The Love of Wisdom and the Wisdom in Love
Þessi ritgerð var skrifuð fyrir áfangann Problems of Modernity sem haldinn var við Warwick-háskóla vorönn ársins 2020. Hún fjallar um hugtak ástarinnar eins og fyrirbærafræðingurinn Max Scheler útfærði það í skrifum sínum, en ritgerðin breiðir talsvert úr sér undir lokin og dregur ályktanir um það hvernig heimspeki og ást tvinnast saman. Lokaniðurstaða ritgerðarinnar er sú að án ástarinnar geti heimspekin ekki orðið annað en andlaus sólipsismi; ást viskunnar byggist á visku ástarinnar. Málverkið í haus heitir Eaton’s Neck, Long Island, og er eftir John Frederick Kensett frá árinu 1872.
1. Introduction
Etymologically, philosophy means an affection for or even a love of wisdom—and the word philosopher signifies an affectionate friend of wisdom. Philosophy, a portmanteau of the Greek words φιλία—love—and σοφία—wisdom—has fully established itself as the quintessential term for the practice to which it refers. But what exactly does this practice entail? What is the meaning of this so-called wisdom towards which the philosopher is so affectionate? Questioning the (rigma)role of philosophy has been a favorite pastime of philosophers from its very inception: it is precisely because philosophy is a mode of questioning that philosophers cannot help but question their own questioning.
This predilection gives philosophy its qualitatively unique metalogical character—it is a recursive and as such critical mode of thought, first and foremost, and thus only superficially concerned with the answers provided by each philosopher in turn. This is all well and good, and immediately evident to anyone steeped in the history and practice of philosophy. Even so, as philosophers, our commitment to this grand philosophical endeavour would require us to take a closer look at the terms we use to describe ourselves—for example: what is this love which we ascribe to the subject of philosophy, the philosopher, and what exactly does this term entail?
Ancient philosophy had answers to this question—love is an ontological force of harmony, Empedocles insists[1]—while for Plato, love is a sort of divine madness which overtakes the lover as he is reminded of the Idea of beauty itself.[2] In each case, as in many others, love is taken to be constituted by an eternal and cosmological constant first and foremost, while the “human, all-too human” feeling of love is subjugated to this constant.
In modernity, however, with the advent of phenomenology, to name but one example, writings on the concept have focused on love qua emotion. Martin Heidegger, for example, contends in a marginal passage in his “What is Metaphysics?” that the joy which appears in the lover in the presence of the Dasein of a loved human being serves as a conduit which makes the whole of beings as such come into view—by disclosing the relational character of beings to the lover.[3] Max Scheler, on the other hand, makes of love an immediate and primitive emotional reaction to the object of love—an emotional reaction which is constitutive of value-judgment as such.[4] In both Scheler and Heidegger there is thus a common strain which asserts that love has essentially to do with how we relate to and value phenomena—that is, love is treated as a power of disclosure in which the world to which we relate comes to the fore insofar as it is related to our personal evaluations.
In light of these introductory remarks, the reader might have already become aware of the aims of the present essay: my objective will be to explore how love is to be construed not only as a prerequisite of philosophical practice but as a primary relational-intentional reaction to the world which acts as a sort of metric for life—a reaction which can ultimately serve to ground philosophical reflection in the phenomenological subject as such.
The essay is comprised of four sections. Firstly, we will attempt to think through what love is comprised of by constructing a generalized—yet concrete and intuitively attractive— philosophical concept of love. In so doing we will turn to Max Scheler’s arguments for the nature and essence of love and hate in his The Nature of Sympathy (1923). Secondly, we will consider Scheler’s arguments in closer detail, homing in on how love can be conceptualized as immediate at all. Thirdly, we will consider in what manner this idea of love can serve philosophy insofar as it is supposedly this love of wisdom—and ask a critical question: in what way can the wisdom found to reside inherently in love steer and inform philosophical practice in a positive and constructive manner? I will conclude by arguing that while philosophy professes to be a love of wisdom, it is just as much a practice built upon the wisdom of love—in the sense that the critical questioning found in philosophy is in a sense always an act of love for the world.
