Journal of Applied Philosophy, Vol. 3, No. 2, 1986 229

The Two Sides of Love

PAUL GREGORY

ABSTRACT The kind of love under consideration here is that between equal persons as it typically occurs within the context of afriendship. It is assumed that love opens the way to a sense of meaning or purpose for the individual, the diflculty addressed being that of how to pursue or recognise love. Is it primarily a f m of action or of feeling? Can love be said to consist of giving? How does love relate to fieedom and dependence? The consideration of these questions leads to the argument that love necessarily involves the creation of needs and therefore of vulnerability. The essay closes with a conception of how the conflict between love as action and love as feeling ('the two sides of love? may be resolved.

Love as Action

Is love first and foremost a pattern of feeling or of action? Our instinct says feeling, but not everything which feels or poses as love is love. What people claim about the way they feel must be checked against how they actually behave. Action which is informed by love must, it seems, be good and so recognisable as such, whereas when it comes to feelings alone people can deceive both themselves and others. The world of feeling seems too volatile and subjective to do proper justice to what is meant by love. What feels like love might be more possessiveness, or dependence, or familiarity, than the disinterested concern for another, or others, which bears the name of love.

We seek in love a sense of meaning, and this, at any rate, must be some sort of emotional well-being. But it is not clear that we can decide of ourselves what we will feel or even to feel. It is, it seems, no more possible to seek feeling alone than it is to seek pleasure alone. We can only pursue the things which-normally-bring us pleasure. And where feeling is sought directly the issue is likely to be sentimentality.

Thus if our concern is how we may come to feel love, the best approach seems to be to equate love with action of a certain sort, and leave the feeling to look after itself. In its logic, this strategy would resemble Pascal's counsel to those without faith that if they prayed long and hard enough belief would in due course come of its own accord.

That is, we must only act in a certain manner, and feelings of warmth will follow on; others will eventually respond to the love we show, and we ourselves will find our affection developing by grace of the decision we have taken to act lovingly.

Whether the feelings will indeed look after themselves can be doubted. And if they fail to develop as they should, in one crucial sense the exercise will have been in vain. Perhaps the answer here is a matter of faith. But the more manageable question is that of what the action of love might consist in.

Love as Giving

One answer of appealing simplicity is that love consists of giving. For unequal

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relationships this may be an adequate definition. But what, in an equal and reciprocal relationship, does giving consist of? Here, surely, there is for the most part no proper distinction between giving and receiving; there is, in the background only, in practical- ities, the easy commerce of give and take. The need to share, to communicate, and the balance of this mutual need, will vary. But the thought “now I am giving, and now I am taking’’ can only obtain a real foothold when the relationship lacks or has lost a flow of its own. Where there is love the one who is listening neither takes from nor gives to the one who is speaking. We cannot say who gives, and who takes; or we must say that both simultaneously give and take.

This point can be put differently by talking of a need to give. Love will then consist in a need to give to the person who is loved. This person will be special because it is he or she who will be able to take what is given, who will know how to respond. Another person, with a different sensibility and other experiences, would not know what to do with, or how to appreciate, whatever it is that is given. (What is given might be an insight, a piece of news, a meal, a new friend, a task, a piece of advice, a sleigh-ride, a confidence, etc.)

The specialness of the person loved corresponds to the specialness of the person who loves. That is, the ‘giving’ which takes place is also an expression of the sensibility and qualities of the person who ‘gives’. We have to do with a form of self-expression, and self-expression is a personal need. It is this aspect which here deprives the simple picture of giving of its intended significance, for giving generally means going without for the sake of another or others; but here there is no renunciation.

Of course, none of this is to dispute that under the aegis of love self-sacrifice, which means real giving, can and does occur. But our concern here is with normal circumstances; and the rule of the common way of love, of friendship between equal and mature persons, is a flow which bypasses giving and taking.

