A Short Philosophical Guide to the Fallacies of Love

José A. Díez, Andrea Iacona

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350140875
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Epistemología en filosofía

What can epistemology tell us about love? Here two philosophers use their training in arguments and reasoning to uncover the role of ungrounded beliefs when we fall in love. This not a self-help book, it is a philosophy book. Free of advice, methods and strategies for being successful in love, it does not offer solutions for problems. What it gives us instead is a reading of love as it actually is. The authors illustrate the fallacies of love by drawing on personal experiences, literary characters and imaginary individuals. They provide examples of ungrounded beliefs in Aesop's Fables, Cinderella and Don Giovanni amongst others, and illustrate love as an inexhaustible source of misperceptions, misunderstandings and misconceptions. By tackling those characteristic and all-too familiar ways in which ungrounded love beliefs arise, the book forces us to question why baseless beliefs are maintained and reinforced, showing us that many love beliefs are built on anything but logic.

1

Basic notions

Amore, impossibile a definirsi.

GIACOMO CASANOVA¹

1.1 What we talk about when we talk about love

The word ‘love’ can be used in many ways, but only some of them fall within the scope of our investigation. This book is about romantic love, the state that one experiences when one is ‘in’ love. Romantic love is an attitude that a person, the lover, has towards another person, the beloved, and that exhibits emotional and behavioural traits that distinguish it from friendship, family relations, or other kinds of attachment. Therefore, we will leave aside the use of ‘love’ in sentences such as ‘I love my mother’, ‘I love my friends’ or ‘I love my students’. The ancient Greek had two words for ‘love’: eros was used to refer to a passionate desire for an individual, typically sexual desire; philia, instead, meant a kind of affectionate regard or feeling towards friends or family members. This book is about eros, it is not about philia.

In particular, we will be examining romantic love as distinct from the kind of attachment – call it ‘conjugal love’ – that typically sustains a stable relationship such as marriage. It is possible that two persons conjugally love each other without being in love, either because they are no longer in love, or because they have never been. Conversely, two persons can romantically love each other without ever forming a stable couple or standing in the relation of conjugal love. So, even though many people do not distinguish between conjugal love and romantic love, or talk about conjugal love as the one ‘true’ love, here we will reserve the word ‘love’ for romantic love.

We have said that love is an attitude that a person, the lover, has towards another person, the beloved. But what kind of attitude? The hypothesis that we will adopt is that love is a dispositional state: the lover has a characteristic set of dispositions that somehow involve the beloved. The term ‘disposition’ refers to a property that is defined in terms of what would happen in possible circumstances. For example, fragility is such a property. A glass is fragile in that it has a disposition to shatter when struck: if the glass were struck, it would shatter. The properties that characterize love are like fragility, as they have to do with how the lover would feel or behave in possible circumstances. This means that it is not essential that the lover actually manifests some distinctive pattern of emotions or behaviour. Just as a glass can be fragile even though it is actually intact, if it has not been strucked, a person can love even though he or she does not actually feel or behave in any distinctive way.

At least three kinds of dispositions are usually associated with love. First, lovers typically manifest physical reactions caused by an interaction with the beloved. For example, a recurrent phenomenon they experience is an increase in heart rate and body temperature. The following verses provide a vivid description of similar symptoms:

He seems to me equal to the gods

that man who sits in front of you

and listens to your sweet voice

and smiles softly

that suddenly makes my heart throb

for when I glance at you even for a moment,

I can no longer speak,

my tongue is broken,

a subtle flame runs under my skin,

my eyes don’t see,

a whirring noise fills my ears,

cold sweat holds me,

trembling seizes all my body,

I become paler than straw

And I feel as if I were about to die

SAPPHO, Fragment 31

Other physical reactions might be added to the list, such as the sensation that is sometimes described as ‘butterflies in the stomach’. Pier Paolo Pasolini once wrote in a letter to a friend: ‘I don’t know what’s happening to my stomach. Either it is gastritis or I fell in love again.’ In any case, there is no need to provide a detailed description of the physical reactions that characterize love. For present purposes it would suffice to recognize that such reactions exist, that they may vary person to person, and that they can properly be explained at the neurophysiological level.²

Second, lovers are typically inclined to have intimate, repeated and prolonged sexual contact with the beloved. By ‘repeated’ we mean that the lover desires not just a single episode of sexual intercourse, but an indefinite number thereof. By ‘prolonged’ we mean that the lover tends to prolong each episode and, when possible, spend time with the beloved before and after each intercourse, sharing activities that are not directly sexual. Quite often, when we watch a film, we understand that two characters are in love with each other when we see a scene of passionate sex followed by a joking conversation in bed (with or without cigarettes), or a joyful breakfast together. The two characters tend to draw out their sexual interactions, and the time they spend together is motivated simply by the desire to be together.

Third, lovers are typically apt to act or think in strange or anomalous ways. When one is in love, one often manifests a tendency to do ‘crazy’ things, that is, things that one would never do if one were not in love. As William Shakespeare wrote:

If thou remember’st not the slightest folly

That ever love did make thee run into,

Thou has not loved.

W. SHAKESPEARE, As You Like It, II, iv.

Obviously, what we perceive as crazy may vary from person to person. If Alex never drives a car and is afraid to do so, it would be crazy for Alex to drive 100 kilometres to meet someone on a date, while the same action may not be crazy for Kiko, who likes cars and has a brand new Lamborghini. But the fact remains that love induces each person to act or think in ways that are strange or anomalous for that person. Even though what counts as crazy for Alex may differ from what counts as crazy for Kiko, under the effect of love Alex is more likely to do things that are crazy for Alex, and Kiko is more likely to do things that are crazy for Kiko.

