May - Love: a Secret History

LOVE
A HISTORY

SIMON MAY

YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS
NEW HAVEN AND LONDON

Copyright 2011 Simon May

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

May, Simon (Simon Philip Walter)

Love: a history / Simon May.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-300-11830-8

1. LoveHistory. I. Title.

BD436.M375 2011

128'.4609dc22

2010049424

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To MLM and ADG

I have benefited from the comments of many scholars, who gave so generously of their time, and I should like to record my great indebtedness to Rachel Adelman, Keith Ansell-Pearson, Liz Carmichael, Graham Davies, Nicholas Dent, Alison Finch, William Fitzgerald, Sebastian Gardner, Simon Gaunt, Ken Gemes, Lenn Goodman, Edward Harcourt, Philip Hardie, Michael Harris, Sandra Jacobs, Robert Jackson, Stephen Jaeger, Susan James, Chris Janaway, Werner Jeanrond, Menachem Kellner, Christopher Kelly, Duncan Large, Diana Lipton, Oliver O'Donovan, George Pattison, James Porter, Anthony Price, Bernard Reginster and Gudrun von Tevenar. Special appreciation goes to Michael Burdett, Meade McCloughan, Barnabas Palfrey and Chris Sykes, who provided invaluable help with research, checking citations, and pointing out sources that I had missed. I have enjoyed many fruitful conversations with Stephen Barber and Francis Pike and thank them for their interest and friendship.

Birkbeck College, University of London, was my philosophical home for many years and my heartfelt thanks go to my colleagues and students there for innumerable delightful and formative conversations, which have constituted an entire education. I am, as ever, grateful to my agent, Bill Hamilton, for his encouragement and support. Finally, it has been a tremendous pleasure to work with Robert Baldock and Rachael Lonsdale at Yale University Press. No author could wish for more stimulating, skilful and tenacious editors.

Isn't love indefinable a matter of feeling, not thought? Worse: doesn't delving into this most spontaneous and mysterious emotion risk evicting its magic? And so end up killing precisely what we are trying to understand?

I have repeatedly encountered these questions, along with scepticism, even hostility, towards the very idea of a philosophy of love. A philosophy of love, so this view goes, is either futile (love cannot be defined) or self-defeating (to define it is to degrade it). The motive for such a project is not only nave but suspect: one philosophises about love because one cannot experience it; but if one cannot experience it then how can one possibly philosophise about it?

Interestingly, these critics seldom see other emotions in the same way. Almost nobody believes that to philosophise about compassion, or generosity, or lust, or melancholy, or respect, or the yearning for immortality will destroy the capacity for those feelings; or that the motivation to do so betrays the inability to experience them so that an interest in, say, hate would reflect one's inability to hate sufficiently, or one's having been hated too little, or one's failure to sustain a relationship of hate. If anything, they might suspect the opposite.

By contrast, attitudes towards a psychology of love seem much more positive. And especially towards an evolutionary psychology. Indeed, it isn't uncommon to find that those who despise attempts to philosophise about love are intrigued by, say, explanations of why and how we love in terms of mating strategies and evolutionary fitness, or brain states and neurotransmitters, or stories about the various sorts of loving relationship that can exist, or patterns of attachment in childhood, or the workings of desire for intimacy, for sex, for children. Academic books, chat shows, pop lyrics, internet dating sites, self-help manuals all buzz with curiosity about the conditions for successful love, the right partner, the challenges of fidelity and jealousy, or the virtues of intimacy such as empathy, respect and tolerance. Though one might think that these reductionist theories are likely to be at least as successful as philosophy in evicting the magic from love, it seems quite acceptable to describe people's emotions when they are in love or have recently been rejected; to map the feelings and histories that can obstruct intimacy and how they might be overcome; to explain why you, as the personality type you are, fall for one person rather than another; to explore gender differences in the brain and in courting or mating behaviour; and so on.

Why the inconsistency? Why is talk of love everywhere and yet in a certain sense it is also a no-go zone?

Before venturing an answer it is worth reminding ourselves that it was not ever thus. If you had asked some of the greatest founders of Western love like Plato, Aristotle, Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, or philosophers like Spinoza in the seventeenth century and Schopenhauer in the nineteenth, whether it could be defined, or if uninhibited reflection on its nature could enable one to love better, they would have been amazed at the question. Not only could they all offer detailed definitions of it; it was also central to their philosophy and therefore to what are today considered, in most respects, distinct fields like ethics and metaphysics and aesthetics. For these thinkers, to get clear on what love is, what inspires it, what we seek in it, which qualities are most worth loving and which less, what prices are worth paying for it and what aren't, what virtues must be cultivated if we are successfully to pursue it, where we can fall into conceptual error and how we can educate ourselves to recognise and avoid such error all this, they hold, doesn't stymie love but allows it to flourish. And in particular, allows us to love the right objects with the right sort of attention.

So what is going on today? The answer might be this: we are determined both to make traditional expectations of love come true and therefore to avoid questioning them. It is fine, indeed essential, to ask how love can be made to work, why it doesn't, what social or evolutionary purposes it might serve, what sorts of relationships express it. But the nature of love what exactly it is; what we demand from it is sacred territory. Is it really unconditional? Is it really spontaneous, and ultimately unfathomable in its motives? Do parents really love own sake?

The answer to these sorts of questions is widely assumed to be yes. Which in turn fixes the expectations of millions of lovers: when they feel delight, frustration, success, failure, reproachful, fulfilled, in their relationships. We are still dominated by a background picture of love that belongs to a certain sort of Romanticism and that hasn't changed in its essentials since the late nineteenth century. (In chapter 1, I will summarise what I take the key elements of this picture to be.) Indeed, when it comes to love, the long nineteenth century extends not only into the twentieth, to 1914 or 1917, but well into the twenty-first.