I can envisage three objections to this account. One is that the mutual and implicit generosity which rules within the relationship might conceal selfishness towards, or, more weakly, exclusion of those outside. I have tried to forestall this reservation by mentioning that, among the things which are given, might be a new friend. There is nevertheless a problem, the quite general difficulty that, whenever one end is pursued, it may be to the detriment of other ends. (Although it might too be to their indirect good.) The criticism still misses the mark here because the aim of the above account is to show that one traditional characterisation of love, namely giving, fails in a paradigmatic case to obtain a foothold. This means that, even if the equation of love with the action of giving is correct for some situations, it is unhelpful in others. It might, of course, be claimed that friendship such as I have sketched it is not governed by love. I am unsure how that argument might look, but it brings me to a second possible objection, namely, that no pursuit of self-expression can be called giving or love because it means obedience to the (vanity of the) self rather than to the (moral or transcendental) demands of a given situation.

Again I have tried to anticipate this criticism by postulating a situation where, happily, no conflict between the demands for moral response and self-expression arises. It is one thing to maintain that morality should have precedence over the value of self-expression; it is quite another to condemn the pursuit of self-expression as such. The issue turns on the value which is accorded to, or withheld from, individuality.

In many metaphysical doctrines the individual self is regarded as illusory; by contrast, Western culture has come at times to view individuality as a supreme good.

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In philosophical terms, the notion of the self as anything more than a necessary fiction (a vanishing point) must seem less than coherent. But here it is not strictly necessary to enter into the metaphysical debate. For our purposes it is enough to ask whether, without the individual self, which must in one form or another involve self-expression, there can properly be any talk of love at all.

The third objection is that any emotional dependence, even in the shape of a need to give to and help the other, is a mark of an insufficiently mature love. One way of avoiding this charge would be to maintain that the notion of a need to give is logically incoherent and that the expression was only introduced so as to highlight by means of a paradox the inadequacy of the equation of love with giving. I shall, however, stand by the word “need”; it seems to me that love does, inconveniently, have something to do with a felt need and dependence.

Love as Need

Love can be the will to give, it may be the desire to give, but can it be allowed to be a need? Yet are will and desire enough? Can will be sustained without desire, and is desire which stops short of being like a need powerful enough to amount to love?

Yet our every need seems to detract from our freedom, any dependence is a lessening of our sovereignty. If once love in the fullest sense of the word is allowed necessarily to involve a need, our two most cherished values, freedom and love, will be seen to conflict. (We already know, from our personal experience, that they conflict, but we conceal the structure of that conflict either by emphasizing that love restricts freedom on account of the responsibility it imposes, or else by blaming the incomplet- eness of our love, so unlike the love of the saints that we still need the objects of our love.)

Freedom, nevertheless, is only significant as the freedom to choose, and once a choice has been made, the preceding freedom is so to speak cancelled out. Freedom cannot be of itself an end because its sense lies in its renunciation. Whenever we choose we relinquish a freedom and affirm a value. Freedom is thus the preliminary to value rather than a value itself.

Any value which is deeply rooted takes on the aspect of a need; commitment to a value means, at the limit, not feeling able, except maybe at the risk of surrendering one’s selfhood, to relinquish that value. It is this very inability which makes of the value held a need. In this context freedom is a preliminary not only to value but to need itself. The sense, then, of freedom is not independence from need, but the capacity to choose our values and therefore, ultimately, our needs. (If you have chosen your needs, you can identify with them.)

Any need brings with it a vulnerability. In this light our freedom is the way we choose to be vulnerable. (Viewed from another angle it is our choice of sensibility.)

(We retain a kind of freedom in the sense that we might, with time, transform our values and ultimately our needs. But we are not masters of time. Values and needs cannot be altered at will to the convenience of circumstance.)

Personal love implies that a value is attached to a specific individual; the extent of personal love is reflected in the intensity of the value accorded to the other. Belief in a person resembles belief in a value, and belief in a value entails, when intense, feeling a need to pursue that value, entails not feeling capable of abandoning one’s commitment.

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The object of love thus represents a value to which a personal commitment has been made. A confession of love, as opposed to liking, or mere well-wishing, implies a dependence; it entails the possibility of missing a person.

Persons who love desire and subjectively need to be able to act in accordance with their love; they therefore need in some measure the presence of the person loved. Thus it is that love implicitly makes of its object this one demand.

