Julian Baggini

I was just coming out of Foyles bookshop on London’s Charing Cross Road when I ran into the editor of The Philosophers’ Magazine. It transpired that like me he was on his way to the launch of Michael Bywater’s book, Lost Worlds, being held at the remnant of one such world, Wilton’s Music Hall in the East End. That much I later discovered, for at the time I confessed I knew little about the book or the venue for the party.

“Basically, the book is about all the things, great and small, that no longer exist,” the editor informed me, “such as the dodo, the father’s favourite armchair, and woollen swimming costumes. I’m not sure if he mentions them, but I would also have thought symposiums belong to the category of lost worlds. Of course, businesspeople and academics organise what they call symposiums. But they are nothing like the gatherings of Ancient Greece, with food, wine, flute-girls, libations and so forth.”

“Has the symposium really vanished?” I replied. “Didn’t you yourself organise one? Joseph Chandler told me once about a kind of symposium that you and Michael were involved in a while back. Apparently, you were trying to decide whether a young woman would be advised to fall in love or steer well clear of it. He also said that a fairly vicious fight broke out between two of the philosophers present about the scope of Darwinian explanations.”

The editor laughed. “That’s not quite how I remember it,” he said, “though I have learned not to trust even my own memories entirely. But there is some truth in what Joseph told you. Of course, there were no flute-girls or libations. But there was food, drink and a lively, sometimes heated discourse on the nature of love.”

I asked if he would give me his account of how he remembered it. Since there was a good hour to spare before the launch party and it was being held the other side of town, he agreed to tell me what he remembered as we walked across the city. I believe him to be a trustworthy witness, though his caution about the weakness of memory needs to be doubly restated, as his account has also suffered from the distortions of my own recollection of our conversation. This, in any case, is what I remember of what he told me.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

We had gathered in a restaurant in Soho, an area notorious for its devotion to Eros, if not the other gods of love. Most of the guests were not well-known to each other. I had invited them all because I thought they would all have very different perspectives on the subject of love, which is the topic I had chosen for us to discuss. I remember it took a little time for everyone to really relax and offer their thoughts uninhibited. Fortunately, one of the guests was the philosopher Peter Cave, who is never backwards about coming forwards. So it was that he kicked off our discussion with his reflections of love. This is more or less what he said:

“There is an exchange in Samuel Beckett’s play, Endgame, in which Clov asks Hamm, ‘Do you believe in a life to come?’ Hamm replies, ‘All mine’s been a life to come.’

“The exchange reminds me of love, or at least of erotic love, or at least of what lovers strive after. Love involves both a quest for an end, one of permanence; yet, it seems, an inevitable endlessness to that quest – or even a giving up on the quest.

“I’m also reminded of love by Kafka’s tale of the poor man who seeks access to the law. What gives him hope is the existence of a gate to the law, despite the presence of an oppressive doorkeeper barring his way. The doorman accepts a bribe from the applicant – but only so the applicant knows he had not left anything undone. Eventually the doorkeeper slams the gate shut in the man’s face.

“Many of us seek love, as the poor man seeks justice, as a life to come; indeed, we tend to pity those who lack love and pity those who lack the desire for love. Sometimes we find love – we breathe in the ecstasy, it colours our world – yet we often know that we live an erotic fiction: our very biology slams the gate shut on any permanence.

“Love involves an incongruity between two perspectives: the Parmenidean – ‘All is one; there is no motion’ – and the Heraclitean – ‘Everything is in flux’. Love, on the one hand, has the aim of safety, stability, unity, eternity, the past – ‘We were meant for each other’; ‘Whatever happens, I shall always love you’ – yet, on the other hand, love promotes changes, uncertainties, jealousies, a drawing together of incompatibles (typically the incompatibility of man and woman). We seek love’s mountain tops, blue skies, an eternal togetherness that soars beyond the daily contingencies; yet, fleshy, developing, see-sawing biological monads that we are, we can attain no such transcendence.

“Erotic love, more mundanely, engages us in bodily intimacies, explorations and revelations; in flying kites, stretching the eyes, rhapsodising the moon. Yet it also involves losses and fears. It’s the hope that gets us: our search for the bliss of the union generates our vulnerability to another. This might lead me to recommend the life of a pebble; but, of course, that would be no life at all. Breathing love’s paradoxes at least keeps one amused.

