Phenomenological Remarks on Love-Eros

Abstract

This article attempts to discuss the phenomenological status of love considered as an erotic phenomenon. Is care a kind of desire? A will? A modality of attention? A feeling? Is it rather an existential attitude towards its object? And in this case, how to understand such an attitude? Does Heidegger’s concept of Fürsorge exhaust its nature? It seems necessary to address a specific limitation of fundamental ontology, the equivalency between care and care for oneself, to make room for the possibility of a primary (and not derived) care for another (and also a primary anxiety for another) that seems hardly understandable in Heidegger’s terms. But it also seems necessary to supplement the concept of care with two other “existentials”: unconditional trust and being carried. The article finally examines love as an experience.

1. Introduction

It is probably no exaggeration to say that, given the importance of love in human life, the treatment it has received in philosophy has been surprisingly modest. Philosophers, with a few exceptions, have shown little interest in love, either because the subject seemed too difficult or because it seemed too easy. However, Max Scheler is right when he says that “man, even before being an ens cogitans or an ens volens, is an ens amans” [1] (p. 357). And there is no doubt that other higher animals are capable of love. But the philosopher is often embarrassed when he considers this sublime and ordinary phenomenon, as if he preferred to leave it to the novelist, the poet, and the theologian. He could exclaim, like Bardamu in Journey to the End of the Night: “Love is infinity within the reach of poodles, and I have my dignity!”.

In the reflections that follow, I shall measure also myself against this “misery of philosophy” in the face of love. I shall only try to highlight some of its facets, with the help of phenomenological works that have been devoted to it (by Max Scheler, José Ortega y Gasset, Ludwig Binswanger, Martin Heidegger, and a few others) and by limiting myself to love-eros, to the love that unfolds in the dimension of erotic attraction. I will hardly go beyond sentimental platitudes—but phenomenology has been defined by Husserl as the “science of trivialities” [2] (p. 350). In addition, my reflection will focus on the ideal conditions of this phenomenon and not on its empirical or concrete forms. Behind the apparent simplicity of a word lies, in fact, a multiplicity of phenomena: love is at once something we experience “in our hearts”, and therefore a feeling, something we go through and that changes us (an experience), a story that unfolds from an encounter, and a set of attitudes and behaviors through which it is realized. These dimensions—“sentimental”, experiential, historical, and practical—are indissociable, but they tend to be confused if we assume that love is a simple phenomenon that could be unequivocally defined.

2. Is Love Desire, Will, or Behavior?

Is it possible to isolate behind the diversity of attitudes and practices that come under the heading of love something like a core of this phenomenon? Most philosophers have associated love with desire, or they have conceived of love as a kind of desire. In the Symposium, Socrates begins by relating love to the action of desiring (epithumein) and by pointing out that we desire what we do not possess, not what we already have [3] (200 a–b). This is also what leads Diotima, later on, to define Eros as an intermediary god, a daimôn, the son of Penia (lack, scarcity) and Poros (crossing, passage, ford). Augustine advances the same definition of love in terms of appetite: Nihil enim aliud est amare, quam propter se ipsam rem aliquam appetere: “To love consists in nothing other than to desire a thing for its own sake” [4] (p. 35, 1–2). But is love really a desire or a modality of desire? One of the fundamental characteristics of desire is that all desire aims at its own fulfillment, and that that fulfillment puts an end to desire. Of course, desire can be reborn later on, but by its very nature, it has an object that satisfies it. But supposing that love is a kind of desire, what is it the desire for? What kind of object is likely to satisfy it? For certain types of love, it seems possible to answer this question. If someone is motivated by a love of justice, what will “satisfy” that love is the realization of justice in the courts or human affairs; what will leave that love unsatisfied is the opposite state of affairs. Here, in the very expression “love of justice”, “love” and “desire” are interchangeable: to love justice, all other things being equal, is to desire or want it to triumph in as many circumstances as possible. The problem is that this equivalence does not hold for love-eros or other forms of human love. We can try to put forward several types of formal objects that could satisfy love if it were a desire, and we immediately find out that none of these objects are suitable: (1) love finds its fulfillment in the possession of its object; (2) love finds its fulfillment in being loved in return; (3) love aims at the well-being (or the good) of the beloved; (4) love is satisfied by the pure existence of its object. The first formula is clearly inadequate: love does not consist in taking possession of anyone or anything. The second is just as absurd: love can be perfectly unrequited and still be love. The third reduces love to a form of benevolence, but although benevolence seems to be a necessary component of love (it is impossible to love without wanting the good of the beloved), love cannot be reduced to benevolence. The fourth formula is the most promising, and I shall examine it more closely later. But the problem it raises is that, while the very existence of the beloved certainly elicits joy in the one who loves, love cannot amount to satisfying the desire for the other to exist; otherwise, the existence of the other should suffice to put an end to this desire and therefore to put an end to love. What this reveals is that talking about “fulfillment” in relation to love is inadequate: love is not a tendency or a desire that has conditions of satisfaction.

