Meaning in Life, Volume 2: The Pursuit of Love

Preface to the Irving Singer Library Edition

In The Pursuit of Love, I return to the Nature of Love trilogy in two ways. First, I try to clarify and extend the concepts of love that I introduced there as a framework for the historical analyses that predominate in that work. Second, I raise questions about love that have an independent philosophical import of their own. At the end of this volume, I draw together some of the major foci as a quasi-unified perspective in this area. Since I am the kind of pluralist who recoils from any large-scale system making, however, even this approximation offers itself as merely a general view that others might or might not accept. As in virtually all my writings, I avoid grandiose assertions in order to concentrate on the detailed insights that I wish to convey. As Jean Cocteau says about his films, I think of myself as a carpenter who may construct solid and useful tables but scornfully leaves it to the mystifying mediums to make them talk. In this book the discussions that different readers might find valuable from their own point of view often include historical references that were studied at length in the three volumes of The Nature of Love. Nevertheless The Pursuit of Love goes beyond the conceptual boundaries of that trilogy while also continuing its inclusive panorama.

At the outset I reorient the basic direction of my speculations toward queries about meaningfulness that were scarcely broached in the love trilogy itself. Without denying my previous emphasis upon the role of imagination and creativity in the experience of love, I now investigate at greater length their ability to make one’s life meaningful. Though love is not the only means toward that end, both the need to love and the need to be loved are explicable to a large degree as part of an underlying search for meaning. In the introduction I describe love as a principal form of life by which creatures like ourselves seek meaningful relationships to persons, things, or ideals that matter to us. To that extent, meaning in life is conversely the pursuit of love, incomplete and often defeated as that can be.

As a clarification of this program, I suggest that, far from being either a need to love or a need to be loved, the human quest for meaning is most evident as a need-to-love-and-be-loved. In the rest of the book, I recurrently argue that love creates its manifold meanings through the devious appraisals and bestowals of value that people feel and somehow enact. To elucidate its phenomenology, I devote an early chapter to two myths about love that contribute to the affective experience of many people. One of these harkens back to creation mythology about a benevolent deity who, through infinite love, has made things to be as they are, and whose own being encloses the very perfection of love. Though various naturalistic opponents reject any such conception, as I do too, I try to show how their own views are also problematic.

The second myth is propelled by the concept of merging that was prominent and widely persuasive during the Romantic movement two hundred years ago. While I recognize how much lovers may sometimes crave an ecstatic oneness with another person, I maintain that fusion of the sort that the myth depicts is unattainable in our nature and often disastrous when it is sought.

Instead of following the lead of these myths, I devote the subsequent chapters to a mapping of love, a systematic charting of empirically observable regions within its domains. As a crucial preliminary to this endeavor, I return to a distinction that I made in the first volume of The Nature of Love but barely developed in that work. I delineate the differences between the love of persons, the love of things, and the love of ideals. These may combine but have frequently served as contrary impulsions and contradictory strivings for inherent meaningfulness. Having sought to clarify their individual and joint relevance to any amatory experience, I then map out a theory about the stages of love that human beings, and to some degree other animals as well, go through within their personal development. The bulk of this analysis resides in the eighty pages that I divide into the chapters entitled Sexual Love, Love in Society, and Religious Love.

The discussion of sexual love occurs as a sequel to an earlier book of mine entitled The Goals of Human Sexuality. That work united scientific sexology with a philosophical approach that both sexologists and philosophers rarely undertake. Parts of two chapters had previously appeared in The Journal of Sex Research and The Journal of Biosocial Science. In the book this technical material was placed within the setting of a philosophy of sex designed to provide an outlook that did not limit itself to the boundaries of science alone. One distinction in particular I would later return to in other books. It was a differentiation between the sensuous and the passionate, as I called them. These were terms for phenomena that occur in diverse human experiences, and above all in the varieties of sexuality. The sensuous consists in the soothing and usually pleasant feelings, thoughts, acts, and attitudes that are evoked by gratifying qualities of sensory stimuli. We get this hedonic consummation in immediate experience, or secondhand through memory and imagination, as excitation that our sense organs yield directly in themselves.