“Plato argued that the tragic dramatist should also be a comic poet. An appreciation of love’s quest requires us to see both how it ensnares us in the tragic, yet also in absurdity. As Dennis the Menace from the Beano says, after watching a film, ‘He didn’t really kiss her…they’ve got stuntmen for that kind of stuff.’

“Reflect on how seriously we treat the funny business we do with each other’s body, yet how comical it is. As Schopenhauer said, ‘Love knows how to slip its love-notes and ringlets into ministerial portfolios and philosophical manuscripts. Every day it brews and hatches the worst and most perplexing quarrels and disputes.’ There is the urgency in sexual desire, yet le petit mort follows.”

 

Peter’s speech stirred many thoughts and questions in the minds of those present, but it was agreed that we should hear what everyone had to say in turn without interruption before launching into a discussion. So it was that Ellie Levenson, a young journalist whose columns often touch on themes of love, shared her thoughts with the assembled company.

 

“I should start with a confession. I am not sure that I have ever been in love. Nevertheless this won’t stop me talking about it. It seems to me that love really is some kind of mental illness, uncontrollable and frightening, though perhaps with some good elements too. With love, rationality and logic take a backseat.

“I don’t know that any musings on love can ever be complete without some kind of poetry, And I immediately thought of DH Lawrence’s poem, ‘A Young Wife’, which begins ‘The pain of loving you is almost more than I can bear.’

“Although Lawrence wouldn’t approve of my interpretation, to me, ‘the pain of loving you’ isn’t referring to the fine line between love and hate, or pain and joy, but the feeling, and the anguish, of being an essentially rational being caught up in a mental state where rationality is irrelevant.

“When I was a teenager, I had an infatuation with a friend. We developed an extremely close friendship which hung on our enjoyment of talking rubbish about books, drinking red wine and smoking a bit of cannabis. Over time my crush developed and I became convinced that I loved this person. I laugh at myself now, but I used to think, in that way that teenagers do, that if a gunman were to walk into a room we were both in and say one of us must die, I would choose myself because his life was worth more than mine.

“I thought this was love. I understand now that it was just teenage melancholy. But maybe it was love, because love is different for all people. Because love is an emotion, not an object, it is impossible to know if one person’s love is the same as another’s. So what for one person is love, may to me be lust, or to another infatuation. So it strikes me that love has to be self-defining. We can’t tell someone if they are in love, we cannot agree or disagree when someone tells us they love us or another. If someone thinks they are in love, then they are in love.

“In the musical, Fiddler on the Roof, Tevye the milkman asks his wife, Golde, ‘do you love me?’ She seems puzzled by the question: ‘I’m your wife,’ she replies.

“‘I know... But do you love me?’ Tevye insists. And Golde sings:

“‘Do I love him? For twenty-five years I’ve lived with him, fought him, starved with him.
Twenty-five years my bed is his, if that’s not love, what is?’

“I was talking about tolerance with someone the other day, commenting on living in a shared house, and saying that I am getting to the point in my life where I only want my books on the bookshelves. My companion asked what would I do when I have a partner. And we came to the conclusion that perhaps that is a good definition of love for the pseudo-intellectual such as myself – someone who you don’t mind sharing your bookshelf with. If that’s not love, what is?”

 

The claim that only the lover can judge if they were in love raised the hackles of some of the philosophers, who wanted to insist that people can think they are in love and be mistaken. And Ellie herself confessed to a possible counter-example to her final thought: it had taken ten years of marriage before one couple she knew agreed that they didn’t need to buy two copes of books they both wanted to read. Perhaps aided by the second bottle of Chateau Haut Guillon Bordeaux, opinions were being offered more readily than before. But the resolution to hear everyone in turn more or less uninterrupted was restated. And so it was the turn of another philosopher, Helena Cronin, who now had competition for the attention of those present in the form of the gorgonzola stuffed mushrooms and minestrone which arrived just as she began her speech.

 

“I’m going to tell you what the very best of modern science knows about love. The question is ‘What is love?’ And the answer is, of course, Darwinian. Love is an adaptation, evolved by natural selection. You then have to ask what the adaptation is for; and then how it works, what its mechanisms are.

