In Our Time - The Philosophy of Love

Episode Date: March 29, 2001

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the philosophy of love. In Plato’s Symposium a character called Aristophanes tells a story about Love. He says that once, near the beginning of time, there were three types of human, one male, one female and one that was part man and part woman. Each human type had four hands and four feet and one head with two faces, and what they lacked in beauty they made up for in power and bravery - they even dared to attack the Gods. Zeus, as usual, lost his patience and resolved to split these creatures in half to diminish their strength and increase their numbers. His plan was that there would be more people to offer sacrifices but they’d be too weak to bother the Gods. However, with the split he inadvertently created us - lonely creatures forever searching for our other halves. Aristophanes explained to Socrates, “human nature was originally one and we were a whole, and the desire and pursuit of the whole is what we call love”. This is one version of love that still seems to have strange echoes in the culture of today, but how has the Western understanding of the Philosophy of Love developed since Plato? Has it always been about finding our ‘other half’? With Professor Roger Scruton, author of many books including Sexual Desire; Angie Hobbes, lecturer in philosophy at Warwick University; Thomas Docherty, Professor of English at the University of Kent.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk, forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, in Plato's symposium, Aristophanes tells a story about love. He says that once near the beginning of time, there were three types of human, one male, one female, and one that was part man and part woman.

Each human type had four hands and four feet and one head with two faces. And what they lacked in beauty, they made up for, in power and bravery. They even dared to attack the gods. Zeus, as usual, lost his patience, and resolved to split these creatures in half to diminish their strength and increase their numbers. His plan was that there would be more people

to offer sacrifices, but they'd be too weak to challenge the gods. However, with the split, he inadvertently created us, lonely creatures forever searching for our other halves. Aristophanes explained to Socrates, human nature was originally won and we were a whole, and the

desire and pursuit of the whole is what we call love. That's one version of love. It still seems to have strange echoes in the culture of today. But how has the Western understanding of the philosophy of love developed since Plato? And has it always been about finding our other half?

With me to discuss love is the philosopher, Professor Roger Scruton, author of many books, including sexual desire. Author with me is Angie Hobbes, lecture in philosophy at Warwick University, and author of Plato and The Hero, and Thomas Docherty, Professor of English at the University of Kent.

Angie Hobbes, the type of love I briefly described that Aristophanes described is only one possible answer to Plato's question. Socrates has another answer. Could you tell us about that? Yes. Socrates agrees with Aristophanes that love originates in human imperfection and lack and need. But he claims that what we lack and need is not our other half but the beautiful and good. He claims that love generally is a desire to possess the good forever. and that of course implies that love also desires immortality. Now, as humans, personal immortality is not available to us. All we can do is to produce creations that will live on after us. And the means by which we achieve the production of these creations is through the inspiration of a beautiful beloved. And he goes on to outline three main types of creation, which are open to humans.

the first, and in Socrates's eyes the least important, is biological offspring. Next come heroic deeds and lasting fame. And finally, is the production of works of science and education and legislation and art and philosophy. And the crucial point here is that though these creations can, in some instances, be motivated by love of a particular individual, Socrates thinks that the greatest creations will be produced when our erotic energies are diverted away from particular human beings

and onto ever more abstract beautiful objects, culminating in the vision of the beautiful itself, the form of beauty. So the erotic is a sort of engine which raises a ladder out of which we can climb to higher things? Precisely. Socrates describes this. ascend away from the particular individual towards the form of beauty as precisely a ladder of love. So love is a benevolent driving force?

It is, yes. Oh, it can be? It can be. We'll come back to the other side later in the programme. Roger Scruton, would you agree with, can you comment on that, develop that? Well, of course, that's an excellent account of what Socrates says, and it makes clear, to my view, what's wrong with it? because if the whole culmination and fruition of love,

it consists in this emancipation from the particular and becoming wedded to the universal, then the individual object of love falls away as irrelevant. Yet that's what love is. Love is love for an individual. So Socrates has given you a theory of love and why it is a great and good thing, which makes it something not love,

at all, but a kind of intellectual contemplation of an abstract idea. So what was Socrates basing his idea of love on? What sort of observations, what sort of deductions did he use to draw him to the notion of love which led him to these ideas which, although you've challenged them, have been pervasive and still are pervasive for two and a half thousand years? I think what is persuasive and, well, moving about Socrates' portrait of love is not what it ends up as in this contemplation of the abstract idea of beauty, but what it begins from.

