Berenson, Frances, What Is This Thing Called 'Love'?

, 1991

[65] 'What is this thing called "love"?', asks Cole Porter in his well known song, echoing
our own doubts and confusions. Well, certain things can be said immediately in answer to
his question: 'Love' is a four letter word but of the respectable variety describing a human
emotion. Everybody wants it, seeks it, hopes for it but some are incapable of giving it;
some doubt its existence, others are just confused, still others accept substitutes for the
real thing. Often we find ourselves arguing about it, implying the possibility that love just
means different things to different people. So while we all agree that love is desirable,
very important, a good worth having and so on, our discussions of it reveal all kinds of
inconsistencies in our understanding. This is a state of affairs which philosophers have
tried to combat in various ways but always focusing on producing objective, general
accounts of emotions which include love. Very few have concentrated on love
independently of other emotions although love is a very popular example in general
accounts. This practice, at the very least, tends to distort the importance of the concept
and, at worst, kills dead its formidable significance. Most theories of emotions
differentiate between possible objective evaluations and so called unaccountable
subjective emotional states. Love is singled out as the paradigm of the latter. By objective
evaluations philosophers usually mean the giving of formal, preferably quan- tifiable,
accounts. What does not lend itself to formal treatment is all too quickly dismissed as
subjective and therefore irrelevant. The notion of objective evaluation is, and has been,
discussed at length, but when that of subjective evaluation is introduced at any point,
philosophers tend to shy away from it as something mysterious, defying explanation or
just irrelevant. What is overlooked here is the important fact that every emotion is
necessarily subjective, at least, in the sense that a subject has it; it is my emotion, I feel it,
I own it and I am, therefore, responsible for it and for many of my actions which may
result directly from it. This is as true of fear as it is of love. No theory of emotions will
ever be adequate without coming to grips with this allegedly mysterious subjectivity and
what follows from it, thereby, perhaps, succeeding in exposing subjectivity as not such a
mystery after all. The great problems of philosophy are all of the sort which invite and
reward contemplation but they are often studied in such a technical

[66] manner that it excludes the possibility of a contemplative experience of them. Yet
this latter approach is of paramount importance where emotions in general, and love in
particular, are concerned. I will argue that love qualifies for special treatment and I will
attempt to show what it is about love which demands something more than a standard
approach; it demands an approach which preserves the feel and the experience of loving.
I shall begin by examining a well known and fairly typical analysis: G. Taylor's paper on
'Love'1, in the course of which I shall try to highlight what it is exactly that makes love
different from other emotions. Her paper starts as follows: There is a class of emotions
the members of which share the follow- ing characteristics: 1. If a man x feels one of
these emotions then it will always be possible for him to specify, however vaguely, what
the emotion is 'about'. What it is about, the 'object' of the emotion, will normally be the
thing, the person, event or situation indicated by the grammatical object phrase in the
sentence-forms of the kind 'x os y', 'x is 0 with / of / about y. 2. If x feels the emotion, and
if y is the object, then x will believe y to have a specific property or set of properties.
Depending on which emotion he feels he will believe, e.g., that y is dangerous, that y has
done him an injury or a good turn. Put more formally, this requirement reads: for any
member of this class of the emotions there is a quality or set of qualities 0 such that for
all x and all y, if x feels the emotion towards y then x believes y to 0: (E)) (x)(y) (Exy -
BxCy) 3. x will therefore also believe, and normally be able to articulate, that y has
certain determinate qualities. 4. The features set out under 1-3 are offered as necessary
conditions for feeling one of the emotions belonging to the class under discussion. It is at
least one further necessary condition that x will have certain wants and consequently
tendencies to behave in certain ways towards y .... With these (necessary) conditions in
hand we have a basis on which to decide whether experiencing some emotion on this or
that occasion is justified or not. Taylor elaborates at length on these. Her main argument
focuses on justification which, however important, is not my direct concern at present
although I shall refer to it indirectly throughout this paper. 1 G. Taylor, 'Love',
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, LXXVI (1975/1976), 147-164.

