By Clancy Martin
Few philosophical projects are more ambitious or daunting than writing a book about love. First of all, the literature on love is larger, I’d wager, than that on any other subject. There are classics like The Odyssey, The Symposium, the Kama Sutra, Pascal’s Discourse on Love,Kierkegaard’s "Diary of a Seducer," Ortega y Gasset’s On Love, not to mention Shakespeare, Stendhal, Proust — and Woody Allen. See also the explosion of interest in the topic in contemporary American philosophy since the pioneering work of Irving Singer, Robert C. Solomon, Harry Frankfurt, and Martha Nussbaum, along with contemporary critical minds who have tackled the subject, like Adrienne Rich, bell hooks, Adam Phillips, Simon May, and Laura Kipnis. I have only a small sampling of my favorite books on love at home, and they take up three walls of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. And that’s leaving out the neuroscientists.
On Romantic Love
By Berit Brogaard (Oxford University Press)
Second, starting at anywhere from age 15 to 25, everybody’s an expert, or an expert-in-training. For that matter, we begin to learn about love before we are even born — how much of the feeling of love is bound up with that intimacy we had with our mothers when we were still in their wombs? — and I talk to men and women in their 80s who assure me that love still surprises them.
Third, there are few philosophical subjects that almost everyone cares so earnestly about: I doubt many would disagree that love matters more to us than what makes a true statement true, or the problem of other minds, or the nature of free will (and indeed, all of those intractable philosophical questions play into the deeper question of the nature of love).
Fourth, to write well about love these days, you can’t be "just a philosopher": You have to learn about psychology, neurochemistry, social science; you must become a historian; you’d better study popular culture closely.
Fifth, for any strong thesis that you find championed about love, you will find precisely the opposite thesis being defended equally as persuasively. Everything Plato says about love is contested by Nietzsche. Everything St. Paul says about love is disputed by Freud. And at the end of the day, one feels that, for almost everyone, no matter how powerful the intellect, she or he is mostly telling us about her or his own personal experiences. Because that’s the way love works — it demands intimacy. People who try to write objectively about love usually fail. "The philosophy of every thinker is the more or less unconscious autobiography of its author," Nietzsche observed: how much more so when it comes to love.
For all those reasons, Berit Brogaard’s On Romantic Love is an achievement. Brogaard, an analytic philosopher at the University of Miami, is unafraid to tell us everything she has learned about love from her own life and from the lives of her friends and colleagues, while also including groundbreaking research in the neuroscience and psychology of love, and freely venturing into any area of popular culture that captures her interest.
She understands the phenomenon well enough to advance an original philosophical theory:
I argue that love is an emotion, and that emotions, like beliefs, can be assessed for rationality: love in its developing, ripening, and fading stages is sometimes rational and sometimes irrational. I further argue that love isn’t always something we consciously feel … love sometimes resides below our conscious awareness. … I also take issue with the common belief that love is an on/off affair … because love admits of degrees. … A final claim I defend is that because love is an emotion, and because emotions are subject to a kind of rational control, love too is something we can choose.
Since the work of Sartre and Solomon, the notion that love is both rational and voluntary, that "love is a judgment" (in Solomon’s helpful phrase), is not new, though it remains controversial.
I agree with Brogaard that love is partly rational and that it is also voluntary, or something that we can choose — that puts us in a certain camp of thinkers about love. Many philosophers and psychologists argue that love is a much more bodily and involuntary phenomenon — these are advocates of what Brogaard accurately calls the "James-Lange view" (harking back to the American philosopher William James and the Danish physician Carl Lange). Among contemporary thinkers on love, the neurologist Antonio Damasio is also an advocate of something like the James-Lange view.
What’s at stake is how much control over and how much responsibility we have for our emotional responses to the world. Brogaard and I think that, particularly when it comes to love, the answer is: You have a lot of control and a lot of responsibility.
Two elements of Brogaard’s view are strikingly new in the love literature — both of which I agree with and defend in my own work.
The first is that we have unconscious emotions. There is no consensus on this — even Freud doubted it, and the whole notion of the subconscious has been vastly complicated and increasingly doubted since Freud. But in the Buddhist tradition, for example, it has been argued for at least two thousand years that we have not dozens but hundreds of thousands of emotions that are taking place below our conscious awareness. That we have unconscious emotions is crucial to Brogaard’s view, because it allows for phenomena like the coupe de foudre or "lightning strike" that we sometimes experience when suddenly falling in love, and for the many wildly irrational emotional responses that lovers experience.
The second exciting element of Brogaard’s view is that emotions — like beliefs, I would argue — and especially love as an emotion, are not crudely valenced. They are not true/false, on/off, but admit of degrees. (This view, anathema to epistemologists as recently as 15 or 20 years ago, is now widely accepted by many contemporary philosophers who work on belief. Many epistemologists are also talking about beliefs and forms of knowledge that are not strictly conscious.) This moves the domain of love out of "fact" or "objective truth" into other, more nuanced ways of thinking about the subject. It emphasizes the role of our creative participation. It recognizes, as Stendhal insisted, that the imagination plays a crucial part in the process of falling and staying in love.
Brogaard illustrates her arguments with acute philosophical intelligence, stylistic verve, and concrete human examples. You will find much to disagree with, but that’s part of the charm of her work: She allows readers to engage in a very personal way with profound, contentious philosophical positions. She also navigates easily through the tempestuous technical waters of contemporary neurological research on love, which is where we might expect a flood of future insights.
That said, don’t look to scientists — or philosophers! — to tell you how to love. But it sure is fun to read Brogaard’s take on it.
Clancy Martin is a professor of philosophy at the University of Missouri at Kansas City. He is the author, most recently, of Love and Lies: An Essay on Truthfulness, Deceit, and the Growth and Care of Erotic Love (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015).