Philosophy, or “love of wisdom,” is fundamentally an activity of love. I have always said that love is like philosophy, and philosophy is like love; related remarks can be found in the blog folder “谈情——说爱.”
I also once wrote “Philosophical Style and Attitudes Toward Love,” in which I crudely mapped various philosophical styles across ancient and modern times onto various attitudes toward love. This was not some offhand joke of mine,
The resemblance between philosophy and love is by no means merely a literary analogy; rather, it means that these two activities share something in certain fundamental senses. A culture, or a thinker, who has a certain philosophy will also have a certain kind of love, and vice versa. What I mean here is not only philosophical views and views about love, but the philosophical life and the love life as actual activities. Of course, you may say that one’s view of love and one’s actual love life are two different things; perhaps in reality you cannot find the ideal love you want, or you have not met the ideal person or environment, so can your love life still correspond to your philosophy? But when I speak of love life as actual activity, I do not mean one’s ideal of love in one’s head, nor do I mean what sort of person one has in fact found; the key lies precisely in the point of connection between ideal and reality, and the judgment “reality falls short of the ideal” itself already implies a particular pattern of love.
Both love and philosophy try to shape some important binary relations, distinguishing two opposed things while tightly binding them together: self and other, same and different, spirit and body, ideal and reality, freedom and dependence, and so on.
A fundamental point common to both romance and philosophy is that they are activities of “love.” In romance or in loving philosophy, “love” is not a ready-made state, but an activity of pursuit. Pursuit of what? Pursuit of wisdom? Pursuit of some person? Pursuit of a good life? … Whatever it is you pursue, the first thing is that “pursuit” is the core of the activity. Without “pursuit” there is no philosophy; without “pursuit” there is no love. That is why people say marriage is the tomb of love: because this pursuit seems to have succeeded, what was pursued has been “secured,” and there seems to be no need to “woo” any longer, only to enjoy a happy love life. But the problem is that once you bring the “pursuit” to an end and assume you have secured the object, love has also walked into the tomb. This is much like the sage who imagines he possesses knowledge, only to end up knowing nothing at all; the lover of wisdom, in order not to dig his own grave, cannot stop pursuing.
When it comes to what philosophers pursue, there is a keyword that has to be mentioned: “certainty.” The pursuit of certainty runs through classical philosophy in the broad sense from beginning to end. At the same time, romance also needs to pursue “certainty.” So-called “heaven and earth witness our vows,” so-called “pledging one’s life to another,” are all ways of expressing the search for “certainty.” Of course, the certainty in philosophy and the certainty in love still correspond to one another.
The first typical way is to seek certainty in a Platonic ideal world. This is like love in a child’s fairy-tale world: very pure, without fleshly desire, possessing a kind of absolute perfection. The Platonic search for certainty is how to keep breaking free of shackles and transcend from the real world into the ideal world. This is also the pattern of a typical fairy tale: prince and princess must overcome all the forces that bind them, and after destroying every negative force they reach final perfection, that is, ultimate certainty—“happily ever after.” But this realm of the Good is always abstract and motionless; it contains no real, palpable content. Just as fairy tales will absolutely never describe in concrete terms what exactly this happy shared life consists of, the fairy-tale world contains only clear and distinct dramatic figures, and does not contain the trivial, plain everyday life. In the eyes of the Platonic suitor, true and perfect love can only be obtained after “leaving the body.” The characteristic of this kind of love, like a fairy tale, is that it is perfect and suspended in the air. For such suitors, philosophy and real life are separate, and love and marriage are separate. Just like the typical ancient Greek male: one wife to continue the family line, one concubine for sexual enjoyment, one lover to accompany him in social settings, and then innocent and flawless boys for fantasy… body, spirit, family, emotion, reason, and so on are all kept in separate compartments. Here marriage is not the tomb of love, but simply something irrelevant. Socrates, on the one hand, married a shrew for a wife, and on the other hand could also engage in a spiritual romance with young men; this is not that Socrates was playing both sides or transferring his affections elsewhere, but that these were fundamentally matters of two different domains—the shared life of rice, oil, salt, and daily necessities in reality had nothing to do with the realm of love. This fairy-tale-like spiritual romance is separated from real life, and is entirely an abstract and hollow object of pursuit. What does it mean to establish a love relationship? Does it mean obtaining your body? No, that is too dirty. Does it mean obtaining fame and profit? Even less so. Does it mean living together with you? That is not right either: on the one hand, fairy-tale love simply does not consider the question of how to live; on the other hand, fairy-tale love believes that even if two people are not together, love can transcend time and space, so it also comes down to whether they live together. Then what is the relationship of love? It is nothing at all. No concept that has any real, palpable meaning can describe that infinitely mysterious love that transcends everything. This is one mode of love, and the certainty it seeks means excluding all reality, that is, all mutable and unstable factors; by excluding all uncertainty, it naturally attains absolute certainty. But what, exactly, is this absolute certainty like? It is suprareality, imperceptible, and can only be idealized as much as possible in a state of leaving the body, while real life at best is merely a crude imitation.