[67] My main purpose in quoting the above typically formal extract is to see whether love
fits into the various conditions and, if not, why not. The various formulations in the
passage are used as visual aids to express, in a most concise form, the arguments which
precede them. They express several important points about human emotions: 1. That
emotions characteristically are about something; that emotions always take objects. 2.
That emotions involve beliefs about their objects-if I fear x, that implies that I believe x
to be dangerous. I have definite beliefs that x possesses certain determinate qualities
which are dangerous or threatening. 3. That objects of emotions can be shown to be
appropriate or inappropriate or mistaken, i.e., that I cannot take as an object of my fear
something that I do not perceive as fearful or harmful or dangerous in any way or that I
cannot feel pride in something that I had no involvement in bringing about. 4. That as a
result of feeling an emotion, I will have certain wants and consequently tendencies to
behave in certain ways towards x. I may want to run away from x because I believe x to
be dangerous, or to hit y, etc. All these necessary conditions for a feeling to count as an
emotion are designed to show, above all, that all emotions have a conceptual, rational
basis which enables us to judge any particular emotion as rational/irrational, appropriate
or inappropriate in particular contexts. They are all valid conceptual points about the
meaning emotion words have and how we normally use these words to describe what we
feel and why. All these sorts of fairly abstract, formal explanations are a sincere attempt
to arrive at an objective, true account of certain phenomena. The search for truth is
always of great importance but, in the case of emotions, we must not allow ourselves to
become fixed on or limited to purely abstract, formal explanations which may leave us
wandering lost in a forest of detail and drowning in the mire of unease about this kind of
handling of living experiences. At worst, it may tempt some to bend the phenomena or
ignore various aspects of them, to serve the desire to fit them into existing patterns. The
very essence of certain phenomena demands treating them in a certain way-in a way
which shows some- thing of the nature of the phenomenon in question and recognizing its
very characteristic aspects. So first let us see how love fits into the general analysis of
emotions. (1) That emotions take objects is certainly generally accepted and, therefore,
love, being an emotion, must necesssarily have an object. Much philosophical mileage
has been traversed on this road. Love certainly fits the general scheme of emotions which
are analysed in

[68] terms of their objects. Love is always, invariably and necessarily directed towards
some object. Sexual love, which is our specific con- cern, unlike other emotions, is
paradigmatically directed towards one, very particular object, whereas there is no such
exclusivity about the other emotions. I may fear, be angry with, be proud of several
things at the same time, not so with love. The further significant difference between love
and other emotions occurs in that whereas all other emotions such as fear, pity, remorse,
pride, anger and so on, all take specifiable, determined sets of objects, in the case of love,
there is, in contrast, an embarrassment of riches which invite bewilderment. Whatever the
case may be, one thing is certain, it cannot be a case of 'anything goes'. Although
complex and varied, the objects of love are not unlimited. Love necessarily requires a
foundation in fact, if it is to count as love for another person. (2) This brings us to the
second necessary condition, that emotions involve certain beliefs about their objects; that
x possesses certain determinate qualities which make x dangerous or hurtful or that y
achieved a, which made me proud of him, and so on. This is closely linked to the third
condition about the appropriate/inappropriate objects, so I will discuss them together.
Now, if I am afraid of a lion that is because a lion has the quality of being a dangerous
man-eater but if I love John, there is no such convenient specifiable general and
determinate quality I can point to. The quality of being lovable is quite uninformative.
Supposing someone asked me: 'Why do you love John? What is it about John that you
love?' I could then proceed to produce a long list of qualities that John has, ranging from
the colour of his eyes and his height to his kindness, sensitivity and to his importance for
my life. The first thing to be said here is that however extensive my list of qualities may
be, they still have to be appropriate to the conceptual demands of 'love'; the concept
excludes certain qualities from any such list, e.g., 'I love him because he is cruel, he
disgusts me', and the like. The second point is this: I love John because he has those
qualities, I do not love the qualities, separated from John. If that were the case then
anyone else possessing these qualities could be substituted for John. Whereas any lion
will produce fear in me, my love for John does not allow for substitution. There is
nothing new about this example as such. I am using it to make a further, very specific
claim. On the formal account, y fulfils the necessary conditions which also apply to x,
therefore y can be substituted for x, i.e., my replacing John by Stephen becomes logically
possible, yet it is not possible in a lived experience. It is this fact which should indicate to
us that love involves an essential subjective element which defies quantification but,
nevertheless, demands exploration hand in hand with any objective account. The whole
argument rests on the necessity to distinguish between two types

