from birth, we are over-exposed to images what Love should be, what love should look like; a depiction and perception that changes just as drastically as we do.
perhaps Love comes in the form of silky, lace adorned ball gowns, in witches casting spells on the fair maiden who wears them, in princes sweeping said maiden off her feet and whisking her away to a life of palatial domesticity.
perhaps Love is when our mothers take our tiny hands in their own when we cross the street and tuck us into bed at night or when our grandmothers sit us on their laps and fill our heads with the romantic mysticism of past lives lived.
perhaps Love arises spontaneously, the brushing of hands against each other, uniting over the same pair of cashmere gloves; a procedure in which our memories are erased and yet, we still make our way back to each other; an e-mail chain and the death of an esoteric children’s bookstore in new york city.1
in our attempts to nail down the complex and multi-faceted nature of Love, we have historically constructed it as tripartite:
Eros, or romantic Love, derived from erotas (‘intimate love’) and encompassing initial sexual chemistry and desire, one which seeks transcendental beauty of our ‘other’ (plato).
Agape, or unconditional Love, which is more of an abstract concept involving the selfless giving of our individual Love to others without expecting any return on the investment.
Philos, or brotherly Love, which was considered ideal by the ancient Greeks, and exists between friends - entailing showing loyalty and sacrifice, mutual respect and admiration, intellectual engagement and the sharing of values without any romantic or sexual involvements.
*note: there are further sub-groups of Love - storge (natural affection between parents and their children), philautia (self-love and self-worth, which should be mediated lest in lead to vanity and selfishness) and xenia (hospitality).
as immanuel kant posits, “we cannot will ourselves to feel Love” as it is a “matter of feeling”. the strenuous battle between the human head and the human heart and everything - yada-yada-yada. through this, he is able to more deeply explore the uncontrollable and unknown nature of Love and similarly how humans are, yet again, disillusioned by the amount of control they think they have over their own emotional states and experiences in the big, wide world.
kant’s philosophy is thus referred to as practical, grounded in the christian conception/ideals of Love. specifically in his argument that feelings of Love cannot physically, emotionally or spiritually be wholly controlled by the individual themself, he makes reference to scripture, particularly the age-old favourite, “Love Thy neighbour, even Thy enemy” [Leviticus 9:18].
Love is not something we can pick and choose to feel, it emerges from our duty and obligation to behave within the bounds of morality. kant separates human experiences of Love, or more accurately moral compassion, into that which is constructive and destructive, suggesting that an individual’s experience of ‘Love’ is not unique by any means but instead can be weaponised for ‘good’ or ‘bad’.
kant emphasises the importance of living within the framework of Jesuit-adjacent Love - prioritising the sacrifice of your own being for others, whether you know them or not. putting your ‘neighbours’, or your enemies, first because you recognise that you are not the only human life that matters and (bit of a revolutionary concept here) realising that they too are experiencing life in all of its entirety.
i don’t wholly identify with kant’s definition or exploration of Love. in fact, i find it to be quite sterile. disregarding this, i think his argument has some merit (otherwise i would not be mentioning it). i don’t think we can always control when we feel Love or how we feel Love towards others. i also don’t think everyone has the capacity to feel this ‘baseline’ Love or compassion towards other members of their communities.
at this current stage of my life i am by no means religious, although having grown up loosely anglican/protestant i always felt a deep admiration for the unity that religion provides to communities. the theoretical (and i am emphasising perfect theoreticalism here - we know in practice, it is rarely so) concept of feeling compassion, Love and appreciation for other individuals regardless of where they come from, what specifically they believe in, how old they are etc., because they all belong to this unified conglomerate under God was always, and still is, incredibly attractive to me.
this unadulterated and unconditional communal Love for those unknown to us no longer, or very sparingly, exists in this current social epoch. you see it all the time - people are suffocated by the entirety of their own small existences, overwhelmed by the day-to-day slog of surviving, something that sneaks up on all of us like a nasty pile of never-ending dirty dishes in the sink.
i think unification under the Love of some religious figure speaks to the innate human desire to belong and to feel worthy of something. to have some tangible proof that your existence matters and to have some common connection to another soul in a body which is not our own. at the end, when we are inevitably intravenously connected to the metallic body of a life support machine that is all we want to have - to not be alone. we crave homogeneity.
i am going to pivot here to the philosophies of søren kierkegaard. a common through-line in kierkegaard’s work is his construction of Love as a debt, one that he believes we should never try to escape or, in essence (utilising his lovely metaphor), ‘pay off’. this aligns so much more perfectly with the silly little way in which my brain conceptualises Love and what it should look like and how it should feel.
