The Nature of Love 3: The Modern World

484 Pages·2009·17.478 MB·English

by  Irving Singer

Preface to Irving Singer
Library Edition
Re
ROMANTIC IDEAS ABOUT THE
nature of love developed throughout the twentieth century,
and in the twenty-first they continue to matter to many people.
Their survival is marked by a pervasive dialectic that I examine
in the trilogy's third volume. While romanticism had started as
an offshoot of optimistic idealism that Hegel represented, its
pessimistic phase leaned strongly toward the realist and natu-
ralist approach that rejected Hegelian or other transcendental-
ist doctrines. The dialectic occurs in the fact that some of the
greatest makers of ideas for the twentieth century were nine-
teenth-century thinkers who scorned romanticism but ended
up with opinions that were actually, though diversely, more
Romantic than the ones they attacked.
I call these theorists anti-Romantic Romantics. The chapter
on them focuses on Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Tolstoy, whose
views about love illustrate much of the ambiguity and even self-
contradiction that permeates the dominant thinking about love
in the last hundred years. Both Nietzsche and Tolstoy began as
would-be disciples of Schopenhauer's philosophy. Kierkegaard
did not, but like the other two he felt the impact of Romantic
pessimism and constructed his religious alternative in a way
that presupposed comparable negative judgments. Different as
they were in relation to each other, and to Kierkegaard as well,
Tolstoy and Nietzsche also rejected the benign romanticism of
the earlier period.
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Preface to Irving Singer Library Edition
In studying the work of these three, I argue that their anti-Ro-
mantic views rely upon many of the concepts they themselves
inherited from the Romantic idealism they wished to demolish.
The two chapters that precede theirs constitute a reworking of
what I had attempted in the first two volumes. Those chapters
are also a preparation for present-day concepts that will take us
beyond the seminal reflections of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and
Tolstoy.
In addressing the philosophy of love in the twentieth century,
I concentrate on authors who have had exceptional impor-
tance in our part of the modern world. Their texts have served
as classics of our age. Even so, none of these major theorists
belongs to the mainstream of current Anglo-Saxon philoso-
phy. That movement originated with the efforts of Bertrand
Russell, G. E. Moore, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, together
with allies in America, who wanted to extirpate the "objec-
tive idealism" of the nineteenth century. As a byproduct of
the analytical philosophy that took its place, and that remains
today as the academic mainstay at our universities, questions
about the nature of love were bypassed or overtly eschewed.
They were considered too fuzzy and too elusive for the kind
of professional investigation that sought cogent resolutions in
fields such as the philosophy of science, the theory of mind or
knowledge, and even ethics.
Though the climate of what is deemed respectable may have
changed a bit in the last few years, the classic authors I discuss
in the third volume are rarely studied nowadays in American
departments of philosophy. Yet they are undeniably masters,
and most of our philosophers would acknowledge their impor-
tance in the culture at large. I begin this part of the trilogy with
Freud because his views recur throughout the modern world.
Since the beginning of the twentieth century, virtually everyone
who has written about affective matters has had to confront
some aspect of his theorization. Even William James, writing
in 1902, devotes the first chapter of his book The Varieties of
Religious Experience to a vigorous attack on the Freudian position
as it then existed. *
Preface to Irving Singer Library Edition
Not only is my study of Freud in the third volume more
detailed and, though critical, more sympathetic than the
Jamesian assault, but also it exists within a context defined by
my two previous volumes. Particularly in the first one, I used
Freud's outlook as a touchstone of the inadequacy I detected
among predecessors like him with respect to the concept
of bestowal. He was likewise a convenient foil for later ideas
that I sketched in the second volume. By the time I reached
volume 3, which was completed some twenty years after the
first volume, I perceived how limited my treatment of Freudian
theory had been. I saw no reason to recant my initial criti-
cism, but I now wanted to position it within a more thorough
and comprehensive portrayal of Freud's merits as well as his
residual shortcomings.
