Vladimir Solovyov - The Meaning of Love

ESALEN INSTITUTE / LINDISFARNE BOOKS LIBRARY OF RUSSIAN PHILOSOPHY

In the same series:

War, Progress, and the End of History, Vladimir Solovyov

The Russian Idea, Nikolai Berdyaev

The translation, substantially revised by Thomas R. Beyer, Jr., for this edition, is based on the original translation by Jane Marshall, published in 1945 by Geoffrey Bles, The Centenary Press, London.

This edition copyright Lindisfarne Press, 1985

Introduction copyright Owen Barfield, 1985

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and articles.

Published by Lindisfarne Press

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Solovyov, Vladimir Sergeyevich, 18531900.

The meaning of love.

Translation of: Smysl' liubvi.

1. Love. I. Beyer, Thomas R. II. Title.

BD436.S6413 1985 177'.7 8518037

Cover illustration: Color etching by Georges Braque from L'Ordre des Oiseaux, reproduced by courtesy of Les ditions d'Art Au Vent d'Arles, Paris, 1962.

Cover design by Norman Kanter

T he first time I heard the word sexy used was in a performance of Bernard Shaw's late play The Apple Cart, and I remember the titters it evoked in the audience. It was not long before the neologism had entered into general use; but I think the second World War had intervened before our vocabulary descended even farther to the unlovely, if not positively hideous expression having sex, ubiquitous now in the media and to be heard even in courts of law. Thus the vulgarization of language reflects, and in doing so helps forward, the decomposition of the human spirit.

The assumption of an emergent evolution, whereby man has merely evolved from the status of an animal, is today built into our language on pretty well all subjects, including notably the subject of sex. It is accordingly taken for granted in most quarters that the sexual instinct is the underlying reality and that what is called love is a late-come embroidery on it. The fact that this word still always denotes sex-love, unless the context otherwise directs, as for instance in its attributive useslove poems, love tokens, love-sick, love life, etc.seems at first sight to support this view. The fact that there are nevertheless plenty of contexts in which it means nothing of the sort has led on the one hand to a great deal of confused feeling and confused thinking, and on the other hand to some profound and valuable distinguos, one of the latest being C.S. Lewis's The Four Loves. It is hardly surprising that not a few have reacted to the confusion by insisting on an opposition amounting to incompatibility between Eros and Agape, between the earthly Aphrodite Pandemos of Plato and his sublime Aphrodite Urania. If they had their way, we should cease using the same word for at least two entirely different things.

That is not the conclusion arrived at by Vladimir Solovyov. Where Lewis, with all due allowance for interaction, divides, Solovyov unites. For good reason, he writes,

sexual relations are not merely termed love, but are also generally acknowledged to represent love par excellence, being the type and ideal of all other kinds of love (cf. the Songs of Songs and the Apocalypse).

Others, notably Coventry Patmore, have arrived at the same conclusion on the same or similar grounds, but none I think by the same method. We have to extract Patmore's philosophy of love from poems and aphorisms, whereas Solovyov's approach is quietly scientific. Any attempt, he points out, to account for the sexual relation between human beings and to determine its true function, must account for all the phenomena, not only some of them; and yet one very conspicuous phenomenon, left completely out of account in a biologically biased treatment of the subject, is the experience known as being in love.

Not that the other factors are in their turn ignored. Solovyov does not start from the subjective experience of being in love and ingeniously evolve a whole metaphysic from it. He opens with a biological survey, which easily, and to my mind irresistibly, refutes the age-old presumption (based, it would seem, on an unholy alliance between Darwinian theory and a sentence in the Prayer Book marriage service) that the teleology of sexual attraction is the preservation of the species by multiplication. On the contrary, it is apparent from the whole tendency of biological evolution that nature's purpose or goal (or whatever continuity it is that the concept of evolution presupposes) has been the development of more complex and, with that, of more highly individualized and thus more perfect organisms. From the fish to the higher mammals quantity of offspring steadily decreases as subtlety of organic structure increases; reproduction is in inverse proportion to specific quality. On the other hand the factor of sexual attraction in bringing about reproduction is in direct proportion. On the next or sociological level he has little difficulty in showing that the same is true of the factor of romantic passion in sexual attraction. Both history and literature show that it contributes nothing towards the production of either more or better offspring, and may often, as in the case of Romeo and Juliet, actually frustrate any such production at all.

Why then has nature, or the evolutionary process, taken the trouble to bring about this obtrusively conspicuous ingredient in the make-up of homo sapiens? It is in its answer to this question that the originality (which is not the same thing as novelty) of this little book resides. The answer is approached step by step. It would seem, the argument proceeds, that that ingredient must positively have been an end in itselfand not perhaps an unworthy one. This is a long step already out of the Darwin-Freud paradigm, and one might be not unhappy to rest awhile in it. But it turns out to be only the first step. The next, and the most difficult one, constituting therefore the main substance of the book, is to show that even here nature is after all still at her old tricks, developing quality at the expense of quantity. The rarest complex organization of all, human individuality, is an end in itself by contrast with what has gone before; but on a plane now where ends in themselves are also means to an end. It is the plane of what the author calls the unity-of-the-all idea, or as it was translated in Janet Marshall's earlier English version the all-one idea.

Being, at the level of human individuality, is characterized above all by a relation between whole and part that is different from the everyday one that is familiar to us. We may catch a glimpse of it if we reflect, in some depth, on the true nature of a great work of art. Recent advocates of holism in philosophy or science seem also to be feeling their way towards it. It is a relation no longer limited by the manacles of space and time, so that interpenetration replaces aggregation; one where the part becomes more specifically and individually a partand thus pro tanto an end in itselfprecisely as it comes more and more to contain and represent the Whole.

Sex-love is for most human beings their first, if not their only, concrete experience of the possibility of such an interpenetration with other parts, and thus potentially with the Whole.

The meaning and worth of love, as a feeling, is that it really forces us, with all our being, to acknowledge for another the same absolute central significance which, because of the power of our egoism, we are conscious of only in ourselves. Love is important not as one of our feelings, but as the transfer of all our interest in life from ourselves to another, as the shifting of the very center of our personal lives.