© Ronald de Sousa

University of Toronto
Canada
Internet: sousa@chass.utoronto.ca

Published in RC. Solomon and K. Higgins, eds., The Philosophy of `'Erotic'' Love (University of Kansas Press, 1991)

ABSTRACT:
 

When my love swears that she is made of truth
I do believe her, though I know she lies
            William Shakespeare

O sweet Fancy! let her loose;
Every thing is spoilt by use
              John Keats

Children of a future age
Reading this indignant page
Know that in a former time
Love, sweet love, was thought a crime.
            William Blake

It is a commonplace that love motivates some of our worst behaviour, ranging from dishonesty to murder. We should be more shocked by this than we are. Love is supposed to include a desire for the loved one's happiness; yet a dose of jealousy is considered standard equipment in any love affair, and typically the lover desires the loved one's happiness only insofar as the lover has caused it. Love, then, as it is daily celebrated in our plays, our novels, and our songs, is little more than an acute fit of narcissism.[1] What is astonishing is not that this occurs; we are jaded enough, by now, to accept many unsavory truths about human nature. Moreover, thanks to sociobiology, we are now possessed of a whole new range of explanations that can serve us as scientific warrant for many forms of bad behaviour. But what is most astonishing is that we regard love as a justification for treating people far worse than we would ever condone treating a stranger. We accept this as casually as people used to accept that suspected criminals were to be tortured to extract their confessions; and the utopian idealist in some of us may surmise that sometime, perhaps, we shall be equally revolted by both these ancient barbarities. One might be excused, then, for searching for some alternative, however utopian.

On the other hand, Blake's apostrophe in my epigraph has not altogether lost its point: sex is among those crimes that only love can excuse. Sexuality is widely held to need some sort of disinfection, if no longer by marriage at least by "commitment" or True Love. Prostitution is regarded as at worst a moral evil and at best an embarrassment -- the only point of disagreement having to do with whether it is more degrading to the professional or to the customer. "Casual" sex and one-night stands are often thought to deserve scarcely less opprobrium. In this paper I want to argue for the rehabilitation of certain forms of imaginative rehearsals for love in "casual," "uncommitted," or even commercial sex. I base this plea on certain fairly commonplace observations about the nature of romantic love, our attitudes to love and sex, and the metaphysics that these attitudes presuppose.

I begin by describing four problematic features of romantic love. These make literally impossible demands, which must drive us either to simple self-deception or to some other, more sophisticated response. Although we cannot, by definition, live the impossible, we can sometimes represent it -- as witnessed by art as diverse as the poems of Homer and the drawings of Escher. In that vein, the alternative I suggest is that we attempt to apprehend the unattainable realizations symbolized by the impossible demands of romantic love by playing at love -- by conscious, mutually consenting representations or simulations of love. I argue that a certain sort of sexual encounter, self-consciously limited to the present moment and without commitment to any subsequent relationship of any particular form, is a civilized successor to the old notion of romantic love. I shall call this the theater of love.

But first, a caveat. It is often said that attitudes to love and sex are largely determined by material conditions. Perhaps it is unreasonable to apply to past ages the standards -- of feminism, of egalitarianism, or of sexual morality -- that seem appropriate to our own. The cult of chastity, and the peculiarities of chivalric love, are explained and justified in terms of the realities of pregnancy and disease briefly alleviated in part of the twentieth century. In this vein, many think that AIDS has changed once again, at least for this century, the face of what it is possible or desirable to advocate in matters of sex and its relation to love. This may be right; however, I ignore all such considerations in this essay. The mores of an age are defined not only by what can and does happen, but also by the utopias in terms of which what can and does happen is evaluated. I speak in terms not of current social, demographic, or even medical realities, but for utopia. A disease, even unconquered, falls short of a philosophical argument. At the very least, one should be able to take stock of what one has lost, of what one might now be missing.

But in any case I don't wish to speak of promiscuous sex as such, but of promiscuous love. It will turn out, however, for reasons that I will explain, that a certain measure of sexual promiscuity is entailed by the relevant conception of promiscuous or "theatrical" love.