It begins from this erotic attachment to the pure incarnate individual and the trouble that that causes to us. Socrates is aware of the trouble, partly because in the Greek world to which he belonged, often this attachment was homosexual, and there were all kinds of interdictions as to how it could be fulfilled and how it shouldn't be fulfilled and so on. And he came up with the idea that, of course,

to give way to this as a merely carnal thing would be to demean yourself as a rational being, to become enslaved to the particular, enslaved to the flesh. And our duty as free rational beings is somehow to transcend that attachment to the incarnate human being and rise up to something more spiritual. And that's why he gave this account of the ladder, I suppose. Come to Thomas Stockton here, maybe this isn't the beginning of, perhaps the precursors of Plato here,

but at a time when it is stated that Eros is to do sex, let's use that as a shorthand for Eros, although it doesn't adequate, never mind, is what we have in common with the animal kingdom, and therefore it is a lower thing. Now, that seems to me to be worth commenting on and developing and perhaps challenging, What would you like to say about Thomas Doggety? In relation to the kind of literary manifestations of all of this, I mean, literature is precisely what deals with this contest, as it were, between the demands for attachment to particularity on the one hand

and the demand for a kind of rational social commitment, which is literature's version, as it were, of the universal on the other. And the way in which we see that treated, I think, in literature, is partly to do with what we might think of as, You describe Melvin as a kind of an animal drive. I prefer to think of it just as the kind of physicality of love. Love as a rather material and eventually primarily sexual activity. And in the history of literature, the primacy of that sexual commitment is not always there.

Literature primarily really from about the 18th century onwards is trying desperately to negotiate a relation between the demands of sense and sensibility, as Austin will explicitly call it, the demands of a reasoned love, loving someone for particular reasons, and on the other hand, a love which is ostensibly not quite irrational, but not a love that cannot be accounted for in reasoned terms,

so that we have a love that eventually becomes something rather immaterial. And the way in which we see that in literature is in terms of we can have contest between, if you like, the demands of sex on the one hand and the demands of the social on the other. But just to stick with the Greeks for a moment, which is very clear. Very clear. This idea of sex being a lower thing

is establishing a hierarchy, which seems to me very interesting. Maybe it's a real hierarchy, but why should it be the lower thing? And he doesn't, as far as my reading of it, Plato doesn't say it's sort of physical. He says it's because it's animal, because it makes us like animals,

and we don't be like animals, We have something else. We have something of the divine about us. So let's get away from that. That is a lower thing which you must escape. I want to sort of challenge that and have your opinions on that. Do you want to comment on, Angie, which of you? You want to challenge the idea of... That it is lower, that is necessarily lower.

Do we still accept it is necessarily lower? I think interestingly, I think interestingly what has happened in the 20th century, certainly in the literary manifestations of this in the 20th century, is that sex became the only way in which we began to think of love and now as we go into a new century that is again being challenged

and we're going back if you like to the version of Plato that you're offering where you have a sense that there is a kind of sexual element in love but it's not the only element in love. I mean the great move through the 20th century is that love becomes a question of technique, becomes technique,

it becomes quite simply how good you are at this other activity called sex but we're now beginning I think to to rethink this in terms of sex being and other activity. Can I'm across you in a second, Scruton, can we talk about Plato's second broad definition of love, which is called Phelia?

