Espejo Sideral

Comte-Sponville, André, Dictionnaire philosophique – Nouvelle édition revue et augmentée, 4e édition., Paris: Quadrige, 2013, pp. 52-58.

My rendering of one entry in Comte-Sponville’s Philosophical Dictionary, untranslated into English.

LOVE
“To love,” writes Aristotle, “is to rejoice” (Ethics to Eudemus, VII, 2). What is the difference, then, between joy and love? Spinoza states: “Love is a joy that accompanies the idea of an external cause” (Eth., III, def. 6 of the affects) or, I would add, an internal cause. To love is to rejoice in. Or more accurately (since one can also love a meal or a wine): to enjoy or to rejoice in. All love is enjoyment or rejoicing. All joy, all enjoyment – as long as we relate it to its cause – is love. To love Mozart is to enjoy his music or to rejoice at the idea that it exists. To love a landscape is to enjoy or rejoice in its sight or its existence. To love oneself is to be for oneself the cause of joy. To love one’s friends is to rejoice that they exist, and to rejoice in who they are. If we add that everything in us has a cause and that pleasure without joy is not quite love (the flesh is sad when the pleasure of the body does not also delight the soul: when we make love, for example, without at least loving to do it), we join the two definitions of Aristotle and Spinoza, in that luminous point where they meet: joy is to love; love is joy.

The agreement of these two geniuses makes me happy. It is another opportunity for me to love them.

But what does joy prove? And what is the value of this joyful or lovable definition against so many sad, anguished, unhappy loves – so many loves without pleasure or joy – attested in literature and, alas, confirmed by our experience? What does Aristotle matter in the face of heartbreak? What does Spinoza matter in the face of grief or a domestic dispute? Reality is always right, since it is the real thing to think about. But then again, what about our definition?

Another definition is suggested, which comes from Plato. Love is desire, he explains in The Banquet, and desire is lacking something: “That which we don’t have, what we are not, what we lack, these are the objects of desire and love. Misfortune, with such a definition, can be explained only too well. How could we be happy in love, since we only love what we lack, what we don’t have, since love exists only through the emptiness that inhabits or constitutes it? There is no such thing as happy love; by definition love itself always lacks what would make it happy.

Is it because no lack is ever satiated? Not quite. Life is not that difficult. Instead, because the satiation of lack abolishes it as lack and therefore (since love is that), it abolishes it as love. This leaves only two situations to choose from: at times we love what we do not have, and we suffer from that lack; and other times we have what we no longer lack, and for that reason (since love is lack) we become incapable of loving… Love is enhanced in frustration, and goes dormant or fades out with satisfaction. This is especially true for our love life. The devouring lack of the other (passion) seems to have a happy outcome only in the possession of its object. Is this possession missing? This is assured misfortune, at least for some time. Does it happen? Does it last? Happiness itself wears out or vanishes along with the feeling of lack, in the presence of the one who was supposed to bring happiness. Who can lack what one has, someone who shares his or her life, who is there every night, every morning, so present, so familiar, so habitual? How could passion survive happiness? How could happiness survive passion? “Imagine Madame Tristan,” said Denis de Rougemont. She would no longer be Isolde, or she would no longer be in love. How can one passionately love the ordinary? What magic potion is there against habit, boredom, daily life, satiety?

To be happy, explains Plato before Kant, is to have what you want. This makes happiness impossible: how could we have what we want if we only desire what we don’t have? Schopenhauer, as a great disciple of Plato, will draw the obvious conclusion: “Our whole life swings like a pendulum, from right to left, from suffering to boredom. Suffering because we desire what we don’t have, and we suffer from this lack; boredom because we have what we no longer lack, and we thus find ourselves incapable of loving that… This is what Proust will call the intermittencies of the heart, or at least the two poles between which they play themselves out. Albertine is present, Albertine disappears… When she is not there, he suffers atrociously: he is ready to do anything to bring her back. When she is there, he is bored or dreams of others: he is ready to do anything so that she leaves… Who hasn’t experienced these oscillations? Who doesn’t recognize in this something from one’s life, from one’s misfortune, one’s infidelity? We have to love someone we don’t have, that’s what we call a heartache, or we have someone whose absence we no longer feel, whom we therefore love less and less, and that’s what we call a couple.