The ideal world is motionless; it has no temporality, or rather, it is immortal. Thus Platonic courtship has a typical variant, namely the metaphysical mode. What it seeks is the eternal, unchanging substance beyond space and time. The “certainty” it seeks lies in “eternal invariance.” Love in this mode is also very common; it appears as love of “heaven and earth witness our vows,” a longing for some eternally unchanging feeling—in other words, a pursuit of “immortal” love. Of course, just as everyone inevitably has some metaphysical complex, every suitor more or less also has a longing for “immortality.” Seeking the eternity of love is of course not wrong; however, if there is such a thing as “unchanging” love, then what exactly is it that does not change? Can you give any palpable, realistic description of this immortal thing? — this often has to return to the Platonic mode, that is to say, this immortal love is empty. When you say your love will never change, what exactly does that promise mean? What does it contain? Some people are undoubtedly moved by this kind of immortal promise; when they hear that the love between two people will be eternal, their hearts gain a sense of certainty. But the real source of that certainty is not that you truly possess that eternal love. You cannot obtain tomorrow’s love; rather, it is because you have obtained some promise or some belief at this very moment. Yet metaphysicians are the ones who believe that human beings can grasp eternal things.
There is another variant of this absolutist mode of courtship, namely the form of fatalism—ultimate certainty is guaranteed by God, or by fate. In fact, this means using some ready-made doctrine to provide oneself with certainty. In real life, suitors may also invoke “fated by destiny,” “compatible birth characters,” “social match,” “parents’ command,” “the first time,” and so on as third-party authorities, as solid principles to provide certainty for the love relationship.
By the time of modern philosophy, the suitor no longer seeks certainty from some other, but starts from the self. Thus this self-centered courtship pays more attention to oneself, rather than to abstract patterns or external dogma. Such a suitor begins to know how to reflect on himself first: What is my character like? What are my hobbies like? What can I do? What might I obtain? … This is a rationalist mode of courtship, but the problem is that your “object” is after all not a part of yourself. Rationalists did not sufficiently face up to the heterogeneity of the “object world”; they thought it was enough to do oneself well, while either ignoring the individuality of the object or wishfully understanding the object as one’s own mirror image, thereby producing their own dogmatism.
On the other hand, empiricism gives up the pursuit of absolute certainty and acknowledges change and uncertainty, constantly adapting to the object’s capriciousness, eventually forming a “habit,” at which point certainty becomes the so-called “second nature.” Compared with rationalism, the empiricist’s courtship lacks some of the stirring grand narrative; it does not pursue transcendent love, but believes in principles such as “the plain is true.”
There are at least two empiricist modes of getting along. One is a natural-historical passive relation, emphasizing acceptance, appreciation, and listening; the other is an active relation of experimental science, using one’s own character to interrogate and regulate the other.
