What is love?

a loose and indeterminate reflection

And admission. I’m kind of a YouTube addict. I’m an old fella, so I run out of gas in the afternoons, and by early evening, I’m just a mind peering out from a flaccid shell. Oftentimes, when I’m in this droopy postmeridian state, I flop back into my recliner in the basement, pick up the remote, and open YouTube, where I indulge my omnivorous mini-addiction. I watch fishing videos, lectures and panels, do-it-yourself handyman stuff, music reaction videos (especially the one’s done my musicians themselves), fart pranks (yeah, I can go there), cultural and political criticism, history, and animal vids.

If I’m feeling emotionally run-down, I have a thing for the “puppy surprise” genre—people filmed by loved ones as they receive a new puppy. There’s something uniquely restorative in the similarity of response—that tearful joy—between bourgie young women, all manner of children, all ethnicities . . . intimidating dudes covered in questionable tattoos, middle-aged aunties, geriatric hillbillies (raises hand), sketchy-looking teens, businessmen, the variously disabled, soldiers, no matter. Something that transcends all these circumstances and performances. I’m a sucker for tears . . . and love. And here’s the mystery: a human and a dog who’ve never before met can become instant friends. For real, they can start right out loving one another.

In a long form bit on migration and evolutionary anthropology, I did a brief excursus on the human-dog relation:

Wooden tool artifacts found in China and Germany from around the same Homo sapiens/Denisovan/Neanderthal period show a high degree of innovative intelligence; but other finds show something more, and more “human”: symbolic thought in art and ritualistic disposal of their dead. They had become transcendent. (Barbara Duden, on of my favorite historians, once remarked that formal disposal of our dead is a decisive break between humans and other animals.) We can infer, and reasonably so, that these people not only believed, they had belief systems that reached in beyond the merely sensory. We were already taking our first steps—in my own interpretation—toward understanding the world (rightly, in my view) as enchanted, even divine. I’ll leave that there, lest I steer myself and the patient reader off onto a more Platonic path that posits spirit and consciousness as ontologically prior to the material. (Roughly paraphrasing Private Witt from The Thin Red Line: “What if there’s one big soul? Everyone lookin’ for salvation by himself. Each like a coal thrown from the fire.”)

I mentioned earlier about our symbiosis with fire, and it just occurs to me, as anyone whose ever been hypnotized by a camp fire knows, that the miraculous and volatile magic of fire unlocks our imagination, and with it the capacity to grasp the transcendent.

Along that line, I want to talk about love, a manifestation of that transcendence that binds together more species than even our own. In particular, I want to detour—if that’s what I’m really doing—into the relationship that grew up between ourselves, and the animals that we know now as dogs. Any dog-lovers out there, know that dogs, like us . . . know love (a relation as miraculous and as volatile, in many ways, as fire).

Some researchers have called the human-dog relationship a “dual mediator” of empathy, but dog-lovers and their dogs know this is nothing so bloodlessly clinical. It’s miraculous! Dogs, as intelligent and affectionate animals, call to something in us that knows love prior to the intervention of judgement (something Christ preached, but which is much harder between humans who stand before each other pre-armed with that judgement), a liminal bridge of consciousness and recognition across the species divide.

It seems likely that the first instances of perhaps ostracized wolves or abandoned wolf pups being human cohabitants may have happened as far back as 130,000 years ago. People keep wolves now as pets, so surely this kind of relation, especially in a symbiotic quest for food, was earlier than most fossil records—as thin as they are—attest. I would speculate, given the late arrival of pastoral, cultivator, and war societies, that hunter-gatherers with wolf-dogs were the first instantiation of animal husbandry among humans, leading (through “cognitive flowering”) to the domestication of horses, cattle, sheep, camels, cats, chickens, and the like. By at least 36,000 years ago, dogs were already distinct from their lupine forebears, according to the discovery of a canine skeleton in Belgium.

