The Philosophy of Love. Part 2 - Likings and Loves

Here, at long last, is the second part of the series on the Philosophy of Love which I wrote for the Straits Times about three years ago. I've now found out how to copy and paste stuff from Word into Blogger (not as straightforward as it sounds). So the rest of the articles should follow thick and fast from now on.

LIKINGS AND LOVES

“Our lives – private and public, domestic and professional – have value only in proportion to the love we invest in them and find in them.” (André Comte-Sponville)

This is the second in a series of articles about love. Last week I looked at the Speech of Aristophanes from Plato’s symposium, and concluded that anyone seeking salvation through a romantic relationship will be disappointed.

With so many varieties of love, and so many legitimate objects of love, it is a mistake to focus on one individual.

Love - a four-letter word

Love was recently voted Singapore’s favourite English word. For such a small word, it has a big following! It also has many uses. We use it to describe how we feel towards our husbands and wives, our children, our friends - and even our favourite foods and pastimes.

When philosophers talk about love, they’re usually quick to dismiss statements like: I love chocolate; and I love walking in the park. In such cases, we are told, the word love is misapplied. What we really mean is that we like these things very much. The discussion then moves swiftly on to ‘genuine’ kinds of love, such as friendship, sexual-attraction, familial affection, and so on.

I find this abrupt dismissal of a whole class of statements about love quite disconcerting. It isn’t that I care very much whether the word love or like is used to describe my feelings towards chocolate. But I can’t help feeling that the word like doesn’t adequately describe what I feel for the novels of Charles Dickens, the music of the Beatles or the beauty of the night sky.

C. S. Lewis: Likings and Loves

The philosopher, theologian and writer, C. S. Lewis (1898-1963), author of The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, felt the same way. In his 1960 book, The Four Loves, he devotes an entire chapter to: Likings and Loves for the Sub-human.

According to him, when we say we like / love chocolate or country-walks, we mean that we take pleasure in them. Now, pleasures can be divided into two groups: those that are preceded by desire, and those that are not.

A glass of water is an example of the first type. When you are thirsty, a glass of water is a very great pleasure. But, as Lewis points out, no-one ever pours themselves a glass of water ‘just for the fun of the thing’.

An example of a pleasure not preceded by desire would be the fragrance of flowers meeting you unexpectedly on your morning walk. “You were in want of nothing, completely contented before it,” writes Lewis. “The pleasure, which may be very great, is an unsolicited, super-added gift.”

Lewis labels these contrasting types of pleasures: Need-pleasures and Pleasures of Appreciation.

It is characteristic of Need-pleasures that they very quickly die on us. A glass of water is very appealing when we are thirsty, but becomes a matter of indifference once we have drunk. The pleasure lasts no longer than the need.

Pleasures of Appreciation are very different. The pleasure we take in the smell of flowers, the beauty of the stars or a Mozart symphony seems somehow to take us outside ourselves. We feel that: “Something has not merely gratified our senses… but claimed our appreciation by right.”

There is even a glimmer of unselfishness about pleasures of appreciation. We can imagine a wine-connoisseur, on his deathbed, taking care that his vintages are preserved properly to be enjoyed by others. After all, such fine wines deserve to be enjoyed!

“In the appreciative pleasures… we get something we can hardly help calling love and hardly help calling disinterested [i.e. unselfish].” (C. S. Lewis)

Who cares?

At the beginning of this essay, I quoted André Comte-Sponville: “Our lives… have value only in proportion to the love we invest in them and find in them.” I will repeat this many times during the course of this series, because it encapsulates something very important: love gives value to our lives.

This is why I have spent all this time justifying the use of the word love to describe my feelings towards Charles Dickens, the Beatles and the night sky. I don’t wish to dismiss these things as mere likings, because they bring tremendous value to my life.

It’s taken me years to really appreciate them. Dickens’s novels are not exactly light reading; it takes effort to learn to identify the constellations; and without the many hours I’ve spent unsuccessfully attempting to master the guitar, I don’t think I could properly appreciate the artistry of the Beatles.

But the effort has been worthwhile. After all, love takes work.

Not all readers will share my love of Dickens, The Beatles and astronomy. Some will gain appreciative pleasure from Mozart’s symphonies, fine Indian-cooking, or the footballing artistry of Wayne Rooney. In my view, they can all be objects of love, because they all bring real value to our lives.