Loving is not the same as desiring

Loving is not the same as desiring

Posted on November 3rd, 2009 by Frank Wilson

What St. Augustine says of time could just as well be said of love, that we know what it is until we try saying what it is. Nevertheless, a lot has certainly been said about love. Poets, prophets and philosophers have all weighed in on the subject. Songwriters have made a cliché of it.

Recently I resumed reading Irving Singer’s excellent book George Santayana: Literary Philosopher, which I mentioned in an earlier column. I took it up again at the chapter titled “Idealization: Santayana vs. Freud.”

“For Santayana,” Singer tells us, “love is a creative search for an unattainable ideal object.” Singer then points out that “Freud also characterized love as ‘idealization.'” The difference is that “Freud equates idealization with ‘overestimation’ or ‘overvaluation’ of a sexual object.”

Observing that Freud and Santayana both pose an identical question — “What is it that the lover really desires in another person?” — Singer goes on to suggest that “there is something wrong with the question … It seems to ask about love but is really limited to desire. Yet loving is not the same as desiring. We desire things or persons for what they can give us, for satisfactions we hope they will provide. In loving anyone, however, we take an interest in that person and not just as a vehicle to something else.”

This seems to me to be exactly right. Love, genuine love, is intensely focused upon particulars — this person, as distinct from all others. Montaigne’s explanation of why he and his friend Étienne de la Boétie were so attached to each other says it all: “Because it was he, because it was I.” I love my wife because she is who she is exactly the way she is. Why she loves me is her business — and a mystery to me, which is probably as it should be.

There is, I think, a decisive factor in all this: What makes a particular person who that person is in particular is precisely what that person does not have in common with any other. When we encounter a person — in contrast to merely meeting someone — what is revealed to us is that person’s uniqueness. It is a mystery to which one can only be initiated by the actual presence of the person. The involvement in that mystery enhances one’s own being, which accounts for the sense of deprivation one can feel when that person is absent.

I remember quite vividly when I first saw my wife. She was standing on the porch of a cabin at a summer camp where my foster son worked. She waved at us and we waved back, and for some reason … or no, not for any reason; I just knew — intuitively, in the Aristotelian sense, an immediate awareness — that in that wave something destined was beckoning (which is the only way I can put it that comes at all near to how I felt at the time).

Piers Paul Read’s 2002 novel Alice in Exile, which I also recently read, provides some wonderful insights into the ambiguities of love. Pavel Rettenberg, the Russian aristocrat who rescues the heroine, Alice Fry, from scandal and disgrace, is a womanizer who has been routinely unfaithful to his wife, Tatyana. Having discovered that “after a certain period of time, making love to a mistress becomes as banal as making love to a wife,” Rettenberg concludes that “the thrill … was not in eating the beast, it was in the chase and the kill.”

Rettenberg at first sees Alice as just another conquest, but their involvement turns out to be the genuine article, mutual love. And this experience of love, together with the hard lessons that come of loss — loss of his mother, his sons, his estates, his country — has a transfiguring effect upon his personality. The change from sophisticated seducer to compassionate human becomes manifest as he tends his dying wife:

She was unconscious; her breathing was a painful rasping; her skin was hot. ‘She will die,’ Rettenberg thought to himself, ‘but she will not die soon enough to save us.’ He looked at the pillow and thought of how little strength it would take to smother her. … After all the slaughter they had witnessed, would it matter if he was to bring her death forward by a day or two and thereby save his own life and no doubt the lives of Nina, Alice and her son?

Rettenberg looked at the pillow but his hands did not move towards it. Unaccountably he felt quite unable to obey his own common sense. Perhaps it was just because he had seen so much slaughter; because Sasha had died; because Fedor had killed and then had died; that he could not contemplate taking an innocent human life. The woman who had been entrusted to him, and whom he had so mistreated, would be cared by him until the end.

The mystery of personhood finds its correspondence in the mystery of love. As Dostoevsky put it: “To love someone means to see him as God intended him.”