A REFLECTION ON LOVE
Love can be complex, compassion less so. Both are in great need in a divided world.
Love is a ubiquitous human preoccupation. It is also an unqualified good, and it has many forms. Admittedly, love is suffusing my thoughts of late as it seldom has. After seven years of painful loneliness occasioned by the death of my beloved wife, I have engaged a new relationship with a wonderful woman. My new-found relationship has been a stroke of very good fortune and is nothing less than personally transformative. Indeed, there is serendipity in life, and sometimes fate and fortune can be kind to us.
I believe that we are pervasively social creatures. While we all have different needs and temperaments – and judgment has no place here – I have found being alone in my widowhood difficult. It has also felt unnatural. My newfound love has restored companionship and intimacy to my life. As such, it is warmly enriching.
Love is also timeless. I am in my eighth decade, and at this stage of life, despite a propensity for denial, my age chronically makes itself felt. Yet, in intimate moments with my new partner, I leave my age behind. It becomes irrelevant. I become ageless in a transcendent moment.
It has been noted that being in love, especially in its early stages, is a form of madness. My companion continuously occupies my thoughts. She can do no wrong, and everything she does is bathed in an aura of wonderfulness. So it has been for five months; how long I will remain in this transported state, I do not know.
There is a dimension of clarity to this love. Its clarity is conjoined to its intensity, and it is joyfully liberating. However, this was not always the case. In my past, the concept of love did not seem at all clear to me. It was ambiguous and confusing. In truth, love is not a word I used often or comfortably until relatively recently. By contrast, “respect” is a value I employed with far less inhibition. Respect has neater lines. It is formal and tagged to objective behavior. I can comport myself with another person with respect even if I feel otherwise emotionally disposed. Respect in this sense can be commanded. But it makes no sense to order one person to love another, or even oneself.
The fifth commandment bids one to “honor” one's father and mother, not to love them. I conclude that one can and must bestow honor even in the absence of love, that there is an element of respect and esteem we owe our parents, even in their shortcomings. The structure of parental relations makes a claim on a child that transcends the affective substance of the relationship. By contrast, the commandment to “love one another as I have loved you,” as cited in the New Testament, has always seemed to me to be a conative statement, one of aspiration, and not an imperative that is directly applicable.
Part of my perplexity in earlier years, I conclude, results from the fact that love is a broad concept, containing a multitude of meanings and dispositions. Some of these are contradictory. Unlike respect, which is primarily behavioral, love is an emotion, and emotions can both be cultivated and emerge unbidden. I have had no trouble with love in the superficial sense. I can readily say “I love coffee ice cream” or “I love to go to the movies.” It is love when applied to our fellow human beings, where it matters most, that has caused me confusion and engendered caution.
At its foundation, love, depending on its employment, presents a contradiction. Reflecting on the meaning of love in my earlier years, I identified love with selfless altruism. It was a sublime disposition directed to all humankind without discrimination. I, therefore, concluded it was a rare phenomenon, a refined attribute of people of near saintly capacities. So understood, I couldn't make sense of romantic love that was passionately directed at one other person to the exclusion of others. Such a focus on a single person as the object of one's love seemed at total variance with love in its more ethereal manifestations. It closed oneself off from the needs and suffering of all others beyond the exclusive interests of one's chosen partner. In that sense love, to my mind, became ironically selfish. I might be blissfully happy and fulfilled in my love, but what about the rest of humankind, whose beloved happiness was beyond my interests and left to the mercies of fate? A world in which people went loveless was an unfair one. Was love exclusive, or was it an attribute of character directed outwardly to all? Hence, the contradiction and the confusion that addled my young mind.
The problem, I believe, results from the fact that the word “love” is applied to several quite different emotional states.
Through my study of ancient Greek, I came to realize that love is a common word with varied and diverse meanings and this understanding resolved my confusion. In classical Greek, there are three separate words describing these quite different kinds of love. First, there is “eros,”which is famously described by Plato in his Symposium. Even here it is complex. Eros is the driving force of attraction, most obvious in passionate sexual attraction. It is the attraction of bodies for each other that results from need, but also reveals our resources to seek it out and fulfill our needs. For Plato, this impulse transcends the physical, leading us to apprehend and appreciate another person's internal beauty. Hence the term “Platonic.” In its most rarified form, eros can be the force that impels the philosopher to comprehend the beauty inherent in pristine ideas or the mathematician's delight in the elegance of a mathematical equation. Whether carnal or sublime, eros is love that is charged and directed at an object.
