Love

The Medea belongs to the tradition of the great books because it presents, with an intensity the philosophers do not always match, the fact that love can be a force of destruction as easily as of union. Medea has loved Jason with a love so absolute that for its sake she has betrayed her father, killed her brother, and left her country. When Jason, having been saved by her, puts her aside for a marriage more advantageous to himself, her love does not quietly fade. It converts, without any intermediate state, into a hatred of Jason as total as her love had been. The problem the play sets before the tradition is whether this conversion is a corruption of love by some external cause, or whether love, when it is of this kind, already contains its opposite within itself.

Euripides does not argue the point in the manner of a theorist, but he gives Medea the speeches by which she reasons herself into the act of killing the children she has had with Jason. She considers that the children are the hostages her love for Jason has given to fortune, and that their death will wound Jason more deeply than her own death would. She considers that their living on without her would leave her revenge incomplete. She considers, against all this, that they are her own children and that she has loved them; and she does not pretend that the love has been extinguished. What she claims is only that a stronger love, now turned to hatred, has overridden it. The play refuses the comfort of supposing that some failure in her love for the children made the deed possible. The deed is done in full knowledge of the love.

The questions raised here are taken up, in less concentrated forms, by almost every later treatment of love. The relation of love to hatred, and the question whether the two can have the same object, belong also to the treatment of Emotion, and the working of passion upon the faculty of deliberation belongs to the treatment of Will. What is peculiar to the idea of Love is the display of a case in which the passion is neither moderated by reason nor in conflict with another passion, but is simply the whole of what the agent wills, and in which the turning of that whole against itself is the tragedy.

The later tradition does not forget the case. Plato, in the Symposium and the Phaedrus, will construct a ladder of loves on which Medea's attachment would have to be placed very low, as a love of a particular that cannot rise above itself. Aristotle, in describing the friendship that is founded upon virtue, will mark off Medea's love precisely by what it lacks, namely the wish for the beloved's good as a good. Lucretius, treating love as a kind of fever of the body, will find in the Medea a confirmation of his diagnosis. What none of these treatments quite absorbs is the fact that Euripides' Medea is not deranged, is not ignorant, and is not unloving. She is a woman whose love, having been the whole of her life, becomes the whole of her hate, and she is able to say so.

In the Symposium, Plato offers the first sustained philosophical analysis of love. Through a series of speeches culminating in the instruction Socrates reports receiving from Diotima, love, or eros, is presented as a daimonic force, neither a god nor a mortal but an intermediary, born of Poverty and Resource, always seeking what it lacks. Love, on this account, is desire, and desire is for what is beautiful and good.

The central teaching of Diotima concerns the ascent of love. If a youth begins by loving a single beautiful body, he will soon perceive that the beauty of one form is akin to the beauty of another, and will pass from the love of particular bodies to the love of beautiful souls, then to the beauty of laws and institutions, then to the sciences, and finally to the Beautiful itself, unchanging and eternal, the source of all particular beauty. Love is thus understood as the motive force by which the soul ascends from the sensible to the intelligible. The relation of love to beauty is discussed more fully under the idea of Beauty.

In the Phaedrus, Plato adds a further characterization: love is a divine madness, a growing of the soul's wings, which may lead either to intoxication or to philosophy. On either account, the fundamental motion of love is toward the good.

Plato's analysis establishes the assumption, which later thinkers must either accept or contest, that love is essentially ascent. It also raises a question that recurs throughout the tradition: if the lover's goal is always the universal Beautiful, whether particular beloved persons are ultimately stages to be surpassed. Aristotle, in his treatment of friendship, will insist that genuine love is directed at a particular person for that person's own sake.

Aristotle shifts the discussion of love from eros to philia, or friendship, and devotes two full books of the Nicomachean Ethics to its analysis. Friendship, he holds, is essential to the good life: "no one would choose to live without friends, even if he had all other goods." It also appears to hold states together, and lawgivers care more for it than for justice.

He distinguishes three kinds of friendship, corresponding to the three things that are lovable: the good, the pleasant, and the useful. Friendships founded on utility or pleasure are real but unstable, dissolving when the ground of the friendship changes. Only the friendship of virtuous persons, who love each other for the sake of each other's goodness, is complete and lasting. Such friends wish each other well for the friend's own sake, share a common life, and become, in Aristotle's phrase, "another self."