Moreover, there are recurrent ways of being crazy, which may easily affect Alex and Kiko independently of their individual differences. When one is in love, one is often willing to act in ways that go against one’s self-interest, a willingness which diminishes when one is not in love. There are deeds that the lover decides to perform for the sake of the beloved (the sacrifice of Violetta for Alfredo in La traviata), but also actions of the beloved which harm the lover and which he or she would never accept in other circumstances. More importantly, when one is in love, one is often inclined to form irrational beliefs. Our book focuses precisely on such beliefs. The following chapters provide a detailed anatomy of the tendency to form ungrounded love beliefs.³

From now on we will assume that love is characterized by a set of dispositions that includes the three kinds of dispositions considered. This is not intended as a definition. We are not trying to provide necessary and sufficient conditions for love. It is at least conceivable that one can love without having some of the dispositions considered, or that one can have all the dispositions considered without loving. What we want to say is that those dispositions are typically associated with love. Perhaps we could add to the list the desire to be the only one for the beloved, which is the origin of the passion of jealousy, or the inclination to spend time with the beloved and share experiences that are part of the lover’s life. But for present purposes it is not necessary to specify a complete list of dispositions. In what follows we will simply talk about the dispositions that characterize love – love dispositions – without referring to any specific disposition or set of dispositions.⁴

1.2 Some fundamental properties of love

Some properties commonly attributed to love can easily be described in terms of dispositions. First, love is traditionally classified as a passion, that is, as a state that one undergoes, rather than anything one actively does. Love is not subject to the will. If one loves a person, one cannot refrain from loving that person. Similarly, if one does not love a person, one cannot decide to love that person. This is consistent with the hypothesis that love is a dispositional state. One’s dispositions towards a person are not something that one actively chooses, there is simply nothing one can do about them.⁵

Second, love is not really definable in terms of some characteristic feel. Although passions are generally understood to involve a phenomenological component, they cannot be reduced to such components. When one judges whether a person is in love, one’s judgement is largely based on one’s knowledge of the person’s behaviour. This also holds for the case in which the person is oneself. When one retrospectively looks at one’s past relationships, one often bases one’s judgements on the observation of one’s past actions, rather than on the reminiscence of one’s past feelings. This is consistent with the hypothesis that love is a dispositional state. One’s dispositions towards a person are manifested in one’s behaviour, although they may be accompanied by a characteristic feel.

Third, love, like any passion, varies in intensity and strength. When one loves a person, one’s love for that person comes into existence at some point, then increases, decreases and finally ceases to exist. So, if before and after this lapse of time the degree of one’s love is zero, during the lapse it goes from zero to some higher degree. Moreover, people often make comparative judgements about the strength or intensity of different love relationships. For example, you may think that you love your present partner more than your former partner (or the other way round). People also compare love relationships with other kinds of relationships. According to common sense, loving a person is stronger, or more intense, than merely liking that person or having sex with that person. This is consistent with the hypothesis that love is a dispositional state, because dispositions are properties that allow for degrees.

Fourth, love is non-symmetric: although there are happy cases of requited love, it happens quite often that one loves without being loved, or that one loves without being loved with equal intensity. This is the tragedy of love. A tragedy, as commonly understood, is an inevitable suffering which strikes people against their will. Since love is a passion, people are doomed to suffer when their love is unrequited: there is no way to escape the pains, disappointments and broken hearts caused by unrequited love. This, again, is consistent with the hypothesis that love is a dispositional state, because dispositions are non-symmetric. One can have certain dispositions towards a person, even though that person does not have similar dispositions, or has similar dispositions but to a considerably lower degree.

What we have said so far about love may diverge to some extent from what past and present philosophers have said on this topic. Several definitions of love have been discussed in philosophy. According to one of them, to love is basically to care about the beloved. According to another, what is essential to love is the formation of some kind of union. According to a third definition, love is a matter of acknowledging and responding in a distinctive way to the value of the beloved. The characterization of love suggested here differs from such claims in at least two respects. One is that philosophical accounts of love tend to blur the distinction between eros and philia, whereas we want to maintain that distinction. As long as philia is left out of the picture, love can hardly be defined in terms of care about the beloved. The other is that philosophical accounts of love tend to rely more or less explicitly on some ideal of love, as they seem to define the good love, or love as it should be. Perhaps ideal love consists in forming a union, or perhaps there is good love only when the lover appropriately responds to the value of the beloved. But this book is about love, it is not about the good love. It deals with love as it actually is, leaving aside what it could or should be.⁶

1.3 Truth, justification and knowledge

The existence of love dispositions is a fact that we will take for granted. Some persons love other persons, and it is reasonable to presume that the dispositions they manifest have a causal history that can be elucidated by means of empirical data drawn from biology, psychology or sociology. Our work focuses on what people think about this fact. More precisely, we will draw attention to some ways in which the lover and the beloved may acquire ungrounded beliefs about themselves. As the word ‘ungrounded’ suggests, we adopt a normative perspective that implies a distinction between what is correct to think and what is not correct to think. This perspective can be framed by using some basic vocabulary from epistemology.

Normally, people express beliefs by uttering sentences. For example, the belief that snow is white can be expressed by uttering the sentence ‘Snow is white’. When one utters a sentence, one says that things are a certain way. The sentence is true if things are actually that way, while it is false if things are not actually in that way. Schematically, if one says that p by uttering a sentence, then the sentence is true if and only if it is the case that p. Beliefs can be true or false just like the sentences that express them. The belief that p – just like the sentence ‘p’ – is true if and only if p.

To say that a belief is justified, on the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Dedication
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Basic notions
• Chapter 2 The invention of reasons
• Chapter 3 The power of desire over belief
• Chapter 4 Wanting it all
• Chapter 5 When love goes away
• Chapter 6 FAQ
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright Page