It needs saying, again, nothing linear here, as 40,000 years back, wolves themselves were far more genetically and morphologically diverse than they are now, and domestication, likewise, surely happened in several places independently of one another. Let’s bear in mind that the flora and fauna within and upon which they lived were also very different. Genetic evidence traces all modern dogs back to at least two distinct “domestication events,” and yet all modern dogs are procreatively compatible with one another.

(Does anyone doubt that early humans sometimes watched wolf pack taking down prey . . . and then adopted their tactics?)

Yes, the early canine-human relation was in many ways far more practical than sentimental (but canines are practical as well as sensual people). More than that, upon this practical relation—as between humans themselves—form the bonds of companionship. Dogs and humans are both intensely social creatures.

Fun fact: As cultivation came to play a larger role in human communities, both humans and dogs evolved an increased capacity for the digestion of vegetable starches. In selective breeding for different tasks (pulling sleds, herding sheep, tracking, hunting rats, etc.), these breeds also display variable tolerances for starch-heavy omnivorous diets.

Personal speculation: By learning cross-species ‘empathy,” or selfless affection and a willingness to understand one another, our ability to care for one another was accelerated.

Now . . . this doesn’t cover the whole of the question posed in the title, of course. The affection shared between humans and dogs, as one example, has a different character than other things we categorize, or at least name, as love. Our instant affection for dogs, especially puppies, like our instant tenderness toward infants, responds to (or projects) something to do with innocence or harmlessness . . . and that instant and receptive vulnerability. There is a special freedom in being vulnerable, one that many of us, especially men, have drilled out of us as we grow older. Even as puppies and babies mature, requiring the kinds of discipline and correction, and asserting their wills against our own, that initial bond that’s formed in those moments of shared susceptibility abides through those flashes of assertion and conflict.

It was 2003, during the nascent antiwar movement, when I met Cathy Lutz—a UNC-Chapell Hill professor. She had just written a book about her study of the Fort Bragg adjacent city Fayetteville, North Carolina: Homefront: A Military City and the American Twentieth Century. I was writing and speaking quite a lot about war and masculinity then, and Cathy recommended a book by the Hegelian object-relations theorist and psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin, published in 1988, called The Bonds of Love—Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination.

Benjamin is identified with intersubjective psychoanalysis, which has been described as “beyond doer and done-to.” Her book is about domination, after all. I haven’t any depth in psychoanalysis per se, but there were a few things that stood out for me in that book. Chief among my takeaways from Benjamin’s book was her description of the tension between self-assertion and mutual recognition. (Her most troubling example of the breakdown of this tension was the sado-masochism represented in Ann Desclos’ novel The Story of O.) Benjamin focused on the relation between analyst and analysand, but this “tension” account rang true to me with regard to fraterno-sororal and filial love, friendships and “romantic” relations. Her most succinct account was (paraphrasing here) “love is when I am yours and still my own, and you are mine and still your own.” Love is not an “open borders” policy, but it presupposes boundaries that are permeable.

In the development of a relation, there are serial moments of reception, projection, interpretation, and correction wherein we attune to one another. When the sustained tension between mutual recognition, which needs be a commitment, and self-assertion, says Benjamin—that “intersubjective field” being like a tightwalkers line strung between these two poles—is broken, either the relation itself is abandoned, or it devolves into domination and the “paradox of recognition,” a version of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic.

