The Routledge Handbook of Love in Philosophy consists of seven sections: (1) Family and Friendship, (2) Romance and Sex, (3) Politics and Society, (4) Animals, Nature, and the Environment, (5) Art, Faith, and Meaning, (6) Rationality and Morality, and (7) Traditions: Historical and Contemporary. These sections are spread across thirty-nine chapters tackling a wide range of topics pertaining to the nature and the value of love. They include discussions of the relationship between love and knowledge, reason, value, and morality among others. In addressing these topics, contemporary, historical, as well as non-Western perspectives and methodologies are represented, including African, Chinese, Indian, and Muslim. In the Introduction Martin provides a helpful sketch of the various issues and themes discussed in the chapters, drawing connections between them that go beyond a simple summation of each section. In what follows I provide a small sample of the volume’s content. 

One of the two empirically informed chapters is Monique Wonderly’s “Early Relationships, Pathologies of Attachment, and the Capacity to Love”. It provides a clear overview of the attachment theory formulated by John Bowlby, and the now classic research on attachment styles (secure, anxious, avoidant) formed in early childhood, and their manifestations in romantic relationships. Wonderly points out that although attachment is not sufficient for love, it is related to valuing in important ways. Early attachments inform our capacity to empathize, to care, to be vulnerable, and develop our agency and identity. The development of these capacities determines the way we engage with our romantic partners. Not discussed in the chapter are the specific ways in which different attachment styles play out in romantic relationships with respect to trust, intimacy, jealousy, stability, and satisfaction with one’s relationships.    

Several contributions are made to the longstanding debate on the relationship between love and reasons. Esther Engels Kroeker, in “Reasons for Love” defends a hybrid view, according to which there are different kinds of love, one for which there are normative reasons (rational love), and one for which there are not (arational love). The former kind is more likely to contain both normative and nonnormative reasons than the latter. For Kroeker, love is not necessarily a hybrid: purely rational and arational loves exist (p. 282). Arational love is produced by some causal factors as in cases of romantic love at first sight, or parents’ love for their infant (p. 283). Rational love, on the other hand, takes root from the appreciation of the beloved’s intrinsic value and qualities, or from valuing the shared history. Interestingly, Kroeker says that if one loves for reasons, one cannot be said to be in love (p. 285). According to Kroeker, rational love becomes a hybrid love when the lover finds themselves in love with their beloved. On the other hand, arational love becomes a hybrid love when the lover begins to see and appreciate the various qualities of the beloved because they love them. 

I find two issues with Kroeker’s account. First, the distinction between loving and being in love is unclear. One could guess, given Kroeker’s examples, that being in love is a paradigm of romantic love as it is characterized as spontaneous and captivating, whereas loving is akin to companionate love, which is more measured and less passionate. While this categorization is what Kroeker might have had in mind, it remains to be shown why being in love is necessarily arational, while loving is not. Second, the account of hybrid love that begins as arational and becomes rational because the lover begins to appreciate the qualities of the beloved replaces reasons for love with reasons of love. If love provides reasons that figure in its content, one might hesitate to call the love rational for two reasons: (1) since reasons are not the grounds for love, the love in question is arational in the relevant sense, and therefore is not a hybrid love, and (2) since in love one is prone to idealization, reasons for love provided by it may not be accurately tracking the value of the beloved’s traits, in which case, love may be deemed irrational since it produces a mistaken evaluation of the beloved’s qualities.   

