On Love and philosophical knowledge

[5]    Love is not blind, nor yet forgiving. "O yes, believe me," as the song says, "Love has eyes!" The nearer the intimacy, the more cuttingly do we feel the unworthiness of those we love; and because you love one, and would die for that love to-morrow, you have not forgiven, and you never will forgive, that friend's misconduct. If you want a person's faults, go to those who love him. They will not tell you, but they know. And herein lies the magnanimous courage of love, that it endures this knowledge without change.

[6]    It required a cold, distant personality like that of Thoreau, perhaps, to recognise and certainly to utter this truth; for a more human love makes it a point of honour not to acknowledge those faults of which it is most conscious. But his point of view is both high and dry. He has no illusions; he does not give way to love any more than to hatred, but preserves them both with care like valuable curiosities.--Robert Louis Stevenson, "Henry David Thoreau: His Character and Opinions" Cornhill Magazine, June 1880.

One of the joys of blogging is that my readers educate me constantly; last week David Duffy called my attention to Stevenson's essay on Thoreau. I would be remiss if I failed to mention that the point of Stevenson's essay, which is an unsparing portrait of Thoreau, is to vindicate Thoreau's political thought and behavior as a good man's horror for injustice. 

Last year, in discussing John Williams' Stoner, we encountered how love can be a means toward self-knowledge:

• Love is not an end but a process through which one person attempts to know another and unintentionally learns more about oneself as reflected in the insights and actions of the other.

As is often the case in novels about the literary life, one may treat this as a metaphor for reading novels. So, it then follows that:

• Reading a novel is not an end but a process through which one person attempts to know imagined others and unintentionally learns more about oneself as reflected in the insights and actions of the others. 

Let's call this the by-product knowledge of self through engagement with the other, real or imagined. While it may be logically possible that there may be ways to gain the same knowledge through other means than by way of the by-product knowledge of self, its existence suggests that in so far as philosophy aims at self-knowledge we may need loving engagement with others to achieve this. 

But love may also be an unintentional means toward knowledge of other. This is not to deny ('unlocking mysteries' and all that) we may also sometimes love in order to know more about the beloved. Since few of us are saints -- and the true saints would, to simplify Susan Wolf's famous analysis, probably be insufferable, maybe unlovable in the way that Thoreau seems (again to quote Stevenson) a "cold, distant personality" --, as we become known to our lovers our flaws and shortcomings become known to them, too. This is, after all, what makes some of us feel vulnerable even with modest forms of intimacy. That is to say, love can produce by-product knowledge of other (and, in addition, we may be that other). We recognize this fact about love, because its rupture (or worse) often is said to involve betrayal. When one experiences it (betrayal), it cannot be treated as mere curiosity.

Stevenson has no doubt that such by-product knowledge of other can generate conditions under which we can exhibit magnanimous courage; this is a fancy way of saying, love puts one in a position to keep some secrets. One may even say that from this vantage point discretion is a key virtue of true lovers.

I was going to end my post there. But here's an afterthought: on Stevenson's account, Thoreau's willingness to spill the beans on the nature of love, suggests he is not a jilted or disappointed lover of mankind; rather Thoreau is a less humane (and in a certain sense dishonorable) lover of humanity. If we allow -- and this may be a step too far for some -- Thoreau to be a philosophical exemplar (and it is worth asking what the conditions are for philosophy to sustain horror at injustice), this suggests that philosophy is, in part, too, about uttering truths that from the perspective of society dishonor mankind in the service of a (for lack of a better term) higher love of humanity. If that's right then, indeed, there are many professors of philosophy, but few philosophers. 

 

That love is not an end but a process through which one person attempts to know another and unintentionally learns more about oneself as reflected in the insights and actions of the other. - See more at: http://digressionsnimpressions.typepad.com/digressionsimpressions/2014/01/love.html#sthash.KqqwRImn.dpu

Comments

[Andrew Corsa]

I enjoyed your post.

Your tentative description of Thoreau as a "less humane . . . lover of humanity" was striking.

I wonder how your description might relate to the following quote from Thoreau's Walden:

"No humane being, past the thoughtless age of boyhood, will wantonly murder any creature, which holds its life by the same tenure that he does. The hare in its extremity cries like a child. I warn you, mothers, that my sympathies do not always make the usual phil-anthropic distinctions.”