No argument about love can proceed without narrowing the topic. C.S. Lewis[2] distinguishes among Affection, Friendship, Eros, and Charity, in addition to what he calls "Liking and loves for the sub-human". All these are important and valuable, and in some ineffable utopia perhaps all could be felt for the same object at once; but in our world they are separable. Our lives are not infrequently complicated by the hope that all might be elicited by a single privileged object. But in fact they are -- all too notoriously -- mutually detachable, if not positively independent. I wish here to speak only of eros, and perhaps only of a very specific type of eros. In the present argument I will take for granted that eros is indeed something that can be distinguished from the other kinds of love, and that other types of love do not in general necessarily suffer from the absence of eros. In our culture, eros is thought a prelude to marriage; but in marriage affection and companionship are supposed to supplement it or replace it. In this paper I will have nothing to say about that transition, except that, as will be clear, it is necessarily a transition out of romantic love.

In the kind of eros I am talking about, the dominant feeling is precisely that there is no possibility of real consummation. Of course, there may be sexual intercourse of various sorts or degrees. There may be orgasm, which may lead to the cessation of physical desire. But the experience I am trying to isolate -- that form of eros which I call Romantic Love -- is characterized by the feeling that nothing would actually constitute a consummation. The phenomenological mark of love is this: Love is the acute consciousness of the impossibility of possession.

This impossibility of possession or consummation is central to the classic conception of romantic love that we find in the troubadour tradition, as well as in other writers from Sappho through Stendhal. Although an argument is frequently made that romantic love is specific to certain times and places,[3] it is in fact exemplified by several literatures quite outside the period generally assigned to romantic love. Sappho's poetry bears witness to its possibility in Greece; and Romeo and Juliet have distant Chinese cousins in the legends of Yang Guifei (Tang dynasty, 7th-8th C) and of Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai (Song dynasty, 10th-14th C). What all these legends and stories have in common is the connection of romantic love and death, irrevocable separation, or some other insuperable obstacle. In the troubadour tradition there is also the practice of the "Asag" or test of love in which the lover was expected to spend the night in his mistress's arms without any sexual consummation.[4] But the "Ur-legend" of romantic love is that of Tristan and Iseult.[5]

These classic stories of romantic love present four problematic features, each of which either consists in self-deception or offers an almost irresistible temptation to self-deception. These are crystallization, the Platonic ideal, the anti-Platonic ideal, and the problem of transference and repetition. I now proceed to explain these.

Crystallization: Stendhal, in his analysis of amour passion, accords a central place to a process which essentially consists in the concealment of the bare reality of the loved object. The name of this process is inspired by Stendhal's observation that if you deposited a twig for a few days in the Salzburg salt mines, it would acquire beautiful accretions of salt crystals:

I call `crystallization' that operation of the mind which turns whatever presents itself into a discovery of new perfections in the object of love.... Here is the reason that love is the most powerful of all passions. In the case of other passions, desire must come to an accommodation with cold reality; in love alone, reality is keen to model itself on desire.[6]

This view implies that romantic love is particularly resistant to the encroachment of the real. Whatever dissolves the shining crystals will reveal only a common twig, which seems doomed to banality. Crystallization consists essentially in self-deception, or at least in bootstrapping, that is, in the process of constituting certain features of the love object into virtues by virtue of the very fact that they come to be seen as such.

Whether this is a pessimistic assessment depends on your view of the desirability of self-deception. Bootstrapping seems appropriate when there is no issue about the reality of the object of concern: my enjoyment of a certain food or hobby, say, may be quite independent of any claim that the food has any objective virtue. But if there is an implicit claim of independent objectivity about the quality imputed to the object, then bootstrapping is self-deception. If realism is resolutely subordinated to the quality of feeling, one may find nothing wrong with self-deception. Otherwise, one may find the process disreputable.[7] In any case, self-deception finds itself at the heart of at least one conception of romantic love. The mechanism of self-deception here is idealization: the pretense that the object of love is an incarnation of the ideal. In this respect, crystallization is akin to the Platonic requirement, which is the second problematic feature of romantic love.

The Platonic requirement is the idealization of the object, which goes with the fact that consummation is always impossible or delayed. As Rougemont points out, for Tristan to marry Iseult would be an absurdity:

But let her get a divorce, and she shall be his! Together they shall experience "real life".... But ... will the lover with all his desires gratified continue to be in love with his Iseult once she has been wed? For Iseult is ever a stranger.... she is the woman-from-whom-one-is-parted; to possess her is to lose her. (Rougemont p. 284)

I call this a Platonic condition, because it expresses the duality of desire and the conditions of its satisfaction, which lie at the heart of the Platonic conception of desire.[8] Since the true object of desire is something literally out of this world, it can never be possessed in this life. But the temptation exists to deny this impossibility, perhaps by believing that the loved object is the ideal, or provides some sort of mystical path to the ideal. The Platonic condition encourages the self-deceptive process of crystallization.