[69] of love: love of a particular person and love of qualities. Qualities are substitutable,
persons never are. Each person is more than the sum total of their attributes. Persons
change and develop, yet real love remains. While other emotions may be momentary or
short lived, love is not. As Wittgenstein points out, someone couldn't have a feeling of
real love for the space of a second. If we take the 'couldn't' here as not merely logical but
also as an empirical one, then love, if it is love, has to abide for a significant passage of
time, if not, perhaps, for ever. Persons who seek sexual excitement outside a relationship
return to that which endures, that which has an emotional basis. One of my favourite
lyrics of a popular song expresses this brilliantly, if not in perfect English: 'It's then that
those louses return to their spouses, [hence] diamonds are a girl's best friend'; the only
durable commodity in the absence of love. The quality of excitement within a love
relationship is almost invariably taken as bound up with sexual excitement and
gratification. Important as that is, it is also the one most volatile, changeable aspect of a
relationship. Be that as it may, we tend to forget a whole realm of excitements that two
persons, who love each other, undergo throughout their lives together, all of which are
based on sharing. Sex is a vital part of sharing but only one aspect of it; others are sharing
the excitement of a child's first steps, first words, the memory of which lasts a lifetime,
sharing good or bad news, the discovery of a beautiful object, of living life together.
Bereaved partners almost invariably single out the loss of sharing as the greatest loss.
These excitements not only endure but they have the power to consolidate and give
security to relationships over time in spite of all kinds of changes. As Shakespeare puts it
so well: 'Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.'2 (3) The third necessary
condition about the appropriateness and inappropriateness of one's love for another has
already been touched on with reference to appropriate and inappropriate objects of love.
In addition, it is not just simply the case, as, say, with pride, which is only appropriate if I
had something to do with bringing the object of my pride about; again, there is no such
convenient criterion for objects of love. Nevertheless, we are able to make judgments
about a person's claims to love another. These criteria arise from how one acts towards
another, how one responds and what one fails to do. (4)The last necessary condition also
presents difficulties. While it is true that if I love John I will have certain wants and
consequently tendencies to behave in certain ways towards John, this entails much more
than straightforward avoidance or overcoming of danger as in the case of fear. I shall
return to the notion of wants. 2 W. Shakespeare, Sonnet 116.

