"Because he is the son of Resource and Poverty, Love's situation is like this. First of all, he's always poor; far from being sensitive and beautiful, as is commonly supposed, he's tough, with hardened skin, without shoes or home. He always sleeps rough, on the ground, with no bed, lying in doorways and by roads in the open air; sharing his mother's nature, he always lives in a state of need. On the other hand, taking after his father, he schemes to get hold of beautiful and good things. He's brave; impetuous and intense; a formidable hunter, always weaving tricks; he desires knowledge and is resourceful in getting it; a lifelong lover of wisdom; clever at using magic, drugs and sophistry."The epigraph above is spoken by Socrates to his man buddies during a symposium, a sort of ritual party where Socrates and company drink a bit, lounge a bit, joke a bit, and are challenged to eulogize Love, in this case, the Greek god Eros.
—Diotima (via Socrates via Apollodorus via Aristodemus in Plato's Symposium) on Love, 203d
In early Greek myth, considered the child of Chaos, Eros was one of the first gods to come into being and exerted a wide-ranging force of relationship cohesion upon the universe. Later myth reorients him as Aphrodite's son, and in this role, Eros becomes known for his erotic nature (devolving, after millennia, into a little winged boy with bow and arrow defacing many a Hallmark Valentine's Day card).
At their symposium, Socrates and company start by focusing their discussion on the relationships between adult male lovers and their boyfriends, but broaden and deepen their exploration of the topic, especially when Socrates gets his shot. Socrates relates an encounter with one Diotima, a woman from Mantinea he happened to meet one day, who educates him on Love. In contrast to the lineage of Love put forward by other speakers, Diotima argues that Love is a spirit—a messenger intermediary between and connecting the gods and men. Socrates' Diotima further argues that Love is a lover, a pursuer, of wisdom, that which he does not wholly possess: "Wisdom is one of the most beautiful things, and Love is love of beauty. So Love must necessarily be a lover of wisdom; and as a lover of wisdom he falls between wisdom and ignorance" (Symposium 204b). Socrates goes on to quote Diotima quite a bit, narrating a defense of Plato's metaphysics.[i]
My fascination stems from years of soft concern about the relationship between love and wisdom, the tension between which I first explored in early fictional works written in my teens and later roughly articulated in a freshman college philosophy essay. The gist of the tension I felt is this: intuitively, love seems to involve doing things that don't make sense, while wisdom seems to involve doing only ultimately sensible things. So these two butted heads: Which one ought to trump the other in a well-lived life? Was it more important to be wise without love or to love and be unwise? Shall never the twain meet? And why should two highly socially valued attributes apparently contradict one another?
Over time, I've come to adapt my understanding of what wisdom is along Daoist lines, encapsulated in the statement I've put in the mouth of one of the characters in my novel: "Wisdom is gentleness." I'm not sure this entirely clears the way for love—there are lots of rational snowplows out there just waiting to plow in the driveway—but I think it helps. It did raise another question, however, which is if Daoism itself is compatible with love, the kind of interpersonal passion we intuit in the West. I don't know if it does, so perhaps I must also modify my understanding of what love is.
So what is love?
This is one of those questions that seems exceptionally foolish to ask in a philosophical context. At least with life and death these are serious topics, weighty academic axes to grind. Don't we simply know what love is, the way we know we are awake and not dreaming? What possible traction can one essay gain in understanding love in a non-experiential, non-action-oriented way, with just reading or writing words on a page?
Perhaps no word is so bandied about our language and history. Our culture and cultures are already saturated with assumptions about what love is, what it's not, what it does, what it can't, how to get it, how to give it, where to find it, what to do with it, what not to, why it's so gosh-darn important. Not only for these reasons—though they are good reasons—as a term, love carries so much baggage that any definitional meaning has collapsed into a black hole larger than the universe.[ii]
I. Love is to gasoline…
Love is gasoline to our car. We don't just need it. We don't just crave it. It is blood of a global economy, water that quenches a cyclical thirst and empowers interpersonal function. It is what makes life life and not just life. Yet it is not an understandable thing. You can't stand under it—it's fluid. You can look at the engine it powers. You can tinker with the engine. You can rebuild the engine. But you can't synthesize gasoline. And without gasoline, the engine is nothing. Gasoline comes from dead things. Lots and lots and lots of dead things, compressed and compressed and squished and, to quote Weird Al out of context, "dead for a real long time."
You pour gasoline on things you want to burn, incinerate, explode. So, too, love shows fiery byproducts in emotionally volatile circumstances. You run out of gasoline and you have to spend money to get more, or your car won't go anywhere, and you can't go anywhere, and if you can't go anywhere, you're stuck, and if you're stuck you're not really living the life you choose, and if you're not living the life you choose, what's the point? Love is like that too. Full tank: feeling great. Running on empty: find the red plastic gallon with the yellow spout, ’cause it's going to be a long walk.
