On Love

A Philosophy for the Twenty-First Century

Luc Ferry

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745671376
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy
• Index: Psychology

All the great ideals that gave life meaning in earlier societies - God, the nation, revolution, freedom, democracy - are in disarray today, questioned by many and rejected by those who have lost faith in them. But there is another value, rooted in the birth of the modern family and in the passage from traditional to modern marriage, that has transformed our lives in profound and often unrecognized ways: love. It affects not only our personal lives but many aspects of our social and collective life too, from art and education to politics. In this book Luc Ferry shows how the quiet rise of love as the central value in modern societies has created a new principle of meaning and a new definition of the good life that requires a completely different kind of philosophical thinking. It forms the basis for a new philosophy for the twenty-first century and a new kind of humanism for the modern world - not a humanism of reason and rights, but a humanism of solidarity and sympathy. The ideal that this new humanism realizes is no longer that of nationalisms and revolutions, of the perpetrating of organized violence in the name of deadly principles that are pursued over and above humanity. Rather, it is about preparing and ensuring a future for those we love most: our future generations.

1

The Revolution of Love

A New Principle of Meaning

Luc Ferry: After what we’ve just said, the reader will probably now have a better understanding of the way philosophy is the discovery of great principles of meaning, of the main answers to the question of what a good life is for mortals: a ‘discovery’ in the proper sense of the word since philosophers do not make any claim to be ‘inventing’ ex nihilo, just from their brains, some self-proclaimed principle supposed to enlighten mankind: rather, they strive to lift the veil, to detect, identify and deploy in a consistent way the as yet unformulated themes on which, in the final analysis, their contemporaries base their views of life. We need to bring to light the meaning and the logic of the vision of the world that now inspires us, to allow everyone to understand it and use it as a guideline.

I’ve said that we are currently entering, and this is something quite new, a fifth principle of meaning, a fifth answer to the question of the good life, based on the question of love. So, we are in a fifth period of philosophy, that of the second humanism, after the period of deconstruction of the first humanism. However, I haven’t yet said either what love was when seen from this angle, as a principle of meaning, or why its flourishing in the sphere of the modern family implied a new reply to the question of the good life. Everyone has some inkling of this, or even a more definite idea, but why, after all, should we start out with this love, this passion as old as humanity? Indeed, even if we accept that there’s been a revolution in private life, how can this revolution claim to infiltrate every sphere of existence, including the most public and collective spheres?

How love becomes a new principle of meaning and what kind of love we are talking of. Three reflexive approaches to love: analytical, historical and philosophical

Let’s start with the first question: how can we legitimately consider love as a new principle of the meaning of life and thus as a new philosophical principle in this history of the successive conceptions of the good life that I’ve just described? In contemporary literature, whether we’re talking about philosophy, history or the novel, we can distinguish between three approaches to love, even if the third – the one I prefer, the most philosophical of them – is definitely still very far from having been developed as fully as it needs to be.

First, we find attempts to define, by analysing the concepts involved, the different categories or the different names of love, the various components of the way we think of it, to draw from it a set of ideas about what needs to be done if we are to approach an ideal model. Denis de Rougemont was the first to attempt such an analysis – a very exciting one – in his books on the birth of romantic love in the western world. André Comte-Sponville followed in his footsteps with his usual talent, providing the conceptual analysis with a breadth and depth that it had not known beforehand.

Then come the anthropological and historical studies, which aim to describe and interpret the changes that, depending on the period, the social class and the place, have changed our conceptions of love and its role, marginal or central, in the constitution of families. Our writers of the ‘history of mentalities’, ever since Philippe Ariès, have provided us with some magnificent work in this field: I’ve already mentioned them and we’ll be returning to them in a few moments.

Finally, there’s a third, properly philosophical perspective, the one I’d like to explore. While taking the first two approaches into account, it focuses on the way the experience of love renews the question of our relation to the sacred, for instance, how it leads to a making sacred of the other, a transcendence of the beloved, which nonetheless remains completely circumscribed within the sphere of immanence to humanity, a form of sacred even within our ‘hearts’ yearnings’, the most immediate and intimate feelings of human beings. For this is how, in my view, the experience of love becomes, in a period that has deconstructed all traditional values, the foundation for a new form of transcendence, a new way of thinking about the meaning that we give to life.

