PHILOSOPHICAL EGGS

Introduction

The concept of love can be helpfully approached by understanding insights from three popular theories of it: eros, agape, and philia. In this post I offer a few central insights from each theory and show how these insights can help us cultivate freedom in some form. I then summarize Jean-Paul Sartre’s insight that the fear of freedom leads many people to sadistic and masochistic strategies which undermine love. I close with some wisdom from Ralph Waldo Emerson to inspire us to avoid such strategies and embrace various forms of love despite their risks. 

Eros

In his dialogue Symposium, the greatest philosophical work on love, Plato has his character Aristophanes offer a comedic yet insightful story about the hubristic double people who, with their spherical bodies containing two heads, four arms, and fours legs, decided to storm mount Olympus and attack the Gods. Zeus, realizing that their sacrifices to the Gods were beneficial, didn’t want to destroy them with his lightning bolts. Instead, he had them cut in half to make them weak and remind them who is in charge. Ever since then, Aristophanes claims, we have been seeking our other half because “human nature was originally one and we were a whole, and the desire and pursuit of the whole is called love.” Here we have the ancient origin of our notion of “finding our other half,” “soul mates,” “twin flames,” and so on. We also have the basic concepts for a definition of eros:

• Eros is an intense desire for something we don’t possess and which we think will make us whole. 

There are many other ideas associated with this definition. For example:

• Erotic love, in seeking to overcome our incomplete nature, is essentially about self-interest.
• Erotic love is often most strongly manifested in sexual desire but it is a wide category that includes all forms of intense desire for self-completion.
• Erotic love, in seeking to possess something, will often give birth to something as well. For example, if we love music and want to unify with it, we will end up playing, composing, performing, and so on. And if we love someone and unify with them sexually then we may have children.
• The value of erotic love is based on the value of the objects it pursues. This is where reason can help in thinking hard about the worth of the beloved. Should we love money, power, fame, and pleasure less than things like justice, wisdom, compassion, and freedom?  Why? Why not? 
• This shows how the energy of erotic love can help educate us by allowing us to learn about the things we desire. We come to see what they really are and, more importantly, what they are not: what they lack. This awareness of lack can often be grounds for shame: we are ashamed that we could have loved this or that. But such experiences, although difficult, can often lead to a new desire for something better that, in turn, can teach us something new. 
• Erotic love cannot usually offer fidelity or stability with regard to persons or objects since once we possess something we no longer desire it.
• But erotic love may offer stable desire towards things not so easily possessed, achieved, or encountered like a redeemed social condition, enlightened institutions, truth, wisdom, God, beautiful art, the development of a virtuous soul, and, perhaps, even other people as long as they remain sufficiently profound, in a process of development, mysterious, etc. 

Given all these ideas we can certainly see how eros can lead to a lot of drama, difficulty, and even despair. However, it can also be liberating since it can, on the one hand, free us from certain confining habits, patterns, and relationships and, on the other hand, give us the freedom to improve our lives by opening us up to radically new possibilities of transformation. Eros can therefore offer us an revitalizing experience of death-in-life whereby we die to something we once took seriously in order to be reborn anew.

Agape 

Agape is typically associated with the love of God as this passage from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry “Love” points out: “‘Agape’ has come, primarily through the Christian tradition, to mean the sort of love God has for us persons, as well as our love for God and, by extension, of our love for each other—a kind of brotherly love. In the paradigm case of God’s love for us, agape is “spontaneous and unmotivated,” revealing not that we merit that love but that God’s nature is love. Rather than responding to antecedent value in its object, agape instead is supposed to create value in its object and therefore to initiate our fellowship with God.” But we can give a secular meaning to agape as well. This neutral formulation applies to both and helps us see how strongly agape contrasts with eros:

• Agape is a form of love that, rather than selfishly seeking something perceived to be valuable in order to complete ourselves as in eros, altruistically shares something it already has in order to create value. It is not about possessing something to fill ourselves; it is about giving to fulfill others. 