In writing the long chapter on him, I analyzed Freud's output
with the kind of systematic thoroughness that might be war-
ranted for works in technical philosophy. Since Freud was a psy-
chologist whose (unfulfilled) aspiration was the transforming
of personality psychology into a rigorous science, my treating
him like a philosopher might seem to have been misguided
from the start. But Freud himself acknowledged his indebted-
ness to Schopenhauer, and as he matured he often penned
essayistic and even literary speculations about human nature
that are clearly philosophical and scarcely scientific.
An outstanding example of this is Civilization and Its
Discontents, in which Freud reviles religious and idealistic beliefs
about universal love and altruism as a whole. In my inspection
of what he says about human affect in that work and in his book
on group psychology as well as in many other places, I retained
my previous critique of his color blindness about bestowal. At
the same time, however, I carefully documented how brilliantly
Freud recognized the vast ramifications of appraisal within the
affective life of all men and women.
I tried to present a similarly thorough and nuanced exposi-
tion in the chapter on Proust. I had earlier planned to write
a book about him as a literary philosopher, and in a course
I taught at Johns Hopkins I used its preliminary drafts in my
Preface to Irving Singer Library Edition
lectures. Though that book never got finished, a majority of its
pages on love finds a haven in this chapter of the trilogy. Since
Proust has sometimes been regarded as a Bergsonian theorist,
I included an analysis of Bergson's philosophy of love as well as
the conception of memory, time, and the two sources of ethics
and religion that he delineates. I tried to show how different
Proust's philosophizing is from anything he may have gleaned
from Bergson.
Approaching Proust in this fashion entailed textual difficul-
ties, above all in the language he employs to describe "essences"
and their ability to regain what has been lost in the ordinary
passage of time. In places Proust seems to revert to Platonism,
or at least the kind of Neoplatonism that appears in Plotinus's
defense of the ideality in art. I argue that despite the occasional
confusion in Proust's use of traditional terminology, his philo-
sophical perspective is not especially Platonic. I see it instead as
closer to the naturalistic viewpoint of American and European
pragmatists. The realism that they and Proust jointly espoused
stands in opposition to the idealistic or Romantic attitude
toward love and related aspects of human nature as a whole.
At the same time, Proust outdoes his siblings among the prag-
matists—and almost all other writers—in the magnificence of
his aesthetic awareness. If he is a philosophe manque, as I claim,
he is nevertheless a superlative successor to Stendhal, whose
views about love he frequently echoes once he has cleansed
them of their benign romanticism. In that regard, he resem-
bles Alfred de Musset, the great nineteenth-century poet and
playwright, who typifies Romantic pessimism at its best. I finally
conclude, however, that Proust's exclusive and reverential love
of art prevents him from properly understanding all the other
types of love that most human beings care about and some-
times experience with reasonable success.
In the chapter on Lawrence and Shaw I study a different type
of literary and philosophical exploration that also relies upon
questionable ideas about the nature of love. In their thinking
about marriage as well as sex, Shaw and Lawrence each
retained more of the seventeenth-century Puritanism they dis-
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Preface to Irving Singer Library Edition
dained than either of them seems to have realized. The views
they propound are of course more contemporary in many
instances—in relation to women's liberation as they conceived
of it, for example, or free love and experimentation in sexual
behavior, as well as the possibility of complete abstinence from
sex. For all their revolutionary fervor, however, their outlook in
this region of human experience often derives from concepts
that were formulated by Luther and then by Milton and other
Protestant writers. The Puritan mentality provided a significant
groundwork for the non- and even anti-Christian polemics of
both Shaw and Lawrence.
The chapter on Santayana has special meaning for me. My
first book in philosophy dealt primarily with his aesthetics and
its relation to most of his technical work in general. At the time
no one had much investigated his ideas about love, which is not
surprising since, in his authorial persona, he frequently under-
took philosophy in a rationalist stance not always dissimilar
from Aristotle's. Nonetheless, I felt that it might be interesting
to present a comprehensive portraiture of his scattered writings
on the nature of love. They turned out to be more numerous,
more probing, and more exciting than I had expected. They
included remarks and analyses about the varieties of sexual
love, as well as friendship, religious or spiritual love, and what I
have called the love of persons, the love of things, and the love
of ideals.
