Travis Joseph Rodgers
Once more Love stirs me up, the limb-loosener,
a creature bitter-sweet, baffling.
-Gillian Spraggs's translation of Sappho's Fragment 130
What is love? Haddaway were hardly the first philosophers to ask that question. Around 370 BCE, Plato’s Socrates asked it in his Phaedrus and Symposium, two dialogues on love. Close to a century earlier, Empedocles had pitted love against strife as the two fundamental forces in the universe. Aristotle likewise wrote on friendship, the Romans developed a notion of friendship called amicitia, and St. Augustine developed a notion called the ordo amoris, the order of love. In short, philosophical treatments in the Western canon date back approximately 2500 years. To treat all these ideas would be to shortchange the ideas. Instead, I’ll pick up some interesting threads as we work through this chapter.
Love vs. Strife
Love (philotes), as Empedocles discusses it, is a unifying force; it opposes Strife (McKirahan, 14.58). Love, in this sense, is an attraction, and organizing principle. Strife separates and causes differences. It’s the interplay between these two forces that gives the universe (kosmos) its structure. It’s why we see similarities among the varieties. It’s worth noting that Empedocles offers these principles as much as principles of physics as of human psychology.
The Ladder of Love
Plato's views on love are complex. Sometimes, love is a "madness" that drives an individual contrary to, or at least distinctly from rational thought. In Plato's Phaedrus, Socrates discusses the metaphor of a charioteer with two horses. One horse is reason, attracted to good things. The other is appetite, attracted to appealing things. The charioteer's job is to know when to restrain the horse of appetite. The picture suggests a kind of love that is indiscriminate, at best. It is only with brutally hard work and pain that one can restrain and potentially train the appetites. Socrates's explanation of the bad things a lover would want in a beloved paint a pretty dim view of at least that sort of love. Things are complicated because he then proceeds to offer at least one more, differing account of love in the remainder of the dialogue.
In Plato’s Symposium, Socrates expresses a more positive view of love. It’s worth noting that many view of love are expressed here, by different speakers. There’s a physician, a poet, and a statemen, for instance. In Socrates’s presentation, attraction to physical things is a starting point. It lead us toward increasingly less physical things. We find a body beautiful, then we understand that the personality associated with the body may also be beautiful. So, too, one’s character and mind. The highest rung on this ladder is the "Form" (eidos) of Beauty Itself.
A Platonic Form’s precise nature is the matter of some controversy, but it’s helpful to think of it this way: if all the beautiful things were gone, there would still be a paradigm for what things would count as beautiful and not, were they existing. This immaterial, indestructible paradigm is a Form.
Plotinus, a Neo-Platonist
Plotinus, moved by beauty as much as by Plato’s teaching, penned an Ennead On Beauty. “This is the spirit that Beauty must ever induce, wonderment and a delicious trouble, longing and love and a trembling that is all delight. For the unseen all this may be felt as for the seen; and this the Souls feel for it, every soul in some degree, but those the more deeply that are the more truly apt to this higher love—just as all take delight in the beauty of the body but all are not stung as sharply, and those only that feel the keener wound are known as Lovers.”
-Stephen McKenna's translation of Plotinus's Ennead 1.6
Ordo Amoris
St. Augustine receives a good deal of credit in developing the Christian picture of love. In his Confessions, he writes, “So that it seems to me that it is a brief but true definition of virtue to say, it is the order of love” (XV.22). The idea seems to be that there are levels or orders of things worthy of love. Ordered love involves loving things as they should be loved. Disordered love is loving something too much or too little. He echoes this point in the first book of his On Free Choice of the Will, in his discussion of inordinate love. The orders probably map pretty neatly onto the Platonic map. Increasingly non-physical things that are longer-lasting and not susceptible to degradation should be loved more than physical, fleeting things. Unlike the Platonic picture, the Christian picture puts God at the top – the most lovable thing there is.
Love Languages
Gary Chapman’s excellent work on the five love languages draws a distinction between falling in love and being in love. I’m aware I’ve skipped forward about 1600 years in time. It’s not that I don’t think interesting things have been done in the philosophy of love in that time. It’s rather a matter of space and my expertise. I’ll say more to fill in these gaps later. For now, let’s take Chapman’s distinction seriously.
Falling in love, Chapman writes, is euphoric, physical, drives persons together. This loving feeling is obsessive and even blinding (Chapman, 28-29). It’s not until things slow down that we start to realize that being in love might require some work. It wasn’t hard, after all, to fall in love. This falling in love idea sounds similar to Empedocles’s take on philotes. It also sounds like the lower forms of love Plato and others discuss: erotic, powerful, and disarming.
One of Chapman’s key insights (among many!) is that many conflate this falling in love sensation with the lasting kind of love. Chapman could have cited Plato. Love grounded in physical attributes may be only as stable as the physical attributes. Looks change. Personality traits change, too, but they tend to be much more stable than looks. A compassionate partner can be compassionate for a hundred years. I suppose none of this is too surprising or coincidence, as Chapman is writing in a Christian tradition.