitiveness of emotions is a guide here, perhaps not entirely reliable, but not entirely blind or deceitful either.

The Love Struggle

A generation younger than Proust, the philosopher Karl Jaspers searched for the essence of love in a different way. Authentic existence is, according to him, impossible without the experience of Transcendence. The latter, however, speaks in ciphers, never directly. One such cipher is Unity. Every event in the world aims at founding and sustaining a certain unity. It is a primordial form - it cannot be derived from its many incarnations. This is where love appears in in its existential function: through it we become aware of the presence of unity in the world. In Philosophical Faith Jaspers writes of "spouses united in heaven", demonstrating a twofold relationship: on the one hand, we understand the relationship of love through its ideal image (towards which the effort of reflection directs us); on the other hand, we have no other way of knowing this ideal than through a concrete love relationship, through the tension that arises in it between desire and disappointment, diversity and union. The most important manifestation of love's transcendent roots is its’ exclusive character. As an example, Jaspers cites eroticism, which is polygamous in itself; it becomes transformed by love and directed towards one unique person.

But is this not a florid image? Is there not, at the heart of love, an overwhelming desire, a determining force, a drive, a frenzy of jealousy? Even in the solemn finale of the Divine Comedy we still find this ambiguity. For Dante writes that love echoes desire and will. Is it not then doomed to their impulsiveness and insatiability? But, on the other hand, we read in those famous verses that love sets the sun and stars in motion. It is thus a force, a certain imposition of goodness and order upon chaotic souls. This can also be seen, moreover, in Paradise - in the relationship between the Poet and the somewhat mentor - like Beatrice.

Jaspers perceives a momentous existential fact in the tension of love. Those who love each other bring into the relationship not only their feelings but also their potential, which allows them to live freely. Here, the unifying power of love is a threat. It tends to create one common sphere of possibility; it makes two persons one. Love must contend with this threat: for only in this way can it protect both freedom and itself. In Philosophical Faith we read:

Being oneself only takes place in itself when it takes place in the self as communicating with others. Hence one of the elements of existence is a love which struggles.

What is at stake? Well, what is at stake is the freedom to be yourself while at the same time bonding with a person who is free to be his or her own self. There is a real struggle taking place here. For we do not easily give up our own claims to position and possession, we do not give up our anger 'for goodness' sake', we do not tame our offended pride by an act of will. But sometimes we do all of the above under the overwhelming influence of love, while trying to have a similar effect on another person. We are wrestling with each other in an existential communication that is ultimately about being ourselves and knowing ourselves.

A Mystical Conversation

In Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil follows in the footsteps of the loving struggle, though I suspect Jaspers' formulation was unfamiliar to him. None of the characters in the novel (Urlich, Agatha Deotyma, Arnheim, Clarissa, Walter), have Virgil at their side, unlike the Poet in The Divine Comedy. There is no one to escort them to the place where they meet the spiritual Beatrice. Mankind at the beginning of the 20th century was already completely different: marked by doubt; without faith in the descent of love from the higher realms of being, in its divine origin. He must redefine it for himself anew.

The protagonists of the novel Ulrich and Agatha do exactly that in their never-ending conversation. This is their response to the surprise of their own passion, to the sting of social impossibility - for they are half-brother and half-sister. They are looking for the words of truth and simultaneously for a refuge in which the feeling that unites them could be fulfilled without being cursed. The place they seek is none other than the no-man’s-land known to philosophers - atopos, from which the word 'utopia' is also derived. The siblings, having not seen each other since childhood and practically unknown to each other, who then find themselves in a surprising state of love, do not want to participate in a game of secrets with society, but also remain committed to doing the right thing.

Thus, they both dream of what they call the Other State, where they would be sort of suspended - beyond all principle, in a mystical non-action, in which 'the leaves on the trees are not rustled'. Here they could obtain goodness without striving for it, as it would be impossible for any evil to flow from their action, or rather non-action. This place of love is not the world, but the Millennial Kingdom, the mystical state in which a thousand years are as one moment.

The way to get to that place, as I mentioned, is to constantly talk about love, because unlike friendship, love demands words: '... the brother and sister were constantly in conversation with each other and never had enough of it ... what they talked about revolved again and again and in a myriad ways around love'. And so, they spoke of the primordial nature of love, that in its light everything is charming and without it nothing is, that neither views, nor characters, nor deeds are the ground for it, that 'one does not love according to merit and compensation'. Finally, Agatha agitatedly declares that 'a person is merely a guest within love', that for love itself has no meaning. The Platonic belief that that which is concrete, or individual is unworthy of attention is still at play here. Even the loved person herself must give way to love: 'So nothing at all is important then', Agatha concluded, 'it doesn't matter who someone is, or what they think, or what they want, or what they do!'.

Ulrich and Agatha analyze, define, ignite themselves in occasional disagreements. Thus begins their struggle in the realm of possibility. But the most appropriate possibility has not yet revealed itself to them - the one in which, while expressing love, they give each other space to live. Indeed, we see that nothing else can fulfill their desires. Already at the outset, the writer makes the lovers doubt the reality of ordinary feelings. They are too ambivalent for them, entangled in personal and social mores. In order to protect themselves from the ordinary, the siblings first conceal themselves from society in Vienna, then embark on a journey to an isolated guesthouse to experience something that Musil describes thusly in Agata's words in the unfinished chapter of The Sigh of a Summer Morning:

Is it you or is it not? I know not where I am, nor do I want to know! I've overdrawn all my ability right up to the borderline of dark power! I am in love, and I don't know with whom! My heart is full of love and a void all at once.

He goes on even further:

(...) time stood still. The Millennium was no more than a blink of an eye as time reached the border of the Millennial Kingdom and God Himself seemed to have become palpable.

Ulrich takes in her words and is not surprised that Agatha seemed to know right away how to behave in this Millennial Kingdom.

One must remain completely quiet there," an inner voice whispered to her. - You must not even leave room for any desire, not even the desire to ask. One should deprive one's mind of all tools and not allow it to become a tool itself. It must be stripped of knowledge and will ...

And yet no experience is the last one when it comes to love. After a mystical ascent, Agatha and Ulrich return to their never-ending conversation:

Didn't you once say," [Agatha] asked, "that there are two fundamentally different possibilities of life, which correspond exactly to two different tonalities of emotion? One would be the possibility of an "earthly" feeling that never finds peace and never comes to fulfillment, and the other ... the possibility of a "mystical" emotion which constantly co-resonates but never achieves "full realization"?

This conversation is also a love struggle. It is an astonishing read for a contemporary imagination overwhelmed by images of eroticism that have nothing to tell us - and that is the state contemporary popular culture. Even filmmakers who give it their very best, like Terrence Malick in his film Song to Song, often fail to go beyond the mysterious, stereotypical 'texts' that don’t constitute a conversation. To say nothing of the large Warsaw billboard asking the passerby: 'What do you love Molière2.com for?'

Originally written in Polish by Robert Piłat, translated by: Michał Niedzielski

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