All of this, of course, needs to be explained, made explicit, and spelled out. …

Claude Capelier: Another of love’s strengths is that it can potentially enhance every dimension of human experience, since they are all capable of reinforcing it and it has the ability to find, in each dimension, a reason for love. This also sets it apart as the best foundation for values, just when, in the wake of the liberation of hitherto neglected forms of existence, what we seek is to do justice to every possible form of human life, within the limits (of course) of what is democratically acceptable, finally including them within a coherent overall vision.

Luc Ferry: Yes and no. It’s complicated, since not every form of diversity is loveable and there are also in the human being many hateful and despicable things. And love never comes without hatred; they are probably two inseparable passions, if only because love leads us to hate those who hurt the people we love, or even, sometimes, to hate those we have loved when they hurt us, leave us, or cheat on us. This history of love, even if it is sublime, even if it reveals a new way of thinking of the good life, is far from being a primrose path. We’ll be returning to this when we tackle the third approach to love as a factor in the making sacred of the human. But it is also indispensable to pass through the first two approaches in order to grasp what is necessary and important about them.

The analytical approach or the three names of love: eros, philia and agape

The first of these approaches springs from what was still in the eighteenth century called philosophia generalis, the analysis of general concepts. This analysis may of course have a philosophical dimension, as is the case in Rougemont and, even more, Comte-Sponville, but its first aim is to clarify the notion of love, to spell out the different concepts used to designate it. The two authors I’ve mentioned – they are favourites of mine – have done exactly this, with considerable talent: Denis de Rougemont, in Love in the Western World, for example, and André Comte-Sponville in his fine book, Ni le sexe ni la mort (Neither Sex nor Death). Denis de Rougemont distinguishes, as does Comte-Sponville (though the latter is considerably more detailed in his philosophical analysis), between three categories or three names of love, drawn from three well-known Greek words: eros, philia and agape. I’ll say a few words about them, to make my argument clearer, and because it will be a useful way for me to bring out more distinctly what is specific about the prospects opened up by the ‘revolution of love’.

Eros is the love that seizes and consumes. Although it is different in humans and in animals (especially because of what Freud called ‘anaclisis’ or ‘propping’), eros remains essentially linked to conquest and sensual enjoyment. But above all, and I am here gladly drawing on the luminous analyses of Comte-Sponville, erotic love, romantic love (especially sexual love) has the particular feature of sometimes deriving more nourishment from absence than from presence. This is the very logic of desire as found already in Lucretius in the De rerum natura or in Pascal, in his analysis of divertissement: it is part of the contradiction inherent in the libido whereby desire is extinguished as soon as it is sated and is reborn only after a period devoted to other preoccupations and marked by the absence of the object of desire. In this sense, we can say that eros is nourished both by the presence of the beloved, when we ‘consume’ it, and by its absence, since this object has to vanish for a certain time if love is to be reborn.

I’d give a definition of philia that’s somewhat different from that put forward by Denis de Rougemont and André Comte-Sponville. In translations of Aristotle, the Greek word philia is rendered as ‘friendship’, which is really not very satisfactory since this term does not designate just friendship as such, but also, for example, love for children, which we wouldn’t these days identify – or at least not entirely – with mere friendship. What is philia? I’d suggest an image that I find quite an effective way of understanding it: philia is the feeling that we have, for instance, when we’re out in the street and bump into someone we love but haven’t seen for a long while. A smile springs to our lips before any kind of rational calculation: it’s a reflex rather than a reflexion. Philia is the joy we take in someone else’s mere existence. It’s joy without reason, so to speak, or at least without any reason other than the existence, the presence, of the beloved. So it’s already a form of gratuitous love, in the sense that it’s free of any calculation. What we have here is a love which, unlike eros, essentially takes delight in presence: it’s the very presence of the other as such that makes us happy.

The third level of love is the one that Christians put forward first, giving a new breadth to the idea of agape. This word, too, has been infelicitously translated by the term ‘charity’. These days, we can’t stop hearing in this word a sense of pity, which doesn’t correspond to the real meaning of the word agape. Simone Weil (who was both Jewish and Christian) gave a wonderful analysis of this with reference to the Jewish theory of tzimtzum. According to this, the creation of the world wasn’t a manifestation of the power of God generating, as it were, an outgrowth of himself, but quite the opposite – the effect of his deliberate withdrawal, with the aim of letting the other exist. Like a wave whose ebb makes way for the sand, God withdraws so as to leave room for the universe and for mankind. What Weil attempts to show by connecting agape to this theory of tzimtzum is the depth of God’s love for human beings, its absolutely gratuitous nature: he loves human beings so much that he, as it were, makes himself a ‘lack of being so that there may be being’. Agape is thus the opposite of gravity: it is grace itself. Weil sees it as the summit of love, human and divine.