2. Love Actually, Conceptually
To begin with, let us tackle the basic questions. What is love? We might immediately answer by saying that love is an emotion we all feel, to be sure, an emotion which only arises when we are confronted either physically (empirically) or mentally (in imagination) with an object which we love. As such, we may describe it in phenomenological terms as an intentional state—that is, our emotions are felt as a relative response to an intentional object, the loved thing. When we are dealing with love in a philosophical manner, however, we are most often enough attempting to construct an objective or universal concept out of this subjective emotion. The question we ask, then, is this: what is love independently of the subjective emotional quality which is felt alongside its appearance in the lover? What we are considering, then, is whether there is not something more universal about the experience of love than the subjective and ultimately incomparable and incongruous feelings of love experienced in any given person as compared to any other person. That is, what I may feel to be love is not the very same feeling another person may call love—however, there must be certain characteristics or qualities which these two feelings share, characteristics which we can describe and compare, which allow us to reach an agreement or consensus as to their conceptual identity.
For starters, as we have already considered, love is comprised of an intentional relation. For love to come into being, there must be a lover, which acts as the seat of experience within which love can appear, and there must be a loved, which is the cause and object of the lover’s affection. Without these two factors, and without their coming into contact, there is no love. These are indeed necessary conditions—but are they sufficient? Perhaps not. After all, love is not simply the perception by the lover of that which they love. Love also involves a kind of mental or spiritual aesthesis or movement induced in the lover by that which is loved. It is not quite a feeling of sublimity nor is it a feeling of beauty—it is simply the “sensation” (for lack of a better word) of being stirred or moved in some qualitatively positive manner. Furthermore, one cannot truly “decide” what one loves, simply because the feeling arises in the first-order stream of consciousness before any sort of second-order ego-deliberation such as “do I want to love x?” or “should I love x?” can take place—the ego must simply take love as a fact to be dealt with. In sum, when we love something or someone, it is then a) an intentional affective relation, b) one-sided in that it exclusively moves the lover as they are affected by the loved, and furthermore c) does not require that the lover has consciously consented or chosen to “fall” in love.
It seems as if we have inched closer towards a philosophical concept of love in our reflections above—but something is missing. The idea of being “moved” or “stirred” is as yet unclear—and the mode in which we “sense” this movement is vague at best. Further, the way in which love provides us with this positive feeling is as yet undefined—what does it mean to have a positive feeling as opposed to a negative feeling? There then remain further questions, of course, such as whether our analysis requires that we should distinguish between affection and love, or romantic love and familial love. For the sake of the essay’s length and scope, we will stick to a less intense form of love—a non-sexual, non-familial kind of friendly affection—φιλία, in short. Let us move on to consider these factors in greater detail.
To begin with, what is this “movement” we speak of—this “stirring”? We will not be able to reduce the movement to the collision of physical particles—such as by explaining love as an effect of information-laden photons hitting the retina, which then relays love-data to the brain and thus induces the movement we speak of—whether or not the dictum “love at first sight” is taken to be a possibility or not. Neither will we be able to effectively explain the movement in terms of psychological states—simply explaining love by pointing to a transformation in mental state or mood is to repeat the question of what this transformation truly signifies. We may have to go deeper—to the ontological level, perhaps, as Heidegger does when he refers to the Dasein of the human being we love. Even so, at that kind of depth we may end up describing love too abstractly or mediate it through too much jargon—by doing so we might risk losing the distinctive personal quality which characterizes it. Instead, it might be helpful to try to approach the problem by means of first-personal phenomenological analysis.
I will imagine that I turn a corner on the street and suddenly come face to face with someone I am acquainted with but do not know very well. My first reaction to this chance meeting might be one of subdued surprise, as the person abruptly enters my consciousness with all their significant relations—their craft, family, style, mannerism and mood, to name a few—but as we catch up and exchange small-talk I gradually become accustomed to their personal presence. Initially, I am neither especially positively nor negatively inclined towards them, although I am assured through certain friendly body-language and other learned social cues that they mean me no ill-will and that I am relatively safe in their presence. They suggest that we grab a cup of coffee, and seeing as I have nothing better to do, I take them up on their offer. We sit down at a café and start talking, and as the conversation flows on I find that much about them—their sophistication, their beauty, their wit, for instance—sits well with me. I am content to spend time with them in this nonchalant manner, but were I to be asked what exactly it is about them I have grown to appreciate, I would likely have a hard time narrowing it down to a single quality or characteristic. My inclination towards them as an organic whole has simply grown stronger and more heart-felt. Gradually I come to feel quite strongly that this person has taken up a position of relative importance to me—to some extent, I feel as if an injury caused to them would injure myself as well. That is not to say that I have identified with them, but I feel a sort of desire for their well-being. I care for them in a way I did not before, and in a strong enough manner that it warrants the designation of being “love.”
