skye, you came to the philosophy of love by writing a book about what existentialists had to say about love. could you tell us a bit about that book before we get into your five choices?
The key question that interested me was: can you choose to love? It turns out that the answer is quite complicated, because when we start digging into that question we quickly slide into a tangled mess of theories about biology, evolution, psychology, myths and histories and social structures around relationships. I started reading Irving Singer, who wrote a detailed trilogy on the philosophical history of love. she said that although romantic lovers lose certain freedoms in relationships, the love they gain makes up for it. this statement frustrated me because it wasn’t clear how much freedom we should give up, or how we should even begin to think of love and freedom as an equation.
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I stumbled across existentialist thinkers and found that they specifically addressed this question, including max stirner, søren kierkegaard, friedrich nietzsche, jean-paul sartre, and simone de beauvoir, all of whom I discuss in my book. Now calling someone an existentialist is fraught with danger, because Beauvoir and Sartre grudgingly accepted the label, and Stirner, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche retrospectively affiliated with existentialism. although it is debatable whether they were all “existentialists”, they certainly all contributed to existential thinking about love and freedom.
There are two main ways we can understand this: ‘freedom from’, which refers to freedom from oppression, arranged marriages, traditional gender roles, or being enslaved to our desires, for example; and then there is the “freedom to”, which is the freedom to choose who you want to have a relationship with, the freedom to marry or not marry, etc. the existential idea is that once we free ourselves from all the pressures around us, many of which we may not be fully aware of, we can be free to create more authentically meaningful relationships. however, all of this is easier said than done. As Nietzsche wrote, “invisible threads are the strongest ties.”
Let’s move on to your first choice: an anthology of writings on love, specifically erotic love.
is the philosophy of love (erotic) of robert c. Solomon and Kathleen Higgins, which includes many excerpts from ancient philosophers, including Plato and Sappho, to contemporary philosophers like Martha Nussbaum. This book is a great overview of the philosophies of love, because it shows different methods of philosophizing, not only through classical abstract and parlor philosophers like Hegel, but also through excerpts from Shakespeare’s plays, novels of d h lawrence, the poems of rilke, the letters between héloïse and abelard and others. and it also shows how wildly divergent thinking about love is. There are psychological ideas from Freud and Jung, and feminist ideas from Shulamith Firestone, who believed that romantic love was a conspiracy to keep women in their place because it required them to sacrifice so much of themselves. We can see the seeds of ideas like this in an earlier section on Simone de Beauvoir, who thought that patriarchal social structures limit the possibilities for authentic love because they deprive women of the opportunity to be agents in their own lives and create their own futures. .
love is such a central theme in the work of philosophy from ancient times to the present day, but it is quite rarely taken out. there were relatively few books specifically on the philosophy of love.
yes, and it’s very strange because plato’s symposium is one of the most famous philosophy books of all time, and it’s about love. was written nearly two and a half thousand years ago and is about a group of men at a dinner party who were hungover from the night before. to control their pace and not get drunk too quickly, they decide that they will each give a speech about love. Socrates is the last to speak and towards the end, Alcibiades crashes the party. he is so drunk that a flutist has to help him walk. He is heartbroken and frustrated because he is in love with Socrates, but Socrates is not interested.
in martha nussbaum’s excellent review of the symposium on the philosophy of (erotic) love, she says that socrates is weird; he is like a statue because he is emotionally cold, he is ultra-rational and sees passion and lust as something quite inferior. She calls the symposium a “cruel and terrifying book” because it ends with these two men – Socrates and Alcibiades – competing with our souls by pitting reason against passion, and the philosophical against our humanity. this is one of the central dichotomies of love, the tension between thinking and feeling, which we see repeated throughout history.