The anti-Platonic requirement, however, is perhaps even more important to romantic love. It is the requirement that romantic love be essentially focussed on a singular, particular individual. This is anti-Platonic not merely in the sense of going against the Platonist preoccupation with ideal types as opposed to concrete individuals. More interestingly, it gives rise to a kind of mirror-image paradox. The Platonic lover can never, in this world, find love's true object. But the lover whose love is focused essentially on an individual is condemned to an equal and opposite metaphysical frustration. If I love you, I must love you as you uniquely are; I must love you for being who you are and no other. But being yourself and no other is not enough to distinguish anyone, since it is a property shared by every particular. Thus I must know what properties distinguish you from others. But properties as such are general. If, therefore, knowledge involves more than mere acquaintance, considered as a purely causal relation devoid of conceptual content, it must have conceptual content. So knowledge itself is intrinsically general. I must always love my lover for some qualities, however inarticulate, which severally or together make her lovable for me. So although it is a love of an individual, my love is always motivated by some general characteristics. Singular love can no more be achieved than Platonic love, its equal and opposite chimera.

Actually there are two aspects to the anti-Platonic intuition. One concerns time, the other uniqueness. The essential unrepeatability of any moment is something we must be human to experience:

We alone can see death. When a beast is free
its downfall is ever behind it; before it
there is God. And when it walks, it walks
inside Eternity, like a running brook.[9]

To say that the experience of romantic love requires a linguistic apparatus of temporal notions doesn't mean that we need to experience it as depending on the linguistic apparatus in question. On the contrary, we feel the need to experience time directly -- or rather, since that is no more possible than any other form of direct perception, we need to feel as if we were experiencing it directly. Again, a kind of self-deception is built into the very heart of the experience.

The second aspect of the intuition of particularity has to do more directly with the singularity of persons. The person I love is just this and no other; it would not even be her identical twin, if she had one.

Yet how does this cash out? To direct one's attention onto a particular person, or a particular moment, is certainly possible in fact, but I don't see how it can be possible even in principle to know that one is doing it. I have argued that we can have knowledge only of the general. The general can be as specific as you like, but can never guarantee that it is not taking one singular object for another of the same kind. Here too, then, is an opportunity for self-deception: the self-deception consists in believing that the contingent uniqueness of the properties collected in the one loved object is identical with the necessary uniqueness that pertains to any particular just as a matter of logic. "I love you only, and could love no other," masks the fact that I might become attracted by anyone having just your qualities.

This brings me to the fourth problematic feature of romantic love.

Repetition and Transference. In scientific and more generally in all intellectual matters one can hope to find novelty for ever.[10] By contrast, our emotional life is, I suspect, ineluctably repetitious. Our deepest emotional patterns are probably set in early years, and generally prove desperately difficult to change. When two individuals meet, one might ideally expect their interaction to generate a novel and unique emotional pattern; but in practice we are seldom made as new by a new lover as we would like to think. Our emotional reactions to new people and situations tend to be based on coarse categorizations; our "new" emotions slot into old paradigm scenarios: in some measure, they are likely to consist in what psychoanalysists call transference. (Is that why there are so few love plots or does the causation run the other way?)[11] That too constitutes a fertile ground for self-deception: one wishes to see every encounter as a renewal, when in point of fact it is most often little more than a re-enactment.

Any qualitative experience is in principle repeatable. But what one is purportedly experiencing in romantic love, I have argued, is something in principle unrepeatable. The temptation is to repeat, in a kind of emotional superstition, the gestures associated with the unrepeatable experience. But actual repetition of the same gestures with a different person necessarily fail of their impossible metaphysical goal, while repetition with the same person will transform the experience. It will turn into affection, perhaps, or sometimes into indifference, but in any case into something else. At best, we say, the illusions of early love lead to the reality of marriage, companionship, constant affection. These are indeed goods, perhaps among the highest goods to which the human condition is capable of attaining. But they are not the same good as was promised by the experience of romantic love.

All this suggests that the project of romantic love is in essence incoherent or impossible. (And also, in a certain sense, merely silly: for everything and every moment is unique in the metaphysical sense, and yet we don't care equally for everything.)