This is not to say that any dependence or attachment amounts to love. What is meant is that any love worthy of the name establishes an essential connection between the person who loves and the person loved. Such a connection can be weakened or destroyed in the same way and to the same extent that individuals change. But love, while it lasts, means thinking persistently in terms of the person loved, and such thinking involves the desire for communication with the object of love. There is some room for the cultivation or repression of such desire. But the loss, or the unavailability, of the person loved must necessarily cause a rupture in the person who loves, and the fact of this rupture cannot in itself be taken as evidence that there was dependence and not love. The person whose love is rejected or becomes impossible cannot, on perception of the rejection or loss, simply cease to be dependent. Dependence is as it were an undercurrent which only becomes properly visible in times of crisis. Without dependence, love, in the sense of a movement of consciousness which suspends our isolation, is inconceivable. Love necessarily involves making oneself vulnerable, and the vulnerability remains real as long as the love persists. (Love entails opening oneself up to the possibility of hurt.)

The Need to Love, the Need for Love

Persons in the sense of self-conscious beings are defined by their need to communicate with others, who, in turn, must be perceived as feeling. This need is in the most fundamental way essential, for in its absence we cannot properly speak of a conscious person. The forms which that communication might take are countless, but our concern here is roughly speaking with the spectrum of communication which is benevolent.

In point of fact, some communication is not sufficient: in the long term, people need to be with specific individuals, i.e. there must in the contact which takes place be considerable continuity through time. Discontinuities remain acceptable and possible; people die, go away or grow apart, and so there are breaks, fractures, whether foreseen or sudden. But since the continuity we demand is nevertheless very considerable, it is clear that these breaks must not be frequent.

This does not necessarily entail in every case great dependence on any specific individual or group of individuals, although the chronic failure of a whole sequence of persons to continue being present (available for communication) may well lead eventually to acute dependence on some one or few individuals. (No thread is indispensable except the last; threads can be renewed and replaced, but only with time.) This dependence will be felt as such to the extent that the capacity to love has survived.

The love that persons need to give must, then, be personal. Care for others who remain as it were faceless, anonymous, i.e. that caring which stems from our sentiment of common humanity, cannot generally of itself convey to the person caring the sense of meaning (belonging) we have need of.

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Strictly speaking, I have not shown that a person as such needs to love. An involvement which might be quite unloving could be sufficient as far as maintaining oneself as a self-conscious being is concerned. Here I shall only venture the affirma- tion that a wholesome sense of meaning in life is only possible through love, and this must mean the love that we bear other individuals.

The question posed at the outset was that of the nature of love and in particular whether love is basically a pattern of action or of feeling. I claimed that what was important in the last resort for the individual was that he or she should harbour feelings of love, but that this could only be achieved-uncertainly-via the action of love, it being understood that a person might well, at least initially, act lovingly (caringly) without actually harbouring any proper sentiment of love. The next issue was what such action (the action of love) might consist in. The notion of love as giving was criticised and then essentially modified by introducing the paradoxical idea of someone needing to give. This led to a discussion of freedom and love, and of values and needs, and it was emphasised that love necessarily involves acquiring needs (i.e. a dependence on the person or persons loved). Finally, it was argued that, as beings conscious of themselves, we necessarily need to think of ourselves as in communication with others (even if this communication is only imaginary), and I affirmed that this involvement with others should be one of love. What remains unanswered-although it is perhaps legitimate to sidestep the question-is whether love is first and foremost a pattern of feeling or of action. It might of course be said that it is a disposition, issuing now in action, now in feeling, and this is certainly accurate as far as it goes (it provides an excellent example of what is meant by the word ‘disposition’).

But I wish to close with an analysis which, I think, leads us back to the reality of our emotional lives and the world of tangible needs. The question is: what hinges on the matter of the priority of action or of feeling? And the answer is surely that, whilst it is important for me that I should have feelings for others, and I cannot make up for any lack of feelings by acting towards others as if I felt such affection, it is not enough for others that I should harbour the sentiment of love, this sentiment must, if it is to count for them as my love, manifest itself in action. Similarly, if I am to be persuaded of the love of others, this must show itself as an appreciation on their part of the person I am and the needs and values I have. If others attribute to me needs and values which I find foreign, or only incidental, then I must see their love as a fiction, not because I directly doubt their sincerity, but because their love is for a person who is not myself, i.e. it is for a fictional person.

The issue of the relation between love as a pattern of feeling and love as action now emerges as a strict matter of perspective. That is, neither the one nor the other has ontological priority.

Correspondence: Paul Gregory, Trift 9 , D-2000 Hamburg 63 , West Germany.