This love requires time, equality, and a measure of identification. It is less ecstatic than Plato's eros but more concrete. Aristotle also considers, in the later books of the Ethics, whether a man should love himself most or someone else, and what the relation of self-love is to all love of others. The bearing of friendship on political life is discussed further under the idea of State.

Aristotle's treatment of friendship provides the framework within which much of the subsequent discussion proceeds. Aquinas will adopt the concept of philia to define charity as friendship with God; Montaigne will give it an intensely personal expression in his essay on La Boetie.

In Book IV of De Rerum Natura, Lucretius offers perhaps the most passionate argument against erotic passion in the Western tradition. Sexual love, he contends, arises from images (simulacra) striking the senses, inflaming desire, and driving lovers to frenzies that mistake delusion for union. Venus, on this account, should be entirely shunned, for once her darts have wounded men, "the sore gains strength and festers by feeding, and day by day the madness grows."

The Epicurean counsel is one of demystification. Lovers project perfection onto their beloved, overlooking evident flaws. The physical fulfillment they crave is impossible, since bodies cannot truly merge, and the more they pursue it, the more frustrated they become. Lucretius advises neither asceticism nor cynicism but a kind of clear-sightedness: to enjoy the pleasures of Venus without becoming enslaved to a single object of obsession. The relation of love to pleasure and pain, and the question whether love is more productive of happiness or misery, are treated further under the ideas of Pleasure and Pain and Desire.

On this view there is no ascent from the sensible to the intelligible. There are only atoms in motion and minds that may learn, with effort, not to be deceived by their own desires.

Lucretius thus provides the tradition with a materialist account of love, treating it as a psychological phenomenon that is powerful but fully explicable in natural terms. Both Montaigne and Freud, in different ways, draw upon this perspective.

Augustine transforms the Platonic conception of love's ascent into the Christian doctrine of caritas. Every soul loves, he maintains; the question is only what it loves. Rightly ordered love, or caritas, cleaves to God and loves all creatures in relation to Him. Disordered love, or cupiditas, clings to creatures as though they were ends in themselves.

In City of God XIV, Augustine formulates the distinction in its most compressed form: two loves have built two cities. The earthly city is built by self-love unto contempt of God; the heavenly city by the love of God unto contempt of self. Every human life, and indeed the whole course of history, belongs to one city or the other according to what the will ultimately loves. The bearing of this distinction on political life is discussed further under the idea of State.

The Confessions presents this doctrine in autobiographical form. Augustine records his disordered loves, including those for friendship, sensual pleasure, and worldly ambition, and traces how each was a search for God in places where God was not to be found. "My weight is my love," he writes; "by it I am carried wheresoever I am carried." He further observes that there is "a love wherewith we love that which we ought not to love," and that this love may coexist with a better love, so that the whole task of the moral life is to let the one grow and the other decrease.

Augustine thus identifies love with the fundamental orientation of the will. On his account, the ordering of one's loves determines the character of personal life, the structure of society, and the possibility of salvation.

Aquinas brings Aristotle's philosophical categories to bear on what Augustine had expressed in more personal and rhetorical terms. Love, or amor, he holds, is the first movement of the appetite toward a good, and it is the root of all the other passions. He distinguishes between love as a passion of the concupiscible faculty and love as an act of will, and further between natural love, whereby things seek what is suitable to them according to their nature, and the supernatural habit of charity, which exceeds the inclinations of nature and is infused by grace.

The supreme act of love, on Aquinas's account, is caritas, the theological virtue by which we love God above all things and our neighbor for God's sake. Drawing on Aristotle's analysis of philia, Aquinas defines charity as friendship with God: a mutual benevolence made possible because God has first loved us and has drawn us into communion with His own life. The questions Aquinas raises concerning the objects and order of charity are numerous and searching: whether we should love sinners out of charity, whether we should love our enemies, whether God ought to be loved more than our neighbor, whether a man ought to love himself more than his neighbor.

Charity, in this account, is the "form of the virtues," ordering and animating every other virtue by directing each toward the ultimate end. The bearing of this doctrine on the moral life generally is discussed further under the ideas of Virtue and Vice and Sin.

Aquinas thus draws together Aristotelian friendship, Augustinian caritas, and scriptural agape into a single systematic doctrine in which love connects nature to grace and ethics to theology.

