What is love?

The aim of this post is to develop a little idea I've been working on that, I hope, constitutes a contribution to the philosophy of love. For an introduction to the topic, check out the Stanford Encyclopedia entry here.

I begin with a few observations about love that I will take as basic data to accommodate in my account. These are:

1. To love someone means to have special care or concern for their desires and interests and, often, to wish to have a relationship of intimacy with them.
2. One can, nevertheless, love someone without wishing to have a relationship of intimacy with them, without particularly enjoying their company or feeling ambivalent towards them. An example would be a person who finds her parent to be obnoxious and unpleasant, but nevertheless rushes to the parent's side when he is seriously in need.
3. To love someone is to view their opinions, and particularly their opinions towards oneself, as of deep importance. I will be deeply disappointed if my beloved regards me with anger or contempt, and conversely overjoyed if my beloved regards me with affection and concern for my opinions and interests. 
4. Who we love is at least partly dependent on their properties or characteristics as people. I love someone, at least in part, because of their kindness, their beauty, their sense of humour, their intelligence, and so on.
5. Who we love is not solely dependent on properties or characteristics. If I love A, who embodies certain characteristics, I need not love B, even if B embodies those characteristics to the same, or even to a a greater, degree. I cannot simply "substitute" B for A or, at least, not without the loss of something important. 
6. A person can love several people simultaneously. Examples include non-monogamous romantic relationships or, less controversially, the love of a parent for each of several children. 
7. A person can cease to love another person. 

Having set out these observations, my basic account is as follows. To love someone is to understand them as essentially good, worthy and/or important. That is, the lover adopts a certain kind of interpretative stance towards the personal attributes and behaviour of her beloved, whereby everything the beloved says or does is understood in such a way that is compatible with their fundamental and unique (or very rare) goodness as a person. This accounts for statements 1 and 3. To regard a particular person as uniquely worthy and important is to have a special concern for their interests and desires, and to regard their opinions as uniquely valuable or worthy of attention. The other observations require more elaboration to account for fully.

Accepting both 4 and 5 seems to result in a paradox, and addressing this apparent paradox is one of the major concerns in the existing literature on love. My thought is the following. Coming to love someone is, of course, largely dependent on the appealing characteristics they exhibit. But continuing to love someone is not dependent on the continued exhibition of those same characteristics. Rather, whatever appealing characteristics the beloved exhibits will be interpreted as evidence of the beloved's unique goodness and importance. Conversely, even if one's beloved exhibits unappealing characteristics, these will not be interpreted as resulting from any fundamental weakness of character, but rather from contingent errors of judgement or as responses to external circumstances. Adopting this particular interpretative stance towards a person means that one will attempt, in effect, to elevate their virtues and explain away their vices. 

My model for this account is Kuhn's notion of a "paradigm" in philosophy of science. Kuhn's claim is that scientists do not typically accept scientific theories by themselves, but accept them as part of a "package" of ideas and practices (the paradigm or "disciplinary matrix"). Importantly, part of the package includes certain evaluative standards, i.e. ideas about what problems a theory ought solve and what adequate solutions to these problems would look like. According to Kuhn, this means that scientists who have accepted the paradigm will tend to view it's central theoretical claims more favourably than those who haven't - they tend to regard the areas where it is successful as most relevant in evaluating theoretical success. Conversely, they tend to regard putative problems or anomalies as unimportant, likely to be solved at a later date, and so on. The paradigm only enters a "crisis" - and begins to lose adherents to alternative paradigms - when anomalies accumulate to such a degree that they can no longer be explained away. 

Kuhn's account is aimed at resolving an apparent paradox, that scientists are both responsive to empirical evidence in choosing to accept a theory and yet can be non-responsive to evidence which would seem to contradict a theory they already accept. My account of love aims to resolve an analogous paradox, that who a person loves is both dependent on the qualities of the beloved and yet is not simply a response to those qualities. And my account of love is similar to Kuhn's account of theory acceptance, as I claim that to love someone is also to adopt standards for evaluating their worth that would tend to reinforce the conclusion that they are worthy of special respect and esteem. With this account in hand, I will now try to make sense of some of the remaining observations.

Observation 2, which represents a phenomenon we might call "loving without liking", is one of the most difficult to account for. My current thinking on this is that we all can, and do, switch back and forth between the interpretative stance characteristic of love and a more neutral, or even negative, evaluative stance. Anyone who has been in love has felt that her beloved is the most perfect and wonderful human being in the world and also, perhaps simultaneously, recognised that this feeling does not represent objective reality. Many other people exhibit the qualities she praises in her beloved. This sort of tension animates Bernard Williams' "one thought too many" thought experiment. William's argues that, if forced to choose, most of us would rescue our beloved from death instead of a stranger, and be justified in this choice. And yet we also recognise that this choice would not be justified from the perspective of a neutral observer, who need not conclude that our beloved is any more worthy of rescue than anyone else. 

For one who is fortunate in who she loves, the loving stance and a more neutral evaluation do not pull too much in different directions - her beloved is not manifestly unworthy of the loving treatment he receives. But some of us are unlucky enough to love those who are unworthy - they repay love with scorn, abuse or just consistent unpleasantness. Someone who is unlucky in who she loves will, I think, manifest different behaviour depending on which interpretative stance dominates her thinking at any given time. Sometimes she may avoid her beloved, and sometimes she may seek him out. The "switch" between the two states is, I take it, something like a gestalt switch. Sometimes our beloved is a rabbit, at other times he is a duck. And while both perceptual possibilities are in some sense present at all times, only one can be actively perceived at any given moment. 

Observation 6 is relatively easy to account for - a person who loves multiple others simply adopts the relevant interpretative stance in respect of each of them. This generates no conflict unless our lover is for some reason forced to choose between the irreconcilable interests of those she loves. This, of course, is the dilemma of Sophie's Choice. One thing that is interesting about this story is that, while from a purely evaluative standpoint it might be acceptable to choose which of one's own children is more worthy of rescue, it is utterly devastating from the standpoint of love. Sophie is traumatised, at least in part, because she is forced to consider the worth of her children as if she does not love them. 

Observation 7, finally, is dealt with quite straightforwardly in terms of what has already been said. To stop loving someone is to undergo a more permanent "switch" towards an interpretative stance in which their words and actions are no longer evidence of their unique worth. Their virtues are merely the virtues shared by many other people, and their faults cannot be explained away. Such a switch will often be brought about by something analogous to a Kuhnian "crisis" - the extent to which Alice's beloved is flawed (or at least, not suitable for her) becomes too obvious to continue explaining away, and a competing interpretation of their behaviour becomes appealing. One final observation that links to this broader point is that, often, when a person is in the process of falling out of love, she may adopt an unusually negative interpretation of her beloved. Thus, every vice the once-beloved displays is evidence of his poor character, and every virtue is accidental or otherwise explained away. Perhaps this phenomenon can be thought of as an (overcompensating) attempt by the lover to return to a more neutral stance, in order more dispassionately assess whether it is worth maintaining a relationship with her beloved. 

Kuhn, in discussing the process of adopting a new paradigm (or rejecting a long-held one) frequently compares it to the process of religious (de)conversion. To undergo such a shift is to see the world through new eyes, to have the scales drop from one's eyes. To fall in, and out, of love is, I think, also to undergo an experience something like religious conversion. One who loves sees the world differently to how she did before, with all the emotions and potential traumas that attend such a change.