Now in the face of heroic or impossible -- not to say contradictory -- tasks,[12] there are two common human reactions: religion, and art. Disappointment is the motor of all art and religion. The deepest art and the most desperate religious belief is generated by those immovable disappointments that are metaphysically necessary. If my argument so far has been right, the disappointments of romantic love are of just that kind. I want to suggest that apart from the more conventional consolations of religion, and apart from the representation of love in art, there is a place for the idea that the experience of love itself can be, by mutual consent, consciously simulated or played. That is the theater of love.

But first, I offer two speculations about the motivations behind the self-deception (and deception) that is so rife in matters of love and sex. One comes from the assumption that there is a natural teleology of love and sex. The second stems from a defensiveness about self-deception which I label the religious attitude.

Teleology. Those people who would describe themselves as committed to strict monogamy do not generally claim to be immune from the experience of sexual temptations: and that term is applicable, or course, whenever someone thinks in terms of resistance. But why would one want to resist temptation? Partly because one assigns a teleology to sexual emotions: they are supposed to be exclusive and overwhelming. The relative impersonality of sexual desire[13] is therefore denied, or relegated to an inferior role as some sort of immature and merely preliminary play. "When you encounter real love, you'll see that what you are experiencing now wasn't the Real Thing." If we drop the teleological prejudice, this maneuver no longer makes sense. It becomes reminiscent of the argument produced by the airline passenger refusing a drink in the New Yorker cartoon: "No thank you, I don't think Nature intended us to drink while flying."

The Religious Attitude. All art, as well as all religion, appeals to the willing suspension of commonsense belief -- the "suspension of disbelief." The difference between the suspension of disbelief required by religion and that required by art is that religion is deceptive whereas art is merely illusory. That is, you're supposed to believe in the propositions advanced by the religion you espouse, but you are not expected to believe that the play you have gone to watch was anything but a simulation.

This, then, is my second diagnosis of the prevalence of self-deception in love and sex: it is because people will not accept the possibility that there can be non-deceptive, honest simulations in the area of romantic love. People are thus, in effect, condemned either to abstain from the exploration, in imaginative play, of the emotions typical of romantic love, or else to treat it like religion -- that is, to consider themselves in bad faith unless they actually believe in the simulation in which they are taking part. Self-deception becomes a sine qua non of love. In art, the avowed justification of all activity is typically, perhaps even by definition, aesthetic. In religion, on the contrary, aesthetic concerns are usually heretical. Aesthetes of love are everywhere condemned in much the way that aesthetes tout court are condemned by the religious. Aestheticism is the ultimate sacrilege -- as in religion, so in love.

This isn't universally the case, since there is a whole tradition of art in the service of religion. There is, in a sense, a whole tradition of theater in the service of romantic love: I mean marriage ceremonies and their pageantry. But that pageantry actually has little to do with erotic or romantic love. It seems designed instead to emphasize the social aspects of marriage, its implication for family alliances, property, and procreation -- all of which have traditionally been set in opposition to the erotic and to romantic love.

The theatrical ceremonies I have in mind, by contrast, consist in staging the erotic gestures of love with a view to pleasure and an aesthetic creation, or re-creation, of the poignancy of love, of the consciousness of the impossibility of possession, of individuality, and of the irreplaceability of time. Such ceremonies require some of the same qualities of art and of the best kinds of non erotic love -- integrity, honesty, intense attention; generosity, imagination, and a capacity to take pleasure in the pleasure of the other. It can therefore be demanding in the sense in which all aesthetic experiences can be demanding. Nevertheless it can remain primarily an aesthetic experience, a piece of theater, a form of play. This is because both parties agree to keep the experience of romantic love confined inside a kind of frame isolated from the rest of their lives and expectations. Indeed, when we remember the essential ingredients of the phenomenology of love -- the intensification of the consciousness of temporality and particularity -- we can see that the temporary character of such encounter is not merely an accident: it is of the essence of the experience.

Unlike philosophical doubt, which is better termed suspension of belief, the suspension of disbelief required by art or religion is not easily effected merely by reflection. Art and religion typically enlist the sensual in the enterprise. (Though some religions, such as certain brands of Protestants, regard as suspect that enlistment of the sensuous.) This is why sexual caresses are, can contribute essentially to the theater of love. When sex is involved, the power of theater enlists the power of biology in its aid. The theater of love presents a consensual simulation of love, rooted in the awareness of its own ephemeral character and heightened by sensual pleasure, in which the unrepeatability of the episode figures the irreplaceability of the historical individual.