“Perhaps it is because this conception of the individual reflects a powerful experience,” writes Benjamin, “the experience of a paradox as painful, or even intolerable. Perhaps also, because of a continuing fear that dependency on the other is a threat to independence, that recognition of the other comprises the self. When the conflict between dependence and independence becomes too intense, the psyche gives up the paradox in favor of an opposition.” (Bonds of Love, 50)

Benjamin borrowed the term intersubjectivity from Jürgen Habermas. She begins with the human need for recognition. It’s a fuzzy term, but most of us (ahem) recognize its meaning. Human beings need to belong. We need to be recognized by them as well as granting recognition. Synonyms for recognition in common speech include acceptance, affirmation, validation, and love. For you to recognize me, I need to acknowledge (recognize) you as a subject like myself, and vice versa. Research with mothers and infants shows that this mutuality begins very early. Unlike the object-relations approach of intrapsychic analysis, the child is not merely an appetite aimed at a breast or seeking warmth. The child and mother actually recognize one another. An infant in short order knows the sight, smell, and sound of his or her mother and takes pleasure in her presence beyond the mere satisfaction of appetites. We can see here those permeable psychic boundaries and that necessary element of vulnerability. There’s also “self assertion,” or you might call it willfulness. When the balance (or tightrope) is broken by the polarization of self-assertion and vulnerability between two people, the love that is constituted in mutuality—in “fusion,” as Nancy C.M. Hartsock once put it—“the inability to sustain paradox . . . convert[s] the exchange of recognition into domination and submission.” (Benjamin, 12)

Benjamin summarizes this paradox as the simultaneous need for the “independence and dependence of the self-conscious.” (32) Part of this tension is the fact that the other person is held in my mind in a way that never completely accords with the other person’s own experience of existence ^^^. These misprojections produce expectations, the frustration of expectations, misunderstandings, and so forth. In a sense, the other person must continually be destroyed in my mind, then observed to have survived that destruction in order for me to reassure myself of her existence, an existence—a real subject—who makes recognition possible. Her independence is necessary for her to recognize me, subject to subject. Yet the way I know she is independent is by challenging her independence through my own self-assertion. We’ve all known this tension with our children, our friends, our lovers, our spouses, our parents and on and on. When this dynamic involves a ready state of forgiveness, of starting over, power is negotiated and mutuality is retained. When one “ego,” or whatever you want to call it, has to prevail and another submit, mutuality is lost and a domination-submission dynamic replaces it. The submissive might then desire revenge, which is sought through various sly passivities. The dominator loses recognition, because his objectification of the other out of a desire for omnipotence (the “original sin” btw) has erased the other’s subjectivity and with it the basis for his or her recognition. If one asserts his will, destroying the other in his mind, and the other survives without becoming combative, without pitting the two egos against one another, then rapprochement is still possible. Serial experiences of rapprochement lead to that attunement, and the earliest experiences of attunement—usually between mother and child, but now a little more often including the father—are bound to the development and experience of the erotic—not simply sexual feeling, but the experience of oneness, which presupposes the permeability of boundaries, that psychosomatic sense of deep attachment. Children, for example, who are raised in a zero-sum atmosphere of parental omnipotence form powerful defensive psychic boundaries early, which can lead to abject submission accompanied by feelings of vengefulness and resentment. They often have difficulty later in life forming relationships characterized by mutuality. On the other hand, children who experience attunement, which is a balance of self-assertion and recognition (not permissiveness), are habituated to the practices of mutuality. Erotic attachments later in life, which can include sexual attraction, are likely to reflect these early experiences of attachment; and some will tend toward attunement, while others will tend toward the domination-submission dynamic.

I made a lot of this while writing Borderline—a study of sorts of dominator masculinity. While the above is not a perfectly predictable pattern, the sons of men who abused the boys’ mothers are more likely to abuse their partners, and the daughters of men who abused the girls’ mothers are more likely to neglect or abuse their kids. (In a more sinister vein, masculinity constructed as domination eroticizes violence.) A tragic paradox here is that women in a society where masculinity is constructed as domination are indoctrinated to find dominance in men sexually attractive, which makes Benjamin’s study of the domination-submission dynamic, as opposed to simply domination, so disturbing.

