Irving Singer: Philosophy of Love: A Partial Summing-Up.
Stewart, Robert Scott
Irving Singer
Philosophy of Love: A Partial Summing-Up.
Cambridge, MA: MIT University Press 2009.
143 pages
US$14.95 (cloth ISBN 978-0-262-19574-4)
Irving Singer has been writing deeply and seriously about love at
least since 1966 when his The Nature of Love: Plato to Luther was
published. This work eventually became the first volume of his trilogy
on love, the latter two volumes covering Courtly and Romantic love and
The Modern World respectively. Feeling this trilogy was 'too
sketchy, too narrow, and incomplete' (xvii), he began a second
trilogy on the Meaning of Life and on the ways in which love influences
that meaning. But even these six volumes do not constitute the entire
corpus of Singer's writings on love. Indeed, all his work, it could
be argued, discusses this issue at least obliquely, and often in much
more direct terms. Hence, a short work summing up his thoughts on love
is a monumental task. To make matters even more difficult, Singer does
not have a simple answer regarding the nature of love (110). Rather,
trained in the analytic tradition, he sees himself as 'a maker of
distinctions. And the more distinctions I make,' he says, 'the
more varied are the aspects in which I am able to think about the nature
of love. I don't promote any a prioristic or overarching theory.
I'm very suspicious of that. I don't think that large-scale
terms like love, happiness, meaning of life, ... and such, are able to
have any one definition' (15).
As a result of this, Singer has approached love along various
lines, which often begin with an historical examination of the subject.
Hence, in perhaps the best-known aspect of his work, Singer traces the
Greek notion of love conceived as Eros, contrasts it with the Christian
notion of love as 'agape', and attempts a kind of synthesis of
the two. In the love as Eros tradition, our love of something or someone
is based on the beloved's qualities or characteristics. Thus, for
example, we love an object for the beauty it possesses; or, at its
highest level, as Socrates informs us in the Symposium, we love the Form
of Beauty itself. Singer calls this form of love 'appraisal',
where value inheres in the object itself and hence can be discovered
there. In the love-as-agape tradition, love is based on what he calls a
'bestowal'. God's love of humans is taken as the exemplar
of such a love, where God loves us in spite of our being fallen, sinful
beings. Here, value is created in the relationship itself rather than
discovered as a property the beloved possesses independently.
While there is dispute about exactly how to read Singer's
thesis on this issue, one interpretation is to say that romantic, sexual
love requires an initial positive appraisal of a person, but for love to
be complete there must be value bestowed on the person as well. This
would seem to imply that both appraisal and bestowal are individually
necessary for romantic, sexual love, and jointly sufficient. Singer
employs this distinction (and synthesis) in a number of places. For
example, he uses it to critique Freud's view, arguing that Freud
misunderstood love as involving only an appraisal. Because of this,
Freud took all love to be an ' overvaluation' (53) based on an
inflated appraisal, and hence it was, in Freud's opinion, an
illusion of self-deception of some sort. But this is because Freud
'doesn't perceive the character of the lover's
more-than-merely-selfish creativity in relation to that other person and
whatever blemish he or she may have' (54).
As noted, the distinction between appraisal and bestowal is but one
of the many that Singer considers. There is, he says, 'the idea of
interdependence rather than dependence ...; there is love as an
acceptance of another being; there are different kinds of love--the love
of things, the love of persons, the love of ideals; there is the
distinction ... among the libidinal, the erotic, and the romantic; and
so forth' (110). In addition to exploring the history and
philosophy of these distinctions, Singer also borrows evidence freely
from literature, religion, psychology, and wherever else there are
fruitful ideas to pick.
Consider, to take just one example, the issue of
'merging', and the extent to which lovers are dependent or
interdependent upon each other. As far back as Aristophanes' myth
in the Symposium, we have been cursed with the notion that true and
complete love is a merging with another (our other half). Singer quite
rightly rejects such a view. 'In our personhood we do not merge; we
cannot merge. The most that can happen is that you think you're
merging, you end up falsifying ingredients in the reality of your
relationship' (19). And yet the idea of merging has had a strange
attraction for people over the centuries and in different contexts. The
medieval period was particularly concerned, for example, whether we
could merge and 'be one' with God, an idea that was often
taken in that period as blasphemous. Then, in the Romantic period, with
its belief in the transformative power of the imagination and its
ability to create new, merged identities from originally disparate
entities, there was a focus once again on people merging through love.
Indeed, Singer argues, people began to think that the love of humans,
conceived in this sense, could replace the love of God.
In the Foreword to Philosophy of Love: A Partial Summing-Up, Alan
Soble, noted philosopher of love and sex, recommends that all
'those potential students of the philosophy of love and sex ...
should start ... [f]irst [with] this book, then The Nature of Love'
(xi). Not everyone will agree with this assessment, for some will think
the book too informal and lacking academic rigor. Personally, however, I
found the style of the book charming--rather like listening to a
fireside chat from a wise master with fascinating things to say as he
reflects upon his life-long thoughts. And while I did at times find the
book--especially the last quarter--a little too vague, that has simply
increased my desire to read more of Singer's work (or read it
again) and more generally to work on the subject of love. Surely, that
is a mark of success for any literary and philosophical work.
Robert Scott Stewart
Cape Breton University