Alcibiades was this beautiful young man that everyone was in love with, except Socrates, whom he loved. Socrates’ view of the nature of physical and erotic love was that it was a way of moving from the particular to the general, that it was a kind of springboard for people to get more in touch with the ultimate nature of reality, not which was an end in itself.
correct. it presents passion as a necessary first step, but also as something that must ultimately be overcome. the interesting thing is that socrates, when he explains this, is telling what a woman, diotima, has taught him about love. she describes a ladder where the first rung is appreciating one beautiful body, the second rung is appreciating two beautiful bodies, the next rung is appreciating all beautiful bodies, beautiful acts, knowing beauty, and so on to the top of the ladder where we can get to appreciate the beautiful with a capital b, a pure form.
“martha nussbaum says that socrates is weird; he is emotionally cold, he is ultra-rational, he sees passion and lust as inferior ”
This anthology is like a gateway to other philosophies of love because, for example, it doesn’t have Diotima’s full speech and it’s missing one of my favorite stories about the birth of love. Diotima explains how at a dinner of the gods, the god of resources drank too much nectar and passed out in the garden. the goddess of poverty saw him, slept with him, and thus the love of resources and poverty was conceived. I love this metaphor, because it is another way of illustrating the tensions of love. love can be super intense and overflowing, but it is also a lack. he is needy, but also creative. we have this idea that love is beautiful and wonderful, the other side is that it can also be very hard.
The book doesn’t give a definitive answer, but it’s my first choice because it opens up a lot of possibilities to think about love. However, in the conclusion, Robert Solomon suggests that instead of thinking of love as a force or a mystery, we should think of it as a virtue. in his opinion, love is an expansion of the self, but not in a narcissistic way. it is a dialectical and creative process, which implies loving and being loved, and defining ourselves as individuals and each other.
Let’s move on to your second choice of book, which is a 20th century classic: The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir.
This was published in 1949 and was so controversial when it was published that the Vatican banned it because it provided too much detail about women’s experiences and bodies. Beauvoir argued that we need to be free from oppression in order to be free to live and love authentically. the problem is that women, throughout most of history, have been subservient to men. not because of any particular struggle, but because women have accepted the story that it is what is best for them and that their highest destiny is to marry, be a mother and a housewife, and raise children, all under the guise of love.
“too often, marriage has been a socially acceptable form of slavery”
Marriage has been marketed to women as of such importance that women came to be defined by whether and to whom they were married, but too often it has been a socially acceptable form of slavery: housekeeping to change of financial guardianship. the existential problem is that it imposes roles on women that they did not actively choose. if they are forced to do so, it is oppression, and if they blindly accept it, then they are evading the existential responsibility of being agents in their own lives.
Under the guise of romantic love, presumably. the image of a romantic love is that, for the woman, it culminates in a conventional marriage and the care of the children and the care of the husband. As much as it is about love, it is attacking a particular vision of how we should live.
was a critique of romantic love, but also of those who find meaning in life second-hand through other people rather than creating it themselves. so that it can be through romantic love, like people who define themselves through their partners. But there are other ways people can use love to escape being what Beauvoir called “sovereign subjects”: through narcissism, mysticism, and motherhood. for example, the ideal of maternal love is supposed to involve self-sacrifice: the greater the sacrifice, the more ideal the mother. If a mother becomes a slave to her children, extracting all the meaning of her life from them at the expense of her own projects, then that presents a potential existential problem.
but de beauvoir wasn’t saying you can’t love your children, you can’t have children and be authentic.
no, of course it’s okay to love your kids and be proud of them. however, I think he underestimated the meaning that children bring to the lives of parents. Beauvoir had no children, and I sometimes wonder if his philosophy would have been different if he had. however, his point was that if children become the only meaning in a person’s life, then that is a problem. one of the things that beauvoir didn’t address was that sometimes people take time to do that kind of thing and then go back to their other projects. Beauvoir was writing in the 1940s when there were fewer women in the workforce, but she has an excellent point: She wrote The Second Sex nearly 70 years ago, yet we still see statistics showing that women’s careers suffer far more than men’s. men when they have children. Now, financial independence isn’t the only path to freedom, but he was right that it can make it easier.
obviously criticizes a particular vision of romantic love. but does that mean he has nothing positive to say about love?