“The answer to the question of what love is for is very simple and rather mundane: it’s all for the sake of the children. Love is designed to keep future fathers and mothers together. The offspring in our species come into the world utterly unable to fend for themselves; they require a huge burden of care, unceasing vigilance, a never-ending stream of resources. And they stay that way for a long, long time. Ancestrally, mothers couldn’t manage this alone. So it paid fathers to invest in them, to provide resources and protection. That is why natural selection has favoured both sexes with our treasured ability to form deep and long-lasting attachments – to fall in love.

“Love is therefore a human universal. So, contrary to a widely-held myth, romantic love is not a modern, European invention. It is part of our evolved human nature. So, for example, in all societies world-wide we find evidence of it in the culture. There’s always a specific word for love in the local language, always love songs, and always folk tales about romantic entanglements.

“Now to the question: How does this adaptation work? It comes in two stages: romantic love and companionate love. Romantic love is what both Peter and Ellie apparently had in mind; and both of them were rather cynical about the fact that it doesn’t persist. But it’s not designed to persist. Romantic love brings potential parents together; it is companionate love that keeps people together. And the two adaptations work in very different ways. The thing about romantic love is that it signals credible commitment. You are committed to your loved one not because you’ve made a rational calculation that she’s got the right waist-to-hip ratio, or he’s got the right bank balance. You may well take those things into account. But, if that were all there was, the object of your love would be vulnerable; for you might soon find someone else who scores even better on your check-list. Romantic love solves this problem because, above and beyond the check-list, you fall in love with someone because it is them. One of the most intriguing pieces of evidence for this is that even someone who is in love with an identical twin doesn’t fall in love with the other twin.”

 

Helena had some more to say about companionate love, but what I have just told you provided the real heart of her message. Having fulfilled her locutionary obligations, she was free at last to set upon the fungi that had been slowly cooling in front of her. Her Darwinian intervention had certainly sown the seeds for some discontent which was to emerge later. But once again, we resisted entering into a fierce debate prematurely, as two more guests remained to speak. The order of their doing so was settled by the most pragmatic criterion: Whereas Anthony Price was still eating his starter, Michael Bywater had polished his off. So it was that the writer and journalist said something like this:

 

“I’m not sure that talking about design doesn’t lead us down all sorts of blind alleys. But so does everything else. Everything we think and talk, believe, experience, feel, see, hear and are told about love turns out to be wrong.

“One of the problems with love is whether we’re talking about eros, agape, philia or storge. If we move to the Latin chop it’s neater: between amor – the erotic, sexual love between adults – and caritas, the caring love between friends and families. A couple of years ago I saw an advertisement on the Paris metro for Dim Tights. It showed a woman with endless legs, a very short skirt, very high red heals, probably Manolo Blahnik by the look of them, wearing these tights. This image of absolute erotic power would never be seen in our society, because there was another person in the picture, clutching her around the thigh. This person was a toddler, obviously her child. Amor and caritas were combined in a way which we find hard to imagine.

“That reflects the fact that love is a fractal phenomenon. Fractals are things which show the same pattern of order or randomness at whatever scale you look at them. Think of a coastline drawn big on a map. It goes in, it goes out, it’s jagged, it curves. Look at a bit of coastline closer up. It does the same thing at smaller scale. Look at it even closer still. It does the same thing. Look at a leaf, look at most biological systems and they’re fractals. Love behaves like a fractal. However closely we look at it, it seems to show the same pattern of desires, illogicalities and compulsions. It’s too broad for us to understand and it’s too fractal for us to understand.

“Suppose we do try and understand it. Imagine I am God, working through natural selection, creating a species with a high-investment reproductive strategy. The first thing I have to do is get sex right: I have to make sure that male A and female B meet, form a bond, breed and look after their children long enough for the life to go on. To lapse into the Anglo-Saxon, I need to get these two exemplars of the species to fuck and then stick together. But the first thing to do is to get them into bed. Once that’s achieved I can allow them to evolve lovely things like art, culture, poetry, music, philosophy, love, fidelity, constancy and so on. But first I must get them into the sack, drive them temporarily mad, get them to make a ridiculous commitment to each other, to believe against all possibility of denial that each to the other is special, the two sundered halves that have found themselves over the whole wide world.