the premise of kierkegaard’s argument is that “to cheat oneself out of Love is the most terrible deception; it is an eternal loss for which there is no reparation, either in time or in eternity”, thus positing Love as central to the meaningfulness of human existence. Love is a first phenomenology here, the ultimate source of all meaning and value of the lived experience - an abstract source of all lived philosophical systems, aesthetic judgements and both human behaviour and the action that arises from it. it is an entirely separate entity from the metaphysical concepts of self, sin and salvation, which kierkegaard associates with the human experience of fear, instead aligning itself with Loving others first, rather than one’s self or God.
this is contradictory - as kierkegaard also argues that none of us have a fucking clue what Love actually is, even though we live, breathe and seek it almost incessantly. in this way, the human desire to attain experiences of Love is much like our desire to attain the pipe dream of happiness, and a minority of us (to me) who elect to move past the sole goal of making money and accruing wealth, will spend their lives chasing something undefined.
kierkegaard expertly weaves manifestations of Love with that of faith, submitting that the experience of Love still finds its foundations in representations of biblical Love, particularly through a Jesuit lens, and constructing both as inherently paradoxical - in works of love (1847), Love is constructed as one and many at the same time, implanted into our hearts by God.
there are some elements of kantian philosophy here, in that he emphasises that one should have “the same equal Love for all” and expounds two binaries in which Love exists:
Of preferential Love, which is encompassed by erotic Love and friendship, and
Non-preferential Love, which we feel for our ‘neighbours’ or ourselves, which cannot be commanded and does not extend to include emotions, affection or attraction, yet encompasses responsibility and unconditionality. 2
in alignment with kant, kierkegaard discusses the Love for which we feel for others in our community (our ‘neighbours’) through the lens of “kinship of all human beings”, one which no other individual can be excluded from.
both philosophers emphatically suggest that Love is not hierarchal and not judgemental; instead it is something that is shared, communal and equal. this is captured most aptly in kierkegaard’s elucidation that our duty to Love is “an outstanding debt to which God obligates you”, indicating that we live most of our lives in debt and will be paying it off, with whatever Love we have consolidated, unto others for the rest of our existence. non-preferential Love is authentic in this way, a separated from the emotional soul and better explained as an unconscious action.
there is such beauty in the idea that we contain everlasting fabric of Love within our beings, which can be shared and bestowed upon other individuals and communities. what i find is incredibly lacking in society as a whole is the selflessness to give Love to strangers. it is most aptly reflected by kierkegaard here, “Love is the expression of the one who Loves, not of the one who is Loved. Those who think they can Love only the people they prefer do not Love at all. Love discovers truths about individuals that others cannot see.” in my humble opinion, kierkegaard is writhing in his grave - for him, everlastingly remaining in the debt of Love was the definition of Love itself. to be totally surrounded by your own love for self and love for others is utopic.
off the back of exploring both kant and kierkegaard’s construction of this selfless, neighbourly Love, i feel as though it is again important to stress that we are lacking this to an extreme extent in this society. we have been conditioned from birth into believing that romantic or sexual Love is the only form of affection and compassion that we can experience. when was the last time you held the door open for someone? smiled at a stranger on the street? kissed your friends on the cheek or taken their hand in your own?
society is so socially isolating and as a result we have almost completely closed ourselves off from the merits of non-romantic Love. affection can be platonic. you can give and receive Love to and from anyone. we do not need our needs to be catered to and met by only one person. it’s incredibly restrictive, not to mention soulless and, to me, entirely boring.
as aforementioned, aside from this ‘neighbourly’ or community non-preferential Love, kierkegaard similarly explores non-preferential, or romantic, erotic and platonic iterations of Love. this erotic Love is not unconscious, nor does it refer to action in the same way that non-preferential Love does - it is felt in isolation toward one other, distinct from the rest of our ‘neighbours’. it is intense; governed by emotions, passions and impulses - think more on par with sexual desire or lust. while non-preferential Love is continuous and never-ending, poetic or erotic Love is founded in the temporal - moving with the ebb and flow of the intensity of emotions or desire we feel for those we are attracted to.
consistently, kierkegaard warns against being lost in the allure preferential Love, believing it is inauthentic, and in most cases causes despair and hatred if felt or experienced in excess. this is because preferential Love expects things in return, whereas in theory non-preferential or ‘neighbourly’ Love is selfless. as a solution, he suggests a re-contextualisation of erotic Love as a moral duty - not removing it of impulse, affection or desire, but by rooting it in divine Love. in this way, our experiences of Love remain unchanged when our object of Love changes and we are able to protect ourselves from despair.
in direct opposition with the emphasis that both kierkegaard and kant place on prioritising non-preferential or ‘neighbourly’ Love, georges bataille (who i fuck with very heavily and in a very not-normal way) pivots to the discussion of Love and the erotic as motivated by our innate and selfish desire to pursue the pleasurable. in this sense, Love is not about personal fulfilment or selflessness or the achievement of romantic idealism, but a way in which the individual is able to confront the limits of physical existence through physical unification with another being.