This connects with a famous song by Nougaro: “When the ugly husband kills Prince Charming…”. It is, however, the same individual, but in two opposite situations: Prince Charming is the missing husband; and the ugly husband is Prince Charming who is no
longer missing.

These two definitions of love display symmetrical advantages and disadvantages. That of Aristotle or Spinoza bumps up against the failure of love, against its misfortune, its sadness, its anxieties. Plato’s, on the other hand, fails in the face of its successes: it explains very well our sufferings and our disappointments in love, but not the existence, at times, of happy couples, where each one rejoices not in the lack of the other – how could that be possible? – but in the existence of the other, their presence, the very love that unites them and which they share. Every happy couple is a refutation of Platonism. This, for me, is one more reason to love couples, when they are happy, and to not be a Platonist. But how, if love fails, how can I remain a Spinozist?

Let’s start with what is easiest. That love can be obscured by anxiety or suffering, there is nothing mysterious about it. If the existence of my children brings me joy, how could I not be sad, excruciatingly sad, if they were to die? How could I not be tormented, excruciatingly tormented, at the idea – alas, always plausible – that they may suffer or die? If their existence brings me joy, the idea of their non-existence, or of the diminishing of their existence (their illness, their suffering, their unhappiness), can only make me anxious or sad. This is something that Spinoza explains sufficiently (Eth., III, prop. 19 and 21, with their demonstrations), and it is useless to dwell on it. To love is to tremble – not because love is fear, but because life is fragile. This is not a reason to give up loving, nor to give up living.

The couple is harder to think about. That it usually begins in want or lack is a fact that is less physiological (sexual frustration has never been enough to make anyone fall in love) than psychological, but the former is no less established in it. The Beatles sang: I need you, I love you, I want you, I miss you, I need you… In its beginnings, Love almost always proves Plato right. That’s what the Greeks called éros: love that lacks its object, love that takes or wants to take, love that wants to possess and keep, passionate and possessive love… It is to love only oneself (the lover loves the beloved, wrote Plato in the Phaedra, as the wolf loves the lamb), or the other only as we miss them, as we need them or imagine them to be necessary to us, and that is why it is so strong, so facile, so violent… Love of lust, the scholastics used to said: to love the other for one’s own good. See the child who takes the breast. See the greedy or brutal lover. See the
exhilarated lover. To lack is within anyone’s reach. Dreaming is within anyone’s reach. But what happens when the lack disappears? When dreams wear out against the continued presence of the other? When mystery becomes transparency or opacity? Some will never forgive the other for being what they are, and not being the miracle they had first imagined. This is what is called “désamour” [Translators note: perhaps close to the sense of the English word “disenchantment”], which almost always has the bitter taste of truth. “One loves someone for what they are not, said Gainsbourg, and one leaves them for what they are.” However, not all couples break up, nor do they all live in the midst of boredom or lies. Some have learned to love the other as they are, let us say, as they present themselves to be known, to live alongside with, to be experienced, to the point of rejoicing in their presence, in their existence, in their love, and all the more so, since they are not missing but they are there, giving themselves, not being absent, in the joyful repetition of desire, only to better manifest their presence, their availability, their power, their gentleness, their sensuality, their tenderness, their skill, their love… This love that lacks nothing, is what the Greeks called philia, which could be translated as “friendship”, but only on the condition of also including the family and the couple, as Aristotle did, and especially what Montaigne called “marital friendship”: a love not out of lack, but the love of someone who rejoices, who gives, who nurtures and comforts. That eroticism can also find its place there, it something couples know well, and which bears them out. As the truth of the bodies and souls is more exciting for two lovers than the dream! The presence of the other – their body, their desire, their gaze – how much more exciting than their absence! How much more pleasing than lack is pleasure! Better to make love than to dream about it. Better to enjoy and rejoice in what is than to miss or suffer from what is not.