Can you describe that before we move on? Yes, philia is familial love or friendship love, and Plato never comes up with a definition of it in the way that he comes up with some definitions of eros, erotic love. He does discuss it in a wonderful dialogue called the Lysis, and it's never quite clear whether good people are friendly with other good people because of their goodness or because they lack something or need something. It seems to me that in the Lysus, Plato may be exploring, if not challenging,

the notion that all human love stems from lack and need, because the models of friendship that he critiques in that. ISIS all fall down because they all seem to stem from the idea that friends must lack need something in their friend. And if somebody is perfectly good that they won't need friends, they won't need that kind of love. On my reading, Plato might be raising questions and saying, well, maybe not all forms of human love need to stem from lack. Although when he discusses Eros, he does seem to accept the model of love based on lack. What value does it now have?

You know when you say, I love someone to someone who knows you love them, that is a specific, particular, local, and one hopes proper value. But the word's thrown around all over the place now. People go, I love you, all over the blooming place. It's like, never used to happen in my childhood. But it does, and it just seems what's left of it? This hasn't happened recently, Melvin. After all, even when we were young,

the ordinary Koppany approach, between man and woman was to call the woman darling, you know, or love. This promiscuous use of a holy word is an old English habit, you know. Now perhaps people use the F word, sorry, I mean that the BBC wouldn't allow me to pronounce with the same promiscuities they used to use the L word. And it's still, you know, one shouldn't say that that's because we take it, and make it any more cheap. Can we move to what could be called the dangers of,

love. Angie, would you like to kick off with that? What dangers were spotted, as it were, originally, as you can take Plato's original, and how have they developed in the philosophy and literature of love? Yes, well, Socrates makes it quite clear in his speech in the symposium that if you stay at the level of erotic attachment to a particular individual, you are living a very risky life. You risk your lover dying, you risk your lover withdrawing his or her love.

You risk what Socrates calls the potential for enslavement in love. So he sees this particular erotic attachment to one individual as no life for a free human being. And he believes that his ladder of love offers us a very comforting picture in which we can ascend to a place where we are free from such shackling desires and demands. and from which we can view the individual, not as a unique particular, who can have a particular hold over us,

but simply as an instantiation to a greater or lesser extent of the form of beauty itself. So particulars lose their unique particularity. They become seen simply as earthly copies of the divine form of beauty and the other divine forms, and they become simply tokens of a universal type and hence replaceable. And Socrates thinks this is a very liberating form

of the re-channeling of desire. Now whether we would agree with Socrates as another matter, we might well find such an image rather disturbing and chilling. Thomas Stockett, is it about the Renaissance and afterwards that it becomes prevalent for several hundred years that individual erotic love, love of sentiment, is dangerous? and is can be poisonous and can ruin lives and can lead to all the sorts of...

It becomes a great part of... Is it reflecting life, do you think, or is it instructing life in that sense? I think in that early modern period, certainly what we're seeing is that the love we've been talking about is always a question of risk. When you say, I love you to another individual, what you're looking for is an investment that's going to yield a return. you do not want the person typically you do not want the person to reply to you well frankly I can't stand

your guts I mean what you're looking for in reply is I love you two but more so it's as it works like a kind of banking investment almost and what you're seeing I mean you see that explicitly in the opening scene of King Lear if you remember it was the great opening point of King Lear what I'm interested in is the predicament in which

a potential lover is put At the beginning of that play, the conventional views that everybody's there, everybody's at the court in order to see King Lear splitting up the kingdom. But why is he splitting up the kingdom? He's splitting up the kingdom because he's got two daughters who's married and one daughter who's about to be married, one daughter who he clearly wants to marry off to the Duke of Burgundy, who's waiting in the wings.

At that moment he puts Cordelia into an impossible position because he says to Cordelia, tell me how much you love me. And Cordelia is profoundly aware of the fact that Burgundy is in the wings and she's about to be married off to him, how can she swear a huge love to her father when she's about to... How could you say, I love you all?

Absolutely, absolutely. She's put in a predicament where she's having to, as it were, limit her investments, so to speak, or to control or regulate her investments. And that's where the element of risk comes in. And what we have in the modern period, I think, is a sense of love as something so absolute.

