I come not to bury love, but to complicate it. There is something wrong with our concept of love. Romantic love (just “love” hereafter) isn't what many of us think it is when we ask ourselves “Do I love her?” or “Does he love me?” Many of us are making some kind of mistake. But what kind of mistake is it, and what is love if it isn't what many of us think it is?
A concept, roughly, is a way of thinking of things or features of things in the world. To have a concept of something is to have a kind of psychological ability to “individuate”, or pick out, all kinds of things in the world, for thought and talk, and for action. Some of our concepts are of psychological states. For example, I have a concept of pain and a concept of belief. I also have a concept of love, as do you. The suggestion that I am making is that there is a mismatch between love and our concept of love. But what is the nature of that mismatch?
One possibility is that our concept of love is of something that simply doesn't exist. This kind of mismatch is certainly true of some of our concepts. For example, we have (or used to have) a concept of “witch”. The story of why some people have been called witches (and treated accordingly) is a story about our social history – about sociological influences (power relations, for example), and not about the way people, in fact, are. There are no witches (at least not of the broomstick-flying variety).
The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche took very much this line on freedom of the will: there is no such thing, he said. We mistakenly think we are free because the idea was foisted onto us by other people (the priests), who wanted to make us think we were free in order to make us feel guilty, and who wanted to make us feel guilty in order to have control over us.
Similarly, according to this view of the mismatch, we have the concept of love because of our social history. But there is no such thing as love. And, one might add as a gloss to this view, our lives would go better if we didn't think there was such a thing.
To say, baldly, that there is no such thing as love seems (if you will forgive the understatement) to be something of an overstatement. But there is another version of this view that might have more appeal: it's not that there is no such thing as love; rather, the mismatch lies in this: the concept we have of love is hopelessly idealistic, hopelessly romantic.
There may be something in this view. Consider poor deluded Madame Bovary in the novel of that name by Gustave Flaubert. Madame Bovary was introduced to the concept of love through ploughing through “the refuse of old libraries”. The concept of love that she formed was a distorted one – of love as involving “gentlemen brave as lions and gentle as lambs, too virtuous to be true, invariably well-dressed, and weeping like fountains.” And it was because she had this hopelessly idealistic concept that she made such a terrible and tragic mess of her life.
Before they get married, people are often warned not to be too idealistic about love so that they will not be disappointed. I do think it's true that when we are young, we often expect too much in our loving relationships – of ourselves and of others. I am inclined to agree with Flaubert's diagnosis of at least one source of our errors: the romantic novel. But I don't think that many of us grown-ups have such an idealistic concept, so this isn't the mismatch that I am going to pursue here.
A second proposed kind of mismatch needs a bit of background. Science has sometimes shown us that something can be redescribed, in terms of something more basic or simple, but in a way that leaves nothing out in the redescription. For example, the kinds of things talked about in chemistry can be redescribed in terms of the kinds of things talked about in physics. This is called reduction. Consider heat. Science has shown us that heat can be redescribed in terms of, or “reduced to”, molecular motion; that's just what heat is. We have two concepts – “heat” and “molecular motion” – but these two concepts are of one and the same thing. So it would be a confusion to say that when we put a cup of soup in the microwave, the increased movement of the molecules in the soup causes the soup to heat up. Rather, the increased motion of the soup's molecules just is the soup's heating up. There aren't two things going on, with one causing the other; there is just one thing.
Scientists and philosophers have often sought to achieve the same kind of reduction for some of our concepts of psychological states. So, for example, some philosophers have argued that pain is a certain kind of neural activity in the brain. Again, we have two concepts, pain and neural activity, but they are two concepts of just one thing. If this is true, and I wouldn't like to pronounce on whether or not it is, then brain scientists are wrong when they say (as they sometimes do) that a certain kind of neural activity causes pain; the neural activity no more causes the pain than increased molecular motion causes increased heat.
Claims like these, about psychological states, are more readily and easily made than they are shown to be true. Indeed, they are often highly contentious. Consider pain once more. It feels like something to be in pain – it feels painful. But is this feature of pain left out when it is reduced to some kind of neural activity? Again I wouldn't like to say. But, in any event, when we come to love, I have seen no suggested reduction to a more basic or simple vocabulary (a vocabulary of brain states perhaps) that is even remotely plausible.
Sometimes, though, the claimed redescription of a psychological state doesn't involve reducing it to the terms of a more basic vocabulary. Sometimes the redescriptive claim involves redescribing a given psychological state in terms of another psychological state. For example, the French writer La Rochefoucauld claimed that benevolence or kindness to others is really just self-interest in disguise. Often – and I am not sure why this is – this kind of redescription reveals or expresses a certain cynicism – and La Rochefoucauld is a good example of this. Moreover, it's often a short step from claiming that such a redescription is true, to claiming also that there really is no such thing as whatever is the target of the redescription – benevolence in this example.
This is really elimination rather than redescription, and it often goes with a dismissive “nothing but”: benevolence is nothing but self-interest in disguise. So how would this go for the case in point? Love is really nothing but ... what? Well, in our cynical age – an age dominated by sex – I suppose sexual desire is a favourite. (There is a book called Love Ain't Nothing But Sex Misspelled .) Other candidates for the “nothing but” eliminative claim might be the desire for companionship, or a redirected desire for parental love. So here, unlike the first proposal I considered, the idea isn't that there is no such thing as love, or, less unconvincingly, that we have a hopelessly idealistic concept of love; the proposal here, rather, is the eliminative idea that love is nothing but some other psychological state – sexual desire or whatever it is.
