Likings and Love

“[The] human race can only achieve happiness if love reaches its conclusion, and each of us finds his loved one and restores his original nature.”

Plato didn’t intend us to take Aristophanes’ speech too seriously. The historical Aristophanes was a comic poet whom Plato despised. In The Symposium, Plato’s personal views about love are represented by the character Socrates. But despite this, it is Aristophanes’ speech that receives the greatest acclaim, and which has most influenced our contemporary notions of romantic love.

The Myth of Aristophanes finds its modern expression in the concept of the ‘soul-mate’. A soul-mate is someone who is made for us, accepts us just as we are, and somehow makes us complete.



Modern myths

It’s a beautiful and romantic idea, and one that strikes a chord deep within. Many of our best-loved stories are built upon this notion.

Take Ross and Rachel from the US television-series, Friends. How relieved we are when, in the final episode, they finally accept what we have known all along - that they belong together. We know they’ll live happily-ever-after, because… well, because their love is ‘meant to be’.

Or consider the movie, Bridget Jones’s Diary. The heroine, Bridget, is a mass of anxieties and neuroses. But salvation is at hand in the form of human-rights lawyer, Mark Darcy.

“I like you, very much,” says Darcy.

“Ah – apart from the smoking and the drinking, the vulgar mother and the verbal diarrhoea…?” Bridget replies.

“No,” insists Darcy. “I like you very much. Just as you are.”

After this, we know that Bridget has found true love – the kind of love we dream of and long for. Her life will surely be transformed.


The Cold, Hard Truth

Sentiment aside, we know that love isn’t quite so simple.

If Ross and Rachel’s past is anything to go by, their future will have its share of conflict and heartache. And anyone who’s seen the sequel to Bridget Jones’s Diary will know that Bridget’s anxieties and neuroses didn’t simply melt away in Darcy’s warm embrace.

These stories are wonderful entertainment, but they have little to do with love – real love, that is.

There are some things we may reasonably expect from a romantic partner: passion, excitement, companionship, and perhaps even marriage and children. But it is foolish to expect salvation.

Psychologist R. J. Sternberg sums it up neatly: “Some people seek salvation in love, much as other people do in religion, hoping to find in another the perfection they cannot find in themselves… But eventually disillusionment is almost certain to set in. They discover two facts. First, the other person has flaws… Second, no other human can save them - not even the love of their life.”


The Power of Love

This is not to say that I’m sceptical about love.

On the contrary, I agree with the French philosopher, André Comte-Sponville: “Our lives – private and public, domestic and professional – have value only in proportion to the love we invest in them and find in them.”

With so many varieties of love, and so many legitimate objects of love, it is a mistake to focus on one individual.

Love - a four-letter word Love was voted Singapore’s favourite English word. For such a small word, it has a big following! It also has many uses. We use it to describe how we feel towards our husbands and wives, our children, our friends - and even our favourite foods and pastimes.

When philosophers talk about love, they’re usually quick to dismiss statements like: I love chocolate; and I love shopping, eating. In such cases, we are told, the word love is misapplied. What we really mean is that we like these things very much. The discussion then moves swiftly on to ‘genuine’ kinds of love, such as friendship, sexual-attraction, familial affection, and so on.

I find this abrupt dismissal of a whole class of statements about love quite disconcerting. It isn’t that I care very much whether the word love or like is used to describe my feelings towards chocolate. But I can’t help feeling that the word like doesn’t adequately describe what I feel for the movies of Audrey Hepburn, the music of the Bee Gees or the beauty of the night sky.


C. S. Lewis: Likings and Loves

The philosopher, theologian and writer, C. S. Lewis (1898-1963), author of The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, felt the same way. In his 1960 book, The Four Loves, he devotes an entire chapter to: Likings and Loves for the Sub-human.

According to him, when we say we like/love chocolate or shopping, we mean that we take pleasure in them. Now, pleasures can be divided into two groups: those that are preceded by desire, and those that are not.

A glass of water is an example of the first type. When you are thirsty, a glass of water is a very great pleasure. But, as Lewis points out, no-one ever pours themselves a glass of water ‘just for the fun of the thing’.

An example of a pleasure not preceded by desire would be the fragrance of flowers meeting you unexpectedly on your morning walk. “You were in want of nothing, completely contented before it,” writes Lewis. “The pleasure, which may be very great, is an unsolicited, super-added gift.”

Lewis labels these contrasting types of pleasures: Need-pleasures and Pleasures of Appreciation.

It is characteristic of Need-pleasures that they very quickly die on us. A glass of water is very appealing when we are thirsty, but becomes a matter of indifference once we have drunk. The pleasure lasts no longer than the need.

Pleasures of Appreciation are very different. The pleasure we take in the smell of flowers, the beauty of the stars or a Mozart symphony seems somehow to take us outside ourselves. We feel that: “Something has not merely gratified our senses… but claimed our appreciation by right.”

There is even a glimmer of unselfishness about pleasures of appreciation.

“In the appreciative pleasures… we get something we can hardly help calling love and hardly help calling disinterested [i.e. unselfish].”
(C. S. Lewis)


Whom Are the Ones who cares?

I quoted André Comte-Sponville: “Our lives… have value only in proportion to the love we invest in them and find in them.” Because it encapsulates something very important: love gives value to our lives.

This is why we all have spent time justifying the use of the word love to describe our feelings towards the things/objects or people in our life. I don’t wish to dismiss these things as mere likings, because they bring tremendous value to my life.

It will take us a long time or years to really, really appreciate them. But the effort would be worthwhile. After all, love takes work.

Not all readers will share my love of Hepburn, The Bee Gees and philosophy. Some will gain appreciative pleasure from Mozart’s symphonies, fine Indian-cooking, or the footballing artistry of Wayne Rooney. In my view, they can all be objects of love, because they all bring real value to our lives.