Valentine's Day with the philosophers

You could tell that it was Valentine’s Day at Princeton because the LGBT Pride Alliance papered the campus with their signature techno-colored posters of heterosexual and homosexual couples kissing, bearing the caption “Love = Love.” This year, even the Anscombe Society got in on the action, posting airbrushed images of guys and girls with slogans from famous songs (notably, “Shoulda put a ring on it”).

We usually think that “love” is a better subject for posters or poetry than for philosophy, more fit for sonnets than syllogisms. So it is surprising to find an overtly erotic element in many of the greatest philosophers of the West —and in particular, at the heart of one of the founding documents in Western philosophy.

There is a poignant moment in Plato’s “Symposium,” when Aristophanes imagines two lovers engaged in sex, each one having found his “other half”: They try to identify what it is that they want from each other and can only say that it is “something more” than sex. And Hephaestus, the blacksmith god, stands over them with his tools, offering to weld them together so that they might share one life and one death. When they eagerly accept his proposal, Aristophanes explains that “love” is the name for “our pursuit of wholeness, our desire to be complete.”

So Socrates takes up the conversation and relates how he learned the secret arts of “erotics” from his teacher, Diotima, who taught him that “love” means “wanting to possess the good forever.” Thus, she says, do lovers pursue the beloved, and thus do students pursue knowledge, and thus do parents create children and artists their masterpieces. But the pursuit of physical love, to Plato, is securely grounded in the same impulse that leads scholars to study books and astronomers the stars: because education, too, can be driven by the drive for “I-know-not-what.” It is an impulse that suggests that somewhere in the structure of the universe, or hidden in the verses of Shakespeare, is some indispensable knowledge that will “complete us,” in as profound a sense as that eternal union offered by Hephaestus.

This is why Hector, near the end of “The History Boys,” lamely defends his sexual interest in his students by claiming that “education is itself an erotic experience.” It is why Allan Bloom blamed the decline of American education on a culture saturated by sex: “The eroticism of our students is lame,” he wrote in “The Closing of the American Mind.” This is why Plato taught that we move from love of bodies to love of ideas in an unbroken chain that ultimately culminates in “the sea of beauty” and the Form of the Good.

Christian writers had little difficulty mapping the God of Golgotha onto the basic outline of Platonic metaphysics, but it took the genius of Aquinas to bring Aristotle to bear on the problem. Aquinas was wrestling with a signature difficulty in the teachings of Christ: that we are to love not merely our neighbors, but even our enemies. How, one might argue, could we possibly bring ourselves to feel genuine affection for those with whom, by definition, we do not get along?

Applying the characteristic insights of Aristotle to a fundamentally religious problem, Aquinas taught that love is not merely an emotion but an act of will, that “to love” means “to seek the good of another.” So when we teach students, we are promoting the good of knowledge. And when parents raise children, they are promoting the goods of physical and emotional welfare. And when we learn, we are seeking the good of truth for ourselves, because in the system of Aquinas, one cannot love others until one has learned to love oneself. For Aquinas, this self-love is predicated on the basic act of creation by God and the subsequent passion of Christ on the Cross. “Passion” itself is from the Latin word for “suffering,” and so was used by Roman Christians to describe Christ’s death; and from this, the word was more broadly used to describe supreme love, and thus fervent desire.

And so did Augustine write his great prayer, “Late have I loved thee, beauty ever ancient, ever new — late have I loved thee. You were within me, but I was outside you: I rushed upon those fair things which, if not in you, would not be at all. You called to me, you cried out, you shattered my deafness. You blazed with light and broke my blindness; you sent forth fragrance and I drew in breath and now I pant for you. I have tasted you, and I hunger and thirst for you. You have touched me, and now I burn for your peace.”

Few poets have ever matched the breath-taking intensity of Augustine’s style, the magnificent ardor and the unshielded honesty of this philosopher’s prose. Yet in Aristotle, we can find an idea nearly as lovely; the notion, carried over into Aquinas, that if we will to love another, the emotions shall follow, that we can cultivate a sense of love like a sense of art, that the habit of benevolence can be learned, that we may yet love even our enemies. And that, to me, is as much in keeping with the spirit of Valentine’s Day as anything you’ll find in a poster around campus.

Brendan Carroll is a philosophy major from New York, N.Y. He can be reached at btcarrol@princeton.edu.