Our narrative here obviously describes a gradual and relatively mild growth of affection in the first-personal “I” which gives the account. More importantly, it clearly displays how the intentional object, the person loved, comes to be valued as an end in and to themselves—an end which the “I” comes to view as their own end, their own goal. The “aisthesis” or “movement” we spoke of must then refer to a movement which a) originates in an intentional apathy towards what is more or less an object to be circumspectively worked with or around (an in-itself), and b) concludes in an intentional attitude which sees the intentional object as a goal-driven process (an in-and-for-itself)—as a subject. The object has been invested with a higher value. It is of great import to stress here that there has only been a transformation in the lover and their intentional attitude towards the object—no such transformation takes place within the object itself. Furthermore, the “positivity” we spoke of earlier is disclosed to us here in that our “I” acts not only as a passive receiver of sensation but becomes, for all intents and purposes, a well-wishing advocate (and perhaps, if it comes to it, an active agent) of the loved person’s well-being.
So what can we surmise from this? Has the first-personal “I” simple come to “know” the person in a deeper, clearer way? In a sense, yes, but not in the sense that an aggregate of predicates previously unknown have been “added” to an already existing knowledge of the object—there seems to be something else which is hard to place. We might conjecture instead that an almost intuitive kind of knowing the object has been achieved—a sense of the person as it is, not merely in-itself, but for-itself as well. This raises some further questions. Can this intuition be reduced to an identity in which the lover sees the loved as a goal-driven process identical to its own, worthy and valuable in the same manner that the lover views themselves? Perhaps—but this explanation risks losing the alterity of the loved object. Love does not reduce the relationship between lover and loved to an abstract identity in which they are “the same”—on the contrary, they are radically different, and precisely this is the beating heart of love. It is a participation or communion in which the lover becomes more than they are while remaining themselves—it is a kind of spiritual growth in which the ego is expanded over and into the other while simultaneously viewing the other qua other. Love provides us with a deeper access to reality—it deepens our experience of the world in and through other people. Our own values and maxims are transformed, heightened, even, as the world itself seems to take on a novel quality of difference through identity, or identity through difference.
3. Love and Hate in Scheler
The above analysis is—in no small part, albeit not entirely—inspired by and based on Max Scheler’s philosophical reflections on the nature and essence of love and hate. In his excellent work on the phenomenology of emotions, The Nature of Sympathy, he argues that love, alongside hatred, is a primitive and immediate emotional reaction to a given object of valuation.[5] That is, we do not actively or consciously evaluate by loving or hating something, but our valuations are immediately disclosed to us in and through love and hate—value only truly becomes possible insofar as we react to an object by loving or hating it.[6] Furthermore, he contends, love is a “movement of intention whereby from a given value A in the object, its higher value is visualized.”[7]
For Scheler, then, love is also a positive act of valuation—and keeping with our conclusions above, this corresponds to our argument that love makes of the loved object an end or a goal in itself which the lover feels positively compelled to pursue and strengthen for the sake of that which they love. On top of all that, Scheler argues, love is not a quasi-discursive feeling or attitude of preference—on the contrary, preference presupposes love.[8] In fact, as Scheler remarks, any sort of intellectual evaluation of the loved object feels like a betrayal—love cannot be rationalized, for example, as something that has utility for me, or as something that brings me a certain degree of joy as opposed to other objects. Instead, love is the original basis for all these degrees of comparative evaluation.[9] Nor is the quality of love to be found within the loved object—neither as a property nor as a power of movement. Instead, love must be thought of from within the domain of the evaluating subject, the lover, since it is from them that love necessarily issues forth towards the thing which is loved. Moreover, Scheler argues that the alterity of the object must be maintained—love cannot be reduced to a kind of monism in which the “I” simply recognizes itself in the object. The “I” must recognize the other qua other.[10]