The passionate is different. It arises from strong emotions, ardent responses, and powerful desires that are often willful, emphatic, assertive. The sensuous can be gentle, patient, and suave but, on other occasions, it may be as insistent as any other urgent stimulation. The passionate also varies in intensity, but it is usually heart-pounding and vigorous. It sometimes bursts forth in a desire for oneness with another person’s body, mind, and total being insofar as that is amenable to sexual yearning. The sensuous and the passionate can occur separately or else in some confluence of the two. In my book Explorations in Love and Sex, I include a later version of the original distinction, but in The Pursuit of Love’s chapter on sexual love it plays a part in showing how greatly disparate sexuality can be.

Though the sensuous and the passionate belong to love as well as sex, my analysis of love more thoroughly depends on a wide-ranging distinction I make between the libidinal, the erotic, and the romantic. The great myths of love in the Western world, for instance those about Don Juan and Tristan and Iseult, graphically portray these three components. My discussion of them is predicated upon my reading of the complexities and ambiguities incorporated in the relevant myths of love.

In its libidinal mode, sexuality as a whole, and sexual love in particular, reflects the ultimately reproductive urges related to the preservation of the species. It is not by chance that Freud concentrates upon the ramifications of what he calls libido. His entire system of thought issues from the assumption that biological imperatives needed for the species to survive are either the obvious or hidden causes of sexual behavior, sexual feeling, and sexual depictions (as in art of virtually every kind). His postulates are reductivistic, though highly nuanced in the notions of sublimation, repression, and unconscious versus conscious motivation. Within these derivative constructs, biological facts of reproduction are thought to explain the meaning of all sexuality, and of love itself.

Rejecting this type of reductivism, in other books as well as in The Pursuit of Love, I treat the libidinal as just one among other elements in sex and in the sexual love to which it leads. It is a prominent but not exclusive form of love. Far from being definitive of all sex or of all love, the libidinal element of both sex and love fluctuates and varies in strength within a particular relationship. Imperious as it can be, it normally diminishes with age. Moral, aesthetic, and religious constraints may also tame and harness most of the libidinal forcefulness in men and women at any period of life.

The concept of the erotic has a broader, and profoundly more inclusive, scope as compared with the libidinal. The erotic accommodates the sometimes subtle and evanescent feelings that express the moral, aesthetic, and religious dimensions that I just mentioned. They help elucidate why elderly men flirt with young women and elderly women enjoy the attention of young men. A male’s fascination with a female’s profile or graceful posture when she walks may often be erotic, but not necessarily libidinal. The erotic is a gravitational pull that attaches his brain and body to this other person without requiring an explanation in terms of reproductive needs and impulses. I choose the word erotic because it comes from Eros, the name of the wayward god of love who bestows his favors gratuitously and in keeping with an ephemeral but basically aesthetic whim. Not being an offshoot of the libidinal, the erotic often displays itself at its best in works of art that we readily call beautiful because they are consummatory in ways that transcend biologically reproductive responsivity.

For its part, the romantic (in ordinary usage and whether or not the word is capitalized to signify the movement that reached its peak in the nineteenth century) entails two coordinates that may frequently govern the manifestations of sexual love. One of these is an eagerness to prolong the intimate relationship indefinitely—forever, as the poets often say. But romantic unions are notoriously fragile. For many people the romantic bond does not last for more than two or three months. Nevertheless, the fact remains that, while it does endure, those who have this kind of attachment may be captivated by the unrealistic hope that it will never end. The other co-ordinate of the romantic locates it as a bonding with some one and only man or woman who may then create and receive all, or almost all, the sexual love we are able to experience.