[70] All the above dissimilarities do not entail a denial of the four necessary conditions
also applying to love. The differences are, however, so significant that they present us
with at least two choices. Either we deny that love is an emotion, which is not really a
serious alternative, or we arrive at the inescapable conclusion that something is wrong
and that, therefore, somehow these conditions will require far more complex analysis
than in the case of other emotions. It is these formidable differences which lead me to
search for an alternative approach or a different view of the kind of emotion that love is.
Love is an emotion which takes many forms and many kinds of objects not least of these
being love at a distance, the paradigm case of medieval tales of courtly, romantic love. To
complicate matters, love encompasses sexual love, parental love, brotherly love, love
between friends and love of God, not to mention love of works of art or other objects or
places. This list is not meant to be exhaustive in any way. We have inherited from the
ancient Greeks eros, agape and philia; Aphrodite Urania and Aphrodite Pandemos
(sacred and profane love). All of the above, far from showing that there is an inherent
ambiguity in the concept of love, as some have argued, merely show what a rich,
fascinating and complex emotion love happens to be. That, in itself, is enough to demand
a separate account of it; trying to fit it conveniently into a general theory of emotions just
will not do. But I wish to make a much stronger claim. Brentano3 suggests that all other
emotions presuppose love or hate in some way; he says that all emotions involve love and
hate. D. W. Hamlyn4 discusses this in detail and argues that, if Brentano is right, then
love and hate would best be characterized as feelings directed towards something and
would be primary forms of these. Described in this way, love and hate are not just passive
states that are produced in us, as pains are, but something which also involves an attitude,
an active directedness towards an object, a readiness to receive what the object has to
offer, thereby actively encouraging an opening out of oneself towards the object of love.
But there is something further to be said, conversely to Brentano's view that all emotions
involve love and hate. I think that love can, and to some extent, always does involve all
the other emotions: fear (for the well being of the loved one, fear of loss and, in some
cases, fear prevents love from fear of hurt), happiness, joy, remorse, pride,
embarrassment, anger and so on. If I am right in this, then obviously, we require
philosophical accounts of love, which 3 F. Brentano, Psychology from an Empirical
Standpoint (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973). 4 D. W. Hamlyn, 'The Phenomena of Love
and Hate', Philosophy 53, No. 203 (January 1978), 5-20.

[71] What is this Thing Called 'Love'? will include hate, prior to general accounts of
other emotions, which will then stem from the paradigm, all embracing emotions of love
and hate. Although I am concentrating on love there is one important point to be made
about hate. Hate is usually taken as the opposite of love. This view is wrong because in
order to hate someone I must already care deeply, in some way, about him. I cannot hate
anything that does not matter to me greatly. For this reason I see love and hate as intense,
powerful and related emotions; they are not negations of each other, as is often supposed.
We can now ask the question whether love takes objects which are objective in the full-
blown sense, i.e., whether there are generally accepted appropriate objects or whether
there is an inescapable subjective element which needs analysis. Subjectivity enters at the
point where we recognize that John (to refer to our original example) having certain
qualities is of secondary importance to the exclusive volatile kind and combination of
these qualities and how they find expression in John, the person. It is this exclusivity
which has the power to arouse tenderness, an essential component of love. Individuality
is what makes love possible. Love is a relationship between two persons who are, in an
important sense, separate and unique beings and who wish to remain so. Love in no way
endangers individuality. Love makes choices of objects which are always personal and
not ever universalizable in a way that would make substitution possible. The uniqueness
involved in the way one's qualities find expression within a given relationship cannot, by
definition, be universalized. Nevertheless, however personal and individual, one's love
has to fit the universal concept of love as distinct from unique expressions of it. Those
who have tried to force a distinction between personal and universal concepts of love
have chosen the wrong place to make the distinction and thus, understandably, have got
lost in confusion. A very good example of this kind of fundamental confusion is provided
by some interpretations of W. B. Yeats's poem: 'For Ann Gregory'. In the first stanza the
poet says: Never shall a young man, Thrown into despair By those great honey-coloured
Ramparts at your ear, Love you for yourself alone And not your yellow hair. The lady
responds by saying that she can dye her hair and then she may be loved for herself alone
and not her yellow hair. In the last verse comes the crunch. The poet replies: I heard an
old religious man But yesterday declare
[72] That he has found a text to prove That only God, my dear, Could love you for
yourself alone And not your yellow hair. This poem5 is usually taken as showing that the
poet does not really love Ann, he just loves her hair which is a potent physical attraction
for him. He loves a quality of Ann yet he claims to love her. Hence the view that personal
conceptions of love have to be distinguished from universal conceptions. Nevertheless, it
is the universal concept of love which enables us to argue that, as described, he does not
love Ann because it follows that if something were to happen to Ann's hair, love would
cease. This is not what love is about. Having said this, I think that Yeats may be making a
much more subtle, important claim. He may be pointing to an important fact about human
love as opposed to purely spiritual love, which Plato advocates; that earthly love is both
spiritual and physical. We cannot, as human beings, separate them where feelings are
concerned. The last lines of the first stanza express just this: '. . . love you for yourself
alone and not your yellow hair.' Her yellow hair is a part of her which cannot be ignored.
This is reinforced by the last lines of the poem:'. .. only God, my dear, could love you for
yourself alone and not your yellow hair.' God alone is concerned exclusively with the
spiritual not with bodily attributes. The unique relationship between two persons that we
call love can be recognized as a genuine perception of a special, unique individual worth
in a particular person which includes both spiritual and physical qualities. But however
unique and particular, what enables us to identify what we feel as love, is the universal
concept of love which we all share. Preferences are a matter of taste or opinion, concepts
never are. Because love is something we all want, wish, desire or long for, it often
precipitates us into, what I call, the state of craving for love. It is a state where not only
are we craving for love but, often, we start a search for an object of our longing; we do
this sometimes quite deliberately and at other times we are hardly aware of doing so.
When we get into such a state we expose ourselves to the danger of ignoring what the
object of love is actually like; this being less important than the desper- ate need to find
someone to match the state we are in. That particular situation opens up the floodgates of
self-deception, infatuation or, rarely, obsession. This kind of situation is the most
frequent cause of muddles which prompt the claim that love means different things to
different people. Self-deception, which arises out of a deep desire to be 5 D. W. Hamlyn's
example, op. cit., 12, from The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (London: Macmillan,
1977).