Fire. Love. Combustion.
Combustion is just pyrotechnics unless you channel it to do work. And what engines we have built to do work with and for love. Marvelous machines. Intricate cultures, beliefs, structures, networks, families, people, faces, places, lives, stories. But they all need fuel. Fuel is like patience waiting to burst. Fuel is sheet music, composed long ago but allowing for and encouraging actualization with effort. Fuel is the stilled guitar string, the pregnant possibility for choice and action. The thing about fuel is we don't ever make our own. We only use what is given to us, process it into new forms, stroke the string, break and recombine the hydrocarbon chain, create a new pattern, radiate what might become fuel for others. Do we all have access to this particular fuel, the gasoline of love? Can we, if conditions are right? What truly governs those conditions?
II. If love is transbiological…
Suppose biology isn't so important a condition—then why should we suppose machines can't love? Or rocks? Or patterns? Or just certain patterns?
As Kate Morrissey sings:
And they might tell you, ’cause they told me,
That this love can't get outside of the family,
That this love can't transcend the boundaries of species, countries.
You saw through all that
When you were young
And now you keep on. You keep on.
And they won't all love you, but the smart ones will.
They won't all love you, baby, but the smart ones will.
And you keep your eyes open, you can't help but get your fill,
And in the meantime, baby, you—you keep on, keep on.
III. Life & love…
Or perhaps biology is essential to the equation, in ways that those with certain political agendas don't care to face. For there exists a deep complementarity between males and females of our species—and all sexually reproducing life. This sexual, social, psychological, physical, and aesthetic complementarity permits the formation of deeply meaningful and subjectively special unions, relationships, organized channels for the exchange of love.
IV. Politicized because of uncertainty…
But special unions are by no means the exclusive domain for love. People will fight in the abstract over unborn children or mental vegetables, because we love human life, but what does this even mean? It seems to go without saying that human life should be valued, loved, above all else. But why? What causes this to be the case? The conventional answer is that human life is special, therefore it demands special treatment. It seems that part of the drive to preserve life, to love it ultimately above even liberty and the pursuit of happiness, may be due to the reptilian remnant of our brain and the innate drive to survive. If this template is so strong, and it is no doubt strong, then it doesn't take much argument to suggest it has transposed itself onto our social structures—even if we individual humans are ignorant of this love-for-life-first projected bias. I'm not saying this projected value is a bad thing. But it is a prejudice around which our various societies place harsh penalties. Homicide, suicide, genocide—almost always are extreme taboos. But issues like abortion and euthanasia plague the borders of the categories we create. We are surrounded by slippery slopes. Then is love instead, if not gasoline, brake fluid? Keeping us from plummeting down the icy inclines? Locking us onto terrain like glacier-pronged boots?
V. Love is a force
Consider love as a physical force. Love, whatever it is, is relational. Love is a force—an action involving two or more entities acting upon one another. It is not an intrinsic property of a substance. In the English language, I don't have love. You don't have love. We don't have love. We aren't love. I love someone, something. So do you. So do we. Love takes an object, when used as a verb. Except for when the word takes on additional metaphysical implications, when it morphs into a special kind of transcendent noun, perhaps in religious or spiritual contexts, a la, God is Love. But even those deemed most holy ask us to use such love, apply it into the world and work for people, to care for others, to act for others' benefit.
VI. Love is good choice
If we are choice-making beings, then love is the product, essence, and motivator of good choices. If we accept some form of "good," then this should be true. When I honestly act for the good, I am loving in some respect. I am loving beyond myself because if "good" exists, good surely exists beyond self-interest. It is thus more than a feeling, an intuition—love is an action, but not just a behavior—all the tightly bound emotions and choices that are packed into a good action by a choice-making being making a choice along the lines of force made possible by relational context. The good choice would exist between the chooser/doer and some object or relationship external to the choice-maker, therefore enhancing the connectivity of the universe via action.
VII. The urge to completion
In football, satisfaction is gained by passing the ball from quarterback to receiver and making a maneuver down the field. Plays culminate in first-downs and ultimately some drives consisting of such plays culminate in touchdowns. Neither first-downs nor touchdowns are ultimate endings for the ball or the players or the game, but passing certain points satisfies the need implicit in the structure of the game. This is like the structure of relationships compelling the choice of love.