Love has nothing to do with satisfaction, and in that sense, nothing to do with desire, even though it can certainly be accompanied by desires. This is true of love-eros, which is accompanied by a host of desires (sexual desire, but also the desire to spend time with the beloved, to get to know him or her better, to exchange ideas and feelings with him or her, etc.) but does not amount to such desires. As Ortega y Gasset points out, “desires are undoubtedly born of love; but love itself is not desire” [5] (p. 576). And the converse is equally true: desire is not a kind of love. To desire a glass of water is not to feel love for that beverage. To desire to take drugs is not to feel love for that substance—the drug addict often hates drugs because he knows it destroys him and nonetheless gives in to it. Love is a stable disposition towards the loved object; desire is something fluctuating and transitory, which may or may not be based on love.

It should be noted in passing that to say that love has nothing to do with satisfaction obviously does not mean that love is “eternally unsatisfied (un eterno insatisfecho)”, as Ortega y Gasset concludes perhaps too hastily [5] (p. 554). This was also the image of Eros in The Symposium. Love has nothing to do with both satisfaction and non-satisfaction: such notions make no sense for love.

If love is not a desire, should we not say that it is rather a will? But a will is also an intentional attitude that possesses, in the broad sense of the term, conditions of satisfaction: if I want to become rich, for example, it is the state of affairs according to which I am rich that provides my will with its conditions of satisfaction. So if love has nothing to do with satisfaction (or dissatisfaction), it cannot be a kind of will. Thus, when, in a famous letter of 13 May 1925 to Hannah Arendt [6] (p. 21) (see also [7]), Heidegger attributes to Augustine the sentence Amo, volo ut sis—a sentence that does not seem to be present in his works, and that Hannah Arendt also attributes to him in The Origins of Totalitarianism by translating it as “I want you to be” [8] (p. 301)—he identifies love with a kind of will, provided that we read the alleged quote as an equivalence. But a will for the other to be, and to be in the fullness of his essence, is not the same thing as love, even if such a will does seem to flow from love or necessarily go along with it.

We can reach the same conclusion by looking at the way love comes into being. A will is, by definition, up to the agent: I can bring myself to will something simply by considering the reasons that make that thing desirable. This is what made Augustine say that nothing is more at my disposal than my will. But I cannot bring myself to love someone merely by considering the reasons that make that person lovable, for it is quite conceivable that I am persuaded that this person has all the qualities that would make her lovable and yet find that I do not love her. In the same way, it is conceivable that I consider a person hateful, at least in certain respects, and yet discover that, after all, I love her. Love simply does not fall within the sphere of the voluntary. Does it then fall in the domain of the involuntary? Is it merely a passion (from patire, to suffer) that affects me? Perhaps some authors arrive too hastily at that conclusion. Love is something that is inspired by its object and therefore occurs sua sponte in us, on its own initiative, and not as the product of our will. It belongs neither to the voluntary nor to a kind of raw involuntariness, of that which is purely suffered because the way I love expresses myself, manifests who I am. The domain of emotional spontaneity differs at the same time from the purely voluntary (like our actions) and the purely involuntary (like a mere reflex).

Not only do our spontaneous tendencies and inclinations manifest who we are, but we can also try to control them: we can always repress a feeling, for example. Repressing a feeling is a voluntary act that consists of diverting our attention from it or acting against its immediate manifestations. But this act exposes itself to the risk of failure: perhaps, after all, the repressed feeling will resurface against our will in all its force, and we will have to admit that we have failed to rid ourselves of it. Similarly, we can try indirectly to influence our feelings by trying to reason with ourselves or persuade ourselves that they are inadequate; this is what Ulysses does when he whispers to himself, “Be wise, my heart”, as he tries to control his anger. But such an action is only indirect and, to this extent, is likely to fail. In short, the sphere of our spontaneity is not entirely resistant to our will or judgment, but our capacity to act on it remains limited, and, in addition, we cannot act on it without also acting, by the same token, on what makes our feelings expressive of ourselves. To seek to repress our love, in short, is to deprive ourselves of an essential part of who we are, given that, as Scheler rightly points out, “whoever has a man’s ordo amoris [i.e., what he loves and what he hates] has the human being himself” [1] (p. 348).