In considering American philosophers who lived when
Santayana did and whom I admired, I had hoped to include
members of the pragmatist school of thought—James and
Dewey, in particular—but I discovered that in the area of love
and sexuality they had hardly anything to offer. They scarcely
touched upon these topics, and with very little originality. If
only byway of contrast, Santayana's writings stood out as monu-
mental demonstrations of what philosophers in his generation
could say about such vital matters. Since my own orientation
was pragmatistic and empirical, I readily employed it to attack
Santayana's Neoplatonism, up-to-date and imaginative though
it was. Nevertheless, by seeing hiip as basically an aesthetician
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and literary philosopher like myself, I was able to discern the
creative potential in many of the statements he made about
human feeling and behavior.
While much of my systematic treatment of Santayana's
thinking is critical as well as highly appreciative, I end the
chapter with a discussion on the redeeming virtue of his
thoughts about friendship. They are at least as good as what
one finds in Aristotle, and, in addition, they lend themselves to
an understanding of married love that is more plausible than
most of what Kant said on the subject. After the entire trilogy
was already done and printed, I came upon a letter Santayana
wrote toward the end of his life that includes ideas about
marriage itself as a type of friendship. I would have liked to
quote from it in my Santayana chapter in this third volume of
the trilogy. I did so in my subsequent book George Santayana,
Literary Philosopher. Its presentation of Santayana's philosophy
of love (a version of what appeared in the trilogy) closes with
the letter I have just mentioned. In this reprinting of the third
volume, I have tacked on that letter as a suitable termination
without changing anything else in the original chapter.
The analysis of Continental existentialism that follows
the Santayana material is an extension of what I had written
in my earlier chapter about the contrasting perspectives of
Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. I address the antagonism between
the religious and the atheistic versions of existentialism in a
corresponding manner. Though I was intrigued by the remarks
about love in the works of Martin Buber and Gabriel Marcel—
whose humanist inclinations arise in the midst of their alle-
giance to Judaism and Catholicism, respectively—I found
Sartre's books more pertinent in my search for a nontheistic,
pluralist, and explicitly humanistic outlook.
I listed three stages in the development of Sartre's thinking
about the nature of affect. The first appears in Being and
Nothingness, whose statements about the "futility" of both love
and sexuality were untenable, I thought, as Sartre also did in
his later philosophy. This first stage was followed by his Marxist
period, during which he moved in different directions^ The
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third stage emerges in the notebooks on ethics that remained
unpolished and unfinished when Sartre died. Despite their
chaotic state, the notebooks outline an affirmative system
of thought about love and sexuality that points toward more
promising conclusions.
To some extent the radical shift in Sartre's views resulted from
his beneficial intimacy with Simone de Beauvoir and her ideas.
In this chapter I study those views at length and in their own
right. Her book The Ethics of Ambiguity was, and is still, worthy
of renewed perusal. When my completed trilogy came out, a
reviewer complained that it paid attention to only one female
author, Madame de Lafayette in the seventeenth century. I was
astonished by the fact that my careful writing about Beauvoir
as well as other women in each of my volumes had apparently
gone unnoticed. Stirred by this misrepresentation, I skimmed
the three books and discovered that they consider the ideas
of twenty-three of them. Several, like Beauvoir, have a signifi-
cant role in my panoramic intention, and some, like Marie de
France in the twelfth century and Melanie Klein in the twenti-
eth, are heroes of mine.
The title of the remaining part in this volume is a variation of
The Future of an Illusion, Freud's title for his critique of Western
religion. In attempting to avoid any such illusion, I envisage
the future as dependent upon cooperation between pluralistic
humanists and empirical scientists who, in fields like biology,
primatology, and psychology, apply their expertise to the affec-
tive problems that all people face. In the chapter on scientific
intimations, I describe the work of Konrad Lorenz, Harry F.
Harlow, and other theorists in the life sciences. The findings
I cite are inevitably dated, as older scientific research always is,
but they all illuminate prospects that are relevant to both our
present condition and what may happen in the future.