In “Reasons of Love”, Katrien Schaubroeck aims to account for the conflict between reasons of love and moral reasons by arguing that love is an “enabling condition for morality” (p. 297). She claims that the ‘separatist’ accounts, according to which reasons of love and morality are distinct and potentially contradictory, confuse morality and moralizing. Reductionists are also wrong to think that reasons of love are just moral reasons since doing so does not address Williams’s ‘one thought too many’ objection. Citing Jollimore, Schaubroeck says that love affords a unique perspective of the beloved, recognizing them as valuable and special, seeing them for the person they are. Generally then “without the experience of love we would not know what morality is about, let alone be able to behave morally” (p. 297). Furthermore, “Love is the ideal that we should strive for when interacting with other people”. Schaubroeck seems to take disinterested concern to be at the core of the kind of love that moves one to care for the beloved for their own sake. This way she attempt to dismiss the conflict between love and morality by saying that reasons of love and moral reasons are not that different. While it is reasonable to think that the husband mourns the life of a stranger he did not save because he has learned, through loving his wife, the value of an individual, there still remain questions whether and why he did the right thing. 

In one of the chapters on the connection between love and sex, Jennifer Ryan Lockhart in her “The Normative Potency of Sexually Exclusive Love” attempts to justify sexual exclusivity in love by postulating a distinctive sexual ethics according to which there is sui generis value to exclusive sexual activity. The requirement for sexual ethics stems from the failure of the general moral framework to demonstrate the goodness of sexual exclusivity by attributing instrumental value, personal preference, or intrinsic worth to it. Lockhart’s thorough analysis leaves one wondering why the idea of the goodness of excusive sexual love should not be abandoned altogether in light of the objections raised against it. 

Situating love in the social and political domain, Myisha Cherry in “Love, Anger, and Racial Justice” demonstrates the compatibility of love and anger in confronting racial injustice. Not only are anger and love compatible, but anger can also be a manifestation of love. Cherry argues that agape is the most relevant type of love in confronting injustice because it is spontaneous, unmotivated, not grounded in any particular qualities of the beloved object, which is not an individual person but a group of people. The object – the oppressor – is loved despite their qualities. Agape allows the lover to understand their tormentor, to sympathize, to seek reconciliation. Moral anger is generally directed at an injustice. Its presence indicates that the state of affairs is not acceptable by the angered. Agape and anger are compatible because both aim to transform and correct the situation. Anger can also be the vehicle for agape in manifesting self-love by standing up for oneself, recognizing the wrongdoer’s agency by holding them accountable so that they could improve, and for the moral community at large since it aims to restore justice. Indeed, both anger and agapic compassion seem necessary for changing the hearts and minds in an oppressive society.

Shyam Ranganathan’s “India’s Distinctive Moral Theory” is one of the chapters on love in non-Western philosophy. In it Ranganathan attempts to elucidate the methodological approaches to the task of explaining the concepts central to unfamiliar traditions, contrasting “interpretation” and “explication” (p. 372). The distinction appears to be between trying to make the unfamiliar view plausible in our terms, vs. showing how it holds together in its own terms, in such a way as to allow us to see how debates might have been framed in that tradition without taking sides. The fact that the distinction is itself rather hard to follow highlights the difficulty of understanding a tradition in which the more fundamental concepts lack obvious correspondence with those of our own. Thus we are given to understand the fault line across which Indian debates about love and morality take place relates to the question of the priority of the right or the good. In one camp, the Good produces the Right, as in Western “virtue ethics”, while in the other, exemplified by consequentialist theories, the Good justifies the Right. In Indian philosophy these are illustrated respectively by Jainism and Buddhism. Neither is very favorable to love as we understand it. On a third view, the Right justifies the Good. This favors a sort of deontology exemplified in the Indian tradition, by the Pūrva Mīmāmsā tradition and the Vedānta tradition. In a fourth tradition, embodied by “Bhakti/Love, also known as Yoga/Meditation”, the Right produces the Good.  This last conception makes love into a morality of its own.

The volume does present an impressive diversity of contributors and a bewildering breadth of topics. But like many of Routledge’s unwieldy “Handbooks”, this one collects more material than could be used in any one University course, yet would not provide enough on any reasonably focused course. It is difficult to detect a rationale for some of the specific topics broached by its different sections. 

Ⓒ 2020 Arina Pismenny

Arina Pismenny, University of Florida