Love is a powerful concept that has driven many human decisions, making it a popular topic for philosophers to philosophize about. Because of love’s importance, people even build their lives around it, dedicating themselves to feeling it, giving it; some even argue that “all you need is love”.
The problem with love is that it’s complex and culturally dependent; furthermore, there are many different types of “love”, and love is not static, changing over time. Even with everyone in the world loving each other, people may still harm people that they love in order to benefit others that they love. Thus, “all you need is love” is a pretty reductionist statement – it’s like walking into a hospital and saying “all you need is drugs”.
Ancient Greek Love - Diotima of Mantinea
One of the most famous discussions of love is found in Plato’s The Symposium, where the ideas of Diotima are discussed. Diotima sees love as a progression, ascending up rungs of a ladder; basically, as you live your life and gain experiences, you go up the ladder, getting closer to finding what love truly is.
The first rung on the ladder is bodily love, which is pretty straightforward. The interesting is that when Diotima that points out is that upon deeper thought (“Why do I love this person’s body?”) you come to the realization that whatever qualities are attractive to you are not unique to this person’s body – plenty of other people have bodies with these qualities too.
The second rung is the realization that there’s a deeper form of love available – personality (Diotima refers to this as their soul). This is also pretty straightforward; as you spend time with people you are attracted to, you talk to them and have deeper conversations. Most people spend their lives in the first two rungs on the ladder, such that you love your partner because of a combination of their body and personality. However, our previous concern comes up again; when you think about the personality traits that your partner possesses that you are attracted to, you also come to the realization that these are not actually exclusive to them. This realization brings us to the third rung.
The third rung is realizing that what you love about this other person really has nothing to do with them as a human being, but is instead a love of concepts that they embody. Once you realize this, the next step is realizing that the concepts this person embodies is a reflection of the environment/cultural context they were raised in. Thus, the next rungs are:
- Love of the laws and institutions that create the people/things you love
- Love of knowledge of the laws and institutions
- Love of knowledge itself
- Love of the Platonic form of beauty (similar to Plato’s Ideal World of Forms)
There’s tons of discussion on these further rungs, but Diotima’s key point is this: once you’ve experience a higher forms of love, you can’t be satisfied with lower forms.
Other Views on Love
Diotima’s hierarchical concept of love became a foundational concept for much of western philosophy for centuries – lust is the lowest form of love, love of God is the highest form of love. This changed in the mid-18th century, when Romanticism happened, which pushes the idea that love is not practical/logical, as is preached in the classical eras, but these feelings are not within human control. Romanticism argues that love should be intuitive and based on feelings, which can be challenging and impractical, leading to much despair and pining.
Much of more recent philosophical deals with this problem of the impracticality of the Romantic version of love. For example, Schopenhauer compares marriage to two porcupines trying to huddle together to stay warm; the art of being with someone you love is huddling close enough to keep each other warm but not so close that you prick each other. To Schopenhauer, everything is about survival and the will to life; what we’re attracted to in someone else is what we perceive as weaknesses in ourselves. Humans hope that by supplementing these weaknesses through a relationship, you are more likely to prosper and survive.
Nietzsche on Love
This is where Nietzsche’s views on love come in. Nietzsche’s style is that he likes to take two things that appear distinct and argue that they are in fact two different states of the same thing (for example, night and day are not distinct but two different states of the same thing). So, in the case of love, he notes that greed and love are quite similar.
Nietzsche on Greed and Love
“Greed and love: what different feeling these two terms evoke! Nevertheless, it could be the same instinct that has two names – once deprecated by those who have, in whom the instinct has calmed down to some extent, and who are afraid for their ‘possessions’, and the other time seen from the point of view of those who are not satisfied but still thirsty, and who therefore glorify the instinct as ‘good’.”
In other words, love and greed are actually the same thing, the only difference between whether we classify it as love or greed in the moment depends on how satisfied someone is with what they already have.
Example: You’re a huge fan of Italian sports cars and you save up a lot of money and finally get one. Someone else comes along who is also a fan of these cars and decides that they want your car specifically, going to extreme measures to take your car from you. This person would seem greedy. Yet, being a lover of cars yourself, if you came across this car in your travels, you would also want it, but you would think about it in terms of your love of cars, not that you’re being greedy. Now replace the car with your significant other.
Nietzsche doesn’t think that the equivalence of love and greed is a bad thing; he just thinks that, like all else, love is a will to power. In fact, he think it’s a beneficial will to power, and is a big fan of love and friendships. All he’s saying is to take a closer look at why you’re doing these things and don’t try to justify your actions with how it’s all about the other person and just accept that it’s a manifestation of your own will to power.
Aside: Perception of Nietzsche
Stuff like this is why I think Nietzsche is misunderstood a lot of the time. If you look at his work with little context (“Love is greed!” “Existence is will to power!”) he seems empty, joyless, and bitter, and is thus used as a poster boy for nihilism (I don’t even think Nietzsche’s philosophy is nihilist other than acknowledging that life has no inherent meaning). This type of thing is why his work was so easily distorted by his sister after his death to support the Third Reich. His work actually has far more nuance and optimism than he is often given credit for. Interestingly, Nietzsche seemed to predict the impact of his work in his autobiography:
Nietzsche on His Impact
“I know my fate. One day my name will be associated with the memory of something tremendous — a crisis without equal on earth, the most profound collision of conscience, a decision that was conjured up against everything that had been believed, demanded, hallowed so far. I am no man, I am dynamite.”