VIII. Relations desire saturation
Like an electron attracted to an unsaturated electron shell, lovers draw one another to each other into a system of tension but relative stability. Single electrons are unstable, needy creatures orbiting probabilistically and liable enough to be pawned off to other atoms with high electron affinities. In contrast, paired electrons are mates, like bonded males and females, spinning opposite directions yet occupying the same shaped energy level about a common nucleus. They are relatively stable. They may be said, in the words of my high school chemistry teacher, to be "happy."
IX. The desire for complementarity
Other cosmic particle pairs are tethered through quantum entanglement—where one particle's behaviors are inextricably entwined with another's, even if that other particle is nowhere in physical proximity. The lack of proximity does not put a damper on the relationship—something keeps these particles related outside of conventional cause-and-effect, action-reaction. The property has been observed and is highly counterintuitive, yet it exists and bespeaks another tendency toward connectivity in our observable universe, whether a remnant of an older, deeper unity or some heretofore not understood universal law. Entanglement is significant in the discussion of love because what is the nature of that connection for these particles? Why are they connected? What makes them act together even when parted? Some force we do not understand through physics alone. A force that unites pairs, creating system wholes out of parts.
X. Christmas cards
Love is giving and receiving Christmas cards—the tethers of distant relationships manifest in colorful paper and cultural scribbles.
XI. Relationships are like Planet of the Apes
People are tender when it comes down to it, but sometimes people turn to bitterness out of excess fear or power.
XII. Rhythm
I recently saw the Milwaukee Rep put on the play Eurydice, a retelling of the Orpheus myth. It was good. The playwright explains Orpheus' and Eurydice's ultimate inability to connect in the afterlife, and his inability to rescue her from the underworld, as a failure of the two to stay in rhythm. (Even here, in reimagined myth, it was simply a question of timing!) In the myth and the play, Orpheus—the world's greatest musician—must march out of Hades without turning ’round to look upon Eurydice—the love of his life and in the play a curious and literate female emphasizing the written word—who was prematurely taken to the land of the dead. As they make their way upwards and outwards through the darkness, she following him, she stumbles at his back and calls out his name; he turns at her call and all is lost. In that moment, he laments that she never learned rhythm and could not reproduce his music, which he played to guide them out of Hades, in her mind. Their relationship did not survive this asymmetry despite their mutual love. Like the myth, the play's ending does not suggest the two remain mystically entangled afterwards—they are forever and tragically severed.
XIII. Coming together
Let us consider rhythm, in a wider sense, to be an ebb and flow of asymmetry to symmetry, a push-pull between these two organizational principles, neither which terminally supersedes the other, but whose pattern might be recognizable and reconcilable to conscious beings. In love, there is asymmetry when a subject lacks an object or an object lacks a subject, or, to parse the situation in more postfeminist terms, when a person lacks another person with whom to relate.[iii] There can be symmetry if two (or more) such complements organize themselves in some tandem pattern. Such symmetry depends, however, upon a natural isolation or bifurcation or asymmetry of things so that they can come together.
XIV. Coming to rest in space
Like chemical reactions where activation energy must supply a spike to combine reagents, human relationships seek both dynamism and stability. People require dynamism to attract them from less organized, relatively stable states into chaotic situations which can resolve into more organized, less stable but more interesting, and still somewhat stable, states accommodating tension or complexity.
Example: You go to a party and get drunk and go home with someone. The party and the alcohol are catalysts, lowering the activation energy required to meet and greet this other someone. But still, you must input some form of energy to meet and greet them and perhaps get to know them a bit. Your single state has ruptured, replaced first by an open field of possibility like that before a defensive safety intercepting a pass and now headed to the opponent's goal line, and then by a less certain but potentially stable and more highly organized state of existing within a relationship with the other you have befriended. Once this relationship's dynamism and stability regimes are tested sufficiently, however, you may enter into another relatively stable regime where it would take even more activation energy or even greater catalysts or substantial decay of either party of the relationship to move the situation from the new status quo. Those couples and pairings who are able to come to rest so in space may be said to love each other in the sense that their relationship is sufficient to withstand the equivalencies of other particle collisions (roving suitors or tempting adulterers) and the instabilities of possible new products (children or families or dogs or cars or apartments or jobs).
Human relationships are not just chemical reactions, but all relationships follow the same patterns when viewed as systems behaving as systems or not—are they stable, unstable, chaotic, and/or how are they changing or trending under changing conditions? It's relatively easy to break things down in these terms; it's relatively difficult to separate oneself from the empirical emotions incumbent upon a participant in such reactions when they are actually happening. This, combined with different degrees of social or political or physical impotency, prevent different patterns from being understood or attempted or enacted in real-time.
