Topics Love

Question Why don't philosophers philosophize about love more? Is it not a good philosophical topic?

Accepted:
June 5, 2011

Comments

Actually philosophers have written quite a bit about love, and the different kinds of love. You can see this in Plato and Aristotle on up through Kierkegaard (who wrote an important book called Works of Love) to the present (I have a "popular" book called Love. Love. Love. And Other essays on Life, Love, and Death, with Cowley Press). And while you may not always see abundant uses of the word "love" in ethics, much of ethical inquiry in philosophy may be understood as an inquiry into what to love and what not to love. Among the many questions philosophers have wrestled with concerning love, they have considered: what is the difference between loving a person and loving her or his qualities? what is the difference between romantic and non-romantic love? can love create values (that is, can your loving a person or thing confer some additional value on the person or thing)? if a friendship ends (e.g. either through disagreement or lack of energy), was there ever a friendship in the first place? does friendship involve duties?

Perhaps it is worth pausing to ask: What is it to "philosophize"? What sort of questions or puzzles or worries call for "philosophizing" as a response?

You might say: philosophy is a motley business, embracing Plato's Symposium and Kierkegaard's Works of Love as well as Aristotle's Physics and Frege's Foundations of Arithmetic. We might count too Montaigne's Essays, or Sartre's Nausea. Very different styles of thought, reflected in very different literary forms, but all counting as philosophizing in a broad sense.

Or you might say: we really do need a label for a narrower kind of business (which has always been a key department of philosophy in the broader sense), where we aim to investigate fundamental conceptual questions and foundational assumptions with a distinctive kind of rigour and clarity, depending on sharp conceptual distinctions and tight logical argument, and where the preferred literary form is now the academic paper or monograph written in very cool, analytic, prose. And (like it or not) "philosophy" has come to be used, in some academic circles at any rate, primarily for that narrower sort of enquiry.

Now, we might well think that some topics don't particularly lend themselves to being philosophized about in the second, narrower, sense of philosophy. Or better: philosophizing in that sense isn't the way to answer the questions that really bug us. And some deeply important matters like central questions about love are perhaps examples (which is why philosophers in the narrow sense haven't had much to say). Exploring the varieties of love has been the business of novelists for centuries, of poets for millennia; and then there are the psychologists and anthropologists and social historians and others who widen our understanding. Some of these may be philosophizing in the broad sense -- whatever that quite comes to -- but very rarely in the narrower sense epitomized by modern analytical philosophy. And their writings are none the worse for that. There are some things that you will learn more about from Shakespeare and Tolstoy than from any philosopher in the narrow sense.

Question Why don't philosophers philosophize about love more? Is it not a good philosophical topic? Accepted:June 5, 2011

Question Why don't philosophers philosophize about love more? Is it not a good philosophical topic?

Accepted:
June 5, 2011