perhaps one of my favourite quotes from bataille is: “My true church is a whorehouse — the only one that gives me true satisfaction”, where he, as per usual, uses blasphemy to completely turn christian and romantic ideals of Love on their head - aligning sacredness with decay and abasement. essentially, he is a little freak.
most notably in his book l’éroticism (eroticism: death and sensuality, 1957), bataille explores Love as a profound and intense experience unbounded by conventional (biblical) boundaries. bataille emphasises that Love is instead dual; intertwined with both the sacred and the profane, a source of both ecstasy and transgression. in this sense, Love is a transcendence of conformity; one which allows individuals to confront death, violence and the taboo.
contrastingly to the christian construction of human morality and Love, as elucidated by kant and kierkegaard, bataille views individuals as inherently perverse and disgusting. he confesses this throughout much of his work, “I don’t want your Love unless you know I am repulsive, and Love me even as you know it.”. i truly think this is so fucking beautiful, perfectly describing Love in the context of romanticism and eroticism. to be Loved is to be bared naked to another; whether that is emotionally, physically or spiritually, and have that person accept you for all your flaws, for all the sick thoughts in your head, for all of your depraved behaviour. to be united under the commonality of filth and degeneracy without the constraints of maintaining whatever picture perfect image of ourselves we present in a public context.
in bataille’s eyes we are not distinctly separate from animals; the only thing that draws a contrast between us is the imposition of taboos; woven tightly within the fabrication of our ‘morally’-minded social worlds. the only obstruction between us and a descent into feral and violent animalism is our ability to construct language, and as a result morals and meaning. through language we are able to impose and communicate laws, morality, knowledge, reason and logic; humanising a world which would otherwise be rife with natural violence, “nudity, death, corpses and blood”. he is absolutely sickening and i love it. 3
no matter how many people continue to push the white picket fence/nuclear family narrative as an archetype that we should all strive toward; all humans are the same at their core - depraved, feral and completely unadulterated in their behaviour and actions. as baudelaire expresses, “l’unique et suprême volupté de l’amour gît dans la certitude de faire le mal” or, the “unique and supreme pleasure of love lies in the certitude of doing evil”. we, as a species, are drawn to sin and transgression; we are fundamentally aroused at even the thought of rebelling, of being naughty. we are instructed not to venture to the kitchen and use our grubby little hands to extract a cookie from the jar which sits, wobbling and warbling, on the kitchen counter…but we do so anyway. and good lord, is that cookie delicious.
in antiquity, eroticism has been a continual link between the act of Love and sacrifice - fusing attraction to an individual through the physical ‘giving-up’ of the human body, personal vulnerabilities, purity and innocence - providing another with access to the most private and intimate parts of one’s self. in this way, the naked state is thus symbolic of dispossession - a decisive action that directly contrasts self-possession, revealing continuance of being beyond the constraints of the physical realm. the erotic always commands the breaking down of patterns of social order, which bataille defines as discontinuous. people are so attracted to sensuality and eroticism as a concept because it provides them with a fleeting continuity; of looking into the great abyss of all that surrounds us and feeling almost infinite.
in this way, experiences of eroticism, sensuality and Love disrupt our social order - where the aim of normative conduct is to acquire goods through working, which allows us to increase the sum of our possessions and solidifies our status in society. the all-encompassing nature of Love and desire creates a rift in this linearity, causing us to behave in the opposite way, with passion and reckless abandon.
in french, the orgasm is referred to as ‘the little death’, or ‘le petit mort’, encapsulating the push of the line between pain and pleasure to the extent that it results in near-unconsciousness. if we go back to medieval times, the orgasm was referred to as such out of the belief of physicians that the act of sexual climax resulted in the very life force itself being drained from the physical body.
this erotic excess implies disorder, ruin and degradation. it is in our nature to surrender to this ruin, to drag ourselves into this wild extravagance and completely rupture the banality of the social institutions which we are defined by. we see it throughout history, and even now, this never-ending thirst; a desire to consume and annihilate, to create and then destroy; to ruin what we hold divine and sacred. “To be this much in Love is to be sick (and I Love to be sick).” this is what Love is to me.
i find this quite intimately connected to the representation of Love, sex and eroticism in a film i recently watched - lars von trier’s nymphomaniac, vol. I (2013). if you have not watched it, from the title it’s evident what the subject-matter of the film is - centering on a woman named joe who is found unconscious and bloody, passed out in an alley and is adopted/cared for by a man in the street, seligman. as she is ‘nursed’ back into health she reveals the story of her life, particularly her sexual exploits with men (through a metaphor of fly fishing, no less). what touched me was her reflection on the concept of Love, about half-way through the film:
“Seligman: Love is blind. Joe: No, no, no. It's worse. Love distort things. Or even worse, love is something you never asked for. The erotic was something that I ask for or even demanded of men. But this idiotic love... I felt humiliated by it. And all the dishonesty that follows. Joe: The erotic is about saying yes. Love appeals to lowest instincts, wrapped up in lies. How do you say yes when you mean no? And vice-versa. I'm ashamed of what I became. But it was beyond my control.”