But pushing empiricism to the extreme leads to skepticism. For no matter what, in empiricism the homogeneity, or rather the unity, of the “object” is not guaranteed. Making love into a daily habit becomes a kind of certainty, but the problem is that daily habits can be broken at any time. Once an empiricist has suffered the pain of heartbreak a few times, he may become disheartened and give up on pursuit.
Empiricism tends to blame the failure of romance on the object’s capriciousness and elusive nature. Transcendentalism, by contrast, first acknowledges this point—namely, that “she” cannot, at root, be fully grasped by you—but the certainty of love does not come from the object world; it is bestowed by myself. Therefore the transcendental suitor will first reflect on himself: What do I feel? What should I do? What kind of happiness am I worthy of? Then, according to the framework and standards arrived at through self-reflection, he will seek, observe, and regard the object. Unlike rationalism, which pays attention only to the self, the self in transcendentalism merely provides possibility and cannot construct real love; real love ultimately still comes from the object’s stimulation. And unlike empiricism, which pays attention only to the object, transcendentalism does not ground certainty or uncertainty in the object, but takes responsibility for everything itself.
The certainty sought by classical philosophy is always invisible. Whether it is the ideal world or the transcendental form, you cannot see or touch it; it leaves no trace in the real world. Contractualism, by contrast, represents a demand to fix abstract relations in place. No matter whether abstract certainty comes from God, endowment, reason, or custom, when we restate and establish it in the form of a contract, it seems that only then have we grasped real certainty. In the view of these people, what is called a love relationship or a marriage relationship fundamentally consists in establishing some kind of contractual relation. Of course, if one wants certainty that can be seen and touched, the more direct way would be utilitarianism. Of course, contractualism or utilitarianism are both extended, supplemental forms; the principles behind them are still classical.
Romanticism, which revolted against the classical, greatly reduced the status of reason and exalted the power of emotion. Such a suitor no longer bothers to reflect on love, does not pay attention to establishing a relationship that is certain and stable, does not speak of souls or spiritual affinity, but first and foremost focuses on bodily and emotional affinity. This attitude does not mean giving up the pursuit of certainty; rather, it is because they believe that only the emotions of the present are certain.
There is also the historicist mode, which emphasizes tracing the past and sorting through memory, taking the continuity of history as the source of certainty.
What is phenomenological love like? Phenomenology seeks unconcealment; in other words, a state of wholehearted confrontation. Phenomenology values the body and emotion, but it does not set body or emotion against reason; this is why Heidegger cannot simply be classified as a romanticist. Romanticism values emotion and intuition, but it treats intuition, emotion, and the body as the opposites of reason. Phenomenology, by contrast, tries to reconstruct reason starting from intuition, emotion, and the body. Such suitors, like romantics, value flesh and passion; at the same time, like classicists, they value reason and sameness.
Finally, there is another mode that has to be mentioned: the feminist mode. In the various modes of pursuit mentioned above, the point of departure is either masculine or neutral, and very rarely do we look at the pursuit of love from a specifically female perspective. Just as the whole history of philosophy has basically taken men as the protagonists, and typical patterns of romance have also taken men as the protagonists, then what might a philosophy that seeks certainty from a female standpoint look like? Of course, a female standpoint does not mean how a woman pursues a man; woman pursuing man is in fact an inversion of the positions of the two sexes. To put it in precise terms, the so-called masculine mode is the active mode, and the feminine mode is the receptive mode. In specific cases, women can also take the active role and men can also take the receptive role. In short, the pursuit in traditional philosophy has always unfolded according to some active-role logic.
As for my own mode of striving, whether it be relationism or philosophy of play, it is still far from taking shape, so for the time being I won’t say much more.
Latest comments
- Gu Du 2010-02-13 01:45:51 After seeing B-classmate repost it, some people asked about Hegel, so let me add a bit here. My own outline is entirely rough and sketchy; if one goes further into individual philosophers, one should be able to discover some interesting cases.