One way to understand this creation of value is to focus on freedom. When we love we are giving the gift of enhanced freedom to another. One might say that love is the extension of what we already have, freedom, to others for their sake. Now we can enhance the freedom of others in material ways by providing them with shelter, food, clothes, and so on. But one influential lesson from Christian agape is that we can enhance people’s freedom on a more fundamental level by (1) granting them forgiveness which allows them to transcend the past and be free to change and begin anew; and (2) relating to them through duty-bound promises that create an improved relationship free from the uncertainties of change in the future. And those who offer this two-fold form of freedom enhancement are themselves enhanced by relinquishing negative emotions, ideas, experiences, and relationship patterns and creating positive ones in their place. 

Philia

Philia, or friendship, is a form of mutual love that was famously given three forms by the Greek philosopher Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) in Book 8 of his Nicomachean Ethics: friendships of utility, pleasure, and friendships of virtue. Friendships of utility are based around mutual use value and last as long as the use value lasts. For example, two people may help each other at work, in a business partnership, or in politics. Should the context for the use value change – say the two no longer work together – then the friendship ends. Friendships of pleasure are similar but are based around pleasure: playing sports together, playing music together, etc. Again, if the context for pleasure ends then the friendship comes to an end. Both these forms of friendship, despite being mutual, have a selfish motive: to gain use-value or pleasure. But there is a superior type of friendship that has very different properties:

• Friendships of virtue do not start with a selfish motive to gain anything. They start with a mutual admiration of virtue or character excellence and proceed into activities in which the friends develop virtue in one another for each other’s sake. These friendships will feature rational dialogue as the means to the development of virtue and good judgment. And, since these friendships are committed to a life-long development of character in order to reach a state of eudaimonia or fulfillment, they do not fade like friendships of pleasure and utility do. Naturally, this fulfillment will have use-value and can be pleasant. But such use-value and pleasure are not the motives for entering a friendship of virtue; rather, they are the beneficial results of it. 

This account shows how important friends are to our freedom. Without virtuous friends we can’t develop virtue and without virtue we can’t expect to make good judgments that allow us to live well. Vices lead to poor judgment and all kinds of failure that lead us into forms of bondage. But with good judgments we can be free from such bondage and free to develop a well-rounded life. Of course, we must keep in mind that we will need to become virtuous, or at least pursue the development of virtue seriously, if we expect virtuous people to admire us and befriend us. Aristotle points out that “the friend is another self” which means we can carry on rational dialogue and seek virtue with a friend just as we can with ourselves. Friends can certainly help us improve. But we need to think with ourselves, avoid contradictions and inconsistencies in our character, and strive to obtain justice, wisdom, courage, moderation, and other good traits. In doing so we can be capable of improvement and will have the resources to help our friends improve as well. 

The Fear of Freedom 

In his work Being and Nothingness (1956) Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) offers an interesting account of sadism and masochism (see the sections “First attitude toward others : love, language, masochism” and “Second attitude toward others: indifference, desire, hate, sadism” in part three). He points out that masochists want to be objects and sadists want to reduce others to objects. Why? To escape the burdens of freedom such as anxiety, guilt, responsibility, shame, failure, and so on. If people can be objects then they don’t have to worry about something free subjects have, namely, “transcendence” or future possibilities for action. They can, like objects, just be what they are with nothing to worry about. And if people can reduce others to objects then they, too, don’t have to be threatened by transcendence. They can remain who they are and need not worry about those possibilities that threaten their fixed worlds. Thus we see that masochists want their freedom possessed and sadists want to possess the freedom of others in order to engage in an impossible escape from the very freedom that makes them human. 