We will pay homage to the absoluteness of it by being willing to. to risk everything for us. Is it, I think I was delighted you came into that, because is Cordelia's management of her divided love, the sort of sense and sensibility that she takes on both in a way, can that be contrasted with Desdemona's passion of throwing herself out, pure sentiment,

a man who she's warned against and who will drive her to destruction and does destroy her? Can we see those two as the pillars of the way that the ideas of love moved into more modern ways? world to literature. Frangis Scruton. Difficult question. I would say that there's an enormous difference between Desdemona's case and Cordelia.

That's the interesting thing. In that, well, yes, Cordelia is, as Thomas was saying, I mean, in a position where the language of investment makes sense, because after all, she's having to balance familial love, love for a father, against married love and the irons. erotic basis which that implies. And of course that's not a calculation that anybody can seriously make, certainly not when challenged in this way.

Whereas Desdemona is her love is through and through erotic, and the whole purpose of the play is to show that a love can be both erotic and wholly chaste. And yet Othello, precisely because the love is erotic, is subject to this temptation, the terrible temptation, that we were obliquely referring to before of seeing the animal part of it as predominant and therefore being at every moment open to the possibility of sexual jealousy.

But fulfilling the very ancient idea, the erotic idea, eroticism, erotic level inevitably leads to jealousy and revenge. It doesn't inevitably lead to that. It can inevitably lead to that. It can inevitable. Othello makes a mistake just in the way that Lear makes a mistake. mistake by putting emphasis on the wrong aspect of love.

Can we move on to the philosopher Kant, Roger Scruton, and what did he contribute to this debate about love? Well, Kant was typical of the whole tradition of Western philosophy in that he didn't really have much experience of this aspect of human life. No, there were a few exceptions. But the great number of chaste philosophers, aren't there? Yeah, there are. and Kant was chased in both senses. Three women who wanted to marry him. He couldn't bring himself to go ahead with it.

Kant is famous for having produced an ethical theory which is, as it were, adapted to the condition of enlightenment man. It's an ethical theory which makes no mention of God, but which nevertheless captures the absolute force of morality as we, all of us experience it. And in particular, he takes the view that the categorical imperative, as he describes it, tells us to treat human beings and ourselves among them as ends in themselves and never as means only. As means to our own, yes.

Yes. And he does think that there is contained in that idea the basis for our sexual morality. And he comes, he returns to this topic several times. in lectures on ethics and elsewhere. But always with a slightly bleak vision. He describes marriage, for example, as a contract for the mutual use of the sexual organs, which is a very unappealing conception

of what actually induces people to tie themselves forever to each other. You would think that surely love is something more than that. Can I turn to Thomas Dockley? Thomas, you raised earlier at sentences. Sensibility, Jane Austen's book. I think the idea is expressed about Kant by Roger. They apply there, don't they?

Especially the notion of marriage. Am I right? I think so, to all right. That's true. And the account that Roger gives, I think, is broadly accurate and is reflected in the literature. But again, what you're seeing there is a kind of contest

between a kind of love that can be rationally described in the rather bleak terms that Roger has given us in those Kantian the passage from Kant. You've got a love there that can be described in rational terms. What Austin's interested in is whether it is possible to articulate or enact a love that is equally reasonable

but cannot be accounted for in such schematic, abstract terms. But the resolution, it seems to me, and if anybody's going to correct me, you three are, is in marriage. That's where sense will take us only so far and can be monstrous. Sensibility can take us only so far and would be monstrous.

In marriage, these things can be resolved. And you find that very admirable in philosophy and philosopher himself, Hegel, don't you, Roger? Yes, I think Hegel is sort of unique among philosophers and that he actually was married.

Twenty happy years? Yes, he did have, I produced an illegitimate child beforehand. Aristotle. Yes, Aristotle was married, but we don't know about whether he was happily married or not. We don't know that about many people. But, yes, what Hegel says, well, implies,

is very close, actually, to the underlying meaning of, as I read of the Jane Austen novels. The erotic does have its roots, of course, in animal instinct, and nobody can deny that, but it also is intrinsically moralised, as it were, by us. We're always making this distinction between the right and the wrong employment of it, and this creates a huge tension in us, which demands resolution,

and this resolution can only occur by transition to a higher stage, to another stage of being, where your union with the other person is such as to cancel all these tensions, Finally, there is complete trust which, as it were, unites you as a composite corporate entity and you face destiny together. And that, I think, is a beautiful idea. Is there a recent, Andrew Hobson, which Freud recategorise love at the start of the last century or the end of the start of last century? Oh, yes.

