Love Is a Philosopher

Love’s Movement, Love’s Gift

The philosophical investigation of love invokes millennia-long conversations stretching from Plato’s Symposium to Kierkegaard and Binswanger in the 19th and early 20th centuries, from Martha Nussbaum to Harry Frankfurt and Jean-Luc Marion in the late 20th century up to the more recent studies like Anthony Steinbock’s Knowing by Heart: Loving as Participation and Critique (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2021). In these and many other cases, the question is not one of renouncing the justifying power of love but simply one of admitting that we can neither fully grasp nor instrumentalize love. I am aware that the indications toward apprehending love in the essays below remain programmatic and suggestive. That this special issue opens up the field of not-knowing and that it is programmatic is not sufficient to disqualify it as a philosophical exercise—quite the contrary.

Nevertheless, some elect to disqualify love as a legitimate horizon in which to relate to one another. Love’s purported status as an “ideal” remains, well, always an ideal, out of reach and never realizable in this world of concrete relationships. Jacques Derrida adopted this sentiment, in keeping with his skepticism about all things logocentric. In the hands of deconstruction Derrida reconsidered love as mere economic exchange, cancelling the possibility that the gift of love enjoys a movement of unconditional advance. For Derrida love cannot help but descend into the self-interest of narcissism. In a late interview, he observed tellingly, “I believe that without a movement of narcissistic reappropriation, the relation to the other would be absolutely destroyed, it would be destroyed in advance. The relation to the other-even if it remains asymmetrical, open, without possible reappropriation-must trace a movement of reappropriation in the image of oneself for love to be possible, for example. Love is narcissistic. Beyond that, there are little narcissisms, there are big narcissisms, and there is death in the end, which is the limit” [1].

How might the present special issue rescue and defend love and even something like self-love? Must we abandon love as a philosophical category because it always already implicates itself in the self-referential movement of narcissism? Shall we break the spell of its being a healthy form of self-esteem (amour propre in French) by exposing it as a toxic command that carries with it an inescapable accusation of gross absorption in my own self-appropriating ego? Put otherwise: Is Derrida right on this score; does the initial movement of love necessarily require a second stage of appropriation and grasping, the circular folding back of love’s return to itself?

Further challenges arise once we turn our gaze toward ancient discussions of love. Plato’s great work on Love, The Symposium, enjoins us to think with Socrates about the meaning of love in relation to our desire for beautiful and good things. The god of love, Eros, persuades us that love forms an inner desire that motivates us to love something other than ourselves. This “something” naturally appears to be wisdom due to the fact that wisdom cultivates what is beautiful and good in life. From this perspective, Socrates exclaims that “Love must be a Philosopher.” Yet, a closer reading of The Symposium illuminates that it is not so much wisdom as it is personal immortality that remains the final goal of love, which, in turn, involves a form of self-appropriation—because it is only in the act of propagation that immortality is born and thus secured. “Why is the object of love procreation? Because procreation is a kind of everlastingness and immortality for the mortal creature, as far as anything can be” ([2], p. 44). A few pages later, it is proffered that, “And the correct way for him to go, or be led by another, to the things of love, is to begin from the beautiful things in this world, and using these as steps, to climb ever upwards for the sake of that other beauty, going from one to two and from two to all beautiful bodies, and from beautiful bodies to beautiful practices, and from beautiful practices to beautiful kinds of knowledge…” in order to attain the “eternal…it exists on its own, single in substance and everlasting” ([2], p. 49). It is little wonder Derrida dismantled love, since it appears here in the Platonic tradition to be born of both narcissism’s desire to secure a legacy—as well as the diminution of the contingent world in favour of the “steps which climb ever upwards” to the pure form of archetypes, the purity of an ideal.

This kind of Platonic archetype of love, the desire to have one’s identity or sense of “I” passed on through the ongoing acts of birth and generation, the drive to eternalize oneself, becomes a foil which the present special issue challenges. This special issue’s model of love thematizes a type of anti-Platonism. Insofar as we begin not with a movement from procreation to intellectual assent, but rather with love’s movement from the self to the world and back again, i.e., the concrete domain in which we find ourselves embedded is the site of lovemaking; here, and only here, do we recuperate the concept of love. Philosophy, I suggest, can wrongfoot the Platonic desire to achieve immortality in procreation and intellectual ascent by beginning with a recommencement of Descartes’ question: “I know that I exist; the question is, what is this ‘I’ that I know?” Who am I, here and now, is a question more urgent than the self I aspire to pass on through procreation. Instead of I “think,” therefore I am, we may gesture toward I “love,” therefore I am.