I can no more love at will, i.e., on the sole basis of the consideration of the reasons that make an object lovable, than I can fear or feel anger at will—whereas I can act at will, of course, on the sole basis of the reasons I have for acting in that way. For the same reason, it is inadequate to define love as a set of (voluntary) acts or behaviors. In French, a phrase often attributed to Pierre Reverdy (I do not know if he actually ever pronounced it) has passed into a proverb: “Il n’y a pas d’amour, il n’y a que des preuves d’amour” [there is no love, there is only evidence for love]. Taken literally, this phrase is absurd. Even though love leads us to adopt behaviors, and even though someone who has no tendency to act accordingly would show that he or she does not love, love does not consist of such behaviors. Franz Brentano and Max Scheler argued, the former in The Origin of Moral Knowledge, the latter in Formalism in Ethics and in Nature and Forms of Sympathy, that love should be classified as an act and not as a feeling or emotion¹. Love, according to Scheler’s “essential definition”, “is the tendency or, depending on the circumstances, the act that attempts to lead everything in the direction of its fullness of value” [1] (p. 356). Such a definition of love in terms of action or of a tendency to act is hardly satisfactory. Of course, no one would deny that loving someone also implies doing certain things for her, for example, supporting her, looking after her if necessary, and so forth. But it would be quite wrong to define love in terms of an action or a tendency to act. What shows it is that we can perfectly well perform exactly the same actions out of duty without loving that person in the slightest. A purely behavioristic definition of love is nonsense.

This does not prevent us from thinking that the type of action that is most revealing of love is giving, or that there is a close, essential connection between love and giving—and especially all the “immaterial” gifts: a gift of attention, of care, of time, of presence, of patience, and so on. When it is present, love is obviously accompanied by acts, and the absence of such acts would be a good criterion for the absence of the former. In the same way, love is accompanied by wills, and, among these, the most important is undoubtedly the will to renounce all constraint and coercion, be it direct or indirect, on the beloved, for the sake of changing him, even “for his good”—the will to give up all influence aimed at transforming him for my purposes or according to my judgment. Love is therefore characterized at least by a “negative” will: not wanting others to be other than they are. And consequently, love also consists in rejoicing oneself that the other is purely what he is and that he becomes, if possible, more and more so². But this will and this joy flow from love; they are not love.

Since love is neither desire, nor will, nor a set of behaviors, what is it then? We have already begun to glimpse it: it is exactly what Scheler says it is not, namely a feeling, an enduring affective disposition. Scheler maintains that it would be a mistake to classify love among the emotions and affective states in general and that this mistake can be explained “by our one-sided perspective on this matter, which is that of our time and which is based on a total lack of phenomenological investigation” [9] (p. 274). In his view, we should rather say that love and hatred are responses to a superior or inferior status of affectively perceived values that lead us towards the objects that instantiate them or turn us away from them. For the reasons I have given, it seems to me that this exclusion of love from the affective sphere does not stand up to scrutiny. It is true, however, that love is not only an affective state; it is rather a disposition to experience a whole range of emotions and feelings towards the object we love; it is a general attitude we adopt towards that object. In this sense, love is not an emotion that just happens, because if it were, it would also have to fluctuate in the same way as emotions do. Now, love does not have the fleeting, transitory character of our emotional life. Admittedly, when it is born, love-eros is part of a genuine emotional hurricane, and it elicits a propensity to experience a wide range of emotions and feelings towards the beloved. Nevertheless, love possesses a form of stability that removes it, for the most part, from the fluctuations of emotions. Nor can love be identified with the joy we may feel in the presence of the beloved, even though such joy is certainly a strong clue of the disposition to love. It is not entirely accurate to say, as Spinoza does, that love is joy: “Love is joy with the accompanying idea of an external cause” [10] (III, prop. III, note). This is another example of the confusion between love and its consequences.

Within the affective sphere, three types of phenomena can be distinguished: emotions, moods (in German, Stimmungen), and feelings. What is special about moods is that they are not “about something”; they are not intentional. I can be in a perfectly good mood when everything around me encourages me to be in a bad mood, and the other way around. Emotions, on the other hand, are generated by the objects that motivate them, and, above all, they are “about” these objects: fear is fear of this or that, anger is anger at this or that injustice, at this or that object generating frustration, and so on. The same is true of feelings, with the difference that they are much more persistent than those sudden storms that are emotions. So it is with my friendship for this person or my affection for my parents. Feelings remain sensitive to circumstances because they are “about” certain objects, but they are generally about beings or characteristics of the world that are less likely to change than those to which emotions relate. Therefore, love (and in particular love-eros) is a feeling that is intentionally directed towards an object and brings me towards that object in a certain way. It is this object and this way of being connected to it that we must now attempt to clarify.