For example, Hegel’s pursuit of certainty relies on the so-called dialectic of negation of negation; correspondingly, Hegel’s love, in simple terms, is “negation of negation,” or “thesis-antithesis-synthesis,” that is, first one must negate oneself, throw oneself selflessly into the other, and finally achieve oneself—such a “thesis–antithesis–synthesis” process. It is also easy to find Hegel’s own discussion of love online, and it is basically just this sort of thing~ This is also a fairly common mode of courtship: first affirm oneself, then negate oneself so as to enter completely into the other, and finally, in the union and harmony of both sides, arrive at a renewed self-affirmation. - unic 2010-02-21 22:29:43 Anonymous 210.77.59.5 In modern philosophy, the suitor no longer starts from some other, but starts from the self in seeking certainty.
······Indeed, from this point of view, the change in modern times compared with earlier periods makes a lot of sense.
There is also the historicist mode, which emphasizes tracing back into the past, sorting out memory, and taking the continuity of history as the source of certainty. ······ What is the relation between historicism and historical determinism?
What I want to ask is:
1. Why is love a kind of search for certainty?
2. I basically have no sense of transcendentalism. Could you expand on transcendentalism according to the line of thought in this article? Especially regarding the “possibility” and “bearing” in the passage below.—-
“Unlike rationalism, which pays attention only to the self, the transcendental self merely provides possibilities and cannot construct real love; real love ultimately still comes from the object’s stimulus; and unlike empiricism, which pays attention only to the object, transcendentalism does not ascribe certainty or uncertainty to the object, but instead takes on everything itself.”
3. I also basically have no sense of the phenomenological viewpoint. Could you explain how it is possible for it to achieve the following?
“But phenomenology tries to reconstruct reason starting from intuition, emotion, and the body. Such suitors, like romantics, emphasize the body and passion, while also, like classicists, emphasizing reason and identity.” - Gu Du 2010-02-22 11:11:33 Historicism and historical determinism are opposed to each other. Historical determinism holds that above history there is some transcendental law that determines the direction of history, whereas historicism maintains that everything is historical, and that there is nothing that transcends history.
One cannot say that love is a search for certainty, just as one cannot say that philosophy is “love of certainty.” Philosophy is love of wisdom and a search for wisdom, but in any kind of seeking, there will be an element of seeking certainty. It is like when you are chasing a ball: merely touching it still does not quite feel like you have caught it; only when you firmly hold it in your hand, with that definite sense of reality, are you satisfied. Similarly, whether you are chasing a ball, an egg, or a chick, you cannot avoid carrying with it this desire for certainty. The desire for certainty in the pursuit of love and in the pursuit of wisdom will also manifest itself in specific ways.
The self-reflection of transcendental philosophy is critical rather than constructive. Rationalism believes that through self-reflection one can construct knowledge; transcendentalism says no: knowledge always comes from experience, while one’s own a priori cognitive capacities provide only the possibility of knowledge—that is, what kind of knowledge you may obtain and what kind you cannot attain can be understood through self-reflection, but ultimately what knowledge actually is still has to be examined through your experience. Yet those who traditionally believe that knowledge comes from experience think that the experiential world is objectively determinate or else ever-changing, whereas transcendentalism holds that properties such as certainty and uncertainty, change and changelessness, and so on, are not attributes possessed by the world “in itself,” but are bestowed by human cognition.
As for the phenomenological viewpoint, it cannot be explained clearly in just a few words. But we can ask back: how is it possible to set up head and body, reason and emotion, in opposition to one another? We seem to take intellect and emotion as naturally opposing poles, but this mode of thought is not self-evident; it is a tradition of Western philosophy, whereas in the East there was originally no such sharp opposition.
Emotion and the body do indeed always hinder the exercise of intellect, but that does not mean they are antagonistic. It is like air always causing resistance and interference for flight, yet the truth is that air is precisely the basis of flight; without air, one simply cannot fly. Emotion certainly always obstructs reason and interferes with reason, but the truth is that without emotion there is no reason. Phenomenology seeks within emotion, intuition, and the body the source of how reason is possible. - Xiaoli 2010-02-24 11:32:09 Anonymous 166.111.126.240
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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