When couples are unhappy, it’s often linked to the gravity that weighs them down: we’re heavy creatures, and this is because we’re always asking for things; we’re afraid the other will escape us; we give in to jealousy. Those people who are always asking ‘Do you love me?’ expose themselves to hearing the reply, ‘Of course I love you.’ The subtext here is: ‘Leave me alone.’ When gravity drags a couple down, when one person asks for more than the other, loves more than the other and turns this ‘surplus love’ into a burden by endlessly requiring that it be reciprocated, this is generally the sign that a split is looming. Agape is the intelligence of love, the wisdom of love that consists in leaving room for the other, letting the other be, leaving the other free: this is true love.

In Christian theology, agape reaches a very long way: in principle, it goes as far as love of one’s enemy. For a very long time, when I was a boy going to catechism classes, I didn’t know (and I don’t think the priest had much of an idea, either) what on earth this so-called ‘love of one’s enemy’ could mean. I couldn’t see how the Jew could love the Nazi who exterminated his family right in front of his eyes; I couldn’t understand how you could claim seriously to love the murderer. I saw it (and I think I was largely right) as nothing more than a priest’s ‘sermonizing’, without any real impact on reality.

In the Gospels, however, we find a key to this riddle, in the form of a metaphor that’s repeated several times: that of ‘little children’. When we love our children, we experience this same agape. Not that they are really our ‘enemies’, of course, but because we love them whatever they do, even when they misbehave. This is a model that obviously can’t be applied just like that to the bloodiest of tyrants, but it does indicate the nature of a feeling that leads us to continue, in spite of everything, to see the man behind the monster and to treat him humanely even if we resist him.

One of my young readers (Julien Banon – to whom I am most grateful) made a good point to me over the internet: his remark was valuable and I’d like to pass it on to others. He noted that my example of love for children ‘even when they misbehave’ could, strange as it might seem, apply even to the most dastardly of adults. This at least, he wrote to me, is the underlying message of this sublime extract from the Notebooks of Albert Cohen, on Pierre Laval:

When I’m standing before a brother human being, I look at him and suddenly I know him, I am him, akin to him, his fellow […]. And because, to some extent, I am the other, I cannot fail to have for him, not indeed the love I have for the people I love, but a tender feeling of complicity and pity.

What is this strange tender pity when I imagine Pierre Laval in his prison? I imagine him, I know him and, strangely, I become him, a poor villain avid for some ephemeral power. Yes, he was a chief of the milice, he served the Nazis, yes, he harmed my Jewish brothers and he scared my mother, and he sent to their deaths children guilty of being born to my people. Yes, at the time when he was powerful and maleficent, he deserved death, a quick death, without suffering. But now he is abandoned by everyone, jeered at, in prison, awaiting sentence. I can imagine him and see him, and suddenly I am him. I can see him in his prison cell, and he is in pain, he is in pain because of the asthma in his chest and, in some peculiar way, in my chest. He is suffering and I can see him vanquished. I can see his crumpled face, his face, the sickly, humiliated face of a man who is doomed and knows it […]. And I am suddenly pained by the fact that prisoner Laval is in pain, stretched out flat on his belly on the cement of his cell without any chair, stretched out leafing through the dossiers for his trial. He is vanquished, who was once victorious […], a sad, pitiful cur lying there […] stretched out writing notes for his defence, in the desperate hope that he won’t be killed. And suddenly […] he knows that he will be killed, he who was once the little boy Pierre, once the victorious minister with his white cravat […]. Ah, his misfortune sweats on the cement of his cell, and he’s all alone in his cell, alone without his wife and without the daughter he loved, alone in his misfortune, and jeered at by all […]. How can I fail to forgive this wretched man, suddenly so close, suddenly my fellow?