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beauvoir was well aware that existentialism had a reputation for being negative, but I think his view of true love is positive, and applies to all kinds of love, not just romantic love. he says: “authentic love must be based on the reciprocal recognition of two freedoms; each lover would then experience himself as himself and as the other: neither would abdicate his transcendence, they would not mutilate themselves; together both would reveal values and ends in the world. for each of them, love would be the revelation of himself through the gift of himself and the enrichment of the universe”. In romantic love, an ideal relationship is one in which the lovers can freely choose each other instead of being united by a situation of dependency or weakness, or by the desire to possess each other.
that is quite different from my understanding of what jean-paul sartre said about human relationships, which is that they are constantly on the verge of sadism or masochism. either you subjugate the other person and make him part of your will, or he fights against you to subjugate you. there is this constant risk of turning the other person into a kind of object, instead of recognizing their humanity.
yes in being and nothingness, sartre implies that there is really no way out of this vicious circle; But Beauvoir’s philosophy is a direct response to that. he thought we could overcome it with generosity and equality. Furthermore, Sartre later moved closer to Beauvoir’s way of thinking and admitted that he might have missed something about the reciprocal recognition of freedoms. in notebooks for an ethics he says that perhaps authentic love is possible. perhaps we can “enjoy” others without trying to possess them. however, he was not entirely convinced because he also suggests that overcoming sadism and masochism could be overcoming love itself.
let’s move on to the third book: tête-á-tête by hazel rowley.
tête-á-tête is a dual biography that focuses on jean-paul sartre and simone de beauvoir. The second sex was Beauvoir’s theory, but this book explores the practical application of his and Sartre’s philosophy. i think this is an important book because beauvoir and sartre wanted to create a philosophy that could be lived, and they tried to live it as much as possible, breaking social conventions like marriage and monogamy and engaging in social activism. on the one hand, it’s voyeuristic because there are deeply intimate and often unflattering details about their relationships. on the other hand, they wrote prolifically about their intimate lives through their novels, which were loosely veiled accounts of their actual relationships, as well as autobiographies and personal letters. this book brings together a lot of that.
“It started with sartre without wanting to commit to a single girlfriend, but it became a whole philosophy”
It started with sartre not wanting to commit to a single girlfriend, but it became a whole philosophy. she told her friends: freedom is the most beautiful gift we can give ourselves. everyone accepted him for a while, but eventually abandoned him. Later, when he met Simone de Beauvoir, she hugged him. but the point was that it wasn’t just about the freedom to have sex with other people, because they thought that would be a cheap and meaningless form of freedom. they wanted to be more courageous and give themselves the freedom to fall in love with other people.
That’s interesting. that’s a much more radical kind of openness about the relationship. the usual characterization of the sartre-de beauvoir relationship was that theirs was an essential relationship and all others contingent. this seemed to imply that the contingents were not very significant, while only the central one was significant. but if you allow people to have multiple love attachments, then they are potentially very significant.
correct. and formed deeply meaningful relationships. that’s what made it so difficult. I think they underestimated that when you allow yourself to fall in love with other people, the stakes are raised much higher than a meaningless sexual encounter. anyway, sartre didn’t much like sex: she preferred croissants. Some people have suggested that this is why Beauvoir agreed, because she had wishes that Sartre could not fulfill. they had affairs with students and broke many hearts. Bianca Bienenfeld had a nervous breakdown and Evelyne Rey committed suicide. the book does a good job of highlighting the ideals and hopes, and the tragedies and risks of their lives. there were a couple of lovers who came very close to threatening the primary relationship between sartre and beauvoir as well.
so you think it was an experiment that worked? because it’s kind of an experiment in a different model of love than the traditional, romantic approach of finding your other half. it has that element in the sense that they meet, but it has the additional element of a lot of other people who also fit into that.