In the last chapter, I augment the distinction between
bestowal and appraisal through the articulation of supplemen-
tal analyses of interdependence, autonomy, and the sharing of
selves in contrast to any merging. Writing the trilogy evoked
these new explorations.What I suggested in the first volume
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Preface to Irving Singer Library Edition
had also elicited astute criticism, notably by Russell Vannoy, that
I could now respond to by sharpening my presentation. What
was then recent work in feminist philosophy, as represented
by the ideas of Ti-Grace Atkinson and Shulamith Firestone,
together with various others, also merited careful commentary.
Likewise, problems in the writings of Paul Tillich and Robert
C. Solomon helped me amplify the anti-essentialism and anti-
reductivism in my approach to cognitive as well as affective
issues.
These culminating excursions, like the rest of the trilogy,
resulted from my having access to the speculations of the many
forerunners in the history of thought about the nature of love
and sexuality. My work did not exhaust the vast subject I was
addressing, but I finally came to appreciate how much more
has yet to be done. For me, at least, that mattered greatly.
I. S.
September 2008
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Preface
L
LN WRITING THIS BOOK, I HAVE
tried to make it a self-contained entity, more or less independent
of volumes 1 and 2. The title that I use for one of its parts—Love
in the Modern World—could have served as the title of the entire
book. Readers who have not finished (or begun) the preceding
volumes will find that they can follow the reasoning in this one
without much difficulty.
At the same time the present book is more than just a supple-
ment to the others. As the final segment of a single work, it knits
together the threads of history and analysis left dangling by the
volumes that concentrate on centuries prior to our own. Since the
present is both a completion of the past and an anticipation of the
future, the "modern" must always locate itself within a continuity
of time. There are several ways in which a philosophical historian
may cope with this necessity. Like Hegel he can acknowledge that
he has inherited from earlier concepts his ability to think about
the world he lives in. He may then conclude that his own ideas
reveal what the past has been seeking to achieve. This approach
always runs the risk of egotism and megalomania. For how can
one know that one's own vision is objective and peculiarly valid?
How can one be sure that time has been moving on a trolley that
leads it to oneself and then goes onward predictably?
A second approach avoids such hazardous assumptions by
reporting faithfully what has happened in the past but leaving
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the future open, like uncharted terrain that can be known only
as it is traversed. Though this methodology is sane and teachable,
whereas the other kind may not be, it generally lacks imaginative
scope. Even when its contributions are helpful, they must always
seem to be unadventuresome.
Throughout my trilogy I have wished to follow a middle path
between these extremes. My approach to the history of philoso-
phy and literature has been guided by a personal perspective.
I have not hidden it, and by the end of this book it should be
evident. It represents what I have learned from past ideas as they
have filtered through the contemporary modes of philosophiz-
ing in which I have been trained. The trilogy focuses on writers
(almost entirely Western) who have influenced my thinking about
problems that spoke to my own sense of reality. I have no doubt
that others, coming from intellectual milieux not wholly congru-
ent with mine, will create comparable histories that are very differ-
ent in their conception of what is either sayable or worth saying.
My effort can possibly be useful to them. It does not claim to be
definitive.
In keeping with this basic pluralism, I have sought to avoid the
tendentiousness of those who think that future as well as past
occurrences in history must carry out the dictates of some thesis
that has fixed itself within their intellect. But since my writing
is consciously motivated by my own philosophical point of view,
I would be disingenuous if I denied that my critical analyses
have served as projections in that respect. This admission does
not relieve me of the obligation to study both past and present
authors with scrupulous fidelity to detail. It only means that even
if my achievement is persuasive or acceptable, it cannot aspire to
objective certitude. Its genre approximates conceptual art, and its
success or failure must be determined accordingly.
In Part I of this volume, I relate the conclusions of the first and
second volumes to our present condition in the post-Romantic
era that we inhabit. The concepts of courtly and Romantic love
cannot be meaningful to us in the way they formerly were. In
the chapter on traditions that survive, I show why the problems
inherent in both courtly and Romantic ideologies caused thinkers
of the nineteenth century to reject them while also prolonging
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