In distinguishing between the libidinal, the erotic, and the romantic components, I emphasize that they can occur simultaneously and in a harmonious unity, on occasion at least. Whether individually or in cooperation with one another, they can each contribute to sustaining the different expressions of love that I analyze in the chapters on love in society and religious love. In the first of these, my stage theory, originally inspired by the empirical research of Harry F. Harlow and other primatologists, begins with self-love and then proceeds through parental love, filial love, peer love, friendship as a form of love, love of one’s people or nation, and finally love of humanity. I see self-love as not only a foundation for any interpersonal love, but also as a necessary condition for each kind of it. This would not be the case if we identified self-love with selfishness or even self-confidence, as some theorists have. That mistaken idea was largely avoided by most of the ancient Greeks and by modern philosophers, Nietzsche for instance, who admired them.

The erroneous identification of self-love and selfishness is characteristic of Judeo-Christian thinkers who glorify the ideal of self-sacrifice and treat self-love as a deviation from love of the supreme deity, who is assumed to be infinitely loving. Whether or not God is thought to have descended into our worldly morass for the sake of taking its horrid sins upon himself, that conception of human worthlessness is abhorrent to me. Any such view of love goes wrong from the outset, I believe. Making the self-demeaning attitude uniquely definitive of spirituality precludes all genuine love that men and women can sometimes attain.

The succeeding types of love, each arising out of the wholesome love of oneself to which I have alluded, are internally related in the sense that the later stages are unlikely to be happily and meaningfully achieved unless the preceding ones have been, more or less. For instance, as Harlow concluded about the primate species he studied, individuals who had damaged self-love and inadequate peer love found it hard or indeed impossible to move on to viable and satisfying sexual love. Though this scientific generalization must always and progressively be validated by empirical research, in addition to whatever philosophical clarification is needed, it helped me formulate the comments and insights that structure this part of my writing. Something similar applies to the remarks I make about the love of humanity. In criticizing the philosophies of St. Augustine, David Hume, and Henri Bergson, I introduce ideas that seem to me more capable of surviving empirical inquiry than theirs can.

The chapter on religious love as well as the chapters on love in relation to autonomy, freedom, compassion, and the love of life extend my overall perspective. Mapping the relationship between love and autonomy, I augment my distinction between bestowal and appraisal by portraying love as an acceptance of the autonomy of some other person. I argue that love is a means by which one respects and sustains another’s autonomy while also affirming one’s autonomous relation to that person. This is an act of freedom regardless of the other kinds of freedom a lover may thereby renounce.

In my comments about religious love, I emphasize the courage and imaginative audacity in its searching for a worldview that encompasses everything in the cosmos and every bit of reality. At the same time, what I find most rewarding is the concept of compassion that some, not all, religions espouse. I distinguish compassion from sympathy or empathy inasmuch as compassion, unlike the other two, most fully manifests itself through meaningful action that an individual undertakes for the benefit of someone else, or other living creatures. My ideas about the love of life proffer a pluralistic view that reveals how love for what there is in animate nature, as a whole and in beings that are radically different from us, may be considered spiritual. The same can be said about the sheer love of love itself.

Once I finished The Pursuit of Love, I realized that much more was still needed to bolster and possibly complete my philosophy of meaning as well as love. Within its own context and raison d’être, The Harmony of Nature and Spirit resulted shortly afterward as a continuation of the reflections that appear in this book and cry out for further elaboration. As I have mentioned elsewhere in these prefaces, my writing normally proceeds in that fashion. I wish to emulate the tree of life I describe in the Johns Hopkins preface to The Pursuit of Love. Each branch yields new and sometimes interesting vistas, but the meaningfulness in climbing a tree resides in our moving on to successive branches with their novel perspectives that augment what we have seen at a former, lower, level. No single and pretentious totality is ever available to us. Only glimpses of varied realities.

I.S.

February 14, 2009

Preface

Wittgenstein was mistaken when he said that philosophy leaves everything as it is. He meant to identity philosophy with analytical maneuvers that enable us to solve cognitive puzzles rather than problems about how to live. He was probably reacting against Marx’s insistence that philosophy should lead us to change the world instead of merely telling us what it is. At the same time Wittgenstein and Marx were both greatly interested in basic questions about human values and the search for life’s meaning. Wittgenstein felt a kinship to religious writers such as Kierkegaard and Tolstoy, and his philosophic work always presupposed a mystical outlook he considered fundamental even though it defied articulation in language. What could not be said could be shown in expressive gestures, in art, and in moral acts. For his part, Marx remained faithful to his Hegelian origins insofar as he believed that the changes philosophy induces must be predicated upon truths about the nature of man’s existence as a nonrational as well as rational being.