Why impossible? Well, on one hand, sadists want to make people into objects without freedom. On the other hand, they need the people they objectify to remain free subjects. Sadists don’t go and humiliate dolls. Why not? Because they need a human to acknowledge their presence. But as long as such acknowledgment exists the sadist hasn’t reduced the person to an object. So the sadist is trying to make a human into a doll that will nonetheless remain human. And masochists are in a similar predicament. On the one hand, they want to be treated as objects with no freedom. On the other hand, they want to be aware that they are objects that lack freedom. But such awareness would show they are still free subjects not objects. Thus the masochist, too, is trying to make a human into a doll that will nonetheless remain human. So Sartre argues both sadists and masochists are engaged in contradictory and thus self-defeating strategies.

Sartre’s theory explains a great deal of human behavior and certainly connects to love. As we’ve seen, all three forms of love above connect to freedom in some positive way. But these manifestations of freedom can lead to danger. For example, in eros we are transformed in our pursuit of the thing we think will complete us. But this transformation can lead us to be alienated from our former relationships and our new ones as well should our love end. In agape we act for the sake of others to enhance their freedom and, in doing so, hope to become freer ourselves. But we may suffer when people fail to reciprocate our love, when they break promises, or when we find that, despite all our efforts to transform them for the better, they go deeper into misery. And in philia we also saw how perfect friendships require us to act out of admiration for another. But what if someone doesn’t admire us in return? And what if, despite our efforts to become virtuous, we fail to reach fulfillment due to things we can’t control? Given these observations, it is easy to see how, when it comes to love, we all too often are inclined to escape freedom enhancement. True, they promise us liberating forms of self-development. But since they can also fail and lead to suffering we may want to escape into masochistic and sadistic modes of control on some level to neutralize them.

Love, Wonder, and Abandonment

In his essay Circles, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1822) writes: “Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens.” And he notes that every “ultimate fact is only the first of a new series. Every general law only a particular fact of some more general law presently to disclose itself. There is no outside, no inclosing wall, no circumference to us. The man finishes his story, — how good! how final! how it puts a new face on all things! He fills the sky. Lo! on the other side rises also a man, and draws a circle around the circle we had just pronounced the outline of the sphere.” Emerson’s vision of our experience as an ever-expanding and changing realm of circles is instructive when it comes to love. We have an option to close ourselves or others in – or allow others to enclose us in – a circle which will prevent opening to others in ways that forge real loving relationships and positive development. As we have seen, there are dangers in expanding and encountering the new. But if we don’t draw other circles how can we grow and, as Emerson says, be an apprentice of the truth? It is hard to see how.

Now, we can certainly help ourselves and others expand if we focus on a good education, a strong sense of self-worth, encouragement by family and community, an ability to learn from people who think and act differently, and so on. But, when it comes to love, I think there will always be those anxiety-inducing factors over which we have little or no control. In the end, we may, if we really want some form of love to enter our lives, have to draw new circles by abandoning certain conceptions, relationships, and practices and take, as Soren Kierkegaard prescribed, a leap into the unknown. One of our most powerful allies in this endeavor is wonder – the wonder of beauty, of a new lover or friend, of creation, and so on – which calls us out of ourselves and allows us to forget all the calculating, controlling, and cowardice that can get in the way. In such moments of wonder we enter into as disinterested form of contemplation in which all attention is on the thing contemplated and none on our self. It is therefore the complete opposite of that controlling impulse which reaches its zenith in narcissism which, in seeking complete control over people, precludes love.

I read “Circles” in high school and never forgot these ideas which served me well in my own development which, especially at this point in my life, I can see was made possible with the help of leaps into new circles. Therefore I will conclude with Emerson’s wise words that connect these ideas in memorable concluding passage:

“The one thing which we seek with insatiable desire is to forget ourselves, to be surprised out of our propriety, to lose our sempiternal memory, and to do something without knowing how or why; in short, to draw a new circle. Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm. The way of life is wonderful: it is by abandonment.”

Go here for my other posts on love and love-related topics.

Go here for my posts on Aristotle.

Go here for my posts on Sartre.

Go here for my more in-depth look at Emerson’s “Circles” and his vision of the imagination.