[73] loved and to love is one of the most dangerous enemies of worthwhile, lasting
personal relationships. We want love so much that we are all too ready to endow the
object of our love with what just is not there or deliberately ignore discordant notes
which threaten our fantasies and illusions. Some of us are so afraid of loneliness that we
are all too eager to pay any price to avoid it. Even in cases when we come inevitably to
recognize that the loved one is not what we took him to be, we continue with the
relationship hoping that he will change, which, as well we know, is fatal, rather than face
reality and the subsequent loss. There is a conscious attempt to avoid learning the truth.
Learning plays a vital part in all love relationships. Learning to love someone involves
learning to understand that person as the person he is. It involves getting rid of
preconceived ideas about the other. It is not enough to see a person simply as the object
of one's love. That view leads to possessiveness, to treating the other merely as an object
which one owns and, therefore, is entitled to treat as one wishes. That is to see the other
literally as an instrument of gratification of one's desires, wishes, pleasures and
expectations. Learning to love someone involves learning to see the object of one's love
as a subject in his/her own right. Love is a particularly profound, intimate exploration of
human experience. The loved one becomes a part of one's life, not in the trivial sense of
occupying one's time, nor in the sense of a possession but in the sense that it engages the
lover in his depth and thereby reveals constantly his own depth to him. Love is a mutual
revelation of otherness, it is never an abdication of individuality which the familiar notion
of two lovers becoming one demands. George Eliot6 describes this kind of learning as: . .
. conceiving with that distinctness which is no longer reflection but feeling-an idea
wrought back to the directness of sense, like the solidity of objects-that he (the other) had
an equivalent centre of self, whence the light and the shadows must always fall with a
certain difference. John Bayley7 also stresses the importance of individuality. He writes:
We desire in obedience to the fixed patterns of our sexual imagina- tion, but we fall in
love because we are really seeing another person. Love is the potentiality of men and
women which keeps them most interested in each other, . . . Nothing else that unites
human beings so emphatically declares at the same time the plurality of living; . . . I said
earlier that love is never a question of possession as one might possess an art object
which one loves. This brings me to the, by now, 6 G. Eliot, Middlemarch (Oxford
University Press, 1959), 225. 7 J. Bayley, The Characters of Love (London: Constable,
1960), 5.