Even the most sophisticated feminist thinkers frequently shy away from the analysis of submission, for fear that in admitting woman’s participation in the relationship of domination, the onus of responsibility will appear to shift from men to women, and the moral victory from women to men. More generally, this has been a weakness of radical politics: to idealize the oppressed, as if their politics and culture were untouched by the system of domination, as if people did not participate in their own submission. To reduce domination to a simple relation of doer and done-to is to substitute moral outrage for analysis. Such a simplification, moreover, reproduces the structure of gender polarity under the guise of attacking it. (Benjamin, 9-10)

In war, and warlike cultures, where dominator masculinity is given its freest reign, there’s also a kind of extreme male submission to authority, an adoration of dominant figures. This might be anything from an admired infantry squad leader to the Führer. If we can’t understand the submission half of this dynamic, we can’t fully grasp the power of domination and its relation to the persistence of conquest-masculinity. I wish more people were studying masculinities with regard to the protofascist upsurges of recent years, and the Trump cult phenomenon. I have a tendency to wander afield on this issue—sorry dear reader—but it keeps on rearing its head. Bit of an obsession on my part, I suppose.

“The historic problem that shaped the inquiry into domination most powerfully,” said Benjamin, “was . . . the appearance of fascist mass movements with their ecstatic submission to hypnotic leaders.” (Benjamin, 6)

What’s this “paradox of recognition” then?

In gangster films and urban crime films, we often see violent men in search of something called “respect.” This conceit is a clarified artistic version of the relationship between the desire for recognition and the desire for omnipotence coalesced into a domination dynamic. The “man of respect” in the gangster genre is actually a man who is feared. He is admired, too, but for his capacity to create fear. If you fail to recognize him, that is, give him his due respect, he might hurt you or kill you. The problem for this man is that he can never know mutuality. At the same time that he asserts himself through the desire for omnipotence, he forecloses the possibility that the other can see him in the sense of I-Thou, subject to subject. This domination-respect is an anti-erotic connection. One’s sense of belonging doesn’t entail “fusion” or “attunement,” which would presuppose the permeability of one’s boundaries. There is not the vulnerability of love, but a world seen through a bulletproof one-way mirror. This sets up a cycle of demand and frustration.

I reckon many readers by now are seeing something similar, albeit less dramatic, in relations You’ve experienced or observed.

Benjamin was writing as a feminist, so this gendered dynamic was foremost in her mind. Psychotherapeutic specialties—using the intrapsychic (as opposed to intersubjective) or medicalized approach—could not penetrate the cultural origins and social structures of masculinity constructed as domination or violence as long as they attended only to the symbolic world of the infant and child as if it were both universal and immunized from formative and variant cultural influences. Boys, who are indoctrinated into the idea that dependency is a threat to their selfhood as a male, will turn against the mother, and against all women, as a deleterious influence. They’ll will close the border (here I assert a psychoanalytic connection between Trumpism and “the crisis of masculinity” as a deficit of love). “Why is the border closed between the genders?” Benjamin asks. “Feminist theory concludes that the derogation of the female side of the polarity leads to a hardening of the opposition between male and female individuality as they are now constructed.” (113)

The need for recognition is transformed into a struggle for omnipotence—understood as a flight from dependency (real men are independent!)—not by an imbalance between id, ego, and superego, but by particular constructions of masculinity (and complementary femininities). Because boys generally form their first and deepest attachment to their mothers, this is a painful process of separation that can contribute to deep confusion, as well as resentment toward and irrational desire for revenge against women: You made me dependent! You told me no! You threatened my boundaries with feminine vulnerability! ← These traumas are sublimated in demands to “close borders” and the perversely eroticized desire for revenge against women (and as anti-feminism).