What Wittgenstein and Marx both neglected is the way in which philosophy is itself a changing of the world. Each new venture in philosophy is not only a refraction or redirection of what previous thinkers have asserted but also a contribution to the intellectual and emotional equipment human beings need in order to create meaningful lives for themselves. Ideas evolve just as morphological structure or behavior does. Concepts that are not useful will not survive, except in the memory of antiquarians. A philosophy that lives on is one that affects, however indirectly, the imaginative efforts of people at some moment of history who are groping to make sense of the realities to which they are subject.

Needless to say, the consequences of philosophy may be very different from anything the philosopher himself could have foreseen. That is in the nature of creativity, as the God of the Old Testament learns when he realizes how corrupt his progeny have become and then decides to destroy almost all of them in the flood. If it is viable, a new way of doing philosophy originates a vital impetus that can alter what human beings recognize as their world. But it cannot control the ends to which it will be put, just as it cannot know in advance whether others will cherish or discard it. Even at its best, it merely offers future men and women an enlarged capacity to create their own meaning in life. They are free to treat it as they wish.

For this reason, no philosophy can provide a final solution to problems about meaning and value. Philosophy may nevertheless serve as conceptual art, as an artifact of the imagination that can elicit and fructify creative responses in other people. However incomplete, each effort encourages the human spirit to confront the mysteries that permeate existence. Writers such as Camus have likened man’s search for meaning to Sisyphus’ punishment in having to push boulders endlessly up a mountain, only to watch them roll back down again. A more accurate account of our condition occurs in the experience of Penelope, the heroine of Homer’s Odyssey. She reveals how the imagination operates both in constructing human problems and in coping with them.

In Homer’s tale, Penelope must find a means of temporizing while Odysseus is abroad. He has been at the Trojan wars for ten years. The nobles in Ithaca want her, as the queen, to choose another consort from among themselves. In order to fend them off in a tranquillizing manner while also being true to the husband who is ever-present in her thoughts and whom she awaits with unrelenting hope, Penelope promises to marry one of the suitors whenever she finishes a tapestry she is weaving. She works at it during the day, but secretly at night she unravels its intricate design and thereby gives Odysseus more time to make his appearance.

What is Odysseus to Penelope after ten years of absence? Not just a husband, but also an imagined object of her love in relation to whom she defines her worth, her respectability, her ideal state as a woman. Remaining his devoted wife as she does, she gives meaning to her existence. The ongoing tapestry symbolizes the continuance of her marriage and the fact that its integrity depends not only on Odysseus’s return but also on her constant anticipation of it.

In the process of making and unmaking, of weaving and reweaving, we may see the normal workings of imagination. Human beings regularly fabricate artful and sometimes fanciful behavior as part of a quest, which is native to our species, for meaningful life. By undoing what it has fashioned with such elaborate care, the imagination employs creative tropes that revise and sometimes reject responses that were previously valued but are now considered outdated or uninteresting. Once Odysseus does come back, he and Penelope must still spend that first long night together sorting out the pieces of their less than perfect marriage. Having done so, they can then build a new relation that takes them beyond their old one.

In some respects everyone’s life experience resembles the climbing of a tree. Whether or not our species can be said to have progressed as time passes, we possess the ability in each moment to explore different branches at our present elevation. Having preferred one or another branch, however, we are forced to choose among alternatives that are then within our grasp. It is always difficult to go backward, and possibilities that we neglected usually become unreachable. This fact of life involves freedom, not merely constraint in the choices we can make. It can even be beneficial. Anxieties we might have had as younger persons with seemingly endless prospects for personal development disappear once we need not make the hard decisions that formerly imposed themselves. Many branches that could have beguiled us will no longer necessitate burdensome deliberation if we know that some earlier choice has taken us to a point of no return.

In life—and above all, in the pursuit of