Oxford’s “Very Short Introductions” series, which began in 1995, now has an astounding 350 volumes. Obviously, the series sells well, and one would think that its appeal extends beyond professional academics to the wider public. That makes authoring such a book a difficult enterprise, especially when the books must, of course, be very short, typically around 120 pages of text. That’s a lot to pack into a subject like love, which has been examined since the beginnings of Western philosophy and literature.

Moreover, as de Sousa argues in the first two chapters of Love, there is little reason to think that a conceptual analysis of love will yield only one unique answer. As Plato’s Symposium amply testifies by having six (or seven, if you count Alcibiades unscheduled appearance and speech at the end of the dialogue) completely different accounts of the nature of love ranging from reductive physicalist accounts to ones explaining love as a reunification with our ‘other half’, or to a desire for immortality. Examining love is far more likely to lead to puzzles than answers, according to de Sousa: Can we only love other humans, or can we love other animate things, or even inanimate ones? Is love objective or subjective? Is love based on reasons or is it beyond reason? Is love a kind of freedom or bondage?

De Sousa’s target is erotic love rather than agape or philia. More specifically, he investigates what he calls “limerence,” after the work of American psychologist, Dorothy Tennov, particularly in her 1979 book, Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love. De Sousa never provides a precise definition of this concept, though he seems clearly to follow Tennov who describes it as an involuntary, interpersonal state that involves obsessive thoughts about the object of affection, an irrational positive attribution of the object’s qualities, emotional dependency, and a longing for reciprocation. While this is hardly the sort of stuff you would find on a typical Valentine’s Day card, many of our greatest writers, according to de Sousa, have described one or more of these characteristics regarding being in love. Love is a mixed blessing, as they say.

In subsequent short chapters, de Sousa examines the connection between love and desire; between love and reason; the scientific study of love, and, in his last chapter, titled, “Utopia,” he considers alternatives to our current ideology of “monogamism,” which he describes as separate from the practice of monogamy. Rather, he says, it “is neither a choice nor a practice; it is a normative system, as firmly enforced by regular adulterers as the war on drugs by drug lords” (100). As he does elsewhere in the book, de Sousa argues that we have little reason to believe the socially accepted view, and that we should be open to alternatives.

While it seems clear that love essentially involves desire, it is far less clear what desire itself is and whether love is reason-based or reason-free.  As Diotima pointed out to Socrates, love is a desire for something we lack. In this, it is a motivating force. E.g., if I’m thirsty, I am moved to get a drink. But note, as de Sousa does, that the desire itself can often be painful, and our limerant desires are often (always?) of this sort. In this, the desire of love is like a craving. Worse yet, de Sousa argues, the fulfilment of our desire is often also associated with disquieting feelings — often of disappointment or guilt. Why, then, do we love? One answer to this is: for no reason at all. Following the 12^thcentury Countess of Champagne, who disparaged as unloving all relationships based upon feelings of obligation, necessity, and commitment (45), de Sousa argues that love is a reason-free desire.

De Sousa continues his investigation regarded the relationship between love and reason in Chapter 4. Briefly there have been two main, and divergent, strands of thought taken here. One is that we love on the basis of reasons, and those reasons stem from the qualities of the beloved. E.g., I love her because she is intelligent and beautiful. Alternatively, there are those who eschew reason as a contributing factor for love. These folks believe that love is “bestowed” on a person irrespective of his or her qualities. Both views, as de Sousa points out, have their problems. The first view fails to recognize the specificity of the beloved. After all, you don’t love all beautiful and intelligent women; you love her. The second view, however, seems phenomenologically false: our initial desire for someone is typically the result of some features that person has and hence isn’t completely baseless. A third view, which de Sousa calls the historicity view, and attributes to Niko Kolodny (71), can actually be found in the work of others as well (e.g., Irving Singer and Robert Nozick). Here, love is viewed as a combination of the lovers characteristics and the relationship that develops between them. So your love of her is originally based on her beauty and intelligence, but in time, the love continues because it is her beauty and intelligence as experienced in your lives together. I admit to favouring this last view, but it too is rejected by de Sousa (71-73).

The penultimate chapter of de Sousa’s book examines what science, including chemistry, biology, and the social sciences like psychology and sociology, has said about the nature of love.  His view about this is perhaps best summed up in the following passage at the end of the chapter: “From this brief survey of scientific approaches to love, as well as from the failure, in the last chapter, of all efforts to find any convincing way in which reasons are involved in love, we can conclude that our efforts to make sense of love are unlikely to succeed in bringing us into any simple harmony with nature” (96).

The claims made in this passage represent well de Sousa’s thoughts about explaining love in general. The concept is incredibly complex and unlikely to yield to simple analysis — certainly not the analysis we have conducted thus far despite some incredible insights made by poets, novelists, philosophers, and scientists through the ages about certain aspects of love. This is perhaps a sceptical attitude — and certainly too sceptical for many readers’ tastes, but I would argue that it is actually a philosophical attitude, which we first came across in Socrates as he berated us to continue our investigation and not to settle for false beliefs or half-truths. As I mentioned, not everyone appreciates this attitude, but for those willing to engage philosophically with a complex, perplexing notion, you would do well to spend some time reading this work.

© 2015 Robert Scott Stewart

Robert Scott Stewart, Ph.D., is a Professor of Philosophy at Cape Breton University. His most recent work has mostly been in the area of the philosophy of sex including two books: R.S. Stewart, ed., Talk About Sex: A Multidisciplinary Discussion (CBU Press, 2013) and Laurie Shrage & R.S. Stewart, Philosophizing About Sex (Broadview Press, 2015).