Topics Love

Question Is it possible for one to be in love with the feeling of being in love, instead of loving the person you believe you're in love with?

Accepted:
October 16, 2005

Comments

The feeling of being in love is certainly lovable. And it seemspossible that one could love the feeling of love that one gets fromloving a particular person more than one loves that person.And it seems that one could believe that one loves a particular person,yet fail to really love that person, but because one believes that oneis in love with that person, one has the feeling of being in love withthat person. In such a situation, it seems, one could really love thefeeling of being in love with a particular person but not really love theperson. So, yes, I don’t see why not.

A few reactions to your interesting question. We do speak of "lovingthe feeling of X" or "being in love with the feeling of Y", but surelythe sense of "loving" or "being in love with" here must be differentfrom the sense in which one loves one's mother or is in love with one'sspouse. The first seems more or less synonymous with "finding deeplypleasurable", while in the latter cases — well, I don't know exactlywhat we mean in the latter cases (Alan Soble, help!), but I do knowthat we mean something quite different from "finding deeplypleasurable" (which is of course compatible with saying that beingaround someone one's in love with is deeply pleasurable). OK, so giventhat, it's of course quite possible that John is in love with Hilaryand also finds being in that state deeply pleasurable. But that's notyour question. You're imagining a situation where John thinkshe's in love with Hilary, but really isn't. People do speak as if theycan be wrong about whether they are in love: "I thought I loved him,but now I realize I never did". That's interesting in itself andperhaps offers some clues about how (and how not) to treat the notionof love. (In this connection, you might see Question 75 and Question 104.) Are you also imagining that John experiences deep pleasure from this faux love? If he is, then he's not "in love with" being in love (or not just in love with that)— since he's not in love. And it's interesting that what you actually wrote is of his being "in love with the feeling of being in love" (emphasis added). This raises the further question of whether being in love feelsany particular way. If we assume that it does (which seems like a bigassumption), then your question is whether we can imagine a situationin which: John is not in love with Hilary; John is having thoseexperiences that characteristically attend, but do not exhaust, hisbeing in love; (perhaps as a consequence) John believes that he is inlove with Hilary; and finally John is taking deep pleasure in havingthose experiences. Putting aside major reservations about thepresupposition involved in the description of the second feature of thissituation, I don't see why not.

Both Jyl and Alex have covered the territory, and I have little to add. It seems to be true that loving a person (or even an animal) and loving an object or thing (chocolate, or a feeling) are different. In the philosophy of love the question arises: if both these two phenomena are in fact types of love, what do they have in common in virtue of which they are love? A tough one. Alternatively, we could say that "love" for a thing is not love at all, but something else; it has some things but not much of anything else in common with love for a person. Still again, we could resort to a "family resemblance" account of love, in which case there may not be any interesting common feature that links all loves together, and we can meaningfully speak both of loving a person and loving a thing or a feeling. We do so all the time in English, at least ("I just love your shoes!"), so Ordinary Language is on the side of both these phenomena being genuine cases of love. Or, because other languages are more linguistically sophisticated, what OL-English implies is that Americans (and the British? who else?) have a screw loose about love.

Wasn't it Aristotle who claimed that we could not love (philia) wine, or be its real friend, both because the wine cannot reciprocate and because we cannot wish the wine well for its own sake (but only for ours). I once made this point in an essay on the geneticist Barbara McClintock. Others had said about her that she was friends with her maize plants and that was a big reason for her success in studying and learning from them. In that essay I worried that such claims made a Nobel laureate look like an idiot. Nowadays I would make the point a more subtle way.

Something else we might want to look into is what is called "the elenchus of Agathon," in Plato's Symposium, in which Socrates grills Agathon and in the process proves to him that his claim that love is beautiful must be false. Socrates also shows, en passant, that one cannot love love. I reconstructed the argument in an essay in Apeiron (years ago) and Martha Nussbaum offered her own reconstruction in an essay she wrote on the role of Alcibiades in the Symposium.

Question Is it possible for one to be in love with the feeling of being in love, instead of loving the person you believe you're in love with? Accepted:October 16, 2005

Question Is it possible for one to be in love with the feeling of being in love, instead of loving the person you believe you're in love with?

Accepted:
October 16, 2005