Although Scheler’s arguments seem sound and clear enough for the most part, some of his positions seem a little strange at first glance. How, for example, can love be an “primitive and immediate” evaluative reaction? What would that mean for our scenario at the street-corner? Does it not imply that some sort of love for the other person was already dormant in the “I” before we could speak of any growth of affection which resulted in the φιλία which was present at the end? It seems almost as if, for Scheler’s assertion to be correct, that the quasi-apathetic intentional attitude the “I” felt towards the other person at the beginning of our analysis must be construed as “love.” For, on Scheler’s account, in order to have even considered the other’s invitation to coffee as a possibility, insofar as it is in some sense immediately given as agreeable and valuable, the “I” must already feel a sort of “love” towards the other. Our imaginary case-study, however, seemed to display a love in becoming, love as a movement and result and not as a primitive and immediate reaction to something which is already valued. A common sense understanding of the term “love” would probably find Scheler’s homonymy questionable—since love, colloquially, seems to fit the first-personal account much better than the more abstract-formal “primitive and immediate emotional reaction” account. We simply don’t think or speak of love in that manner—love is much rather an end-product generated from a process of emotional relation, not a starting-point.
However attractive the common sense rebuttal might seem, Scheler is simply not attempting to accommodate common sense in his account. It might be argued that Scheler is engaged in a process of “conceptual amelioration”[11] here—that is, his account is designed to deepen the colloquial or everyday concept of love by transforming its informational-intentional content: Scheler’s account provides us with a fundamental intentional-evaluative dualism of love and hate (which can also be construed as a monism of scale) which can then be developed by degrees of intensity into derived concepts—on the side of love, we have qualitative determinations such as appreciation, inclination, affection, infatuation, lust, devotion, adoration and ultimately worship. A similar tally might be carried out for hate. The intensity determines nothing but the qualitative-evaluative intention found in the subject—the more intense the quality, the greater or lesser a value something has for them.[12]
Such an understanding of Scheler’s argument would make more sense, then, in the context of our case study. That is, in our imaginary encounter, love is present at first only as a germ[13] (in the form of, say, respect), which then takes root and flourishes into what we would colloquially call love proper[14]—but in any case, it was “love at first sight,” so to speak—albeit in weak form. We could, of course, also imagine an alternative scenario which ends abruptly after the chance-meeting on the street-corner—our “I” merely has to experience a slight negative inclination (wherein hate germinates) in their mostly apathetic attitude towards their acquaintance. Our distinction here is one which differentiates between potentiality and actuality, it seems—insofar as love and hate are each these primitive and immediate potentialities which can become increasingly actualized in the mediating movement of our coming to intuit the other as being in-and-for-themselves. Love and hate are then constant but implicit or weak in their basic forms—and only explicit for us in their developed forms contingently.
Scheler’s insistence on such a level of conceptual depth and primitivity for love is somewhat attractive philosophically since it authorizes us, albeit in a somewhat limited manner, to enter into the sphere of a “love-ontology” in a meaningful way. Construed in this manner, love and hate become primordial intentional attunements which determinately inform our relationship to beings. Our narrative would then allow us to explain plenty of things—such as the way in which mystical forms of “love for the world” operate: they involve a consciousness of a cosmic in-and-for-itself of which the mystic is a part. The Christian God, similarly, represents love itself, total acceptance and good-will—He is absolute value given corporeal, terrestrial form in Jesus Christ.
However, although Scheler’s account may be useful in certain contexts, it certainly does not mark the completion or end of philosophizing about love. On the contrary, it can only serve us as a point of departure in our search for the wisdom we philosophers so love—and more importantly, perhaps it can provide us with a deeper understanding of that search itself.