First, should we maintain that the object of love is an individual being or rather a set of generic characteristics (qualities or values) that are exemplified by this object? Do we love a being in its individuality or rather the generic human qualities it instantiates? We are all familiar with Pascal’s famous affirmation: “And if I am loved for my judgment, for my memory, am I loved? No, because I can lose these qualities without losing myself” [11] (n. 567; my transl.). According to this view, we would never love a being, only qualities. But if this is Pascal’s final word, this situation must be attributed to the depravity of human nature since the original sin. For a love that took only qualities as its object (and a person only insofar as she exemplifies them) would be a love promised from the outset to death because of the perishable nature of these qualities. But there is an even stronger reason to dissuade us from considering that love relates only to general characteristics: it is that a love that loves only for such reasons could only love for the sake of one’s self. It would be a variant of self-love, since it would only value its object for selfish reasons (because it flatters our vanity). Therefore, a similar love could not love others for their own sake. It would be what Stendhal calls “un amour de tête [a love of the head]” (which is based solely on vanity) and not “un amour de cœur [a love of the heart]” [12] (p. 713). Now, if forms of disinterested love are possible—and there is nothing to suggest that they are not—then love must be about what we might call the absolute illeity (from the Latin ille: that person) of another. Granted, all love does have reasons (i.e., general considerations that count in favor of it), but we never love for these reasons alone: the object towards which love radiates is another in his or her singularity. Love is not motivated, one might say, but inspired by a person. Max Scheler is right in this respect to emphasize that “it is not a value that ‘I love’, but always something to which a value is inherent (Ich ‘liebe’ keinen Wert, sondern immer Etwas, das werthaltig ist)” [13] (p. 171). This made Montaigne say that he loved Etienne de la Boétie “because it was him, because it was me”. In addition, love is primarily aroused by a being’s absolute core of individuality, beyond any generalizable characteristic, and its reasons can only be made explicit after the fact, when we adopt an analytical attitude towards it. As Scheler notes, people are “deeply embarrassed [...] as soon as they are asked the ‘reasons’ for their love and hatred. We then find that the ‘reasons’ alleged are reasons found only subsequently” [13] (pp. 171–172). This is why, unlike a belief whose primary relationship to the state of affairs that motivates it is one of justification, love’s primary relationship to its object is one of inspiration: like a Muse, love guides us towards its object and enlightens us about what is highest and most valuable about it. There is a “gaze of love” and an “intelligence of love” (objective genitives) that are inseparable from it.

The consequence is that love is not just a reaction to certain qualities of the beloved that would be perceived independently of her; it reveals its object in a new light, a light that makes it lovable; it is a renewed revelation of its object. That is why it seems possible to maintain both (which some philosophers would consider contradictory) that love occurs spontaneously in us, as if by sudden inspiration, and that it responds to reasons—but precisely reasons such that they are only known after the fact, when love itself has revealed to us (or helped to reveal to us) what is singularly lovable about a being. By helping to reveal to us what makes its singular object worthy of being loved, love proceeds in the opposite way to what Stendhal believed with his (all too) famous theory of crystallization [14]. Stendhal’s theory of crystallization is not a theory of love but a theory of error in love based on vanity. It is merely a theory of false or illusory love. Moreover, Stendhal’s novels show exactly the opposite of what his theory of love predicts—which is hardly surprising, since it reveals that Stendhal is a better novelist than a philosopher: Madame de Rênal, in Le Rouge et le Noir, is the counter-example of the theory of crystallization; she immediately grasps the whole spiritual physiognomy of Julien, this proud young man trying to fight against the misery of his condition, and she becomes attached to him because of his very faults; she loves him in a selfless gift of herself and thinks of nothing less than the subterfuges of her vanity.

As a result, love, when it is not tainted by illusions, has an “alethical” dimension that takes us to the very heart of the other’s reality. That is why it is about the other person herself and the other person in her irreducibility to me. Moreover, it does not consist in loving the other in his illeity despite his faults, but in loving these very faults, since it is that person, and not qualities or values, who is the object towards which love is directed.

We can sum up these remarks by saying that love is indeed a feeling, an enduring affective disposition, but that feeling is not everything. Love commits us to adopt a complex attitude towards the beloved, an attitude that consists not only of punctual affective reactions but also of desires, wishes, wills, and behaviors that enable us to establish a complex relationship with the loved object. It is this relationship that I would like to elucidate now. We therefore move from love as a feeling to love as an existential attitude, without abandoning the view that love is not intrinsically a desire, a will, or a set of behaviors.