Each of the essays enclosed within this special issue moves according to its own rhythm and involves us in debate with its particular array of philosophical voices. I thank all who attended the workshop on “Philosophies of Love” hosted at Dublin City University in March of 2024 under the auspices of the Dean (Professor Derek Hand) of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. This special issue has been the fruit of that day-long discussion. Moving from Lilian Alweiss’s adept analysis of worldly love in Hannah Arendt (amoris mundi), to Eileen Brennan’s essay, we can glimpse in Brennan a close reading of the early works of Paul Ricoeur. Brennan complicates any oppositional reading of eros and agape in that early phase of Ricoeur, during which he also discussed love in light of French education reform. Joseph O’Leary discusses, too, the distinction to be had in any literary analysis of love, but from another angle of entry: sacrificial agapeic love versus the dark underside of possessive love or toxic love that can generate an atmosphere of abuse and death—with a literary analysis of Jean Racine’s Phèdre (1677). One wonders here if love truly loves once it possesses; does love not transform into manipulation or control, and ultimately hate, if my love for the beloved yields to my impulse to murder the beloved. Love cannot, from my point of view, be understood as a “hole” through which the world shines into an inner chamber of the heart that is otherwise isolated from the world. The experience of love, its movement, does not assimilate into itself something alien into the heart, so that it may possess it. That act of possession, full of passion though it is, involves the grasping bound up with the pathology of pride or the libido dominandi—not love.

Ian Leask reinvokes Plato’s Symposium in brilliant fashion on this score. The concept of parrhesia makes itself felt at the end of that dialogue, with a drunken speech delivered by Alcibiades, an interruption of the will to escape temporality. After the “climbing” toward the eternal universal form is suggested as the movement proper to love (its otherworldly flight), Leask suggests a more complex picture of love’s movement may be visible if we account for that final drunken irruption—which focuses on the particular, the love of Socrates. Errol Boon reframes the idea of perfectly “infinite” love from the point of view of marital love, which entails incisive readings of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and the German Idealists.

Michael Hinds takes care to discuss the underlying logic, if there is one, of Walt Whitman’s conception of “amorous love” in conversation of desire and love in Giles Deleuvze. A surprising connection, indeed; however, Deleuze did admire and write on the American poet. Deleuze thought the dynamic play of the becoming of the “self” in Whitman served as an exemplar of the rhizomatic unfolding of the plurality and fungibility of the self—in and through the ache of love. Felix Ó Murchadha also formulates love in the vocabulary of excess. So understood as utterly unconditional and unnecessary, love is viewed as a movement of sacrifice made on behalf of the singularity of this unique person in question. A sensitive phenomenology of this intersubjective movement occurs in conversation with Arendt and Patočka, although I suspect Jean-Luc Marion’s idea of the vulnerable advance of love (that does not wait for conditions to be fulfilled) would enrich such a phenomenological analysis.

Claude Romano’s keynote address, here understood as a phenomenological analysis of erotic love, informs us that love as a feeling-structure is not a set of behaviours, a desire, or even a will. It instead refers us to the complex disposition known as an existential attitude, by which we make and remake our surrounding world. The existential attitude of love implies ontological significance. Its ultimate movement toward the other lies in its letting-go, its capacity to teach us to refrain from exercising power or control over the other. On the basis of this condition is erotic love or the desire for sexual fulfilment possible. My essay on self-love traverses similar territory; it asks how my relationship to the other already in advance occupies the intellectual debate over the nature of the “self” and self-presence. However difficult may be a precise definition of self and love, such definitions are essential to any resolution of the issues in debate. As the intellectual tradition after Descartes makes plain, the characterization of the self is no less an arduous task than assigning conceptual boundaries to love. Actually, “self” and “love” enjoy a correlative significance: to define the one we must know what is included in or excluded from the other—which is why so many of the essays contained in this special issue raise for consideration the specter of the “self” and “identity.”