[74] standard analysis of jealousy. Jealousy is often cited as a paradigm of an irrational

and/or immoral emotion. It is argued that loving someone entails, above all, a
commitment to their happiness, and this is incompatible with jealousy with its essentially
egoistic element of possessiveness. Such a view of human emotions in general and
jealousy in particular seems to me to be basically irrational; it completely fails to take
into account what human beings really are like. The lofty sentiments expressed in the
above argument are most appropriate to saints, martyrs or a very few, very exceptional
human beings. We cannot ignore in any argument, in this context, how, in fact, most
people feel. The argument is also too facile and too simplistic in failing to take into
account different kinds of jealousy, some of which could legitimately be condemned,
while others can be understood and sympathized with. After all, jealousy is never a
pleasant emotion. The kind of jealousy which is, perhaps, always to be condemned is that
of which Tolstoy gives us a brilliant example in Anna Karenina. Anna demands the kind
of 'love' which no lover on earth could possibly give her. For Anna, love means a
complete negation of individual expression, of independent action. She is quite incapable
of seeing the objects of her love, her son and Count Vronsky, as persons in their own
right, who are in an important sense individuals independent of her. She perceives any
separation of their activities from her, anything they do on their own, as a betrayal of her
and of her love. She cannot bear the thought of either of them being engaged in activities
or amusements which exclude her; she goes through torture as a result of her
possessiveness. She has not learned to love, only to possess completely. As a result, she
suffocates Vronsky's love, pushes away her son and finally pays with her own life for her
all consuming obsession. If this is jealousy, and I am not at all convinced that it is, then it
is a pathological form of it and, as such, it is possibly to be condemned but also pitied
because her qualities of awareness, sensitivity to others and her imagination, of which
there are many examples in the book, should have enabled her to love unreservedly and
with happiness. That is Tolstoy's point. But I wish to argue for a much stronger position;
that loving someone without ever feeling jealous would throw in doubt the very
genuineness or depth of the love felt. The criticism levelled at jealousy in terms of seeing
the other person as something to be possessed is ill conceived. What is at stake here is
that if a given relationship means everything to me in the sense that it makes my life
viable, influences the way in which I see the world, is precious to me, then anything
which threatens that relationship is, quite naturally, viewed with hostility and
apprehension. It is my intense caring about the other person and about the relationship,
which is both unique and irreplaceable and also non-

[75] shareable, that makes me apprehensive and hostile to any factor that could adversely
influence or threaten its continuance. If this is to count as possessiveness then, surely, it is
so in a very special sense. Jerome Neu8 in a very perceptive paper on jealousy argues that
the notion of 'possession' should not mislead us into thinking that what is at stake is
property rights. What is at stake is the self, an individual's identity vis-a-vis his beloved.
This sort of identification is misunderstood if it is assimilated to simple 'ownership'. What
is at stake is the loss of self- identity, is that if others do not love us, we may disintegrate.
He goes on: Jealousy is not a sensation or headache, it is in its essence a set of thoughts
and questions, doubts and fears. And these questions cannot be eliminated. They are real
questions. What we must do is first recognise their appropriateness and then see that they
are not given undue weight. . . To raise a question is not the same as to give a negative
answer.9 Neu's view illustrates and links up with what I have been arguing, not only
about jealousy but also about learning. It stresses the difference between loving someone
blindly, being in love with love and not with a person and real love of another individual
where our very caring constantly provokes questioning. We cannot help raising all sorts
of questions about our relationships with persons whom we care deeply about. We cannot
help it in the strong sense that we have no choice in the matter, if our feelings are
genuine. Alternatively, supposing someone claimed that his understanding of love has
changed as a result of seeing that what he took to be a case of profound and devoted love
has turned to jealousy. This position just does not make sense and is indeed based on a
misunderstanding of the relationship. One cannot be jealous about someone whom one
does not care strongly about; this is both a conceptual and an empirical point just as in the
case of hate, mentioned earlier. It is not the case, in this example, that love has turned to
jealousy but that the relationship has changed, something has been added. Jealousy is
typically over persons, envy is directed towards things and qualities. At the centre of
jealousy is fear, fear of loss arising directly out of what is special about persons-the
capacity of persons to give love, something that things or qualities cannot do. One can
lose a possession but not its affection-hence jealousy has little to do with possessiveness,
envy has everything to do with it. Perhaps that is why envy is a cardinal sin while
jealousy is not. 8 J. Neu, 'Jealous Thoughts', Explaining Emotions, A. Rorty (ed.)
(University of California Press, 1980), 424-463. 9 Op. cit., 432.