The power of sex has so frightened most cultures that they have surrounded it with elaborate myths and barriers. There is a long tradition of regarding sex as incompatible with love, as killing respect, an "expense of spirit in a waste of shame." There is also a long tradition of people killing one another for religion; could these two things be connected? In both cases, I surmise, what is at work is the defense of self-deception stemming from what I have pejoratively termed the religious attitude.

According to the religious attitude, if religion is treated as mere art, or if love is allowed to be, in Yeats's words, "a game that follows when I let the kerchief fall," then it threatens the process by which religion, including the social religion of sacred marriage and other institutions, is held up. It allows art to be mixed with life.

But of course art -- imagination, fantasy, play -- is already mixed with life and love. The traditional views of romantic love, including Stendhal's crystallization, are nothing more than the careful cultivation of illusion. They differ from the proposal I am making mainly in that the illusions in question are, in the traditional perspectives, supposed to be cogent: they are supposed to be akin to the illusions of religion rather than to the illusions of art, in that they are supposed to be believed at every level rather than subject to a suspension of disbelief.

The issue, then, is not whether we should countenance self deception, but whether we should countenance the self-conscious playing out of an emotion relatively insulated from the rest of reality. The view that we should not calls to mind Oscar Wilde's uncharacteristically moralistic definition of sentimentality: "a sentimentalist is one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it."[14] But if one countenances any aesthetic experience beyond the painful and costly process of the creation of a work of art, why shouldn't we indulge in emotions without paying their full price in reality? For what is the desire for the contemplation of art, if not the desire to do just that?

There are disanalogies, of course. Theatrical performances are generally scripted and rehearsed; those of the theater of love are not obviously so. And yet to acknowledge the role of transference is to recognize that they have been scripted by our past and have been rehearsed before in earlier "performances." Aesthetic delight, here as elsewhere, lies in the small variations.

There is another interesting analogy, one that plays on a paradox about the conditions most conducive to the apprehension and telling of truths. We expect that in the theater, as in other literary arts, we will see our own lives delineated with more clarity and force than we can give them ourselves. Inside the context of a self-conscious pretense, or simulation, we can apprehend certain truths more freely and more clearly. Similarly, in the relative anonymity of an encounter with a stranger, certain truths may be realized, certain patterns of emotion or response revealed, which in the routine of our ordinary life are hidden or repressed. It is a platitude that intimacy requires old acquaintance; equally, it is a platitude that old acquaintance sometimes makes certain kinds of intimacy impossible. People tell all their secrets to strangers on planes, precisely because they are strangers. With those who know us, there is often too much at stake to tell the truth. With a stranger, like a priest, you have nothing to lose. Masks can be dropped with strangers, which it is desperately important to keep up with one's intimates.

Needless to say, these virtues do not invariably bless any self-conscious attempt to play at love. Nor, for that matter, is every work of art a good one. But they are possible, and that, in the absence of countervailing dangers, would seem justification enough for pursuing the genre.

The power of biology and the power of theater are arguably those that hold the human mind in the tightest of all grips. So it is easy to see why the sorts of ceremonies I have in mind are generally considered dangerous. And indeed they are dangerous, just as art and religion are dangerous.

Among its dangers are the obvious ones, of actually finding one has deceived oneself or the other, if only unintentionally. But there are also more straightforwardly aesthetic dangers. What, for example, is the difference between playing at attention to the particular and being enmired in the merest generality? Henri Bergson thought only comedy was general, while tragedy was particular.[15] But in fact all art aspires to the particular, but with respect to its subject matter it can achieve only the general. It achieves the particular only in its medium -- which is of course the fact exploited by abstract art. The one night stand is the abstract art of love.

Another objection comes from the opposite direction: it is one that is implicit in Rougemont's analysis, and it is also illustrated in Huxley's Brave New World. The objection is that by playing at sexual love one will be trivializing its beauty and blunting its power. We must hem sex in to keep it exciting. This objection is interesting in that it involves exactly the kind of studied self-deception that I am in different terms myself advocating. So it can claim no moral high ground over the defense of promiscuity. But if taming the power of eros means innoculating it against its ancient association with death, as illustrated in the classic myths of romantic love, then perhaps that is an outcome that a civilized sensibility can welcome.