Between éros and philia, between lack and joy, between love-passion and love-action, we will do well to avoid choosing. These are not two worlds, which exclude each other, nor two separate essences. Rather, they are two poles in the same field. Two moments in the same process. See the child taking the breast, I said. It’s éros, the love that takes, and all love begins there. And then see the mother, who gives it. It’s philia, the love that gives, that protects, that rejoices and shares. Everyone understands that the mother was a child first: she began by taking; and that the child will have to learn to give. Éros is first, always, and remains so. But philia emerges from it little by little, and prolongs it. The fact that all love is sexual, as Freud wants, does not mean that sexuality is all of love. That one begins by loving oneself, as the scholastics had observed, does not prevent – but on the contrary allows – that sometimes one may also love someone else. First the lack, then the joy. First of all, the love of lust (loving the other for one’s own good), then the love of benevolence (loving the other for their own good). First the love that takes, then the love that gives. That the latter does not erase the former, that is something that everyone can experience. It is no less clear that the path leading from one to the other is a path of love, or love as a path.

How far does it go? To love what makes me joyful, what makes me feel good, what makes me feel full or soothes me, is still to love myself. Whereby benevolence does not escape from lust, nor philia from éros, nor love from selfishness or the principle of pleasure. Can we go further? This is what the Gospels ask of us. To love one’s neighbor is to love anyone: not the one who pleases me, but the one who is there. Not the one who does me good, but also those who do me harm. To love one’s enemies is, by definition, to transcend the boundaries of friendship, at least in its egological or Montanian definition (“because it was him, because it was me”), perhaps also out of logic (the Greeks would have seen in this only a contradiction or madness: how can one be a friend to one’s enemies?). The first Christians could not use either éros or philia to designate such love in Greek: they borrowed from the Septuagint the quasi-neologism
agape (from the verb agapan, “to love, to cherish”), which the Latins translated as caritas and which is at the origins of our “charity”. It would be benevolence without concupiscence, joy without selfishness, like a friendship freed from ego, and therefore without a shore: disinterested love, pure love, as Fénelon said, love without possession or lack, love without covetousness, as Simone Weil says, the one who hopes for nothing in return, the one who does not need to be reciprocated, the one who is not proportionate to the value of his or her object, the one who gives and abandons him or herself. This would be the love that God has for us, that God is for us (“o Théos agapè estin”, says the First Epistle of John), and that says enough about its value, at least in imaginary sense, and how much it surpasses us. Are we capable of it? I doubt it very much. But that does not prohibit us from striving for it, from working on it, from getting close to it, perhaps. The more we move away from selfishness – the more we move away from ourselves – the more we approach God. Love of charity would be a joy, as Althusser might have said, without subject or end.

Thus everything begins with lack, and tends towards joy – towards a joy that is ever greater and freer. The common trait between these three loves – which would therefore be love itself, or its next kind – is joy. We must rejoice, imaginatively, at the idea that we could possess what we lack (éros), or rejoice in what we don’t lack and which does us good (philia), or rejoice, purely and simply, in what is (agapè).

One can also love nothing (this is what Freud calls melancholy: “a loss of the capacity to love”), and realize that life from then on has either flavor nor meaning. Many people have died or will die from it: one only commits suicide when love fails, or when one fails to love. Any suicide, even legitimate, is a failure, as Spinoza observed, or the mark of failure. This should discourage both condemnation – no one is bound to always succeed and praise. Failure is neither a fault nor a victory.

Is life worth living? There is no absolute answer. Nothing is worth living in itself or by itself: nothing has value other than the joy one finds or puts into it. Life is only worth living for those who love it. Love is only worthwhile for those who love it. These two loves go together. Not only because you have to be alive in order to love, but also because you have to love in order to get a taste for life, and even – since courage is not enough – in order to go on living. It is love that makes one live, since it is love that makes life lovable.
It is love that saves; it is then love that is to be saved.

English Translation by Nicolás Arias Gutiérrez.

Copyright notice: I hereby share my English translation of André Comte-Spònville´s work under the terms of Creative Commons license CC-BY-NC 4.0, which allows others to use, adapt y modify this content, given the following conditions: (i) the acknowledgement of the source and any potential modifications, and (ii) the prohibition of using the content for commercial purposes.