[76] Finally, I wish to return briefly to the notion of wants. It is often said that love
involves wants. This is G. Taylor's last necessary condition. She offers an account in
terms of wants having dismissed the possibility of an account in terms of specifiable
qualities. The argument, very briefly, goes as follows: All emotions involve beliefs-fear
takes place as a result of the belief that a lion is dangerous but love does not lend itself to
treatment in terms of beliefs that x because that brings us back to believing that the loved
one has certain qualities, with the consequences already discussed. She suggests that a
man experiencing love will have wants as well as beliefs which are inter-related in that a
man will have certain wants because he has certain beliefs. If, therefore, we can find a set
of wants which are typically involved in the case where x loves y then this will reveal
particular qualities in virtue of which x can love y. She writes: We view love as a give-
and-take relationship, so that essential wants will have to reflect this feature. If x loves y
we have on the one hand x's wants to benefit and cherish y, on the other, his wants to
have y take an interest in him, to be benefited and cherished by y.10 Let us spend a little
time on that well known view that love is a give-and- take relationship. My first reaction
to this is that give-and-take is an excellent description of a bargain, a contract, an
agreement-'I will give you x if you give me y'. I do not wish to deny that give-and-take is
involved in any and every human relationship. Two persons disagree about which
television programme to watch-they have no video. They may well agree that one will
give in tonight, the other will give in on the next occasion. Nothing about this example
tells us who the two persons are or what their relationship is. They could be brother and
sister, two friends or a married couple. My point is that while all human relation- ships
involve these kinds of agreements, give-and-take is not, therefore, exclusively
characteristic of love or a necessary precondition of it. On the contrary, Taylor's
argument about a priori wants from a relationship often results in disaster. Love
characteristically involves the lover opening out to the other in an effort to understand
and discover the otherness of the loved one without any preconceived wants or
expectations. In the old ballad Lord Randal explains to his mother that he has just been
with his true love who fulfilled all his wants and expectations and then promptly drops
dead from the poison which his 'true love' administered to him during the visit! He
wanted a certain relationship and, instead of living it, opening out to the mutual
understanding of that relationship, his preconceived wants, desires and expectations com-
'0 G. Taylor, op. cit., 153-154.
[77] pletely blinded him to reality. There is a further danger in accounts in terms of
wants. I may concentrate on those aspects of a person which satisfy my wants and
thereby never get to know and understand him as the person that he is. G. Taylor writes: .
. . what is seen by the lover as satisfying his various wants will often be connected with
his belief that y has certain characteristics, his evaluation of these, and his estimate of his
success. If these latter beliefs are irrational then very likely something will be wrong with
the former ones as well.11 She uses as an example Helmer, in Ibsen's A Doll's House.
Helmer cherishes his wife Nora according to his lights but he sees her exclusively as a
sweet, charming plaything, affectionate and eager to please. His understanding of Nora
arises from his wants and expectations of her and has little to do with understanding Nora
as the person that she really is. Helmer regards only those qualities of Nora as important,
which directly fulfil his wants. His feelings are tied exclusively to his expectations of
how he will benefit by their relation- ship and his giving is directly related to his taking,
he is quite incapable of seeing beyond that; his calling her 'featherbrain', as a term of
endearment, amply illustrates the fact that he is quite blind to the fact that Nora has so
much more to give. He loves only that part of her which suits his wants and interests.
Taylor comments: Where x's view of what constitutes a benefit to y is so entirely
coloured by his considerations of his own interests, his wants concerning y will be
correspondingly 'unbalanced' in that he is more concerned with taking than giving and the
demands he makes on y will tend to be unreasonable.l2 She considers Helmer's behaviour
unbalanced, unreasonable and irrational. Given her account of give-and-take as a
necessary condition of the relationship, it seems obvious that far from being irrational,
etc., Helmer gives exactly in relation to what he takes. He cares for her, he protects her
and tries to please her according to his lights. We have here a startling example of how
any kind of specific wants inhibits not only any real possibility of understanding the other
person but, more important for our purposes, of loving that person as the person that she
really is. Our wants can only stem generally from our need for a love relationship,
wanting it to work and to develop without any preconceived ideas of what we want
specifically to take from it. The implica- tion which the notion of give-and-take carries
with it is, as in the case of n Op. cit., 160. 12Op. cit., 160.