But the psychoanalytic frame, like the “objective” frame is inadequate to describe or define love as love is experienced. Even Benjamin’s nuanced intersubjective perspective is trapped within its own schema—never getting fully ahold of that “oceanic” phenomenology. Nor does it take on the varieties of “love.” I’m immediately reminded of C’S. Lewis’s four categories of love: storge, philia, eros, and agape. From the C.S.Lewis Website, with its decidedly Christian gloss:

Affection (storge)

Affection covers an array of loves. Like animals, the care of mother to babe is a picture of affection. It relies on the expected and the familiar. Lewis describes it as humble. “Affection almost slinks or seeps through our lives,” he says. “It lives with humble, un-dress, private things; soft slippers, old clothes, old jokes, the thump of a sleepy dog’s tail on the kitchen floor, the sound of a sewing-machine…” Affection can sit alongside other loves and often does. For example, when a man and woman fall in love it is often because of certain affections – a particular location, experience, personality, interest – that begin to wrap around the couple so to make love an expected and familiar part of their shared lives. It’s the familiarity of, “the people with whom you are thrown together in the family, the college, the mess, the ship, the religious house,” says Lewis. The affection for the people always around us, in the normal day-to-day of life, is the majority of the love we experience, even if we don’t label it.

Friendship (philia)

Friendship is the love dismissed. “To the Ancients, Friendship seemed the happiest and most fully human of all loves,” says Lewis, “the crown of life and the school of virtue. The modern world, in comparison, ignores it.” Why? Perhaps we know it’s the most time consuming, the least celebrated, the one we could live without. Perhaps too, as Lewis says, “few value it because few experience it.” Romance lends itself to conception, affection enables us to have a sense of place and belonging, and charity provides a track to redemption. But friendship doesn’t provide the same level of productivity, if we want to state it in a consumer mindset. However, Lewis thinks friendship likely has closest resemblance to Heaven where we will be intertwined in our relationships. We develop a kinship over something in common and that longing for camaraderie makes friendship all the more wanted. “Friendship must be about something,” Lewis says, “even if it were only an enthusiasm for dominoes or white mice. Those who have nothing can share nothing; those who are going nowhere can have no fellow-travellers.” Think about it too. Friendships have begun faith movements, developed entire areas of thought, and contributed to many projects from art to business.

Romantic (eros)

Different than friendship, lovers, “are always talking to one another about their love” and “are normally face to face, absorbed in each other,” says Lewis. The danger in romantic love is to follow blindly after a feeling of passion. Then, we celebrate the passion and think its absence means such love has died. Certainly, true romance is not so fickle. Though the feeling is useful. “The event of falling in love is of such a nature that we are right to reject as intolerable the idea that it should be transitory,” says Lewis. “In one high bound it has overleaped the massive wall of our selfhood; it has made appetite itself altruistic, tossed personal happiness aside as a triviality and planted the interests of another in the centre of our being. Spontaneously and without effort we have fulfilled the law (towards one person) by loving our neighbour as ourselves. It is an image, a foretaste, of what we must become to all if Love Himself rules in us without a rival.” There’s a reason Scripture teaches this bond of man and woman, from Genesis onward, is the picture of God’s love for the world, Christ for his bride, the church. When we discover afresh that romance is more deeply set than the drivel served up by our culture, than we will more rightly hold our spouse in the model of unconditional love.

Charity (agape)

This is our chief aim, the unconditional love of the Father given to us through his Son. Affection, friendship and romantic love are each the training ground for charity to grow. It’s also a rival to the three. Lewis mentions St. Augustine’s deep loss of a friend who says that such desolation is what occurs when we give our heart to anything but God. “All human beings pass away,” says Lewis. “Don’t put your goods in a leaky vessel. Don’t spend too much on a house you may be turned out of.” Yet, we are made to love and we are in want of it. If we play it safe, we are not living out the Gospel, but burying the coin in the safe ground, as the parable says. Lewis reminds us:

“There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket—safe, dark, motionless, airless—it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.”

I, too, am a Christian, perhaps of a somewhat different sort than Lewis, but we’re a contentious horde.

When I flip through my Eerdmann’s Bible Dictionary, I find that the Hebrew and Greek words love and hate, both of which are called simply love and hate in English, have several words and connotations, among them affection or hostility, but also references to loyalty and disloyalty, agreement and disagreement (without the emotional baggage), association and disassociation . . . sometimes simply turning toward (love) or turning away from (hate). Jesus obviously didn’t tell people to despise their parents, for example. He did suggest they might “turn away” from their parents’ culture.

