WHY DO WE fall in love?
It’s a tough question. Evolutionary biologists say that it’s due to our hardwired instinct to propagate the species. But that answer, quite aside from its tendentious heteronormativity, fails to address the real question: why do we fall in love with this person, out of all the people in the world? Plato says we fall in love because we perceive beauty in the beloved, which inspires us with a desire for that greater, absolute Beauty of which it is an image. But again, this leaves open the question of why one beautiful person in particular should be the focus of intense love and desire, while others are merely objects of admiration. It also raises what philosophers have come to call the “trading up problem”: if I love you because of some combination of virtues you possess, then, logically, I should transfer my affection if I find someone who possesses the same virtues to an even greater degree. Yet that scenario seems neither ethical nor true to experience; I don’t love another child more than my own, even if I objectively perceive them to be more virtuous. These difficulties have led many philosophers of love to leave out the question of “why” altogether, and focus instead on what happens once the thunderbolt, or Cupid’s arrow, has already struck. As for the source of the emotion, they are willing to throw up their hands and say, with Michel de Montaigne: “If you press me to tell you why I loved him, I feel this cannot be expressed, except by answering: ‘Because it was he, because it was I.’”
That answer doesn’t satisfy Simon May. His new book seeks to define exactly what it is about a person, or a thing, that inspires love. According to May, love is our joyful response to whatever holds out the promise of what he calls “ontological rootedness” — whatever, in other words, seems to offer us “a home in a world that we supremely value.” Whether you love God, your parents, your country, or someone you have just met, you love them for their ability — or potential — to give your life the grounding it innately craves. May specifies four qualities of the beloved that contribute to that sense of rootedness: an origin or heritage with which we can identify; an ethics to which we aspire; a power to intensify (or even, at the limit, to grant or deny) our existence; and a calling toward a new life or destiny. When we meet with the being who encompasses all these things, we experience the unmistakable symptoms of love. (...)
The trouble, as May sees it, is as follows. Our current conception of love is based on the model of Christian agape: love that is disinterested, unchanging, affirming of all aspects of the beloved, and above all unconditional. But there are two problems with that model. First, that understanding of agape is a comparatively recent development, one that is at odds both with Scripture and with most of the history of Christian thought, which has usually viewed God’s love as very much conditional, partial, and judgmental. Second, even to the extent that we do find elements of such idealized, selfless love in early Christian thought, it is only God who is conceived as being able to love in this manner. Gradually, however, theologians began to assert that humans too — with the help of God’s grace — were capable of such love. Eventually, the notion of grace faded away, with the result that human love is now generally conceived, by philosophers and by popular culture alike, in divine terms that it can never possibly realize. May finds this misconception not only frustratingly illogical but deeply pernicious.
In claiming that the common understanding of love today is not just wrong but even slightly insane, May strongly calls to mind the 20th-century Swiss thinker Denis de Rougemont. Like May, de Rougemont traces an errant history of love in which Christianity is the culprit. According to his influential, if controversial, treatise, Love in the Western World (1940), Christianity, including Christian agape, represents an unnatural imposition on Western culture, which well into the Middle Ages remained essentially pagan — specifically Manichaean — in spirit. The result of this incompatibility was the exaltation of passionate love into a religion, begun in the 12th century by Provençal troubadours as a means of reconciling pagan and Christian, body and spirit. But this solution merely papers over a deep, heretical, and irreconcilable division. Love as we currently understand and experience it, therefore, is utterly mistaken, a failed ruse. As de Rougemont puts it in a later essay (with reference to the idea of marrying for love, one of his most frequent objects of criticism): “We are in the act of trying out — and failing miserably at it — one of the most pathological experiments that a civilized society has ever imagined.”
Only occasionally does May indulge in such pointed provocations (such as when he refers to “the disaster that love has suffered in the West for roughly the last two centuries”). But his willingness to expound a thesis that, like de Rougemont’s, really does break with so much received wisdom allows him to provide genuinely new insights into what is, as he notes, an ancient topic. Among other advantages, the idea that love is inspired by the promise of ontological rootedness permits May to group together forms of love that are often treated as distinct or even incompatible: not just love for God, family, lover, and friend, but also love for a great work of art, or for an institution (your alma mater, for instance), or for a natural landscape — all of which can offer the same sense of an exalted home as human relationships. May’s theory extends as well to the love so often felt for tyrants and dictators, which he reads not as perverse, or even misdirected, but as perfectly continuous with other instances of love.