[78] Frances Berenson the example, that any doll-like woman (anyone who fulfils our
wants whatever these may be) would do as well and we are back again to the original
difficulty about qualities and substitution. That, also, is not what love is about. Love is
primarily an activity. What we value about love is the spontaneity of feeling that persons
experience for each other and the revelations that these lead to. The active character of
love amounts to giving-to receive is passive. The notion of give-and-take is based on a
serious misconception of giving as involving sacrifice for the sake of the desired reward
of taking. In other words, it is a conception of giving as a price to be paid for goods
expected, wanted and so on. Hence I call it a contract, a bargain, etc. Love, above all, is
about joyous giving of oneself, of one's time, of one's very concerns in life, one's joys and
sorrows, one's understanding, humour, failures and successes, sadness and
disappointments, one's deepest concern for the other and of spon- taneous, sensitive
responses, of life's tenderness. Receiving, rather than taking, will take care of itself, it is
at its most poignant when what one receives is utterly unexpected. In summary, I have
argued that the standard necessary conditions for what is to count as an emotion are
inadequate to accommodate the complexities inherent in the emotion of love, except in
such a general way as to be uninformative and, in the case of beliefs and wants, quite
misleading. The differences which emerged between love and the other emotions are of
such significance that they demand a different treatment of it. This led me to characterize
love and hate as the sum total of our emotional lives in the sense that they encompass all
other emotions. I have attempted to indicate to some extent what kind of emotion love is,
how it affects one's life and how it absorbs the other emotions. If I am right, then it
follows that love and hate form the category (or class) of emotions from which any
analysis of other emotions will proceed. This is a strong claim which, if correct,
necessitates a radically different starting point to theories of emotions. The fact that love
involves such a fascinating variety of combinations of its various elements, in any
particular instance of it, not to mention the enormous variations in depth of feeling that
individuals are capable of, severely limits the usefulness of necessary conditions in this
context but does not altogether eliminate them. None of this entails any monsters of
subjectivity lurking about the concept of love to scare philosophers away. Love is,
without doubt, the most individual, exclusive and complex of emotions. But, however
personal, love still has to fit generally applicable criteria of its meaning. Subjectivity
enters only in a limited and circumscribed sphere. This concerns attraction, which is a
matter of taste, in what one finds of special importance and how one expresses one's
feelings and one's qualities. The subjective elements

[79] What is this Thing Called 'Love'? influence our selection of whom and how much
we love, they have no power to distort the fact that we love or do not love, what is to
count as loving. They have primarily to do with the mode of loving. One only has the
possibility of being subjective within the limits of objectivity. Any analysis of love needs
to focus not so much on necessary con- ditions but on the variety of appropriate criteria
arising from the meaning of the concept and, imperatively, from the contemplation of the
lived experience of loving. Such an approach will exclude idealized conceptions of super-
human love as well as eliminate the possibility of accommodating conceptions of love to
our preferences or to our conveniences. Birkbeck College, London 79