In the Divine Comedy, Dante gives poetic expression to the theological understanding of love developed by Augustine and Aquinas. The entire moral universe of the poem is arranged by love: the damned in the Inferno are those whose loves were disordered; the penitent in Purgatorio are souls purging defective love; and the blessed in Paradiso are ranked according to the depth of their participation in divine love. Heaven, as Beatrice says, is "pure light, light intellectual full of love, love of true good full of joy."

Beatrice herself embodies the conjunction of the Platonic and Christian conceptions of love. In the Vita Nuova, she is an earthly beloved; in the Paradiso, she becomes the soul's guide toward beatitude, eventually yielding to Bernard and the final vision of God. The ascent remains recognizably Platonic in structure, but the stages are now the hierarchies of grace. The bearing of love on the ordering of sin and virtue is treated more fully under the ideas of Sin and Punishment.

The poem concludes with what is perhaps the tradition's most celebrated line on love. Having seen God, Dante writes that his desire and will are "revolved, like a wheel which is moved evenly, by the Love which moves the sun and the other stars." The cosmos itself is in motion because everything, in its own manner, loves God.

Dante thus presents love as the ordering principle of the entire created universe, the motive force of every creature, and the end toward which every soul is directed.

Montaigne, writing in the wake of the early death of his friend Etienne de La Boetie, offers in the essay "Of Friendship" the Renaissance's most personal account of love as friendship. He distinguishes what he calls perfect friendship from all lesser bonds, including kinship, marriage, and erotic attachment, and concludes that he has known such friendship only once, and expects not to know it again.

Erotic love, Montaigne observes, is "more active, more scorching, and more sharp," but it is also fickle and feverish; in this he recalls Lucretius. Marriage is a social contract whose affections are diluted by obligation. True friendship, by contrast, is a free and chosen union of two souls so complete that the ordinary language of debt and benefit no longer applies. "In true friendship," he declares, "I more give myself to my friend than I endeavor to attract him to me." Asked why he loved La Boetie, Montaigne can only reply: "Because it was he, because it was I." The distinction between the love of desire and the love of friendship is discussed further under the idea of Desire.

Aristotle's conception of the friend as "another self" is here given a deeply individual expression. The Essays as a whole may be understood, in part, as a conversation continued with an absent friend.

Montaigne preserves the Aristotelian ideal of friendship while departing from its systematic form. In his account, friendship is less a virtue to be classified than a singular experience, rare and difficult to articulate.

The treatment of love in Shakespeare is given most concentrated form in Othello, where a noble commander who has married the daughter of a Venetian senator is brought by the patient work of an ensign to doubt her fidelity and finally to kill her. The tradition from Plato through the theologians had discussed love chiefly under its highest and most ordered forms: the ascent to the good, the love of God, the friendship of the virtuous. The problem Shakespeare raises is what becomes of love when it has been set upon trust, and the trust is undermined from outside by a man who has no reason for the undermining which the play will finally disclose. Othello's love is not in the first place defective. What is defective is the capacity of the lover to bear what is presented to him as evidence against what he had believed; and the tragedy is that the same mind which had found in Desdemona the whole of its happiness finds itself unable to hold that happiness in the face of the insinuations Iago provides.

Three further plays extend the treatment in other directions. Romeo and Juliet is the case of a young love which has no obstacle in itself but only in the feud of the families into which its lovers have been born, and whose end is the reconciliation of the families by the deaths of the two it has joined. Antony and Cleopatra presents a love on the scale of empire: Antony has put aside the interests of Rome for the sake of the queen of Egypt, and the play is at once an account of what this love has cost him and a celebration of what it has made possible. The Sonnets, finally, are a long interior examination of a love which is neither licit nor fully illicit, and which the poet returns to in many moods across a hundred and fifty-four poems. The Shakespearean treatment, taken as a whole, does not propose a doctrine of love. It shows instead the range of cases and the range of ends to which the passion can be brought.

The philosophical questions raised belong to several other ideas. The relation of love to the other passions and to the will is treated under Emotion and under Will. The bearing of love on the family and on the bond of husband and wife is discussed under Family. What Shakespeare contributes to the idea of Love is the showing of what a love which had been given its full scope in a soul looks like when the conditions of its existence have been disturbed, and of what the lover can and cannot bear. The question the plays leave open is whether there is any love, on the human plane, which is proof against the kind of testing Iago provides.

