Can philosophy say what love is? In a short and argued work, Francis Wolff tries his hand at the game of definition, showing that friendship, desire and passion delimit love as much as it is nourished by it.
Like Émile Durkheim who chose to make the individual act of suicide a sociological object, Francis Wolff observes the singular paths of love to take it as a philosophical object. The last lines of his work implicitly underline the originality of his reflection: love is, in literature, the motif of a large number of stories, “heartbreaking songs, irresistible comedies, overwhelming tragedies”, but “of all these real or imaginary stories, philosophy has nothing to say (my emphasis).”
While so many authors evoke the feeling of love in order to delight in the torments of their ego and the enjoyment of their emotions, F. Wolff engages in an exercise in argumentative thought that is fascinating from beginning to end.
Can love be defined?
To question love is first to ask whether it can be defined. Would it not be an essentially variable feeling, anthropologically and historically? Although the era is difficult to define, F. Wolff sets out to capture, if not an intangible essence, at least a background music. A demanding task as the idea is widespread that “the vagueness of the concept adds to the charm of the thing” (p. 17), and also because love is expressed in several senses. Let us think of the frequent tripartition between philia, Eros And agapeor friendship, desire and love of neighbor, of which we can wonder if they fall into a common category. We’ll talk about it again.
To define love, the author tells us, “is to formulate what it is, himand who distinguished of everything that is not him” (ibid.), is to seek the clarity of the idea and not the beauty of the apophthegm, such as that popularized by Lacan: “To love is to give what one does not have to someone who does not don’t want to.” From a definitional perspective, is it heuristic to determine what gender love belongs to? One might think so by placing oneself under the tutelage of Aristotle. But, with the latter, the definition implies knowledge of the genre in question. However, in this case, we do not know to which genre love belongs. This method, perfect for presenting a known definition, is therefore hardly valid for an unknown definition. Without being able to identify the type of being to which love belongs, are we able to determine its necessary and sufficient conditions?
F. Wolff shows that neither the definition conative of love, by the actions it makes us do, nor its definition emotionalthrough the feelings he makes us experience (p. 20), avoid letting “indisputable cases of love escape in the narrowest sense, the love of the lover” (p. 21). The conditions posed by these definitions are therefore neither necessary nor sufficient. Should we then look for a solid point of support in the notion of prototype ? We know that when speaking of “family resemblance”, Wittgenstein describes individuals who may not have any common characteristics, but who all seem related. Can we not, asks the author, say in the same way that “the different loves of lovers are more or less related, without having anything in common between them” (p. 23)? This theory of reference is, according to F. Wolff, indirectly confirmed by the work of cognitive psychology on natural categorization by Eleanor Rosch. We do not categorize things by proceeding “by their edges”, but by the prototypical center of a notion, “which brings together the most characteristic features according to the use we make of them in natural language” (p. 24) . Therefore, if a feature is missing, the definition of the concept is not invalidated. We could thus, with regard to love, list what characterizes it as a prototype and account for all possible loves, “in proportion to their distance from the center of the target” (p. 25). We would deduce that love would be “the desire to do good to the beloved and the joy experienced in his or her presence, while admitting that there are cases where one of these conditions (…) would not be fulfilled” (p. 26).
And yet, despite the apparent coherence of this type of approach, F. Wolff opposes it with a crippling drawback: cases are encountered where neither of the two conditions mentioned is present, and where yet it seems to us that it there is love. Let us only think of the great jealous lovers, such as Atalide in Bajazet or Othello. Thus, if the method by necessary and sufficient conditions is too demanding, that by prototype is too lenient: “The edges are indistinct” (p. 28).
The components of love: heterogeneous and unstable
We must therefore return to the components of love previously stated: friendship, desire and passion. None of them can assume the function of prototype, but they constitute both terminals external to the concept and trends internal. F. Wolff calls the latter thefriendlyTHE wanting and the passionatein order to distinguish them from the homonymous external terminals:
Love has a friendly or desiring dimension, but friendship and desire remain external limits to love. (p.35)
As for passion, it must “be colored by friendship or desire for us to speak of love” (p. 37): it is also an external boundary. The author’s conclusion is therefore that “love is distinguished, and even opposed, affectively or conatively, to each of the three components taken separately but nevertheless results from the fusion of these tendencies” (ibid.). Love is therefore a triangle with three external terminals to which three internal tendencies correspond.
Therefore, conceptually complete love is “the algebraic sum of the three tendencies” (p. 38). Furthermore, we are able to account for the infinite variability of forms of love by explaining it “by the quantitative and qualitative variability of the three components” (ibid.). Finally, we can draw the borders of the map: defective loves, or “love without friendship, or without passion, or without desire” (p. 41). Hence the very convincing definition proposed by F. Wolff:
Love is the unstable fusion, in variable proportion, of at least two of the three centrifugal tendencies, the friendly, the desiring, the passionate. (p.47)
This definition, authorizing “an infinite variation of singular loves, thus responds to the nominalist objection” (ibid.).
But it has many other merits. While presenting the virtues of the prototype method (“a concept is more or less instantiated depending on whether it brings together more or fewer characteristics), ibid.), it allows, like the method by necessary and sufficient conditions, to clearly delimit what is love and what is not: “Any point outside the map of Tender or confused with one of its summits” (p. 48).
The fact remains that these components, friendship, desire, passion, are “ontologically heterogeneous” (p. 60). This means that they can never completely merge (unlike the omelette, as F. Wolff humorously notes), which explains the instability of love. Nothing surprising: “Friendship is a relationshippassion, a statedesire, a arrangement » (ibid.). And these components do not have the same origin:
Friendship comes from the world of human sociality, of which it is the elementary emotional realization; passion comes from the world of emotions, it is affect in its obsessive, all-too-human form; desire comes distantly from the world of natural needs (mating) of which it is the properly human expression. (pg. 69)
In other words, love contains the three essential dimensions of man as a living being (desire), as an agent (passion), and as a social being (friendship).
This work by F. Wolff is not an excursion on a side path. It contributes powerfully to illuminating the approach of a leading philosopher, busy saying what the world is made of, while proposing a general anthropology, which many of our contemporaries, including anthropologists, refuse to consider, due to lack of to believe in the existence of its object.