For Freud, all forms of love, including the affections that you feel for your family and friends, have their origins in. various forms of infantile sexuality. Now, some of these infantile sexual urges are inhibited by our culture. And these aim-inhibited sexual urges, Freud argues, are later transformed by a process he never makes entirely clear into the affectionate component of all our adult loves. So all aspects of our adult loves, not just the explicitly sexual ones, but the affectionate aspects too, have their roots in these infantile sexual longings,

some of which have been repressed and inhibited. Do you think this was a recategorization which was something that, is this recategorization is something you welcome, Roger Scruton? I neither welcome it nor believe in it. I think the whole thing is a load of self-serving myth, in the minds of a perverted paedophile. Mrs. Freud you're talking about. I really think this is...

I really think it's complete nonsense. There is no empirical evidence. It's all established by consulting one play of Sophocles. You know, it's a wonderful piece of literary criticism that led to this notion of the Oedipus complex. And he was a failed literary critic. Actually, as Leslie Chamberlain says in her recent book on him, he's a failed artist.

but the scientific basis for this is zero and also I think it's led to a complete corruption in people's attitude to children. This underlies people's sense that really sexuality is always there and always ready to be exploited and of course there is a whole coosh of human society for whom that is a green light.

Angie Hobbes, I would guess you'd disagree with that. Well, I'm not sure I agree that Freud thought that all forms of sexual activity were to be despised. I mean, he does say that he thinks that in a mutually loving context, that sexual pleasure can provide humans with our most intense satisfaction and fulfillment, and it's the nearest we can get to returning to that original state of bliss from which we were dragged away during childhood.

However, it's also true that he does emphasize some of the negative dangers of of erotic attachment too, particularly if your love object doesn't reciprocate. And he does also say that he does think that some forms of aim inhibition are a good thing, because given that aim inhibition of early sexuality leads to the development of the feelings of affection later on, he thinks these feelings of affection are much more durable than feelings of erotic passion and are hence much safer bonds. with which to bind society together. And this is one of his main themes

and one of his last works on the civilisation. Can I move from Freud to D.H. Lawrence, to bring literary parallels in again, Thomas Stockerton. What did he take or add to this development, discussion, discourse on the philosophy of love? I think he's broadly consistent with Freud in the sense that, despite what he himself would say about psychoanalysis, he's broadly consistent with Freud in the sense that for him

love becomes primarily a question of sex and what I was earlier referring to as love as technique so what becomes interesting in D.H. Lawrence is not just the regulation of passions but the physical manifestation of those passions, the acknowledgement that love must be physical and eventually that becomes part of a general tendency I think within 20th century literature

that love is kind of elided Love becomes something which gets obscured under a question of sex and how we organise ourselves in terms of sexuality and in terms of something that we call desire. And desire, of course, is something which after Freud we can account for almost in quantifiable terms. Rundis Gruton.

I think another way of putting that is to say that in Lawrence, the sexual act is essentially nuptial. And what he's exploring is the nuptiality of our relations with each other. That's to say that even in Lawrence, marriage, okay, not that perhaps in its

institutional form, but something like Jane Austen's vision of marriage as the culmination and the end point of this is still active in animating his language and the way in which he describes the sexual act. Sorry, Thomas Do you want it to come in? Yeah, I was going to say that in Lawrence,

there's a further complication to the whole thing in that even if such a sexual union of polarities is ostensibly achieved it's never quite enough. Lawrence, famous at the end of women in love, we have an erotic relation, a heterosexual erotic relation, which is somehow not enough.

He still needs a friend. And it's that question of love and friendship. Erosanfilia again, which comes back. Gosh, we've effortlessly come full circle and near the end of the program. We didn't even organise it. Thank you very much. Roger Scruton. Thomas Docherty and Angie Hobbs, and thank you very much for listening.

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