Love as we ought

Harry Scherer
Class of 2022

(2/2022) I recall writing an article during the spring semester of my freshman year entitled, "Love is not an emotion." While my intention with that title was to lend some rhetorical force behind the idea that love is not merely an emotion, I’d like to take the opportunity to qualify my point.

When someone says, "I love you" to another, what is he saying? At the outset, let’s assume that this person means what he is saying (or, if any distinction exists at all, at least thinks he means what he is saying). The lover, for some reason, is motivated to verbalize something that he means; in other words, he is willing to incarnate, to bring into being, to inform a thing that previously existed only insofar as he thought it.

What brings him to this point of verbal recognition cannot merely be an act of the will. Something has to have preceded this act in order to internally motivate the lover to desire such love, to recognize this love, and to verbalize it.

For the past few months, I have been enamored by the imagination and genius of the 20th century French theorist René Girard. Girard clarified and popularized a theory called "mimetic desire." This idea has ancient roots, but Girard focused on the extent to which the desires of human persons can be largely based on the imitation of the perceived desires of another. When an agent desires a thing, he is imitating another’s desire for the same thing, which sets up a paradigm of mutual desire. From this mutual desire comes rivalry, violence, and perhaps the ultimate success of one agent of desire in acquiring the mutual object.

For the human person, the challenge is recognizing the extent to which his desires are a copy or mirror of the desires of another and doing his best to overcome this tendency through intellectual and volitional work. We could say that love, then, is nothing more than imitation: one man desires a woman insofar as another man of similar or greater social stature desires the same woman. This conclusion, though, is more satisfactory for cynics than romantics and leaves plenty to be desired.

Another theory of love is one of necessity. Men desire and subsequently love women because of an evolutional need for companionship and practical help. After his years of apparent self-sufficiency and independence, he is finally willing to look outside of himself and for another. "Finding" love, he thinks, is a compulsory task, and one that, when neglected, would ultimately lead one into a state of disorder and sorrow.

Again, I find this solution to be sadly animalistic and therefore insufficient. If we concede that man is a different kind of thing compared to non-rational animals, then we have to recognize the inherent differences and requirements of human love compared to the evolutionary necessities of mere animals.

A final inadequate conception of love is similar to the second but is more indicative of the contemporary scientistic tendencies of our age. Some think of the human person as a biological thing, nothing more and nothing less. According to biochemist Anthony Cashmore’s 2010 article entitled, "The Lucretian swerve: The biological basis of human behavior and the criminal justice system," "as living systems we are nothing more than a bag of chemicals." To be clear, the "we" he is referring to here is human persons.

The scientist who rejects the basic anthropological assumptions about the human person that have sustained human inquiry for centuries would suggest that "love" is a chemical thing, an interaction of internal substances that lead one to think that he loves a thing. This solution lacks the sort of sophistication that any sincere inquirer would desire, and the honesty demanded by the human person desiring to understand the roots and limits of his love.

Standing by the notion that love is not just an emotion thing, I will concede that there is an emotional element to love that will help us solve this problem. There is no question that human persons desire recognition. It seems to me that the element of human love that activates the emotions is the awareness that one looks at another and says, "he is good." Acknowledging the goodness of another is the closest way in which one can see that other person as God sees him. Through this lens, it is clear that the recipient of love has been given a gift when another confesses his love. It’s no hyperbole to say that a gift of this kind is one of enormous proportions.

This confession is a gift because an authentic expression of love, verbal or otherwise, is an engagement with God’s eternal identity. By analogy, we say that God loves as if this love is some sort of action. In addition to an analogical sense of action, we are sure that love is God’s very being. So, when one loves another, he is, at the very least in a metaphorical sense, extending the gift of God’s being to that other person.

How would a gift that requires such intentionality not engender some sort of emotional response? And how would the love of one for another not find at least some drive by his emotional desires? I can find no easy answer to this question. Our emotions are gifts in themselves, faculties that we have been given to recognize our personality and live in accordance with it. It’s silly to think that there’s anything wrong with the emotions in themselves. If the emotions aid us in coming to see love as a voluntary gift, then they are certainly good things. If they are used as a manifestation of disordered attachments, motivated by the desires of another, by a perception of mere necessity, or by the chemical underpinnings of desire, then love as an emotional thing could be a barrier to unrestricted love as gift.

Fortunately, by the loving gift of the will, we are given the opportunity to choose to integrate the two for the sake of loving as we ought.

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