On Love

In a clip available on Youtube, Jacques Derrida, admonishes girls who were trying to interview him that they should try to ask him questions rather than have him simply talk about love, but when they asked questions such as what do you think of what Plato said about love, he did not like the questions; so he asked one of his own: can you actually love someone or do you love the person’s qualities. His answer seemed to be that Fred can only love Frieda’s qualities and when he gets to know her better or if she changes while he knows her and he no longer sees her as having the qualities with which he fell in love, he will cease to love her and move on to someone else.

He also got into the issue of love and being. He said the most important question pertaining to being was what is being and the most important question regarding love is what is love.  It was at this point he moved in the direction of asking whether you could actually love a person rather than their qualities.

He did not wish to get into clichés regarding love and I certainly understand his desire to avoid them, but I can think of no other subject so prone to the use of cliché language, than that of love. Any subject written and sung about as much as love, will inevitably suffer from tired and hackneyed expressions (tired and hackneyed, how tired and hackneyed, huh?).

But really, what is love? Does it differ from infatuation? Is it possible to completely love someone, without regard to the qualities we perceive? If someone has a few great qualities we desire in a person, but many others we do not prefer; do we weigh them on a scale and see which weighs more, the ones we love or the ones we do not love? Is it possible to fall in love with a few desirable qualities of a person and then no matter how our perceptions or the qualities change from then on, to love that person without regard to these changes?

If we were to do this, would we wind up being in love with the idea we once had of the person, rather than the person? What does it mean to be in love with the idea of a person? What if the person is mean or unlikeable, but we have fallen in love with him or her? Might we do the person a disservice by continuing to love the idea we had of him or her, and do nothing to help him or her change for the better?

Is the purpose of love merely to make us feel good, to feel needed, desired by someone else and for us to make the other person feel the same, or should it be more? Should love also involve each person making the other person better in some way, serving as a source of inspiration?

I think love that does not result in mutual development is inferior. In other words, I believe the best love has an instrumental part to it. We are all headed in various directions at any given time. In some ways we are moving toward goals, toward something better, and in other ways, we are moving toward bad outcomes, toward something worse. We should each seek to help those we love be better people, to have good futures, to move in the right directions.

This means our love is neither neutral nor unconditional, but rather, it is judgmental. At first this may seem to be a bad thing, after all; Carl Rogers’s term “unconditional positive regard” is one of the nicest sounding phrases I have ever heard. But when you think on the subject a little, you might come to see that positive regard might just be sufficient. Unconditional positive regard suggests I accept you totally, just the way you are; but what if you are doing things that are dangerous to yourself and others? Should I love you without setting any conditions? I don’t think I should.

The conditions of our love should be healthy, not unhealthy, that is, they should center around helping the loved one avoid bad outcomes and to realize good ones. Clearly, what is good or not good will have to be worked out between the two people. Some lovers (people who love one another) will fight over this, but I still say it is better to have such a contested love than a love without conditions.

What Derrida was discussing may be this sort of objectified version of love, one where we look at a person much the way we would a car or a house. We know the characteristics we want in a car, big motor or fuel efficiency, color, reliability and so on. We know what we want in a house, nice closets, or a gourmet kitchen. Should we apply this sort of reasoning to our evaluation of the people in our lives, I would say we are not talking about love as much as evaluative appraisal.

I disagree with Derrida in this respect. I believe we can appreciate a car even though it does not have all the qualities we desire, the same with the house; and I believe we can appreciate a person in spite of the presence of qualities we do not like and the absence of those we do. In either case, we are talking about appreciation or a type of evaluation. In the special case of love though, not only can we ignore missing good qualities and present bad ones, our love for the person transforms all these qualities into positives. That, I believe, is the definition of love: the imaginative process by which we transform another person into a perfect state. The people I truly love, I love entirely, just as they are, warts and all; because, when I love a person, her warts become beauty marks.

So how is it I can love someone constructively, love a person critically so as to help him or her improve; when I have defined love as not seeing anything wrong with the person’s qualities? When I love someone who has faults, the fault, habit, whatever it may be does not cause me to judge her negatively, it inspires me to compassion and I will work tirelessly to help that person change for the better. I can evaluate and love at the same time because love endows me with compassion so I avoid the contempt I feel for flawed people I do not love.