i may be late to the party, but i think this is the only lars von trier film i have ever enjoyed so thoroughly - it was absolutely beautiful.4 joe’s reflection on Love and what it means to be in Love aligns quite perfectly with elements of the conception of Love by kant, kierkegaard and bataille, and even the marquis de sade (who i have not mentioned extensively here, but informed a lot of bataille’s work) - something that is uncontrollable and not willed to be felt, something that disrupts reason and logic and therefore is so much more complex and unknown than the simplicity of lust, sex or desire.
HELLO!
thank you so much for reading if you made it this far! i’ve attached the references which helped me to inform my thoughts below + could make for some interesting reading if you align with any of the concepts i rudimentarily discussed.5
there is so much more i could say on this subject, and so much more reading and research and learning that i hope to do, however i feel like it’s sensible to cap this post at just under 4,000 words (oh my fucking god). this is not by any means a super critical analysis or exploration of Love as a philosophical concept (as you can probably tell) - just something that has fascinated me and i felt like writing about. let’s call it productive procrastination, because i have a paper worth 40% of my grade for one of my university subjects right now and instead, i elected to write this frankenstein of an essay/discourse/thought-piece.
i did also want to explore a few other topics in this piece, but have run out of time, energy and room. in the future i probably will write and publish a second part because i vehemently want to discuss…
**biblical representations of Love (the virgin mary & representations of maternal, pure/innocent, unconditional Love)
**pornography/perversion and the commodification of intimacy
**being pigeonholed and fetishised as a woman in the context of modern dating
ANYWAY - thank you so much for reading all of this mess if you did i truly, truly appreciate it. and if you didn’t make it to the end i don’t blame you, this really was me dumping the contents of my brain/special interest onto substack and hoping for the best.
lots of love as always x
i could insert a rudimentary construction of the notebook here as well, but i have never watched and i do not think i ever will. regardless, i think you get the gist.
pioneer of the ‘self-love’ movement, i fear (this is a joke - i’m aware of it’s biblical origins, ‘Love Thyself’ & etc.).
my love of bataille is very strange because i am so averse to sex in my own life 😭.
i watched antichrist almost two years ago with a man i used to be acquainted with (should have been a red flag immediately) and let me just say i could not look at the screen for the last 30 minutes of the film - if you know, you know. safe to say after this experience i no longer had much desire to peruse any of the other pieces of work von trier’s filmography had to offer. however, i very much enjoyed nymphomanic and would 100000% recommend it if you don’t mind erotic media.
₊✩‧₊˚౨ৎ˚₊✩‧₊ further references which informed this piece/some reading if you’re interested :)
kant:
♡ Fahmy, Melissa Seymour, Kantian Practical Love (Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 91), No. 3 (2010): 313–31. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0114.2010.01369.x.
♡https://philipsmind.wordpress.com/2017/02/09/love-thy-neighbor-as-a-philosopher-kant-socrates-the-solipsists-and-the-wisdom-of-christ/
♡https://www.patheos.com/blogs/approachingjustice/2013/05/20/kant-on-duty-inclination-and-loving-our-enemies/
♡https://kant-online.ru/en/from-self-preservation-to-cosmopolitan-friendship-kant-and-the-ascent-of-love/
kierkegaard:
♡https://philosophynow.org/issues/64/We_Get_To_Carry_Each_Other_U2_and_Kierkegaard_on_Authentic_Love
♡ https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/kierkegaard-on-faith-and-love/
♡https://www.theschooloflife.com/article/kierkegaard-on-love/
♡Lippitt, John and George Pattison, The Oxford Handbook of Kierkegaard (Oxford University Press, 2013)
♡https://readingreligion.org/9780739184936/kierkegaard-and-the-philosophy-of-love/
bataille:
♡https://philosophynow.org/issues/46/Eroticism_by_Georges_Bataille
♡https://anthropoetics.ucla.edu/views/vw220/
♡https://epochemagazine.org/72/laughing-at-darkness-batailles-theory-of-laughter/
miscellaneous:
♡https://www.purefilmcreative.com/killough-chronicles/review-nymphomaniac-vol-1-explores-the-meaning-of-feelings.html
♡https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/3-types-love-eros-agape-philos-modern-world-iris-dating-ctwse/
“Love is not a higher function. It is the first function, it is the first thing we know.” - Anne Enright, The Wren, The Wren