beauvoir later acknowledged that they did not take the third person sufficiently into account, and thought it was a flaw in their system. even though sartre and beauvoir freely chose their relationship and came very close to being authentic, although there are some suggestions that they lied, or rather that sartre lied to beauvoir, they had intense and loving relationships with others that were not existential, and these people tended to feel very hurt and jealous. For example, Nelson Algren was not impressed that Beauvoir described her relationship in considerable detail in one of her novels. algren said: “i have been to brothels all over the world and the woman there always closes the door, whether in korea or india… but this woman opened the door wide and called the public and the press… i have no any malice against her, but I think it was a terrible thing to do.”
That’s interesting, because the whole nature of their relationship was that it was done both openly and privately. in a sense, they were doing it with the awareness that other people would see them as a model of how to live. that’s essentially part of the early form of existentialism, isn’t it? that you become an example, instead of just going around chasing your own individual and subjective desires?
they didn’t mean that everyone should do what they did. rather, they were successful because they challenge us to reflect on our own relationships and situations. they encourage us to think about what is authentic to us. I don’t think they claimed to be role models, and they recognized that they didn’t always live up to their own ideals. Sartre said that it was not authentic, but that he wanted to point the way to others.
that’s probably consistent with their philosophy. the notion of being authentic is always fragile, teetering on the brink of bad faith. Let’s move on to your fourth option. this is a book that i don’t know, by tullia d’aragona, dialogue about the infinity of love. is this in the platonic tradition?
Not many people have heard of it. and yes, it is a platonic dialogue from the 16th century, between tullia d’aragona and her friend, benedetto varchi.
when was it written?
was published in 1547, but was probably written a few years earlier. The preface includes a note from Ella’s friend Muzio de Ella saying that she hopes d’aragona doesn’t mind, but she thought she was being too modest by using a pseudonym. muzio knew it was his voice and her thought, so he changed the name in the dialogue to tullia d’aragona and published it, all without his consent.
in your life?
yes. D’aragona takes a gadfly-style Socratic approach and provokes Varchi with questions about the nature of love. the key question in the dialogue is: is it possible to love within limits? to answer this question, they break it down into other questions: what is love? Is love a noun or a verb? is it a cause or an effect? If love ends, was it really love? if it ends, does it mean it reached a limit? they propose that love is a desire to enjoy a union with someone who is beautiful, or whom you believe to be beautiful. And the answer to whether love is infinite is that it is potentially infinite, but not really infinite, because it is impossible to love, or really love, with an end in sight or with a goal.
Are you suggesting that she implies we can’t avoid the goal-directed form of love?
no, that of d’aragona that loving with a goal in mind -for example, to stop loving after seduction- is a vulgar way of loving. it reduces love to a vile and sordid act. it is still love, but not ideal or virtuous.
Virtuous love goes beyond the physical, presumably, if it is in the Socratic tradition. At the symposium, as we have already mentioned, Socrates was eager to move from the physical individual to the cerebral and abstract form of love.
she does speak of love as a fusion of body and soul. her dialogue partner varchi theorizes about love, but she thinks he is too abstract and tells him to “bow down to experience”, which she trusts more than any reason any philosopher can come up with . she jokingly hints that she should know, because love is her profession.
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So, is she part of the empiricist tradition?
I wouldn’t officially categorize her as an empiricist, as her approach is to suggest and question rather than decree, but she certainly proposes that experience can inform theory in important ways, which is especially important when it comes to thinking about love. . .
