Love and Amorality

What is love? Some would say that love is elicited by something that we rate very positively. You would not say you love Beethoven if you did not rate his music highly, or at least the experience of listening to it; and a person would not be your beloved if you did not think him or her the epitome of beauty or kindness or some other sterling and perhaps unique quality. Others would say that if you aren’t prepared to sacrifice yourself for the other, or some such thing, it’s not love. 

            The latter are moralists. But both are moralists in the broad sense of assuming that everything has a definition, and hence they expect my opening question to have an answer. I believe, however, that any kind of moralism is anathema to love. There are many kinds of love and all are fully love, it seems to me. 

            What prompts me now to write about love nevertheless, and even ask the question, is a sudden sense of there being one salient feature any type of love possesses, and one that is strikingly at odds with the opening gambit above, namely, an abiding caring in the face of recognized flaws in the object of one’s love. “Flaw” here is, as with all assessments, subjective, and so it refers to an imperfection in the eyes of the lover. Yet in the face of those imperfections the lover persists in caring about the beloved. 

            Thus, it is not a case of “Forgive them for they know not what they do,” since that smacks of moralism again. But neither am I saying that the imperfections cease to seem like such. That can certainly happen to the besotted lover, temporarily at least. But I mean something more like what many courageous people have said about fear, namely, that they continue to feel it but carry on nevertheless. That precisely is what makes their behavior courageous. If they felt no fear, where would be the courage? Just so, if one thought one’s beloved were perfection personified, where would be the love? 

            I don’t, however, see a further analogy between courage and love, since I imagine courage to be, or seem, an act of will, whereas love, as I conceive and experience it, is involuntary. (Of course it can be cultivated, but it cannot be willed ex nihilo.) This would make it something like an Aristotelian virtue, which involves not only a motivation to behave in a certain way but also a genuine satisfaction in doing so. The person who is generous begrudgingly is not virtuous in this sense. Just so, the person who as a matter of duty takes care of someone is not in love, I’d say. 

            Thus, I think of the people whom I love. They have awful flaws (that is, again, in my own very critical eyes). But “I can’t help” care about them still. This can be very hard sledding. It is sometimes like having to cover a latrine. (It could even be that literally, of course.) But it is not like being a hospital orderly who can find no other work. Rather, it is like a new grandma I once observed eagerly urging the new parents to let her change the baby’s diapers. To me, who was not in love with that baby, this was remarkable, at first inexplicable, but then a revelation: She’s in love! 

            For me the hardest part of loving other people is contending with their egoism and egotism. We all suffer from this flaw … or exhibit this quality, to put it “neutrally.” (Maybe it is not even “there” sometimes but is an illusion, even a projection of one’s own ego(t)ism.) I am never so in love that I would “eagerly urge” to be exposed to my lovee’s exhibition of it, or that I would cease to wish she didn’t have it. I might even continue to try to change the other person until I fully realized the futility and even counterproductivity of that. But if the only way I could help her or be with her was to put up with it, then I would want to do so (or try to, again and again). 

            And if I could more fully embody the amoralism to which I aspire, perhaps I would cease even to be irritated by her ego(t)ism. I might still note it as something I wish were not so, just as the nose will forever scrunch up at a foul smell even without any moral judgment of that smell. But a great burden would be lifted not to react with scorn or contempt and only with dislike, a matter of preference, like being served food one can scarcely palate but nevertheless eats when hungry.