The Philosophers’ Funnel of Love
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WHAT IS LOVE? Peruse the latest discussions among professional philosophers and you’re likely to come away with the impression that gay men and lesbians are not the ones to ask. Love, it seems, is for straight people.

Take two examples from books that came out in just the past year: Pascal Bruckner’s The Paradox of Love (2012) has many virtues, but they do not stretch to examining same-sex relationships. Turn to the copyright page and you find brutal confirmation. The anonymous provider of Library of Congress shelving data has decided that “the paradox of love” can safely be cataloged under “man-woman relationships.” Faramerz Dabhoiwala’s The Origins of Sex (2012) examines the sexual and sentimental revolutions of the Enlightenment, the period when the boundaries of modern love were staked out. This is territory well and often explored by gay and lesbian scholars, yet there’s barely a whiff of homosexuality in 452 pages.

Of course, publishers often give books silly, over-achieving titles. “The Paradox of Being in a Long-Term Relationship for a French Middle-Aged Heterosexual Intellectual” is hardly likely to sell a lot of copies, however honestly it may describe a book’s contents. Even so, the two books noted above conform to a well established pattern. For evidence we return to one of the best-selling accounts of love of the last twenty years, Alain de Botton’s Essays in Love (1993, published in the U.S. as On Love). It is a meditation on the romance between the male narrator and a woman, Chloe. There may be much overlap between the way heterosexuals go about their romantic business and a discussion of love, but the two are not identical, as a philosopher like de Botton ought to appreciate (although the book’s unrelenting focus on the Alain-Chloe dynamic provides us with no evidence that in fact he does).

Worse, as a gay or lesbian reader presses on through de Botton’s text, the suspicion is likely to grow that a deliberate exclusive focus on heterosexual love is being maintained. For instance, de Botton quotes (in Chapter 7) Aristophanes’ famous speech from Plato’s Symposium in which Aristophanes speculates that all humans were once two “people” joined back-to-back, two halves since separated, and that lovers are trying (literally) to find the missing other half. De Botton says of this myth that “all human beings were hermaphrodites”—male and female halves, joined back to back. Well, actually, no. This is exactly what Plato doesn’t say: his version of the myth has human beings coming in three forms, not one, some being two males joined together, some two females, and some hermaphroditic. Aristophanes says this explains why some people seek a partner of the same sex. De Botton’s misreading—if it is a misreading—has quite simply turned one of the most same-sex-friendly philosophical examinations of love into a straight romantic manifesto. Quite an achievement.

Given the last fifty years of political and social activism and the high probability that de Botton et al. are aware that gay men and lesbians exist, and that they fall in love, their striking assumption that writing about heterosexual romance is more or less interchangeable with writing about love seems hard to explain. There are various possibilities. Clearly the association of love with heterosexual marriage is pervasive in Western culture, and for heterocentric writers to segue from one to the other seems perfectly natural. Or perhaps it’s just cultural blindness, so that even gay-friendly straight writers when writing about love feel licensed to assume that the total experience of love is mapped by their own experience, with no significant omissions. After all, they are the majority.

But based on these recent treatises one is forced to conclude that the motivating force behind the straight literature of love is to be found in an enduring set of beliefs concerning the love of parents for their children. These beliefs constitute a serious mental block, I would suggest, and help explain why straight writers act as if they think that the gay and lesbian experience of love is not worth much attention. It boils down to a belief that heterosexuals dive deep into love, while gay people splash on the surface; and that is because straight people can experience love as parents, which delivers insights not typically available to gay people, whose experience of love remains essentially immature and irresponsible.

Frankfurt’s Parental Paradigm

Beliefs with deep cultural roots, especially if they are attached to strong emotional triggers, often operate under the surface, unstated. So it is fortunate that there is one striking public statement of the paradigmatic primacy of parental love, and it is to be found in the work of the philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt.

Frankfurt, emeritus professor of philosophy at Princeton, published The Reasons of Love in 2004. In it, he discussed the things that “normal people” (his expression) care most about. Frankfurt argued that the answer is basic, instinctual, and uncomplicated. For “normal people” that means above all caring about the well-being of their children. Parental love, he argued, is the paradigmatic example of love as such. “Among relationships between humans, the love of parents for their infants or small children is the species of caring that comes closest to offering recognizably pure instances of love,” Frankfurt says. In contrast, romantic or sexual love is “not very authentic” compared to parental love thanks to the pollution of many “vividly distracting elements,” such as lust, obsession, and attraction. In other words, grown-up love is modeled on the love of parents for their children; everything else is what Frankfurt calls “transient desire.”

If Frankfurt has articulated what a lot of “normal people” believe—that parental love is the purest, archetypal form of love—then we can begin to make sense of straight writers’ silence about gay and lesbian love. If they accept, implicitly or explicitly, that parental love is indeed the paradigm of love, then only straight people have access to knowledge of love in its fullest form. Quite simply, it is the hidden hard core of homophobia.