Spinoza, in the Ethics, gives a careful analysis of jealousy as a passion compounded of love and hatred and pain, and his account is recognizably drawn from cases of the Shakespearean type. Rousseau, who takes up the question of the love between the sexes in the Emile and in the Nouvelle Héloïse, is writing in full awareness of the Shakespearean drama as a standing measure of what love between man and woman may come to. Freud, at the end of the tradition, will find in the passions of the Shakespearean lovers the evidence for an account of love as the displacement of earlier attachments, and will return repeatedly to Othello as a case in which the ordinary defenses of the ego have been overcome.

Spinoza defines love as "joy accompanied by the idea of an external cause," and hatred, correspondingly, as sorrow with the accompanying idea of an external cause. The quality of any love, on this account, depends on how adequate the mind's idea of its cause happens to be. Ordinary loves are confused because we do not adequately understand what we love; they bind us to external things and render us passive. Spinoza, like Aquinas and Freud, treats love and hate more extensively than any of the other passions, observing how their fundamental opposition runs through the whole emotional life.

As the mind advances from inadequate to adequate ideas, it begins to grasp all things through their first cause, which Spinoza identifies with God or Nature. The joy that accompanies this understanding is no longer a passion but an activity of the mind, and the love it involves is what Spinoza calls the amor Dei intellectualis, the intellectual love of God. This he regards as the mind's highest state. The relation of love to knowledge and to the intellectual virtues is discussed further under the idea of Knowledge.

Spinoza further maintains that this intellectual love of God is part of the infinite love with which God loves himself. To love God, on this view, is to participate in the self-knowledge and self-joy of the whole of nature, and it is not possible, Spinoza argues, for one who loves God to endeavor that God should love him in return.

Spinoza thus presents a conception of love that is cognitive and impersonal in character, identified with freedom and attainable only by the mind that contemplates all things under the aspect of eternity.

Rousseau places love in a developmental and social perspective. In the state of nature, the human being is moved by self-love (amour de soi) and pity; erotic love, with its jealousies and comparisons, is, on Rousseau's account, an artifact of social life. As people come together and begin to measure themselves by each other's regard, amour-propre, a vain and competitive form of self-love, replaces the simpler affections of the natural condition.

In Emile, Rousseau traces the awakening of love in the adolescent. Self-love first expands to pity, then to tender attachment, and at last to passion. Rightly educated, this sequence produces virtue and marriage; distorted by luxury and false opinion, it produces obsession and misery. La Nouvelle Heloise dramatizes both possibilities, depicting the intoxication of romantic love and the struggle to reorder it within the demands of moral life. The question of how education shapes the passions is treated more fully under the idea of Education.

On this view, love is neither the timeless eros of Plato nor the natural philia of Aristotle, but a social passion shaped by education, institutions, and inequality. What civilization has disordered, a reformed education may, Rousseau suggests, restore.

Rousseau thus contributes to the tradition both a romantic conception of love and a critical analysis of its social conditions. Love, in his account, is a force that must be educated rather than simply celebrated or condemned.

Freud's theory places the origin of love in the sexual instincts. "The nucleus of what we mean by love," he writes, "naturally consists in sexual love with sexual union as its aim." Self-love, love of parents and children, friendship, and devotion to abstract ideas are, in his view, all expressions of the same instinctive activity, differing from sexual love only because they are diverted from its aim or prevented from reaching it. From infancy the libido passes through stages, fixes upon various objects, is repressed, and reemerges in neurosis, in art, in religion, and in the fabric of civilization itself.

Sublimation, on Freud's account, redirects the sexual instinct from its original aims to cultural achievements; identification binds groups together; inhibition transmutes desire into tenderness. Civilization is thus built upon the renunciation and redirection of eros, and this is the source of both its achievements and its discontents. At one extreme of repression, the claims of civilization "make life too hard for the greater part of humanity"; at the other extreme of expression, the erotic instinct "would break all bounds and the laboriously erected structure of civilization would be swept away." The conflict between the erotic impulses and morality is discussed further under the ideas of Emotion and Duty.

In his later writings, Freud pairs eros with the death drive, and the two together compose the fundamental dynamic of human life. Love remains the great binding force, but it is locked in permanent struggle with the forces of destruction, within each psyche and across history.

Freud's contribution to the tradition is to naturalize love by tracing all its varieties to a common instinctual source. The many forms of love that earlier thinkers distinguished by kind are, on his account, distinguished only by the degree and manner in which the sexual instinct has been transformed.