3. Love as an Existential Attitude

By examining the complex attitude that love consists of, we can bring back into the description several phenomena that we have previously dismissed as a definition of love. For example, the joy we feel at being in the presence of the beloved, or the joy we feel at the mere existence of the beloved, noted by Aristotle in his analysis of philia, are only effects of love; they are nevertheless parts of love understood as a general attitude towards the beloved. “A friend”, writes Aristotle, “is one who wishes and does good [...] to his friend for the sake of that friend himself” [15] (IX, IV). He is therefore also one “who wishes his friend to be and to live (einai kai zên), for the sake of his friend himself” [15] (IX, IV). This is one of the few texts in which Aristotle uses the verb einai not in its predicative sense but in its existential sense—even though in ancient Greek there is no equivalent of our verb “to exist” or our noun “existence”. As for hatred, as The Art of Rhetoric points out, it is accompanied by the wish that the other be destroyed or reduced to non-existence. As the Stagirite says, “he who hates wishes that the other should not exist” [16] (1382 a 3–16). We might therefore understand that all love, insofar as it is accompanied by a desire or a wish for the other to be and to be what he or she is, is also committed to acting in order to promote this being and the fullness of this being. Love is accompanied by the wish for the other to reach its essence and be in its highest form, and it seeks to contribute actively to this state of affairs. Ortega y Gasset, like many others, insists that “to love a thing is to work for its existence; not to admit, for what depends on oneself, the possibility of a universe from which that object is absent”. And he defines love as “a centrifugal act of the soul (un acto centrífugo del alma) that moves towards the object in a constant flow and that envelops, warms and strengthens it, uniting us to it and affirming its being in an executive way (y afirmando ejecutivamente su ser)” [5] (p. 559).

Can we go further and analyze this complex existential attitude? Can we, in other words, break down love as a phenomenon into its essential phenomenological constituents to reveal its internal complexity and thereby reveal the tensions and sometimes the contradictions that lie within it?

My hypothesis is that love as a general attitude can be described on the basis of three fundamental attitudes—in the Heideggerian vocabulary, three “existentials”: (1) care for another or solicitude, what Heidegger calls Fürsorge; (2) absolute and unconditional trust in the other, which leads us to put ourselves totally in his hands; (3) the attitude of letting the other be, which renounces power or influence over him or her and, so to speak, gives her back her own being. The loving attitude is structured by these three existentials and articulates them into a single totality, but it also reveals the tensions that arise between them and makes love a paradoxical phenomenon.

In the first place, all love, whether love-eros or any other kind, is based on a radical decentering of our entire existence around an ex-centric pole, the pole represented by the other, and therefore a form of concern for her that proves to be as strong, sometimes even stronger, than our concern for ourselves. This polarization of my existence around the perspective of another is made possible by an acute form of empathy; it consists of adopting her feelings, becoming attentive to her reactions, her wishes, and her desires, not in order to take her place or identify with her, but rather to integrate her perspective, in its distinction from my own, into my way of being and feeling. It is not a question, then, of substituting myself for the other, as Heidegger emphasized about Fürsorge, for the sake of freeing her from the burden of her being, but rather of making her concern for her being my own and integrating it into my world through a movement of extreme decentering. This movement has been described by thinkers and poets. Ortega y Gasset states that “love is gravitation towards the beloved (amor es gravitación hacia lo amado)” [5] (p. 559). Elisabeth Barret-Browning writes, “where thou art or shalt be, there or here”, which Rilke translates into German as “nur wo du bist, entsteht ein Ort [only where you are, a place arises]”. Ludwig Binswanger, who quotes those passages, also strongly emphasized this phenomenon when he spoke about a loving “we-ity (Wirheit)” as a closeness such that my true place, my home and homeland (Heimat), is where the beloved is. This loving closeness determines the very spatiality of my existence [17]. Augustine famously remarked, pondus meum amor meus; eo feror, quocumque feror, “my weight is my love; it carries me wherever it carries me” [18] (XIII, IX, 10; my transl.). From the outset, therefore, love is experienced as an expansion of my horizon by contrast to my most usual perspective, to the self-centeredness that organizes the world around my tasks governed by my interests. Decentering in love leads to an opposite attitude. It is in the privileged other, in the object of my love, that my true center now resides and toward which my entire existence gravitates.

There are three main kinds of perspectives on the world. The first one governs our customary existence: it grants a place to others but always subordinates their perspective to my own. The second one is exhibited in the outburst of certain psychoses, in what is perhaps the original psychotic experience; it resides, as Henry Grivois showed in Naître à la folie, in a total reorganization of the universe around a unique perspectival center, that of the subject, according to the antithesis: “he and all the others”. This hyper-centeredness exhibits various characteristics: the “feeling of being at the center of the totality of the others”, the “surprise of occupying this place alone”, and the “inability to provide a lasting meaning” to this situation [19] (p. 21). Finally, the decentering of love around a second, ex-centric pole brings about a symmetric transformation: it is first and foremost in the other that I now find my place; it is in her and through her that I exist. And this other is no longer the alius of the paranoid, the one who is other than me because he stands opposed to me, because he sets himself against me; it is the alter, the one who is other than me because he is another myself and through whom I live without ever merging with him. This decentering of love is just as opposed to the self-centeredness of the everyday world as it is to the hyper-centeredness of madness.