“To again use the Anglo-Saxon, we have to remember that the bit of us that fucks isn’t the bit of us that thinks. So when we try to think about love, which stems from sexual reproduction, we find it hard to think about it because at the core of this is a desire which has nothing to do with the bit of us that thinks. The core problem of love is that we think it is the generation of a consistent mind, and we do not have a consistent mind.”

 

I am afraid that I have left out a great deal of what Michael said, perhaps even the most interesting parts. What we remember is so often only that which in some way connects with other memories, so that the web of recollection helps to sustain itself. So it is that of the many mental fireworks Michael lit, only those that flashed direct illumination on the contributions of the other speakers burned themselves into my memory. Still, I am in some ways surprised to have remembered as much as I have. I have often wondered if my memory is worse than it used to be. If it were so, however, I would hardly be able to remember how good it used to be.

So we finally came to our last speaker, a third philosopher, Anthony Price. His starter devoured, we gave him the opportunity to get his piece in before the main course arrived. What he really wanted to do was disagree with Michael and Helena. However, he resolved instead to deliver the speech he had originally intended to give.

 

“For the analyst, adolescent love is a re-enactment of the mental processes by which the child made his world a home. Because he loved his mother, he perceived her as loving him, which is simple projection. Also because he loved her, he perceived her as lovable, which is complex projection. Because he was afraid to lose her, he incorporated her in phantasy within himself, thus forming his first, and most positive, ego-ideal. Of course, this is the rosy side of things. To the extent that he also hated her, and blamed her for being insecurely his own, he projected, and introjected, bad qualities and objects.

“But that is lost, and recoverable only speculatively. The adolescent re-enacts it in a new context of which he will always retain a memory, and in new forms that lend themselves to articulation. He thus recovers a conscious, and gains an intelligent, awareness of the nature that he shares with the child that he was. Falling in love is always a self-revelation.

“Can it also be a revelation of the other? It is a familiar thought that it can’t be, and the theme is recurrent in Proust, who takes the lover to know less than anyone about the beloved. However, our desires enjoy a remarkable plasticity, and – like the Lesbian rule cited by Aristotle – can adapt themselves to objects rather than adapting objects, in the manner of Procrustes, to themselves. Here Molière, in Le misanthrope, is a corrective: ‘Their passion never sees aught to blame in it, and in the beloved all things become loveable. They think their faults perfections, and invent sweet terms to call them by.’

“Such a love re-evaluates what is there to be perceived. A purely idealising love, which re-creates the beloved anew, expresses either ignorance, or hatred, of what she is actually like.

“Both these responses, of idealisation or of re-evaluation, fall under Stendhal’s concept of cristillisation, ‘that action of the mind that discovers fresh perfections in its beloved at every turn of events.’ In this manner, every new discovery about the beloved, and every new situation in which she can be imagined, becomes a new reason for loving her. As Stendhal cites, ‘One of your friends breaks his arm hunting; how sweet it is to receive the care of a woman whom one loves!’

“While the idealising aspect of love is the replica of an infantile attachment, its re-evaluative aspect becomes the prototype of a Christian love which takes as its object not one person as one would wish her to be, but all humans as they actually are, in all their concreteness. Erotic love thus becomes the bridge between the irrecoverable starting-point, and the unimaginable end-point, of human love at its most imperative.”

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

By the time the editor had finished telling me about all the speeches we were already close to the Tower of London and so were near to our destination.

“But what of the fracas about Darwinism and the question about whether it is advisable to fall in love?” I asked. “Are these complete fictions?

“Not at all,” replied the editor. “There was much more discussed after the speeches were given, and if we had longer I could tell you a great deal about them, even though I have forgotten more still. The problem with describing the fracas, as you describe it, is that it was not so much an incident as a kind of intellectual storm that raged in the background of the whole gathering. It’s hard to put one’s finger on what was really at its core. My own view is that the issue was about fitness for purpose. No one was denying that human beings are how they are at least partly because of how we have evolved. But the majority wanted to protest that any historical and biological account of how we came to be how we are is going to leave a great deal of what we now want to know about love unilluminated. For example, nothing about the evolutionary causes of our feelings of love can tell us if love is good or of value.