Another form of this objection is that far from "making the best" of the repetitiousness of our emotional life, the theater of love just guarantees that we shall sink into jaded insensibility.[16] How does the theater of love deal with the problem of the blunting of sensibility by repetition?

The answer is that it does so in two ways: by using the power of sensuality to enhance our consciousness of time, and by relegating repetition to the frame rather than the content of the representation.

Habituation blunts the intensity of experience, but our senses have a remarkable capacity to regenerate, providing we give them time and opportunity. That is why the theater of love requires, in order sustain our excitement, the enlistment of the biological power of sex as well as the psychological power of theater. Sensuality serves to intensify our consciousness of time, just as the rhetoric of art, appealing to our sensual and emotional responses in the evocation of ideas and images, serves to intensify our capacity to take a fresh view at familiar situations of life.

The second way that the theater of love deals with the problem of repetition brings out an unexpected analogy with real theater. The trick here is that wherever there is play or representation, not everything that is part of the representing medium need be part of what is represented. The actor's collapse on being shot belongs to the character, but the fact that the actor later gets up and takes a bow does not. Thus it is a normal if not universal fact about theatrical performances that they take place again and again. But that repetition, including the nightly resuscitation of the hero, is not part of the action represented: it is only an accident of the representing medium. It is an attribute of the frame, not of the represented story itself.

Different aspects of the representing medium can be shifted out or into the picture, in or out of the frame. The way that the theater of love deals with repetition, then, stems from its power to relegate the repetitious elements to the frame rather than to the content. And no wonder that some elements of the representation must fail to correspond to the thing represented, since what is represented or played at is, ex hypothesi, impossible.

So far I have been concerned with the mutual simulation of love between two people whose interest in the matter is the same. But my argument has obvious application to the aesthetics and ethics of prostitution. If the conscious simulation of love bolstered by the power of sex, is a valuable form of theater, why should some people not make a profession of it? Unless we condemn theater in all its forms, there can't be anything wrong with the mere fact that we are being invited to experience emotions that don't correspond to anything that is immediately real. Why isn't prostitution regarded as just another form of theater?

One prima facie disanalogy is that theatrical performances aren't usually mutual: in prostitution, the audience is usually more active than the average theatergoer. Yet actors do get a kick out of their power to move an audience. Often, indeed, it is part of the professional actor's pride that audiences love me enough to pay me. Why might this not apply to the prostitute? (As has frequently been pointed out, it applies well enough to the wife.) Indeed, the analogy may be stronger here than the disanalogy. Some performers typically feel contempt for the audience, and vice versa. The prostitute feels contempt for the john, who reciprocates. But the carnie also feels contempt for the rube, who also reciprocates. And don't waiters in expensive restaurants feel much the same? The "legitimate" theater seems to escape this cycle of contempt. But perhaps this is not because of any intrinsic difference. More likely it varies according to the measure in which the audience esteems the actor. Mutual esteem is a mutual salve; perhaps much of what impedes mutual esteem has nothing intrinsically to do with the nature of the transaction, but rather with the level of social approbation generally accorded the transaction in question.

Probably a career in prostitution is one we should not wish upon our loved ones, even if we were happy for them to enter the closely similar professions of therapist, actor, or even traditional wife. But it remains to be shown that this is not merely a consequence of the social and ethical attitudes I have been questioning. One wouldn't have wished it on one's loved ones to be an actress in the 18th century, or for that matter a Jew under the Nazis. But that was no reflection on the intrinsic dignity of actors or of Jews.