IV. The Love of Wisdom and the Wisdom in Love
We have already broached the wisdom-love chiasmus in our introductory remarks—but here we should take heed as to their significance and import. If what our antecedent analysis describes with regard to the conceptual determination of “love” truly is accurate, then what is the philosopher’s “craft”? What does it mean when we say that the philosopher’s practice is founded on a “love of wisdom” in light of our results? First, let’s summarize: we’ve argued that love is an intentional-evaluative relation to beings in the world surrounding us, a procedural or kinetic relation in constant becoming as we descend or ascend into or out from the intuitive communion we are capable of entering into with the world around us—and the myriad beings which inhabit it. Through love, we are capable of transcending the subject-object split, recognizing the subjectivity of the object—not by way of abstract identity, but by way of concrete and positive difference. Love allows us to approach the radical alterity of the world with an equally radical “care” or “concern,” if we allow ourselves some Heideggerian terms.
If the philosopher, as a loving friend of wisdom, approaches this wisdom by way of love, does this not mean that the philosopher is already in some sense guided by the wisdom of love? Can we even speak of such a thing—can love itself be said to be wise? If so, in what respect? We usually call a person wise if they act or proceed in an understanding manner informed by past experience and knowledge. Traditionally, love has been considered to be in some sense antithetical or incompatible with wisdom—as exemplified by Plato’s characterization of love as a kind of madness—as well as in Charles Meynier’s 1810 painting, Wisdom Defending Youth From the Arrows of Love.[15] Love is often portrayed as irrational or blind, and the wise man wants nothing to do with the fickle caprice of love—the lover tends to make rash decisions and behave in a compulsive manner, as if lacking in self-mastery. The goddess Athena swore to never take a lover, after all.
In light of this, we might see the clever way in which the term “philosophy” subversively turns this antithesis on its head by making rationality, knowledge and understanding the object of our irrational and blind love. Clever or not, perhaps we might want to rethink this subversion in light of what we discussed above regarding love. If love is an archaic attunement—archaic in the sense of ἀρχή—if love is a primary relationship to being—then any wisdom the philosopher seeks is naught but the product of love. After all, wisdom is attained only through understanding, knowledge and experience: without love, no understanding can be gained, no knowledge can be acquired. The world and its beings remain closed off to one without love—to them, the world possesses a sickly, lifeless quality—the beating heart of the world will never divulge itself to the philosopher which does not follow the wisdom of love in his love for wisdom. A loveless philosophy will sooner or later reveal itself to be empty and bloodless abstraction.[16] Any attempt to think without love brings us nothing but solipsism—which is eminently understandable in Scheler’s terms: love offers us the means[17] by which we can take part in the very being of the other.[18]
Love of wisdom or the wisdom of love—which comes first? We might as well ask whether the chicken preceded the egg or vice-versa: it’s not so simple. Both terms are interlinked in an essential manner—without the wisdom of love, our love of wisdom is ill-informed and guaranteed to produce failings: there can be no wisdom without the primary wisdom of love. Love brings us the singularity of the world in its infinite multiplicity, and without its guidance we are doomed to completely misunderstand and misapprehend it. Our questions will become erroneous and our answers will consequently become nonsense. Perhaps we should understand the wisdom of love to reside in the questioning nature of the lover. A questioning is always a quest, a searching—and a searching can only ever be carried out when something valued is hidden from us. We do not inquire into that which we do not have any concern for—it may remain shrouded in mystery for all we care. We must allow the questioning impulse, this calling for discovery and exploration, to envelop us and guide us as we practice philosophy—only by loving and caring for the world around us can we become wise, only by loving the world can we become philosophers at all.
Strangely enough, although almost every other language utilizes a form of the original Ancient Greek “φιλοσοφία” when speaking of philosophy, Icelandic uses the word “heimspeki”—which translates literally to “world-wisdom.” It is imperative that philosophers realize what their purpose and practice actually entail: that they come to know this world of ours by way of love first and foremost, and that wisdom can only be achieved through this peculiar relationship to the being of the other. Philosophers must, for example, attempt to account for our relationship to this world and the ways in which we dwell within it—before our only viable habitat is consumed in a raging fire of overconsumption and thoughtlessness.