“So really the issue was about what kinds of explanation Darwinian accounts are fit to give and what they must leave for other approaches. But even this, I have to say, doesn’t quite explain the ferocity of some of the debate. Those who saw the attempts at Darwinian explanations as extending over too wide a territory were outraged at what they saw as the incursion, while the invaders themselves, to use an unfair metaphor, found the resistance to their methods baffling. People say rather misleadingly that that Darwin saw nature as red in tooth and claw. But it is undoubtedly true that today, debates about Darwin are almost invariably bloody. Isn’t it extraordinary that Darwin still provokes such hostility and disagreement one and a half centuries after the publication of his earth-shattering work?”

“Indeed it is,” I replied. “But tell me, what was your own role in this? Weren’t you too called to make a speech?” The editor laughed.

“My friend, why do you think I am the editor of a philosophy magazine rather than a philosopher? I am an intellectual parasite. I attach myself to philosophers, suck from them what I can and then regurgitate it in digestible form for others. I myself have nothing to contribute, only to redistribute.

“However, I did make one intervention at the end of the discussion, which concerns your second question. Having listened to what everyone had to say, I found myself wondering what use these reflections were to people in love. The question was echoed by another raised by Ellie, who you will recall confessed that she thought she had never been in love at all. What would people advise her? Should she fall in love?

“The problem struck me as one concerning the possibility of romanticism. Romanticism, to my mind, is unfairly ridiculed by those who fancy themselves to be intellectual. That is because people mistake it for naïve idealism and unrealistic expectations. But to my mind, romanticism is not the view that everyone will live happily ever after. To be romantic is to maintain that, even though love is merely a biological adaptation, even though it defies rational control, even though it is not permanent, even though it must contain the bitter as well as the sweet; still, love is valuable and worth having. To be truly romantic is not to give up on love, even when the mist has been removed from our eyes and we see it for the paradoxical, illogical, biological mess that it is. In other words, we are romantic if we could leave our symposium, having said all we have said, still affirming the value of love.

“I asked all the participants if they could do that, and by extension, whether they would advise Ellie to hold out for love or flee from it as soon as it rears its head. Peter replied in the affirmative, remarking that we need to embrace the paradox and absurdity or else we end up with the life of the pebble. Helena agreed that Ellie should be open to love, saying that, even though there are negative aspects to it, nevertheless, by helping us to understand love, science can help to ameliorate these aspects and enable us to enjoy it as part of the rich cornucopia of human nature. Anthony also answered the question with a qualified yes, saying that we can transform the reality of human life by the attitudes we take to it, and that some forms of romantic love can enrich life to make it more worthwhile. Finally, although Michael agreed with that, he wanted to say that the question itself was muddle-headed as it implied we have a choice. The truth is that love comes when it comes, and we do not choose whether to succumb to it or not.”

With that we turned into Grace’s Alley, a mere few yards from our destination. The silhouette of Michael could be seen down the lane, hobbling on a stick as a result of a collision with a scooter in Rome. Perhaps I would ask him for his version of events, though that would have to wait for another day.

I should mention, however, the destination itself. Wilton’s Music Hall is a building to bring out the romantic in anyone. It belongs to a lost world, yet its survival is a sign that, in fact, all is not lost, just as the modern day symposium the editor told me about showed that the customs of Ancient Greece were not completely lost either. Perhaps indulgently, I allowed these romantic thoughts to apply themselves to the subject of love. People build theatres, like they did the Parthenon, and they fall in love. All decay and eventually vanish altogether. But it takes a long time for all to be completely lost. Even when love is gone, something of it remains. It may not be eternal and unchanging, but it is persistent, insistent and will not allow reason to banish it.

With apologies to Plato and the memory of his classic Symposium.

The Symposiasts
Michael Bywater is a columnist for the Independent on Sunday and the author of Lost Worlds (Granta).
Peter Cave is an associate lecturer in philosophy for the Open University and some time ago, co-author of numerous pieces of erotica.
Helena Cronin is co-director of the Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science at the London School of Economics and author of The Ant and The Peacock (Cambridge University Press).
Ellie Levenson is the former editor of the Fabian Review and a freelance journalist.
Anthony Price is a reader in philosopher at Birkbeck College, University of London, and author of Love and Friendship in Plato and Aristotle (Oxford University Press).