In this paper, I have attempted a rehabilitation of certain forms of sexual/emotional play as theater of love. My argument has been that the metaphysical impulses behind romantic love -- the dilemmas created by emotional repetition and by the coexistence of the Platonic and the Anti-platonic requirements -- might be served in a mode that mixes real sex and aesthetic imagination. I might in conclusion take my claim one step further. The theater of love is, in relation to traditional conceptions of romantic love, actually more civilized, at least in respect of two attributes of civilization. Call these attributes: imagination and irony. To be civilized is, in part, to know how to substitute the activity of the imagination for the grosser propensities which evolution has bequeathed us. Thus the Greeks in the heyday of Athens were notoriously more civilized than the Romans in the heyday of Rome: the games of the Roman circuses involved ever increasing savagery; their stakes were real life and death, real freedom and riches, leaving nothing to the imagination. By contrast, the games of the Greeks were sports, in which no one had to die; human capacities were tested in an artistic, abstract context, and their reward a few bay leaves. The superior civilization of the Greeks lay in their capacity to transpose the sociobiological reality of human aggression onto the plane of the imagination.[17] But another, perhaps more advanced characteristic of civilization is irony. Richard Rorty has defined the ironist as "the sort of person who faces up to the contingency of his or her own most central beliefs and desires"[18] -- in particular, this means being self-conscious about the role of fantasy and imagination: to see art as art, and not as religion or as magic. The unattainability of so many of our aspirations drives us to take refuge in imagination at all stages of civilization; but in its primitive avatar this response is religion, in its civilized avatar it is the self-conscious pretending of art. I have argued that romantic love is analogous to religion in taking its illusions seriously. The theater of love may sometimes represent a form of play, in both senses of the word, which reflect a more advanced stage of civilization than romantic love itself.

FOOTNOTES

[1]:. Or some other pathology of the self. See K. Morgan, in this volume.

[2]:. C.S.Lewis, The Four Loves.

[3]:. According to Niklas Luhmann, for example, love requires a certain "code" of communication, which needs to be set up in some sort of social context. Luhmann claims that the question of romantic love concerns the "genesis of a generalized symbolic communicative medium assigned specifically to facilitating, cultivating and promoting the communicative treatment of individuality." See Luhmann, Love as Passion (Cambridge: Harvard, 1986) esp. p. 14.

[4]:. See René Nelli, "Love's Rewards," in Fragments for a history of the Human Body, ed. Michel Feher with Ramona Naddaff and Nadia Tazi; vol. 2. (New York: Zone 1989).

[5]:. See Denis de Rougemont: L'Amour et l'occident, trans. into English as Love and the Western World (New York: Pantheon Books, 1956).

[6]:. Stendhal, De l'Amour (Paris: Cluny 1938) pp. 43, 62

[7]:. In Madness and Reason (London: George, Allen, Unwin, 1985) Jennifer Radden points out that several states, including religious or more broadly "symbolic" states and "aesthetic" ones, involve the sort of paradoxical conflict of belief traditionally associated with self-deception (p. 109). It is important to sort out the variety of states that can legitimately involve this kind of "duality" from those that cannot. My plea in this paper is that some of the ones that we generally disparage in the context of sex and love are in fact quite respectable, once hedged in the right way.

[8]:. At least in those middle dialogues which have given their significance to the label "Platonic". The notion of a necessarily unattainable other-worldly target of desire is developed in the Symposium, Republic, and Phaedrus. It is not plausibly attributed to the (late period) Philebus, but is prefigured in the (early) Lysis and Meno. Or so it has seemed to most readers. For a contrary view of the Symposium and the Phaedrus, in which the individual is seen as playing a far more genuine role, see Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

[9]:. Rilke, VIIIth Duino Elegy:

Ihn sehen wir allein: das freie Tier
hat seinen Untergang stets hinter sich
und vor sich Gott: und wenn es geht, so gehts
in Ewigkeit, so wie die Brunnen gehen          (R.M. Rilke, Duino Elegy VIII)

[11]:. On the finitude of stories, see Peter Brook Reading for the Plot (New York: Random House, 1984). I explore the theme of the repetitiveness of emotions a little more in "Educating the Emotions," forthcoming in a special issue of Inquiry edited by Sophie Haratounian-Gordon.

[12]:. There cannot actually be any ontological contradictions; but there can be what I call ontological tragedies: tragedies are sometimes called "contradictions," as in "the contradictions of capitalism," but they only involve self undermining, not literal self-contradiction. See my Rationality of Emotion, ch.12 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987).

[13]:. Cf. George Bernard Shaw: "Love... is the greatest of all human relations, far too great to be a personal matter. Could [a general] serve his country if he ... refused to kill any enemy... unless he personally hated him?" (Man and Superman).

[14]:. Quoted in Michael Tanner, "Sentimentality," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society New Series (1976) 77:127.

[15]:. See Henri Bergson, Le Rire: Essai sur la Signification du Comique. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1940)

[16]:. Is this what Blake meant when he said that "the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom"? It depends which side you think he was on.

[17]:. I think I learned to think of Greece and Rome in these terms from William B. Macomber, in some lectures at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1971.

[18]:. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1989) p. xv.