Regarding love, my own favorite passages in Paul’s letters is 1 Corinthians 13, in which Paul tells his Corinthian sister and brothers,

If I speak in the tongues of human beings and of the angels, but do not have love, I have become a resounding brass and clanging cymbal. And if I have prophecy and know all the mysteries and all the knowledge, and if I have faith, of such a sort as to move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. And if I distribute all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that it may be burned, and do not have love, I am profited nothing. Love is magnanimous, live is kind, is not envious, does not boast, does not bluster, Does not act in an unseemly fashion, does not for things of its own, is not irascible, does not take account of the evil deed, Does not rejoice in injustice, but rejoices with the truth. It tolerates all things, hopes in all things, endures in all things. Love never fails; but if there are prophecies, they will be made ineffectual; if tongues, they will cease; if knowledge, it will be made ineffectual. For we partially and we prophecy partially; But, when that which is complete comes, what is partial will be rendered futile. When I was an infant, I reckoned things as an infant; having become a man, I did away with infantile things. For as yet we see by way of a mirror darkly, in an enigma, but then face to face; as yet I know partially, but then I shall know fully, just as I am fully known. But now abide faith, hope, and love—and the greatest of these is love.

Paul lived in a time before continental philosophy started asking about “the constitution of the subject,” but he was no stranger to the distinction between authenticity and performativity, both of which are native to the human condition. Likewise he anticipated every question raised by subsequent philosophers about this constitution.

Agamben returned to Paul. Althusser, Badiou, Benjamin (via Derrida), Heidegger, Hobbes, Kant, Locke, Marx, Nietzsche, Rousseau, Schmitt, Adam Smith, Spinoza, and Žižek (as well as his psychoanalytic mentor Lacan) . . . all found themselves at one point or another dealing with Paul.

Love—as Paul speaks of it here—connects us, and the “bonds of love” (sometimes called “the bonds of love and unity”) are what constitute each of us. I am son, brother, friend, cousin, nephew, grandson, husband, father, uncle, grandfather, student, teacher . . . without these bonds, my “self” or my “identity” would be something on the order of a cipher, the generic representative of a species, an imprisoned amnesiac.

When performativity trumps that authentic, haptic call and response, the other becomes an object of manipulation and I enter again into the paradox of recognition.

Love is the stuff that runs through all this contingency. This I believe. It’s the ethereal bonding agent not just of human relations, or even interspecial relations, but of the universe itself. Not anything I can prove, but our indescribable experience of love—even in its most troubled and troublesome appearances—certainly poses an indescribable rebuttal to the physicalists who would tell us that it’s merely a collection of electrochemical reactions. There is much that’s real and defies our pocket-sized descriptive talents. In fact, there is much for which our attempts at description conceal its essence. Poets get at it obliquely. Mystics dwell on its shore.

We don’t create love . . . we partake. We breathe it in . . . trembling and awestruck.

Then again, I believe that consciousness is prior to material . . . so there’s that.

Another wrinkle in defining “love,” of course, are all the ways in which we use the word. Consider “love” as a form of expressive hyperbole. “I love breadfruit” or whatever . . . objects ranging from corporate diners to pop music to a configuration of the sky. We know the difference, of course, between “I love corned beef and cabbage” and “I love my husband” or “my daughter”; but I honestly worry nowadays that atomized entrapment, our disembodiment, our trained circus animal self-centeredness, and learned superficiality might be undermining this kind of casual common sense. We live in a time of progressive trivialization.

I don’t pretend to answer the title’s question, but I’m sure that self-enclosure is a barrier to real love of whatever variety. The other barriers are distraction and the promiscuous pluralism of conflict. Love has its enemies.

Readers . . . your thoughts.

Peace.