Is it easy to read? How long is the book?
is short. about 50 pages. I don’t agree with everything he says because, despite the fact that his interlocutor and friend is homosexual, he makes some homophobic comments. I chose this book because it’s witty and funny, it raises some fundamental questions about the nature of love, and it’s also a fascinating insight into the society of the time. courtesans were among the few educated women, as they were expected to entertain with their minds and bodies, but still had to be careful what they said. d ‘aragona is very careful with her language in the dialogues. she is modest and self-deprecating, referring to her “low status” and apologizing at the beginning of the dialogue with statements like “I might make a mistake” and “I don’t possess enough learning and verbal embellishments…” but she is also bold. and assertive, telling varchi when he interrupts her, “If you hadn’t interrupted me, you might have understood better.”
“The key question in the dialogue is: is it possible to love within limits?”
Some people have suggested that we shouldn’t include women in the history of philosophy because it’s a revision of history, but d’aragona and other women were writing and influencing people. She also wrote an epic poem, Il Meschino, which is currently being translated into English, and wrote sonnets, some of which are available in a book called Sweet Fire by Elizabeth Pallitto. She organized philosophical salons in her apartment, attended by prominent authors, and wrote about her as an intellectual character in her own works. she was influential, but she’s just been overlooked.
It would be strange if the history of the philosophy of love was written entirely by men, since that is only one side of the heterosexual story, and men cannot know everything about love experientially that is relevant to the theme. It strikes me that in the history of philosophy, many of the women who have come to prominence as significant thinkers in their own right have included something on the philosophy of love, while many male philosophers, particularly in recent years, have succeeded and never touched on the subject.
There are male philosophers, such as Plato, Rumi, Soren Kierkegaard, and Stendhal, who wrote extensively on love. Kierkegaard’s Or / Or is one of my favorites because it addresses one of the key themes we’ve discussed: the tension between passion and reason, between emotion and intellect. he, or should i say his pseudonym victor eremita, sets up the book as a choice between the aesthetic or the ethical, but the question in the end is: can you have both/and, or is there something more? stendhal wrote about love to try to understand his obsession with a woman named matilde, a political activist who he said was as beautiful as luini’s salome in the uffizi gallery in florence. stendhal wrote the book for himself, he didn’t expect anyone to buy it, warning that the precondition for reading it is that love has made him miserable, which i suspect most people are, and why he has become such a classic and I was really hesitant to include it in this list.
You’re right that women seem to have taken the subject of love more seriously. one reason could be that it has played a larger role in women’s lives. bell hooks said that men who have written about love have tended to stick to the theoretical extreme and fail to explain the reality of love. while this may be true for plato, it is not true for rumi, kierkegaard, or stendhal.
let’s see the last book: all about the love of bell hooks
all about love by bell hooks is an optimistic book, a bit sermonizing at times, which is based on the spanish mystic teresa d’avila, the trappist monk thomas merton, the american philosopher and activist cornel west, as well as on psychologists like erich fromm. and m. scott peck. hooks, who writes his pseudonym in lowercase because he wants the focus to be on his ideas and not his name, though I suspect the lowercase draws more attention to his name, argues that love can be transformative, both individually and socially, but we we are not taught to love well, we are not taught what love is, and we are not talking about love meaningfully. she says that the family is meant to be the original school of love, but most families are dysfunctional. very often, they are hotbeds of psychological terror and autocratic and patriarchal reigns of power and domination. she is particularly critical of the nuclear family because it encourages women to depend on individual men and makes children dependent on individual women, thus facilitating the abuse of power. she was an advocate for a more communal family structure.
what about homosexuality? Many of the inequalities you speak of derive from gender roles. it gets more complicated if you move into the area of homosexuality. It seems that his problem, so to speak, is with a certain type of conventional heterosexual marriage.
true, and yes, she is particularly critical of traditional heteronormative structures and does not address homosexual relationships in any detail. some philosophers we have discussed do talk about homosexual love. For Plato in Symposium, male homosexual love is the highest type of relationship. Beauvoir says in The Second Sex that lesbian love can provide a model of the truly ideal reciprocal relationship that she had in mind. still, hooks is interested in the practice of love in everyday life for love in general.