XV. "All men are brothers…"
The night Barack Obama was elected president of the United States, you could feel the energy and good will and hope incarnate in all those people standing outside in Chicago, and even though I was isolated from them, watching the proceedings on television and the internet, I participated in a hugely emotional experience I sensed was shared by millions. There is research being done at Princeton University on the effects of human consciousness related to massive human events on the results of random number generators. The researchers have found changing patterns surrounding events like Sept. 11, 2001 and the Nov. 4, 2008 presidential election. During these historic moments when so many people are focused in on the same event, connected and amplified through global media, the hypothesis is that the intentions of the masses of humanity actually changed the laws of probability, affecting the random number generators. The research for this Global Consciousness Project examines the nature and possible influence of collective consciousness, and the results so far suggest that not only does some degree of human connectivity already exist, but that it has potentially meaningful and empirical effects, and that those effects can be modified by human intention of some kind (whether emotion or action or choice is not known). Anyone who takes an interest in a compelling sports contest or a musical recital or a military maneuver already feels the nature of this extended kinship that transcends the self and the family and takes root in some underlying at-least-emotional-and-perhaps-metaphysically-significant human firmament. We feel not only the weighty or lofty consequences of a winning or losing scenario, not only the accomplishment or failure of some task, but also the togetherness with those others also focused on the same task or togetherness with those for whom the task is engineered. Emotional and empirical evidence of such human togetherness calls to mind the rallying cries of the Abraham Lincolns and Martin Luther Kings and Barack Obamas of the world—people whose voices resonated with a call to future unity embedded in the very fabric of our humanity. We might call this propensity for human connectivity, and/or its actualization, love.
Then there is love that has or takes no extant object, creative love, love of a creator for creation to be. This love is still relational, but it is highly asymmetrical. The writer, painter, dancer, football player, pianist, speaker, researcher—they do not know what specifically it is they will love, but they engage in a process driven by love between what they are in the moment and what they in the next moment continue creating. More than a love of the creative process, there seems to be a forcing-through-the-surface-of-something-created and, like the sexual creation of new human beings or the emerging of babies through the typically-too-small birth canal, both the creation and the created are exhilarating when the creator's consciousness is engaged.
XVII. Not falling down
I recently went ice skating for the first time in my life. I only fell once. I watched others skating around me. Many of the kids were speeding around, moving fluidly and using both feet effortlessly. Many other people moved fairly well, but not as fast or as graceful as the kids. At first, I tended to favor pushing with my right foot, while keeping my left foot straight like a ship's keel. This didn't seem to be the way most others skated, and eventually I was able, with much difficulty overcoming the resistance of my body not wanting to move that left foot, to use both feet to move on the ice. While having a good time on the rink, I came up with the following realization about the definition of ice skating: ice skating is not falling down while wearing ice skates. Love is like ice skating.
XVIII. Love is meeting deadlines
Douglas Adams famously said, "I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they fly by." A deadline is like a first down or a touchdown—it is a compelling completion. Love exists with such thresholds—lovers strive for and meet or fail to meet goals that are never final but always refreshing and compelling.
XIX. Back to Plato
"To sum up then…love is the desire to have the good forever" (The Symposium 206a).
XX. Be of good cheer
Merry Christmas, happy holidays, and be of good cheer in the new year.
Michael Timm is a freelance writer. He has written and is in the process of revising a novel, The Philosopher of Milwaukee. He writes news and features for the Bay View Compass newspaper, of which he has been the assistant editor since 2005. His writing has also appeared in the Riverwest Currents, Shepherd Express, and Wisconsin Trails magazine. He earned his B.A. at Ripon College in Ripon, Wis., in 2004 studying both Anthropology and English. His totem animal is the platypus.
[i] If you want to read a more thorough discussion on the nature of love, I'd recommend you read the Symposium. If you're into that kind of thing, it's great fun, including both physical and intellectual humor, sexual innuendo, philosophical banter, and crazy characters. But don't take my word for it.
[ii] Interestingly, following this anecdotal analogy through to its logical conclusion actually generates a metaphysically reasonable situation, or at least one compelling to a great many of human beings: Love, as the ultimate philosophical substance, would supersede, infuse, and transcend every component part and process of the whole of existence. This sounds an awful lot like some religious, spiritual, and mystic beliefs. The question then becomes whether love's hugely successful historic PR campaign, with all its multitudinous brands, constitutes actual philosophical mass or just empty volume.
[iii] Note that in our language we are so disposed to subject-object thinking that personhood itself, as a term, does not easily, if at all, permit such usage and you might find my assertions offensive if you value primarily the individual agency of a single, perceived-unified human person over and above humanity or perpetually-possibly-unified human people. This is because a person is in itself deemed a complete universe, an individual, lacking nothing except an environment; it is a figure in need only of ground, rather than in need of a complementary unit whose isolated existence demands not only the existence of but also the proximity/relevance/relation to its complement.
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