I Would Do Anything For Love
Love is one of the lesser topics of philosophical treatment. Like the word “belief” the term has a fulsome cloud of meaning. The more one thinks about a statement about love, the less clear one becomes about what is meant. Would I do anything for love? It all depends on exactly what you have in mind when it comes to love. “Love” is shorthand for a complex of instinctive reactions, emotional responses, and aesthetic evaluations. Usually the male female, yin and yang of difference and attraction come to mind. That is a place to start.
“Philosopher of love” does not bring Nietzsche to mind. But, Nietzsche penned a number of aphorisms on the subject in The Gay Science, written in 1882. With his distinctive style of doing philosophy with a hammer he offers this contrast between male and female sensibility.
Woman gives herself away, man acquires more – I do not see how one can get around this natural opposition by means of social contracts or with the best will in the world to be just, desirable as it may be not to remind oneself constantly how harsh, terrible, enigmatic, and immoral this antagonism is. For love, thought of in its entirety as great and full, is nature, and being nature, it is in all eternity something ‘immoral’ aphorism 363
Nietzsche notes the testosterone fueled aggression, whether tempered or civilized by culture– is a undeniable male experience of love. On the other hand the female seeks a secure harbor, a simpatico companion. As with all philosophical assertions this is not the conclusion of a detailed survey, let alone a double blind study. But it does seem to accord with general observation. There is “the dance” the tentative movement into deeper intimacy that we’ve all experienced with those that we’ve come to care for most deeply. The dissonance must be worked with and ultimately affirmed……. She is never to become me.
Music is a better vehicle than any words to communicate the essence of the matter. So, I offer this melancholy glam rock tune by Nazareth https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BU3xx7rxVLY
Allow yourself to feel the longing and palpable suffering that love entails in the chords: Love Hurts.
5 thoughts on “I Would Do Anything For Love”
I can’t remember who said this but it goes like this, “If love doesn’t mean you care for one more than another, it doesn’t mean anything at all.
Nietzsche’s take on love is specific to his time, society and gender, although he seems blindly to regard it as universal. I already have lived longer than he did and so have spent more time wading in love, but certainly never have “given myself away” as he proclaims I must have.
Moreover, Nietzsche fixates exclusively on heterosexual desires as love. Nonsense! Sex and love are wholly distinct, although either can lead to the other.
But I defy anyone to compose a more succinct, precise and encompassing definition than Robert Heinlein’s “Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.” (OK, “another creature” instead of “another person” would broaden it even further.) Love is your free offering to the well-being of another, not a craving to satisfy your own emotional need.
Dizzy craving and its satisfaction surely are rapturous, but they should be correctly identified as infatuation or in-loveness (regrettably hard to rhyme in songs) to distinguish that feeling from actual benevolent caring.
Nancy, thanks for the cogent comments. Nietzsche was a philologist and well recognized that all statements are conditioned by one’s time & place. In fact he was no Platonist and attacked the very concept of universal truth with gusto. So to that point, you and he are agreed.
Your comments underline mult-valence of the term love. It’s use is inclusive of the drive to reproduce, erotic desire to possess the other as object, the satisfactions of friendship, aesthetic approval, and a long term monogamous relationship of reciprocal respect and mutual support. Certainly this is but a small sampling of the usage of “love.” And who could contend with Heinlein’s definition? It is a very good one.
As to your final point, feelings can be distinguished from actual caring. It’s great though when the distinction is unnecessary.
Can’t pass up another opportunity to offer a tune by Air Supply that helps one feel the sublime coincidence of romantic feeling and genuine caring. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bG_zk6FwU0
Nancy and Admin: emphatically No, and No – and I’m happy to provide plenty of textual citations to support all of the following reason for why if requested.
Throughout all of Nietzsche’s published works he is explicit, consist, and emphatic that we must learn to love – the teaching of that love being the teaching of his Zarathustra to love mankind and life on this earth. In fact his most important personified virtues are women: Life, Wisdom, Happiness, and Eternity – all women, and in his own name in Beyond Good and Evil he says they are not to be harmed by man, and it is to the shame of modernity that they have been. Here it must also be noted that he explicitly condemns misogyny as the hallmark of a small mind.
Further, throughout his published works Nietzsche is just as explicit, consistent, and emphatic that the worst prejudice of modern philosophy is that one cannot break free from the prejudices of one’s own day (hence his relentless skewering of Hegel). His teaching on the alleged timeliness of one’s thoughts and prejudices was modernity’s own prejudice of superiority grounded in the scientific ideology of conflating progress in technology with progress in morality. I suggest you re-consider his book Untimely Meditations (emphasis upon why he titled it “untimely”).
I emphasize all of this because of how important Nietzsche always felt it was to emphasize that he was a teacher of slow reading. He knew that all would be lost if modern education continued down the track of cursory reading: the kind of cursory reading that leads people to think that his own thought was just a product of his time when literally every indication is that it was not; the kind of cursory reading that fails to recognize the absolute foundational role of love in his writings, a love so deep and encompassing that the mission of his Zarathustra’s life is to combat the very beliefs that cause men not to love one another and life on this earth.
Joe, I have never known a thoughtful person who would do anything for love. Love is a wonderful term with so many layers of meaning, paradox, even contradiction. It would be impossible to know what exactly one was responding to. Your sense of Nietzsche’s viewpoint is parallel with that of mine. The method of knowledge that he advocates is one in which the subject engages intimately with the object. And yes, slow and mindful is the game. This is the opposite of our data drenched, sensory overloaded ethos.