Less charged is philia. Philia is more generalized love. It is the feeling that we have toward friends, family members, colleagues, and members of the community. It is the love associated with fellow-feeling, and a basis for the human bond. Admittedly, as I have grown older, I have appreciated the foundational importance of love so understood as expressive of our social natures and necessary for the coherence of society. Its thinning out may be one of the great societal crises of our times.
The final form of love is agape. Agape was translated into the Latin caritas, which means “charity,” giving it a universal reach. While originating among the ancient Greeks, agape conceptually became known in Western civilization through its employment by the early Christian church. There it was understood as divine love, and as hinted at earlier, love that is selfless. “God so loved (ἠγάπησεν, egapesen) the world...”
So understood, agape is an ideal, a model for human beings to approach, but never achieve. As creatures of the flesh, I would argue that unqualified love is not in the cards for us. Every act that is directed toward the interests of others, is partially motivated by self-interest. It is sometimes noted that a mother's love for her child comes closest to agape in the human realm. But I would maintain that even the most “selfless” mother might still harbor in the back of her mind the hope that her child will grow up to be kind to her, or at least, in some small measure, return to her the love she has given.
Even in this reflection on a most personal dimension of human experience, I can't, in these times, escape the political. Though it may be jejune to mention, our political condition is strewn with division, strife, and a marked absence of loving relations. The threats we confront give rise to combative dispositions, and loving sentiments seem to play little or no role in our public life.
Love is an emotion, and as such, its reach is limited. We are finite in our emotional resources and our love can only extend so far. In the three-fold typology, eros is life's greatest gift and a source of our most exquisite joy. Life would be far more impoverished and often tedious without it. But eros, while the most intense form of love, is also the most exclusive. We extend it to a limited number of others, and in many cases to only a single person over the course of a lifetime.
Pilia extends more broadly. But, again, as an emotional capacity, applied to others, its number of recipients is also limited. And agape is an ideal, inspirationally necessary, but too sublimely abstract to be widely put into practice.
Among the social emotions, my most favored is compassion. In my view, it's a sentiment that bears a relation to love, but I believe it can be more broadly applied to all of humanity. Compassion, in contrast to love, has a universal reach. Whereas whom I love is determined for reasons that are greatly arbitrary – some people I simply love and others I don't – compassionate feelings possess more of a cognitive component. Through understanding or projected imagination, I can apprehend that you and I share a common humanity. My compassionate capabilities can then lead me to appreciate, for example, that the pain I feel when injured, or my dignity impugned, is the pain you feel also. And just as I don't want to be the object of pain, neither do you. This understanding can lead me to action. It can lead me to provide help to you when you need it, or at least refrain from doing you more harm.
It was David Hume who said that reason is a slave to the passions. While I believe this is primarily true, I don't believe that such is completely the case. I believe that our emotions can be expanded, and new emotional possibilities can open up to us based on the cognitive and rational goals that we set for ourselves. In other words, we can grow in our abilities to love and extend our compassion to others.
In these difficult times, suffused as they are with conflict and hate, it is an ability that we would do well to keep in the forefront of our aspirations. Our maintenance of a decent society, indeed our very humanity, is at stake.
Joe, I am happy for you! I think that we can agree that love is really a kind of sustenance for living life beyond mere material survival. (And many people do die from lack of it.)
I raise my glass to your enduring "surthrival"!
Joe, I am so happy for you. We are at an age that we know love and lust cannot be equated, there is so much more to love and those complex relations with others, particularly with a specific person we choose to be devoted to and to love. I have never been alone, first in my parents' home where I enjoyed parental and familial love, and later with a spouse I love dearly. Watching her deteriorate slowly with dementia is killing me a bit at a time. But, this is the woman I love, cherish, serve, and defend.