My comment on this proposal is, again, to insist that there has been, so far as I know, no remotely plausible candidate which would legitimate the elimination. Moreover, the elimination is grounded in a cynicism that should surely be rejected. We might well make the comment, about this man or of that woman, that for him or her love is really nothing but sexual desire; but when we say this we are not implying that this is what love is . The comment, rather, is a kind of criticism of that particular person. And if the cynical elimination were to be accepted, then this kind of criticism would no longer be open to us.
Moreover, its acceptance would also give rise to a deeper worry. David Hume once remarked that one of the troubles with the proposal that all apparently benevolent motives should be subsumed under what he called the principle of self-love, is that if someone believes it, it tends to become self-fulfilling. One comes to consider “What's in it for me?” to be not only a legitimate question in occasional circumstances, but an entirely appropriate one in all circumstances. And I think the same worry can arise with respect to love. If someone really does come to believe that all love is nothing but sex misspelled, then that person may well live accordingly.
There is, however, a third kind of mismatch that I think does explain the mistake that many of us make about love. Many of us think that the emotion of love is a single, simple psychological state. So when we ask the question “Do I love him?” or “Does she still love me?”, the question, we mistakenly suppose, admits of a simple yes or no, depending on whether or not the person concerned is in that single, simple psychological state. The only further question is “How much?”
To explain what I am getting at, it might be helpful to draw a partial analogy to a mistake that John Stuart Mill made about happiness. Assume that everything we do, we do for some further end. We go shopping in order to buy food, we go to the dentist to avoid future pain, we go running in the park in order to get fit. To avoid the obvious risk of a vicious regress (where do the further ends end?), there must be some ultimate end at which we aim, which is the ultimate object of all of our desires. This ultimate end needs to be sufficiently general to apply to all actions of all of us. But what could this ultimate end be?
The obvious answer is happiness. Everything we do is done, either directly or indirectly, for the sake of happiness, which is the ultimate aim of all our actions. But then a further question arises. What could happiness be? Happiness, as the ultimate end of all of us, seems to be stripped of all substantial content. The answer that Mill arrived at is that happiness must be some simple kind of psychological state, namely “pleasure, and the absence of pain.”
Here, then, is the mistake that Mill (and many others) make about happiness. For certain reasons which appear compelling, they think that everything we do is done in order to gain happiness; that happiness must be one simple thing; that that one simple thing must be some kind of psychological state; and that pleasure is then the only plausible candidate. I think that kind of mistake is sometimes at work when people ask themselves “Am I happy?” expecting a simple yes or no, with just the follow-up question, “How happy am I?”
Analogously with happiness, I think many of us do think that we have apparently compelling reasons for thinking that love must be one simple thing – one simple kind of psychological state. But these apparently compelling reasons are not the same as those concerning happiness. In respect of love, the reasons are, roughly, like this:
1 Love is an emotion;
2 Emotions necessarily involve feelings;
3 For every emotion there is a characteristic and unique kind of feeling;
4 So love must necessarily have a characteristic and unique kind of feeling;
5 Whether or not we are in love depends on whether or not we have that feeling.
6 Even if we cannot always tell, through introspection, whether or not we have that love-feeling, there is still a simple matter of fact about whether or not we are in love.
Each of 1 to 6 is wrong. As I don't have the space to examine each in turn, I want instead to put forward an alternative picture of love – one which complicates it.
An emotion – such as Mary's being in love with Paul – is typically complex , episodic , dynamic , and structured . An emotion is complex in that it will typically involve many different elements: it involves episodes of emotional experience, including perceptions, thoughts, and feelings of various kinds, and bodily changes of various kinds; and it involves dispositions, including dispositions to experience further emotional episodes, to have further thoughts and feelings, and to behave in certain ways. Emotions are episodic and dynamic, in that, over time, the elements can come and go, and wax and wane, depending on all sorts of factors, including the way in which the episodes and dispositions interweave and interact with each other and with other aspects of the person's life, so that the complex array of interlocking dispositions can evolve over a long period. (Indeed, they ought to evolve; as the contemporary American philosopher Amélie Rorty nicely puts it, contradicting Shakespeare, love is not love that alters not when it alteration finds.) And, finally, an emotion is structured in that the emotion's unfolding sequence of thoughts, feelings and actions is narratable: it can fall into a kind of narrative structure.
All this is conceived of by us as all being part of the same emotion – as we might say, for example, that Mary loved Paul for the best part of thirty years. The mistake, though, is not to use a single word, “love” to pick out an emotion. The mistake is to think that the single word picks out an emotion which is a single, simple psychological state, as if the questions “Do I love her?” or “Does he love me?” admit of simple yes or no answers. These are just bad questions if love is so conceived – just as bad as “Am I happy?” if happiness is conceived of as pleasure. Each of these questions ought in our minds to fragment into a myriad of questions. To have a concept of love as being a single simple psychological state, with a characteristic and unique kind of feeling, is to make a mistake, just as it is for happiness. Only once the complexity of love is appreciated can its depths be appreciated.
Peter Goldie is lecturer in philosophy at Kings College London and author of The Emotions: A Philosophical Exploration (Clarendon) and On Personality (Routledge)