This displacement of our existential epicenter as a result of our concern for the other can give rise to anxiety. Indeed, contrary to what the ontological dispensation of Sein und Zeit suggests, anxiety is not exclusively anxiety for oneself—no more than care is originally and exclusively care of oneself—and consequently “existential solipsism”. What prevents Heidegger from conferring this anxiety a status is precisely his assertion that the expression “care of oneself” is purely tautological [20] (p. 193). But this claim must be abandoned as the main obstacle to a genuine phenomenology of loving existence. Because in love, care for the other becomes a constitutive dimension of my care, the possibility of an anxiety for the beloved takes shape—which is an anxiety in front of her disappearance, whether in actual or symbolic death. In this respect, neither the position of Sein und Zeit, which consists in closing anxiety onto an isolated Dasein, nor that of Binswanger, who, in response to Heidegger, intends to remove love entirely from the horizon of care (Sorge) as the being of Dasein, seems satisfactory. To begin with the latter position, it is simply not true that love as an essential possibility of human beings removes us from care and its counterpart, anxiety. Binswanger too diametrically opposes Heidegger’s Sorge to love, the temporality of Dasein as it temporalizes itself from being-towards-death to the eternal present of “we”, which, he asserts, “cannot be understood from the presentification of concern (Besorgen)” [17] (p. 45; my transl.). He makes love “the ontological counter-phenomenon (ontologische Gegenphänomen)” to anxiety [17] (p. 54) and presents us with an overly simple alternative between the “ultra-mundane (überweltlich)” character of amorous home (Heimat) and the temporality of care characterized by the Unheimlichkeit of anxiety [17] (p. 98). By contrast, we need to think of a human love that is in the world and not beyond the world [17] (p. 98), and that consequently confronts not only the finitude of being (ours and another’s) but also the fragility and finitude that constitute the bond of love itself. Human love, with its imperfection, its vulnerability to circumstances, and its essential fragility, has no power to tear us away from the world or to confer on us an illusory eternity (Ewigkeit). On this point, we should rather agree with Heidegger’s argument that love is ontologically conceivable only on the basis of care and Being-in-the-world, and that solicitude (Fürsorge) always remains a modality of our finite being: “But care, understood correctly, i.e., ontologically-existentially, is never separable from “love”; it names the ecstatic-temporal constitution of the fundamental character of Dasein, i.e., the understanding of being” [21] (p. 237). On the other hand, Heidegger is wrong, it seems to me, to purely and simply subordinate Fürsorge to the concern for one’s own most proper self, or to the resoluteness of Dasein based on its being-towards-death. It is not true that I can only care about the other insofar as I care about my being and to the extent of such (self) care. On the contrary, the mystery of love is that, at least in its highest forms, it leads us to care for another even more than for ourselves, to be anxious over her finite being and vulnerability even more than over our own. This possibility upsets the ontological hierarchy established by Heidegger: the primacy of care for oneself over care for the other, or rather, the fact that all care is ultimately caring for oneself, grounded in the sich umwillen character of existence, and therefore the priority of death as mine over the death of the other, of anxiety for myself over fear for the other (since anxiety for the other is ruled out by the conceptuality of Sein und Zeit), and it leads us to doubt that the for-the-sake-of-oneself (sich umwillen) ontological structure is the last word of human existence.

But love is more than just an affective disposition, the care I feel for someone other than myself as “another myself (allos autos)”, to use Aristotle’s phrase, a care that can always degenerate into anxiety. It has a second characteristic that is just as essential and gestures towards an entirely different direction. The concern for the other’s vulnerability, which keeps all security away from love, stands opposed to the dimension of elective and unconditional trust granted to the other, without which there would be no possible sharing of love. Love is not just an asymmetrical care that plunges us into a permanent insecurity; it is also an unconditional trust granted to the other, thanks to which I open myself up to the other and entrust myself to her, I abandon myself to her solicitude, and place my being in her hands. Whereas concern for the other, marked by asymmetry, leads us back to a fundamental insecurity that constantly reminds us of the fragility of every human bond, trust granted without condition to the other makes it possible to establish a relation of reciprocity and equality, insofar as trust calls for trust. Such unconditional trust³ directs the phenomenon of love towards security and the alleviation of the burden of existence. Love is not merely a question of the historicity of our being as a finite project, dependent on our being-thrown (Geworfenheit), and stretching between birth and death. Because of this dimension of trust and absolute abandonment to the other, love becomes part of what Oskar Becker has called the “being-carried (Getragenheit)” of life. Life indeed is essentially what carries us, and to describe such a movement, which is at work in the entire artistic sphere, we need to develop what Becker calls “para-existentials”. Life, and especially the adventurous life of the artist, but also, I believe, the adventurous life of the person who loves, stands “as if in suspense between the extreme insecurity of the ‘project-thrown’ and the extreme security of the ‘being-carried’, between the historical, that is the source of infinite questions and natural being which is absolutely without question” [22]. Love, like life and the process of artistic creation, relieves us, at least intermittently, of the burden of anxiety; through the trust that it bestows on us and that defines it, it brings us back to the being-carried of life; it reconnects us with a security that lies beyond all the tribulations of individual history. In fact, trust is that which underpins the most archaic relationships between infant and mother, that which literally carries the former and without which we could not carry ourselves. In the case of love-eros, this trust is confirmed by deeds, and the primary act of love is giving (especially all immaterial gifts). The paradox of giving is that the more I give, the richer I am in virtue of that gift itself: what I give enriches me. This does not mean at all that giving generates a gift in return; what enriches me is not the reciprocity of gifts but the gift itself. This is the meaning of the verses in Romeo and Juliet: “My bounty is as boundless as the sea, /My love as deep: the more I give to thee, the more I have, for both are infinite” [23] (act. II, sc. 1).