It’s a tough question. Evolutionary biologists say that it’s due to our hardwired instinct to propagate the species. But that answer, quite aside from its tendentious heteronormativity, fails to address the real question: why do we fall in love with this person, out of all the people in the world? Plato says we fall in love because we perceive beauty in the beloved, which inspires us with a desire for that greater, absolute Beauty of which it is an image. But again, this leaves open the question of why one beautiful person in particular should be the focus of intense love and desire, while others are merely objects of admiration. It also raises what philosophers have come to call the “trading up problem”: if I love you because of some combination of virtues you possess, then, logically, I should transfer my affection if I find someone who possesses the same virtues to an even greater degree. Yet that scenario seems neither ethical nor true to experience; I don’t love another child more than my own, even if I objectively perceive them to be more virtuous. These difficulties have led many philosophers of love to leave out the question of “why” altogether, and focus instead on what happens once the thunderbolt, or Cupid’s arrow, has already struck. As for the source of the emotion, they are willing to throw up their hands and say, with Michel de Montaigne: “If you press me to tell you why I loved him, I feel this cannot be expressed, except by answering: ‘Because it was he, because it was I.’”
That answer doesn’t satisfy Simon May. His new book seeks to define exactly what it is about a person, or a thing, that inspires love. According to May, love is our joyful response to whatever holds out the promise of what he calls “ontological rootedness” — whatever, in other words, seems to offer us “a home in a world that we supremely value.” Whether you love God, your parents, your country, or someone you have just met, you love them for their ability — or potential — to give your life the grounding it innately craves. May specifies four qualities of the beloved that contribute to that sense of rootedness: an origin or heritage with which we can identify; an ethics to which we aspire; a power to intensify (or even, at the limit, to grant or deny) our existence; and a calling toward a new life or destiny. When we meet with the being who encompasses all these things, we experience the unmistakable symptoms of love. (...)The trouble, as May sees it, is as follows. Our current conception of love is based on the model of Christian agape: love that is disinterested, unchanging, affirming of all aspects of the beloved, and above all unconditional. But there are two problems with that model. First, that understanding of agape is a comparatively recent development, one that is at odds both with Scripture and with most of the history of Christian thought, which has usually viewed God’s love as very much conditional, partial, and judgmental. Second, even to the extent that we do find elements of such idealized, selfless love in early Christian thought, it is only God who is conceived as being able to love in this manner. Gradually, however, theologians began to assert that humans too — with the help of God’s grace — were capable of such love. Eventually, the notion of grace faded away, with the result that human love is now generally conceived, by philosophers and by popular culture alike, in divine terms that it can never possibly realize. May finds this misconception not only frustratingly illogical but deeply pernicious.
In claiming that the common understanding of love today is not just wrong but even slightly insane, May strongly calls to mind the 20th-century Swiss thinker Denis de Rougemont. Like May, de Rougemont traces an errant history of love in which Christianity is the culprit. According to his influential, if controversial, treatise, Love in the Western World (1940), Christianity, including Christian agape, represents an unnatural imposition on Western culture, which well into the Middle Ages remained essentially pagan — specifically Manichaean — in spirit. The result of this incompatibility was the exaltation of passionate love into a religion, begun in the 12th century by Provençal troubadours as a means of reconciling pagan and Christian, body and spirit. But this solution merely papers over a deep, heretical, and irreconcilable division. Love as we currently understand and experience it, therefore, is utterly mistaken, a failed ruse. As de Rougemont puts it in a later essay (with reference to the idea of marrying for love, one of his most frequent objects of criticism): “We are in the act of trying out — and failing miserably at it — one of the most pathological experiments that a civilized society has ever imagined.”
Only occasionally does May indulge in such pointed provocations (such as when he refers to “the disaster that love has suffered in the West for roughly the last two centuries”). But his willingness to expound a thesis that, like de Rougemont’s, really does break with so much received wisdom allows him to provide genuinely new insights into what is, as he notes, an ancient topic. Among other advantages, the idea that love is inspired by the promise of ontological rootedness permits May to group together forms of love that are often treated as distinct or even incompatible: not just love for God, family, lover, and friend, but also love for a great work of art, or for an institution (your alma mater, for instance), or for a natural landscape — all of which can offer the same sense of an exalted home as human relationships. May’s theory extends as well to the love so often felt for tyrants and dictators, which he reads not as perverse, or even misdirected, but as perfectly continuous with other instances of love.