Without in any way trying to denigrate parental love, I would argue that parental love by its nature is very unlike other forms of love and that it cannot properly be used as the paradigm against which all the other varieties of love are judged, or as the archetype from which they are derived. The uniqueness of parental love is evident in two immediate respects:

First, parental love is in principle based on an indissoluble relationship. However much parents may understandably tire of the day-to-day business of parenting, they remain parents, like it or not. It’s a fact of their personal history that can’t be undone. In contrast, all other loving relationships—even non-personal loves like love of country—were chosen in some sense and are capable of dissolution. Marriage itself is an institution designed to make a relationship seem permanent, indissoluble, but clearly that is but a cultural sleight of hand.

Second, parental love is explicitly founded on the impermissibility of a sexual component. This prohibition is not applied to other loving personal relationships, which may or may not include a sexual element. Frankfurt gets himself in a mess here by setting up a moral distinction between the essentials of love (i.e., parenting) and the “vividly distracting elements” (adult pleasure, companionship, sexuality) of voluntary relationships. This is puzzling: why isn’t it the other way around? Why aren’t lust, sexual expression, and a longing for companionship seen as essential to love, rather than being seen as mere distractions? Frankfurt does not explain.

Central to Frankfurt’s argument is the notion that the selfless love of parents for children exists even before the child is born, and so before they can know anything at all about the child. This, he says, is proof that parental love is absolutely disinterested. And yet, it is quite clearly impossible—except perhaps in fairy tales—for an adult human to fall in love with another adult before meeting that individual, even if only through correspondence. And only by knowing something about the beloved, a significant something that’s linked to a quality one values, does one fall for that particular individual. Popular songs may lament the uncontrollable quality of love implied by the phrase “to fall in love,” but surely much of its value lies in the fact that love’s object is freely chosen according to one’s own passions or criteria.
Vernon’s Escape from Two-ness

Frankfurt’s case for parental love as paradigmatic is, then, decidedly weak. But before we dismiss him as merely an old “family values” dinosaur, a defanged T-Rex not worth sparring with, consider the very recent book by Mark Vernon titled simply Love (2013). Here we find that what Frankfurt made explicit in his concept of love is a belief that only hovers in the background of Vernon’s more sophisticated and less tendentious approach.

Vernon’s book is a confection of self-help advice and bulletins from the psychotherapeutic front line, built on Platonic foundations. Unlike de Botton, he doesn’t get Aristophanes’ myth wrong, and while the word “gay” appears nowhere in the text (when discussing Plato’s same-sex lovers the male pronouns go unexplained and unnoticed), he doesn’t positively exclude it. Indeed, gay people can find a home in his text, which has plenty of rooms. What he does is far more interesting because he is obviously a more sympathetic writer than Frankfurt.

Love comes for most people in three stages, contends Vernon. The first is a baby’s total narcissistic involvement with itself. This focus gradually gives way to a baby’s realization that it’s dependent on someone else for care and comfort, an outward shift that—given satisfactory parenting—turns into a trusting love. Romantic love and its stabilization as a mature relationship represent an elaboration of this shift: a finding and completion of ourselves in another which turns into a partnership.

The third stage is when love expands from two participants to three, when a couple realizes that a life of “just the two of us” isn’t enough. This third stage is preferable to stages one and two. Not only is it literally more grown-up, but “life becomes richer” with “a greater sense of existential resilience and reliability.” At this stage the couple opens up to new people or new ideas, “the sciences and arts, friends and work, wealth and fame.” And for many couples—it is, after all, “a common adult manifestation”— the third participant in the loving relationship is their child.

Vernon admits that having children can be troublesome and disappointing, but he implies that having them represents at least an attempt by the adult couple to break out of two-ness through “transcending the boundaries of their own limited existence.” It is also creative and “generative” such that “possessive energies are transformed from being self-serving to being collaborative.”

There’s nothing brutally homophobic here, and I want to be fair to Vernon, whose nuanced and intelligent account tries to address the melancholy and disconnectedness that we often encounter in the human effort to love and be loved. But the drift is clear. Having children is potentially the way to ascend to a higher plane of love in a relationship. And if you believe (consciously or not) that being a parent is for most people the gateway to the third grown-up level of love, then obviously most homosexual relationships are blind alleys, or at best second-level closed doors.

One of the formulas that’s prevalent in recent writing about love is to decorate the text with gravitas-boosting references to the master works of European literature. Tolstoy is very popular, and his Anna Karenina often gets a name-check. And yet, just as philosophers of love silently pass over gay and lesbian love in their books, critics tend to miss the fascinatingly brief appearance of Anna Karenina’s gay couple: two military officers, one a young aristocrat, the other older, fatter and wearing a bracelet. They appear in Part II, Chapter 19, as Vronsky is preparing for the race meeting and is almost blinded by his passion for Anna. Super-macho Vronsky won’t respond to their polite conversational efforts and instead shows his disgust by bearing his teeth. They are a lesson in love Vronsky cannot even bear to look at. The couple is not fazed but instead shrug it off, order some wine for their lunch, and saunter into the billiard room. You get the impression they may have found it funny.

“There go the inseparables,” comments one of Vronsky’s comrades as they leave. And indeed, there they go, walking off the page together, an example of companionable loving that could offer truths to philosophers about love, but will go largely unnoticed once again.

David Thame studied philosophy under Kantian scholar Baroness O’Neill of Bengarve. He recently published a collection of gay short stories, Canal Street Gothic.