In love, anxiety therefore coexists with unconditioned trust, the assumption of the burden of historical existence structured by finitude with the lightening of that burden in the being-carried of life. On the one hand, love is a concern for the other; on the other, it is the play of life as it unfolds, heedless of the future, in an eternally suspended present. It remains to examine the third existential that crowns the first two: the letting-be that gives the other back to itself, shunning any form of appropriation, possession, or hold. If the highest variety of love is that in which the other is loved for his or her own sake, that is, independently of any benefits he or she may bring me, then love itself can only consist in restoring the other to his or her being, that is, to his or her freedom. As Heidegger points out, “the gaze that is attached to the spirit of love does not stop at vision but relates to the very essence of the being loved, in order, thanks to this assiduous gaze, to lead him or her back to their foundation and to allow them to hold on to it” [24] (p. 143; my transl.). As a result, “the word ‘love’ designates the will that the beloved be by rejoining his essence and being in it. Such a will neither wishes nor demands anything” [25] (p. 63; my transl.).

Love does not confer any “rights” over the beloved, although it certainly confers duties on the lover. When it is true, love brings us out of power relationships and instrumental relationships based on the expectation of reciprocity and “return on investment”. Like the gift in which it is realized, it is free, always hoping the other person will love us in return but neither expecting nor demanding it in any sense whatsoever. Love is alien to relations of possession and so, of power. This is why it is in no way a promise of a fusion. As Rilke emphasized in his Letters to a Young Poet, true love does not break the solitude of the lovers but rather builds on it. “We are in a solitary way (Wir sind einsam)” [26] (Borgeby Gard, Sweden, 12 August 1914), writes the poet, and love in its “unequalled insecurity (eine Unsicherheit ohnegleichen)” brings two solitudes together; it is made up of “two solitudes protecting, defining and welcoming one another (zwei Einsamkeiten einander schützen, grenzen und grüßen)” [26] (Rome, 14 May 1904).

It is therefore doubtful whether the idea of a “we” in love is the right starting point for a phenomenology of love, contrary to what Binswanger maintained. If love is a closeness, a coming together, it is certainly not a reciprocal possession or the constitution of a broader whole, and to start from a Wirheit in love is, in a way, to turn what is merely a constantly entertained hope into a given; it is to commit a kind of proteron husteron. Admittedly, Binswanger points out that the dialectic of the “two” is more subtle than that, since in a couple, he asserts, “the greater the reality of we-ness (Wirheit), the greater the possibility of autonomy (Selbstständigkeit) for me and for you; and the greater the reality of autonomy for me and for you, the greater the possibility of we-ness” [17] (p. 125). The fact remains that this dialectic presupposes the pre-existence of a duality, whereas, in a love relationship, duality is perpetually in construction, and it can only be constructed against a backdrop of freedom and solitude. Non-possession and the absence of demands on the other are the beating heart of love. The bond of love is built solely on mutual trust, not on expectations. And lovers never belong to each other: a loving “we”, a couple, cannot be conceived of in that way. Love always consists in letting the other be in her independence from me.

We must therefore maintain both the hope of a gift in return, which confers on love its horizon of reciprocity, and the necessarily asymmetrical nature of the movement by which I come to love the other: it is I who love first, and so I never love to be loved in return. It follows that the highest form of love is sacrifice. To love truly, to love in the truth of the term, is to prefer the sacrifice of love to any love that would impose itself on the other. There are goods (the highest goods) whose intrinsic value depends on the way they are obtained. Love is one of these; it has value only to the extent that it is obtained in the right way, that is, with complete freedom of consent. To obtain it in any other way irremediably degrades it. As Dorante says to Araminte at the end of Marivaux’s Les Fausses confidences, “I would rather regret your tenderness than owe it to the artifice that acquired it for me” [27] (act. III, sc. 12). Because the bond of love is based on trust alone given unconditionally and without expectation, it is also necessarily based on the truth of each of the lovers. For there is no trust without truth. Only trust and truth form the basis of the bond of love, not possession or the desire for fusion or control.