We could say so much about this magnificent text, and give so many other examples of those fallen, wretched tyrants – Ceauçescu, riddled with bullets, still hugging his wife in his arms, the bearded Saddam, filthy, hirsute and covered in dust emerging from the rat hole where he pitifully took refuge. All of a sudden, even when we thought we could finally hate them, and even have the right to hate them, they thrust us into an abyss of ambiguous feelings where pity, and even a sense of brotherhood, strangely well up. It’s worth noting, in passing, that it’s not just a coincidence if Cohen refers to ‘little Pierre’, the child in Laval, but also to his own mother, and Laval’s wife and daughter, in short, this love which within a family forgives everything, agape in its highest form, which can even take the shape of tenderness, pity, indeed, properly speaking, sympathy, sym-pathos, ‘suffering with’ this ‘human brother’ who is still in spite of everything our enemy. It’s a magnificent piece of pleading, be it said, on behalf of forgiveness and thus against the death penalty which makes forgiveness impossible.

At all events, that’s what agape is, even if it’s very difficult: love which even includes love of one’s enemy. We have taken another step forward in gratuitousness: it’s no longer just love outside of any calculation, as philia; it’s a love which is, so to speak, ‘anti-calculation’, almost irrational, anti-rational indeed, at the very least radically anti-utilitarian.

This is what we can learn from this first approach by an ‘analysis of the concept of love’. It may take us further, as with Comte-Sponville, to reflecting on what a successful love should be, a love that would reconcile eros, philia and agape, but above all would manage to solve the problem posed by romantic love: if it’s true that ‘romantic love lasts no more than three years’, how can that love be transformed into an enduring union that will live up to the promise of those first torrid years? What Comte-Sponville is basically telling us, with his sense for the right formula, is that we need to move on ‘from romantic love [amour-passion] to active love [amour-action]’. In a similar way, Denis de Rougemont advised us to transform an ephemeral romantic love into a constructed love, chosen by a firm decision and subsequently developed with the help of intelligence and reason. And this requires more intelligence than passion and involves us sticking to our carefully weighed decision to stay with the same person for our entire lives. If a man fails to do this, he becomes – as Denis de Rougemont puts it so well – a ‘Don Juan in slow motion’. In other words, he becomes someone who, every five or ten years, changes partner and embarks on some new passion.

I can see that the project of Rougemont and Comte-Sponville can be legitimate and even very attractive. However, I’m not sure I can follow them all the way: I sometimes have doubts about the real possibility of truly reconciling these three forms of love; I fear that the attempt risks being less a way of moving beyond the intermittent nature of passion and more a mask for the flagging of our feelings. Anyway (and we’ll be talking about this on the third level of our discussion of love, that of the phenomenology of transcendence and the making sacred of the other), I think we need to go a little further if we are really going to grasp the experience of love right down to its deepest roots.

Claude Capelier: These analyses are extremely subtle and suggestive, but I’m a bit uneasy about the way they seem to want to set out in advance a framework and norms for love which, as someone said, ‘has never known of any laws’.¹ It strikes me rather like essays on laughter or the ‘rules of art’; the theory very quickly seems to lose sight of the essential: the true nature of its object. Of course, in successful love, as in a fantastic work of art, there’s an inextricable mixture of immediate feelings and active reflection. But in these areas, reflection and initiative are valuable only if they prolong desire and feelings. So I think it’s a contradiction to propose a ‘ready-made’ solution to an experience that, by definition, can only blow any such solution to pieces. What makes me sceptical is quite simply the way that this type of reflection seems irrelevant to the reality of experience.

Luc Ferry: I do think that the definition of an ‘ideal’, in love, always more or less comes up against the idea that you need to ‘force yourself to live up to it’. The reality is that stories of romantic love (I’m not talking about the love of children, which avoids this fate), like all stories, comes to an end. However, we need to be lucid enough to acknowledge that it’s not because a love story comes to an end that it’s necessarily a failure, since it might have been a wonderful love story to which we can remain faithful. Obviously, in comparison with the ideal, it may be a failure, but if we use the ideal as a lever to force ourselves to carry on when it’s simply over, that won’t work either. It’s very difficult to be lucid like that. It’s like when a CD stops playing: when the Chopin prelude is finished, it’s finished. This doesn’t mean it wasn’t wonderful. Of course, as Nietzsche wrote, ‘alle Lust will Ewigkeit’ (‘all pleasure desires eternity’): you’d like it to last for ever. If this isn’t the case, I don’t see h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Preface
• Introduction: A Brief History of the Meaning of Life
• 1 The Revolution of Love
• 2 Politics at the Dawn of a New Era
• 3 On the Spiritual in Art and Education
• Conclusion: Death, the Only Objection? Love, a Utopia?
• Index