By disclosing and fostering a relation of love towards the world—recognizing the world in its strangeness and alterity while caring for it and loving it for what it actually is as opposed to what we project upon it—in this way, philosophers can play their part in the restoration of ecological equipoise. This means communicating with the world on the world’s own terms—making philosophy accessible and compelling—so that the wisdom of our dormant love for the world can shine through and make a tangible difference to the beings which dwell in it. Only when we are guided by the method we find hidden within the madness of love can we become truly wise—only then can we call ourselves philosophers.
Bibliography
Readings In Ancient Greek Philosophy: from Thales to Aristotle. Edited by S. Marc Cohen, Patricia Curd and C.D.C. Reeve. Indianapolis: Hackett Pub. Co., 1995.
Davis, Zachary and Steinbock, Anthony, "Max Scheler", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2019 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL. Retrieved June 21st 2020.
Haslanger, Sally. “Conceptual Amelioration: Going On…Not in the Same Way,”—handout for her second lecture in the lecture series “Ideology, Critique, and Conceptual Amelioration” from March 28, 2019. Retrieved June 18th 2020 from URL.
Heidegger, Martin. Basic Writings. Edited by David Farrell Krell. Translations by David Farrell Krell, Joan Stambaugh, J. Glenn Gray, John Sallis, Frank A. Capuzzi, Albert Hofstadter, W. B. Barton, Jr. and Vera Deutsch. Foreword by Taylor Carman. New York: HarperCollins, 2008.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Translated by R.J. Hollingdale. London: Penguin Books, 2003.
Plato. Plato: Complete Works. Phaedrus translated by G.M.A. Grube. Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by John M. Cooper. Associate Editor D.S. Hutchinson. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1997.
Scheler, Max. The Nature of Sympathy. Translated by Peter Heath with an Introduction by W. Stark. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 1970.
Footnotes
[1] Empedocles of Acragas, Readings In Ancient Greek Philosophy: from Thales to Aristotle. Edited by S. Marc Cohen, Patricia Curd and C.D.C. Reeve. Indianapolis: Hackett Pub. Co., 1995. P. 60-65.
[2] Plato, Phaedrus. Printed in Plato: Complete Works. Phaedrus translated by G.M.A. Grube. Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by John M. Cooper. Associate Editor D.S. Hutchinson. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1997. P. 523/245b7-c1.
[3] Martin Heidegger, “What is Metaphysics?” from Basic Writings. Translated by David Farrell Krell. Foreword by Taylor Carman. New York: HarperCollins, 2008. P. 99.
[4] Max Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy. Translated by Peter Heath with an Introduction by W. Stark. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 1970. P. 149.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid, p. 153.
[8] Ibid, p. 148.
[9] Ibid, p. 149.
[10] Ibid, p. 70-71.
[11] See Sally Haslanger’s handout for her second lecture in the lecture series “Ideology, Critique, and Conceptual Amelioration” from March 28, 2019, titled “Conceptual Amelioration: Going On…Not in the Same Way,” p. 3: “Concepts are not simply cognitive placeholders for content; they provide orientations toward content at different levels of granularity, highlight features of the content in response to questions, situate the content in different subject matters, and mandate a cluster of (inferential and affective) responses.” Retrieved June 18th 2020 from URL.
[12] Note the etymological-conceptual parallel between intention and intensity. Does it not make some intuitive sense that love or hate as in-tentional states would grow or diminish according to their tension, their in-tensity? Could intention be essentially comprised of movements of contraction and relaxation, concentration and dissipation—a conceptual duo we find here and there in Bergson? We will not be able to answer these questions here—although they are captivating.
[13] Cf. Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy, p. 156.
[14] And of course, as mentioned above, this flourishing is nothing but the course of love’s own movement—there is no second-order or reflective ego-deliberation involved. See Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy, p. 157.
[15] Accessible by clicking here.
[16] This is what Nietzsche meant when he spoke of writing in blood—cf. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Translated by R.J. Hollingdale. London: Penguin Books, 2003. From “On Reading and Writing,” p. 67.
[17] Ibid, p. 68: “There is always a certain madness in love. But also there is always a certain method in madness.”
[18] Zachary Davis and Anthony Steinbock, "Max Scheler". From The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2019 Edition), edited by Edward N. Zalta. URL = https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2019/entries/scheler/. Retrieved 21st of June 2020.