Love as a lived attitude is therefore a highly paradoxical phenomenon: it oscillates between the extreme insecurity of anxiety and the security without questions of play, art, and life that carry us and relieve us of the burden of our anxiety. It abolishes solitude while maintaining it despite everything as its condition of possibility. It is made up of duties, but duties that we impose on ourselves and which have no counterpart in the other—duties without corresponding rights. It is a unilateral movement, especially in the case of immaterial gifts, and its only richness lies in the gift itself, beyond any exchange process. In the best cases, it can be reciprocal, but reciprocity does not destroy its character as a unilateral movement. It will probably be objected: does not this analysis of love based on the three existentials of concern for, unconditional trust, and letting-be provide a far too idealized image of love-eros, and does not this approach have the defect of ignoring certain essential features of love, those relating to erotic desire and amorous enjoyment?

I do not think so. Admittedly, I have attempted to circumscribe an ideal of love that is never more than partially realized in imperfect human relationships. But I believe that it is on the basis of this complex and paradoxical dialectic of love that the carnal, sexual relationship can only be aptly conceived. Love is not desire, and so it is not the desire for sexual fulfillment or enjoyment. Rather, the opposite is true: sexual desire and the possibility of erotic fulfillment in love are only possible according to concern for, unconditional trust, and a letting-be that refrains from exercising power or control over the other. Sexuality itself is subordinated to the dimension of playful being-carried, which has its source in unconditional trust. Sexuality is merely an extension or a carnal fulfillment of love—not a goal or a starting point for it. This is why, even where sexuality is absent, love can retain most of its characteristics.

4. Love as Experience

So far I have considered love as a feeling and then as a complex existential attitude, as an integral being-towards-the-other that cannot be broken up into feelings, wills, and actions. There remains to consider love as an experience. The idea of experience cannot be dissociated from that of a traversal and a danger. In Greek, empeiria is rooted in peirô, to cross, and peraô, to pass through, to transpierce, which also gave rise to the noun poros, the passage, the ford. All these words come from the Sanskrit root <per>, which also generated “péril [danger]” in French. All experience is inextricably a traversal and a putting oneself in danger by running the risk of a radical transformation. Indeed, the existential decentering that love induces brings with it such a constitutive risk: I am challenged to radically transform my perspective at the risk of myself. But precisely because love-eros is concerned with a single, exclusive object, there is no room here for an experience that would be open to a generalization: it is always a singular love, such or such love of this or that being, that initiates me into the fundamental experience of love so that this experience always also means an initiation into itself, something that is carried out each time for the first and the last time—the first being also the last. The experience of love is inseparable from the person who inspired it. Here, the experience of the absolutely singular is the only pathway to a grasp of the general.

So, whereas in most of the experiences I have, my prior capacities provide me with an openness to what I am experiencing (it is my ability to climb a hill that makes it seem steep to me, etc.), here, by contrast, it is the experience itself that discloses capacities that I did not have beforehand. It is the experience that opens me up to what I was radically incapable of before its occurrence. For instance, it is the love encounter that opens the way for an expectation that did not pre-exist it and that it alone can fulfill.

The experience of love, therefore, has its source in the proto-experience of the encounter. Hugo von Hofmannsthal was right to describe the latter as the “decisive erotic pantomime”: “The encounter, and not the embrace, I believe, is the true and decisive erotic pantomime” [28]. Love is always caught between the encounter that gives it momentum and which represents an absolute beginning for the lover and the risk of possession that always amounts to the death of love. Between the two lies the impossible possibility of human love, its always threatened and vulnerable eventfulness. Love is perpetually in suspense between the event of the encounter that brings to light its promise and the risk of its end that is inexorably announced within it. The event of the encounter is not just something that can be left behind; it is perpetually replayed, perpetually in statu nascendi in the experience of love, giving it the beauty of what is fragile as such and the kind of strength that comes from that fragility. This is what the myth of Orpheus reminds us: not only is love inseparable from the omnipresent possibility of death, which hangs by a thread (a snakebit), but it is gained over death, on condition that I renounce any taking possession of the other, any temptation to control and hold onto him or her—a temptation that, in the myth, is symbolized by the gaze. The moment Orpheus turns round to contemplate his beloved, the moment his gaze settles on her to embrace and possess her being, to bring her back to life, Eurydice is taken from him a second time. He remains alone on earth. Love lives and breathes only from this non-possession, which represents for it the highest possibility and gives the human bond its strength out of weakness.

As Ovid wrote in his Metamorphoses:

“She [Eurydice] was among the shadows that had recently arrived in the tenebrous abode. She advanced with slow steps, delayed by her wound. She is returned to her husband: but such is the law he receives: if, before crossing the dark bends of the Avernus, he turns his head to look at Eurydice, his pardon is revoked; Eurydice is lost to him without return” [29] (X, 1).