“for plato, male homosexual love is the highest type of relationship”
one of the problems you see is that we tend to treat love as a noun, when it is really a verb. love is like love, she says. this reminds me of jean-paul sartre’s idea that love only exists in acts of love. Similarly, for bell hooks, love is a choice and an action. then love does not exist if there is abuse in the relationship, because you are not acting lovingly. she also brings a spiritual element; she defines love as nurturing your own spiritual growth and that of another person. now what she means by ‘spiritual’ is somewhat ambiguous, but her vision is for a more interconnected society; love should be an active force that creates a greater communion between us, but we are far from achieving something like that, and capitalism is partly to blame.
Capitalism exploits our confusion about love because we are bombarded by advertising that tries to convince us that our emotional emptiness and spiritual hunger can be filled through materialism. Many people define themselves by the “I buy, therefore I am” mentality. We’ve become a mass consumer culture and, Hooks writes, “we may not have enough love, but we can always buy.” we have come to worship money and possessions, which makes us more narcissistic, and that is also a problem for our relationships, because it tempts us to see them as disposable. She urges us to give up our will to buy, our will to power over others, and instead learn to love better because, as Thomas Merton wrote, “we discover our true selves in love.”
With this will to love, are we talking here about erotic love? or about love between any kind of human beings?
She is talking about love between any kind of human beings: love for children, love for friends, love for things, as well as love for romantic partners.
It is unusual to have courses in academic philosophy departments on the philosophy of love. I know you teach those. I was just wondering what they are like and how well received they are, if students have false expectations about what you could discuss on that topic.
I teach ‘philosophy of love and sex’ at the city university of new york and it’s a very popular class. It is always full. I don’t know why more philosophy departments don’t offer this as a major topic. philosophy has always been about love. means love of wisdom. beyond that, it is a fascinating subject that affects us all. students arrive with many preconceived expectations. Many believe in soul mates, so I often start exploring the roots of that myth with Plato’s Symposium and Aristophanes’ story that we used to be creatures with two faces, four arms, and four legs. one day we upset the gods and zeus split us in two and ever since then we have been looking for our ‘other half’. some students assume that love is just a matter of biology or survival of the species. many of his assumptions are heavily influenced by religion or pop culture. I hope you walk away with a lot more questions than answers, and shake off some of your prejudices. And that tends to be the case, showing how many different ways there are to think about love and introducing critiques of some of the common assumptions about relationships.
obviously there are more than five books on the philosophy of love. if you wanted to include some additional books, without saying too much about them, what would they be?
I recently came across Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of Women’s Rights, which is another underappreciated work. Wollstonecraft writes that because the women were uneducated, they spent their time trying to inspire love rather than pursue nobler ambitions. she described marriage as legal prostitution because men wanted to enslave women, and women wanted to fall in love with men who were wealthy enough that they could survive socially and live comfortably. this was england in the late 1700s, and wollstonecraft advocated the education of women and equality of the sexes, because then, she hoped, boys would not be so profligate and selfish and would treat women as human beings rather than objects of lust ; and girls wouldn’t be so caught up in frivolous activities that make them weak, vain and arrogant.
love: a very brief introduction to ronald de sousa is a good concise summary of the thought on love. he argues that love is a condition or syndrome, involving both emotions and thoughts, desires, and actions that revolve around another person. He also talks about polyamory, as does Carrie Jenkins in What Love Is: And What It Could Be. she proposes that love has a dual nature: it is both biological and social. for example, love with a robot cannot be romantic because the robot lacks the necessary biology and brain chemicals. she notes that society is beginning to change to allow more possibilities in relationships, such as same-sex marriage, and hopes that society will be more accepting of other types of consensual adult relationships, particularly polyamory.
I would also recommend Alain Badiou’s Praise of Love, a short manifesto in which he describes romantic love as a tenacious adventure that gives meaning and intensity to our lives. And, for the serious student, there’s also Irving Singer’s The Nature of Love: A Huge Three-Volume History of the Philosophy of Love.
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